Sanja IvekoviC
Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Right One. Pearls of Revolution, 2010, © 2011 Sanja Ivekovic. Collection of the artist.

In the same sweeping atrium gallery of MoMA where Marina Abramovic famously held court two years ago, meeting the gazes of rapt visitors in "The Artist Is Present," Sanja Ivekovic installed Lady Rosa of Luxembourg, a monumental public sculpture that was built in the city of Luxembourg in 2001. Commissioned as part of a group exhibition called "Luxembourg, Luxembourgians: Consensus and Bridled Passions," the sculpture was an intervention on the classical Nike sculpture that crowned the Gëlle Fra (Golden Lady) war memorial in the city's central square. While just as dramatic in appearance as Abramovic's performance, Ivekovic's installation could not have been more distinct in terms of its driving motivations.

In Luxembourg, the sculpture had been erected close enough to the memorial so that from a distance they could be seen side by side. They looked similar, but there were key differences: Ivekovic's piece was named after a Marxist activist, the woman depicted was pregnant, and the commemorative plaque was replaced with words referencing alternative histories of resistance, Marxist thought and misogyny. In one deft stroke, Ivekovic was able to expose the rigid roles assigned to women in public life, question the veracity of memorial conventions, and evoke women's struggle for social justice. The piece provoked a huge public debate, which was vividly documented along the walls of MoMA's atrium gallery with news videos and newspaper clippings.

The MoMA installation of "Lady Rosa of Luxembourg" was part of "Sweet Violence," the first U.S. retrospective for Ivekovic, a respected Croatian artist who came of age at the same time as Abramovic. Unlike her fellow countrywoman, who left Serbia in 1976 to pursue international recognition, Ivekovic stayed and worked in Croatia her whole life, living through many of its turbulent phases. Her work is deeply embedded in the sociopolitical matrix that was, and is, the embattled nation formerly known as Yugoslavia. She negotiates this territory well, but it can seem overly serious, maybe even a bit drab at times, to Western eyes accustomed to larger doses of irony, humor and ambiguity in contemporary art; it lacks the flashy universality of Abramovic's pure explorations of personal limits. What it does offer, however, is a keen window into a certain time and place, and of how this pioneering feminist artist courageously responded to those specific circumstances through a shrewd use of the latest conceptual art practices of the period.

In the 1970s, Yugoslavia was marked by a form of government known as the Third Way, a curious hybrid of socialist restrictions and free-market economics concocted by Marshal Tito. The social and cultural tensions produced by this strange mix of state propaganda and Western popular culture were confronted by Ivekovic in many of her earlier works. In the series "Double Life" (1975-76), Ivekovic selected glamorous magazine ads for women's products and paired each with a photograph chosen from her personal archive. The photographs bear uncanny resemblances to the images in the ads, and yet, because they were retroactively chosen and not posed, they are also impudently different.

An ad for shampoo, featuring a woman's bright red tresses tumbling impossibly across her face, sits next to a picture of Ivekovic tossing her head back in the midst of a laugh, her spontaneity contrasting sharply with the model's strained smile. Another ad that has two models posing severely while staring straight into the camera is juxtaposed with a shot of a young Ivekovic sitting casually on the ground with a friend, both relaxed and gazing off toward the side. Ivekovic seems to defy the indoctrination of the ads with the insistent realism of her photographs, which unfold slowly and memorably next to their stiff counterparts.

The performance "Practice Makes a Master" (1982/2009) was first presented in the years following Tito's death, which were marked by growing ethnic tensions. In a video documenting a 2009 re-enactment, performed by dancer Sonja Pregrad under Ivekovic's direction, we see a woman standing on a stage alone, wearing a black dress with a white bag on her head. She periodically jolts her body as if shot, and falls to the ground, then gets up again. Accompanying the performance, a creepy slowed-down version of Marilyn Monroe singing "That Old Black Magic" is heard on the soundtrack, mixed in with gun sounds from video games. The routine is like a cruel cartoon or mime act, recalling the absurd political stages where the horrors of the Yugoslav Wars—and many other wars past and present—are played out.

- Carol Cheh

Judy Chicago
Nye + Brown

Judy Chicago, Bigamy Hood, 1965/2011, Photo Donald Woodman. Courtesy the artist and Nye + Brown, Los Angeles.

We all know who Judy Chicago is—founder of the Feminist Art movement and director of the groundbreaking project The Dinner Party (1974-79) which is now finally, deservedly, in a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum; and contributor with Miriam Schapiro and CalArts students to the collective Womanhouse. This identification has tended to overshadow Chicago the individual artist, and her early work is some of her best. Made in the 1960s when she was a UCLA grad student and shortly thereafter, this work has only been occasionally shown.

During the 1960s and early '70s, Chicago was quickly working through ideas of Finish Fetish and geometric abstraction, and testing out a range of materials, before seizing upon vaginal and womb-like flower imagery as leitmotif as she entered her Feminist Art phase. The title of the show: "Judy Chicago: Deflowered," makes sly reference to that imagery. We have to look with an open mind to her early work, before the flower and all its accompanying rhetoric took over, and we are rewarded to see drawings, paintings and sculpture that seem remarkably fresh. A sensitive and nuanced use of color combines with an experimental use of materials. Color is explored in a series of Prismacolor drawings on paper. They take the form of either donuts or domes, each drawing with a group of three. Like drawing exercises, she played with color shifts—as in her "Donut Drawings" (1968)—and the beauty of geometry. Chicago was equally at ease with three-dimensional work. She extended her two-dimensional explorations into small hemispheres made of acrylic or polished steel—again arranged in groups of three, like a trinity. Then there is the playful work from the mid-'60s—two sets of games for which there are no rules but 12 playing pieces each: the aluminum Rearrangeable Game Board (1965) and the vibrantly colored painted wood Multicolor Rearrangement Game Board (1965-66).

On the wall were mounted two painted car hoods (both 1965/2011). There was one at the Getty's "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980," and it was a total surprise to most viewers. The two on exhibition at Nye + Brown are recent fabrications from designs that Chicago created in the '60s, and they're knockouts of brightly graphic, pop arty design. Read into them what you will, but the yellow one is dominated by a turquoise phallic shape in the center, replete with a flow chart of semen about to spurt; it's flanked by what looks like either halved apples or a cutaway of the female reproductive system. This one is called Bigamy Hood. The other one is Birth Hood—perhaps the female reproductive system again—with a diagonally striped womb and colorful fallopian tubes.

In retrospect these works were steppingstones to Chicago's eventual, radical departure from her art contemporaries. The great leap is represented here by Through the Flower 2 (1973), a painting made with spray acrylic on canvas. The center of the bloom pulses like dawn, a rainbow of colors contained within, while a fan of petals radiate from it.

- Scarlet Cheng

Josh Atlas + Michelle Carla Handel
RAID Projects

Michelle Carla Handel, Big Yearn, Let Down, 2012, Photo Jason Ramos. Courtesy RAID Projects, los angeles.

Two person shows can be difficult to navigate as ?often one artist's work speaks louder than the other, or in some cases, silences it completely. To the contrary, "Hungry Me, Tender You," a joint project by Josh Atlas and Michelle Carla Handel is much like a beautifully orchestrated though sometimes complicated conversation between two disparate artists whose voices are in perfect concert with one another but who also maintain their visual autonomy.

Working with meticulously crafted sculptural forms, both Atlas and Handel have created a dynamic and vibrant dialogue with one another—as well as with the viewer—that serves to both celebrate and mourn the fractured landscape of human desire. With titles like Poor Sugar Dumpling and Bucket Babe (Neopolitan) (2012) Atlas conflates human longing with consumption—of sugar, toys, sex and bright shiny objects, as though a master confectionary chef were revealing some deeply rooted psychological trauma that might have happened with a spatula in a dimly lit room. There is a voyeuristic element to these works. Using sexually charged food items like donuts, albeit giving them hands and googly eyes, and placing them in sugar-coated yellow buckets, Atlas suggests that desire, as with cupcakes or any other nutritionally empty food, has become a commodity devoid of any real human connection. Instead, desire is reduced to the sum of its parts, much like baking—one part flirt to one cup of just another easy lay. Atlas' drawings further complicate this relationship wherein the "body" of the food item describes an anal masturbatory fantasy where icing morphs into feces and vice versa. His world is deliriously bawdy and delicious.

Michelle Carla Handel's extraordinary sculptures weigh in on an entirely different scale, but are equally as appealing. Mining the same territory as artists like Linda Benglis, Annette Messager and Rebecca Horn, Handel uses materials like silicone rubber, vinyl, wood, fabric, urethane and fiberfill to create objects that resonate viscerally and are suggestive of the female body: its orifices, ruptures, gaps and wantonness. What part of the body are we looking at and does it really matter? Or, as is the case with Big Yearn, Let Down (2012), one body part appears to mutate into another. There is also a hint of implied violence here as the main structure could be a punching bag impaled by a giant plaid penis.

As with Atlas, Handel uses humor seamlessly, one shape merging into another, creating a whole new set of associations and relationships. Still other works are less overt in their language as with the enigmatic It's Not What You Think, But I Surrender (2012), where the main structure doubles as both a point of entry and surrender, the pink flag extending from the main apparatus like a loose fitting scarf that has recently fallen to the ground. The object is theatrical and weirdly seductive as though Isadora Duncan had dropped it there by mistake.

- Eve Wood

Abigail Reynolds
Ambach & Rice

Abigail Reynolds, Magic Mountain, 2011, photo Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist. AMBACH & RICE, los angeles.

Combing through flea markets and used bookstores is an integral part of British artist Abigail Reynolds' practice. For her current installation, "A Common Treasury," she continues her exploration of creating physical dimensionality with found photographs and text, making sculptural assemblages. Past work combined illusionistic space with constructions reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller, but the new work departs from a 17th-century manifesto penned by Gerrard Winstanley, an early proponent of social and environmental activism. Reynolds uses his writings to examine how the landscape is viewed, interpreted and socialized. By making montages of historical images she creates a continuum and alludes to a lineage linking past with present. Despite their academic aura, the works have a formal elegance and Reynolds' keen wit infuses them with double entendres.

The centerpiece of the show, Off Camera (all works 2011), functions as an architectural partition. Tinted glass panes are attached to freestanding steel frames and feature images that reference framing, looking and seeing through—the themes that embody the work. The caption beneath an image of a crowd reads, "A forest of periscopes in Trafalgar square." It overlaps an image of a father and child sitting on a bench in a museum who have rolled their programs into paper telescopes. While images within the sculpture explicitly reference sight, sight lines within and through the sculpture point in the direction of and frame other works in the space.

Many of the works are about coupling and interruptions. The Road is a collage of two book pages tacked to the wall without a frame—an image of a motorway in Birmingham is paired with another of the collapsed 5 Freeway after the 1971 San Fernando Valley earthquake. As one image fuses into the other Reynolds suggests that growth and destruction are visually and conceptually linked. While The Road is a minimal response to the effects of man-zmade structures on the environment, Magic Mountain incorporates glass, book pages and a stack of books in delicate, almost ecological balance. Here, four overlapping panes of tinted glass lean against the wall, creating the colors of the rainbow. The shortest piece of glass is supported by a pile of paperback books whose titles include: Dig for Survival, Utopias, Mysterious Britain and three copies (all different editions) of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. Taped to the backside of the glass are reproductions of mountains from various sources combined to create a mythical uber-mountain.

By placing her appropriated materials behind glass, Reynolds not only creates distance but a structure through which to view the originals. Books on precarious metal stands and images taped to colored glass placed on wooden shelves dot the space. Captions intact, these pieces invite reading. What happens in front of and behind the planes is where Reynolds' intervention asserts itself. On a formal level the pieces are a gratifying read, yet when seen in relation to each other the installation becomes a complex architectural environment through which myriad landscapes can be contemplated.

- Jody Zellen

Maggie Preston
SF Camerawork

Maggie Preston, In Situ I, 2012, courtesy sf camerawork, san francisco.

The assumption that a photograph portrays some ?exterior reality has permanently shifted. Artist Maggie Preston further questions the entire impulse to photographic documentation in her recent exhibition "An Unfixed Form." Preston manipulates the materials and tools of the medium resulting in works that may, or may not, resemble traditional photographs, but reflect a conceptual strategy of layering in a decidedly absurd, somewhat perverse fashion.

At the heart of this exhibition are Arrested Polaroids (2012), a trio of small, washed-out images. We learn that Preston scanned the Polaroids partway through their development, printed these images, then reshot them, once again with the "instant" film. We gain a beautiful sense of her will to disrupt and subvert the intended process, putting the material through paces of her own. Each small work presents geometric compositions in light and dark, edges or corners of the industrial space juxtaposing golden, light-filled areas with angular dark areas of shadow.

Chuck Mobley, director of the recently relocated Camerawork, conveyed Preston's fascination with the space, noting that the exhibition title serves as metaphor for the transitions of both it and the medium of photography itself. In Situ I and In Situ II (both 2012) feature a small celestial-appearing image vying for attention with the weathered floor, the glare of camera flash creating a blinding light. In Situ II is solarized with a flashlight during development, and dominated by a large, fuzzy dark circle that appears to hover. Our experience of being in the gallery in real time is at odds with these abstracted reflections of the space in an earlier state. She revels in this opportunity to explore the site in transition.

Other works on display avoid the issue of relationship to the subject of the photograph by removing it entirely. The wall-mounted Black Flash VI (2012) presents a grid of 28 images, each created with a point and shoot camera in the darkroom, its flash appearing as dark markings. Our eye may vainly struggle to find form—when the fluttering dark shape is isolated, we might imagine a bird in flight. This series brings to mind the "Paper Airplane" series created by Klea McKenna, another SF-based artist making photographic prints without a camera.

Also represented were sculptural works created by Preston's manipulation of wet fiber prints left to harden into rigid structures—Form (2012) hung in a graceful arc over its display bracket. Others, like Shot Forms (2012), were captured in photographs, resembling fortune cookies, hankies, origami gone wrong, or even trash.

The perversity and oddness of Preston's work is what renders it, ultimately, appealing. By disrupting our expectations about the logical sequence of events in a photographic process, Preston makes us realize the way in which our thought patterns too often rest in tired grooves. Her playful interventions in the darkroom, along with her quirky abuse of photographic materials, make us think outside the conventions of the camera—which is, after all, a glorified box.

- Barbara Morris

Liz Glynn
Pitzer Art Galleries

Liz Glynn, "No Second Troy" installation view, 2012,Photo Sean MacGillivray. courtesy pitzer art galleries.

Whether by design or by accident, the Nichols Gallery at Pitzer College may have been the perfect venue to showcase Liz Glynn's first solo museum show, "No Second Troy." It's an odd, two-story space with a second level and various nooks and crannies scattered throughout. The path through the gallery is an exploratory, labyrinthine one, and Glynn's show took advantage of this by populating it with a scavenger's trail of questionable artifacts and video documentation of journeys taken through historical sites. The show was essentially a thoughtful archaeological dig enacted through conceptual art, and as such, it was an enchanting, absorbing experience.

As with all of Glynn's projects, the thinking behind "No Second Troy" is packed full with ruminations on specific historical events and their larger, ongoing cultural reverberations. At play here were the excavation of "Priam's Treasure" from the former site of Troy (now Turkey) by amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the 1860s; his gifting of this treasure to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin; the sacking of said treasure by the Soviet Red Army in 1945; the museum's making of poor replicas of these treasures as a substitute display; the discovery by later archaeologists that the treasure actually predates the Trojan War by several hundred years; and the importation of Turkish Gastarbeiter (guest workers) to help rebuild West Germany in the 1960s. All of these occurrences were assembled and tossed together in order to examine our investment of meaning in cultural objects; what happens when both people and objects are recruited/reclaimed and cross borders into different contexts; and the various myths, hopes and falsehoods that inevitably erupt.

Trojan Surrogates (Neues Museum Case I and I) (2011) are two pristinely displayed sets of crude replica objects from Priam's Treasure—rings, necklaces, bracelets, cups, a gourd, etc.—one set made of gold-plated paper trash, while the other set was made out of bronze cast from the paper set. These objects evoked the hopelessness and absurdity inherent in imbuing objects with too much significance, and of attempting to replace them when they're lost. The comical part was that the paper objects looked better than the bronze.

Upstairs, the video Trojan Return (2011) followed Glynn as she carried a bag filled with her crude replicas through the Pergamon Museum, and then through the site of Schliemann's dig. The piece ended when she trespassed onto the dig site and dumped the contents of her bag into the spot where the treasure had been found. The journey Glynn took, which reversed the path of the original goods, is funny and inquisitive, conjuring the frictions that exist between the "real" and the "fake," the embodied and the imaginary, the intention and the result. In falling short of our ideals, we tend to reveal a wealth of agendas, actions and beliefs.

- Carol Cheh

Richard Diebenkorn
Orange County Museum of Art

Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled, 1975, ©The Estate of Richard Diebenkorn, courtesy the Estate of Richard Diebenkorn.

With the feeling of a blockbuster exhibition—large turnout minus the hype and high ticket price—"Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series" was a revelation and a delight to see. Coming close on the heels of the Getty-sponsored exploration of post-war LA art, it managed to outclass the majority of official Pacific Standard Time offerings.

Surprisingly, this was the first comprehensive survey of Diebenkorn's "Ocean Park" paintings. Thoughtfully designed and installed chronologically in the museum's spacious galleries, the exhibition unfolded in a natural order so progress could be observed and the 20 large and important works (some 9 feet in height) could be savored without distraction.

Diebenkorn favored vertical canvasses and he deftly delineated them with soft geometry and muted, nuanced color. The man could draw a straight line (no use of tape here), with linear elements figuring so noticeably that this series was as much about drawing as painting. Whether or not these iconic abstractions were influenced by his surroundings is hotly debated. It is possible that Santa Monica's funky (at the time) light-infused Ocean Park neighborhood could have inspired them. Disregarding impetus, his rectilinear compositions, with their semi-transparent washes of diluted oil paint punctuated by diagonal lines and the occasional curve, are obviously the work of an artist at the top of his game.

Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) had three distinct phases in his remarkable career. After an early and notable foray into Abstract Expressionism, he was a major practitioner of Bay Area figure-based abstraction from 1955 to 1966. But the "Ocean Park" paintings that he developed after moving to Santa Monica in 1967 solidified his reputation and remain the artist's major accomplishment. Begun at age 45, over 140 of these works—many heroic in scale—were turned out during an intense 25-year span.

Ocean Park #38 (1971) seems to be a metonym for the entire series. Close to 8x6 feet, it consists of two expansive, sandy-hued zones bisected by bands of different color and width, one blue and one yellow. Along the very top edge of the canvas is a sliver of red and at the bottom right hand corner is a small pale green rectangle. Now, this visual potency could be read as abstracted architecture or perhaps an aerial view of rural topography, but regardless of Diebenkorn's raison d'être, it is a triumph.

Thirty or so drawings, a number of prints and an enchanting series of small paintings executed on cigar box lids complemented the larger and more assertive paintings on canvas. Rounding out the exhibition was a short film of the artist discussing his work in a manner that suggested he was not completely comfortable talking about it. Nevertheless informative, this addition was supplemented by a timeline that covered an entire wall. Richard Diebenkorn's work represents the activity of an artist dedicated to a singular, solitary pursuit. His accomplishments, especially the "Ocean Park" series, are now familiar and respected worldwide. He was one of the first abstract painters here to be heralded by the New York art press—not an easy feat given the heated rivalry between the east and west coasts.

- Jack Chipman

Nick Cave
University of North Texas, Denton and Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

Nick Cave, Heard, 2012, photo DAVID BACON.

In his new production "Heard," nick cave requires two puppeteers each for 30 horses made of raffia strands with 20 miles of it required for each suit. This construction pulled in 1,000 volunteers from local citizens, students, staff, faculty and even the dean of the Department of Visual Arts, Robert Milnes, at the University of North Texas where Cave, once a student in the 1980s, is serving as artist in residence. Further construction occurred at Cave's studio in Chicago while the faces for the horses were completed in New York City.

Meticulously executed, the final effect is elegant. Their shaggy coats, more reminiscent of dogs than Clydesdales, and with references to Cave's earlier "Soundsuits," have each strand hand-knotted to the underlying mesh, presenting a gradation of color hues reminiscent of exotic birds. Certainly, all the colors were charted in the manner of a needlepoint canvas. The faces of the horses were a beaded, flowered and bejeweled niqab for the puppeteer beneath and were fitted out in Cave's "bits and pieces of discarded this and that" with a couturier's exacting attention to detail. With no movement at all, the effect was a suspension of reality where one never doubts that the pink horse is real.

The performance itself was presented three times, with a final performance at the Nasher Sculpture Center in the downtown Dallas arts district. The two prior performances in Denton had a spacious pastoral feel and allowed for considerable distance between the herd and the audience. At the Nasher the performers became more controlled and animated as they ambled into the sculpture garden itself. There, they interacted with the crowd, each other and sculptures by Richard Serra, Mark de Suervo, George Segal and Joan Miro, to name but a few. Then they strolled through the Renzo Piano designed-building and out toward the street.

Cave, who also trained with Alvin Ailey, orchestrated 30 percussionists from the UNT music department with a drummed fanfare by David Hall to accompany the "Heard" parade out of the Nasher, where they became corralled by their audience. There, they behaved as horses would, ebbing and flowing around their enclosure, but becoming more and more animated, until suddenly the derriere of one pulled off. Then all the horses broke in two. The front half remained horse-like with its head and a full cape falling to the ground. The other part looked nothing at all like a horse's rear end—think "wookie" or better yet, "It" from The Adams Family—which then exploded into a free-form firework-like delight. Gradually, both sides blended for the finale to the 20-minute show.

These three performances were just the beginning of "Heard"—the costumes only having been completed the day before. Cave found the Nasher's urban setting more interesting than the pastoral, and felt the tighter corral there allowed one to better hear his performance... a sound akin to several million Monarch butterfly wings fluttering in the trees of Angangueo, Mexico.

- JP Barentine

Paul Jackson
Paul Kuhn Gallery, Calgary

Paul Jackson, "Monument," installation view, 2012, Photo Mitch Kern.

Everywhere in "Monument," Paul Jackson's body of ?untitled works, there is a stillness and a careful quiet. Rough plywood, wet paint, metal objects leaning on the wall, all give the feeling that the artist has just stepped away from his work-in-progress. We can assume he meant to come back quickly, but there is a feeling that he has been delayed for some time now. The dripping paint on the wire frame is frozen in time, everything paused and waiting.

Around the room are a number of small sculptures on rough plywood plinths, which are custom fitted to the scale of the works and hand-made of a straightforward, minimalist design. The jagged forms suggest small buildings—models with their material and construction pared back to the elements giving the sense of a sketch, but also of solidity and presence. One presents a negative space in plaster, another cast in bronze from a 2 x 4 broken where the wood is strongest, across the grain.

On the walls a number of large paintings bear deep-grooved intersecting lines that demarcate the shifts between shades of subtly tinted whites and reveal hints of the linen beneath the layers. Tarnished black and shiny copper metal objects lean on the wall here and there, like broom handles or crutches. As in the surfaces of the paintings, shapes of other works are reflected, all bringing to mind visions of mirrored high-rise towers, or shards of glass.

Black-and-white photographs corroborate the architectural suggestions and at the same time push the sculptures out of the realm of the architect's maquette. Their fragmented imagery presents the details and geometric forms of a real building and offer a clean, captured glimpse of careful craftsmanship, from their content to their crisp presentation—in contrast to the hand-formed shapes and raw textures in Jackson's three-dimensional works. Knowing that the building pictured is an Italian palazzo that was never completed, never inhabited, provides a clue to the exhibition's puzzle.

Another clue is offered to those who wander to the back of the gallery: past the framing table and the racks of paintings a faint pencil drawing hangs on the far wall, almost tucked into a corner. A viewer might easily miss this very important element of the exhibition, but its distance from the other works bespeaks its relationship as murky antecedent. The faint sketch references a proposed monument designed by Paul Jackson's late father, an architect, in the swell of post-war optimism in Europe. Jackson found the original drawing in a book of proposals published in the 1950s, perhaps as a consolation for the fact that the planned monument was never built.

"Monument" is a conversation between hope and false starts, between earnest endeavor and unexpected interruption, between planning and waiting; it asks questions about how the beginning can know the finish, and insists, in many ways, that the one is the other and vice versa.

- Lisa Benschop

The Ungovernables
2012 New Museum Triennial

Julia Dault, Untitled 19 (3:00 pm - 8:30 pm, February 4, 2012), 2012, Photo Benoit Pailley. Courtesy New Museum, New York.

Curator for the New Museum's 2012 Triennial, ?"The Ungovernables," Eungie Joo, describes the exhibition as being "about the urgencies of a generation who came of age after the independence and revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s." A broad objective that has over 50 participating artists and collectives, there are some significant developments in curatorial practice/exhibition formulation and correlations among the art works that emerge from the rather dense museum installation. For example, the hypertrophic globetrotting described in all the supporting exhibition documentation is both testament to the seriousness of Joo and her assistant Ryan Inouye, and an open question about globalizing curatorial practices. (Related to this endeavor and worth noting is the New Musem's multi-country cooperative curatorial project "Museum as Hub.")

Joo's and Inouye's trip around the world was to more than 20 countries with hundreds of artist studio visits over 18 months—certainly proof of a global reach and something Joo has been working on for years. But the question remains as to how the search coordinates for "The Ungovernables" were originally configured. How did they decide where to start and where to keep going? Is this a mirror to the parade of art fairs currently making their way around the world? The net results are that the exhibition draws extensively on art and artists who are not from the U.S.A.

Another issue keyed by the title is the difficulty to see how the art in the show is related to the ungovernable. In fact, the basic paradigms for conceiving of this exhibition and completing it mesh perfectly with estern art standards elaborated in the '70s and '80s, particularly in the area of conceptual practices. The array of text and image works, impromptu installations and hand-held moving images differ in their sources from earlier canonical works, but instead of having the U.S. or Europe as the backdrop and foil for the art, there are places like Egypt, Vietnam, Columbia or Jordan. Whether or not these artists came from ungovernable places, the majority appear extremely well versed, well educated and therefore in direct lineage with "the governable"—in terms both artistic and commercial. In some cases, the work almost appears to be a kind of cultural tourism: artists go back and revisit places they once came from; it is notable how many of the artists list two locations in their bios for their practice, one lesser known, and the other one often in a main art center.

To highlight a few of the most interesting works, a large-scale sculpture A Person Loved Me (2012) created by Adri´n Villar Rojas (and a team) at the museum is a hulking floor-to-ceiling sculpture that resembles a cross between outlandishly designed industrial parts and components from discarded giant robots. Made of unfired clay over a Styrofoam core, it began literally falling apart upon completion. Another wonderfully weird and forceful work was Pilvi Takala's projection, The Trainee (2008). In this she documents how she feigned being an employee in a corporation, while never actually participating in any work activities. Watching her sit inertly in the corporate cubicles or riding the elevator for up and down for hours, as those around her collectively move from mild disbelief to outrage, is downright uncanny.

There are also the rather offhanded but convincing assemblage works by Julia Dault. She also worked on-site and created each group of industrial materials in a single performance. Forcing the material into folds, rolls and bends with her strength alone, she then secured the work to the gallery wall to keep it from collapsing. The film Jewel (2010) by Hassan Khan, focuses on two men in separate side-by-side projections, performing dance moves to a loud Shaabi beat. Facing each other from the different projections, in very different attire and waving their arms furiously, the interaction looked both antagonistic and collaborative.

Minam Apang's How the Wind Was Born (2010) consists of graphite and ink works on paper where the artist explores the intersection between the world of myth and her own personal lexicon of mark-making. The frenzied array of molecular marks coalesces into an almost golem-like presence, alluding to how chaos and order are interlaced. For her installation, Días en que todo es verdad, [Days of Truth], (2012) Mariana Telleria has set a series of found and manipulated objects very simply on wood shelves. She uses a combination of discarded everyday objects festooned with small various appendages and additions that effectively drag them out of the prosaic into the imaginative.

Physical disarray and dystopian daydreams emerge as themes and are revisited throughout. Whether taking the form of installations or projections or accumulations of paint and objects, "The Ungovernables" seemed animated by a kind of subterranean nostalgia. Generally, most of the artworks are light-handed in technique and disinterested in any specific genre. The artists tended to explicitly acknowledge their socio-spatial context. This implicit sociological dimension—taking the viewer to places unknown—was a compelling part of the exhibition, in spite of the large quantities of words dedicated to meting out where and why artists are producing these works.

- John David O'Brien

Benjamin Butler
Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery

Benjamin Butler, Autumn Forest (Sixty-Three Trees), 2012, Photo Mark Woods. Courtesy the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, new york.

One might easily dismiss Benjamin Butler's paintings as blandly pretty or ironic "bad painting," a faux-amateurish retread of early 20th century Modernism. But they are, in fact, rather subtle paintings with a deceptive simplicity that belies a lot of art-historical knowledge and painterly know-how: the kind of work that takes time to warm up to.

All of them in his recent exhibition "Some Trees" depict not so much trees, as a nearly schematic glyph: the idea of a tree. As in Untitled Forest (2012), for instance, the suggestion of branches is rendered as one or two veering curves attached to a vertical line—enough to convey "tree"-ness. Mondrian's trees come to mind, as if Butler is picking up an art-historical loose end and running with it, although, stylistically, they are more akin to Alex Katz. Similarly, Butler's nods toward Minimalism suggest an attitude of resisting both the idealism of pure abstraction and the picturesque qualities imbued in his subject.

Initially, almost everything about these paintings seems to assert their status as an object. Paint is applied in ways that are unassuming and spare: either dry and scumbled or in very thin washes. These techniques emphasize the grain of the canvas, its materiality. Green Forest (2010-2012), a piece comprised of five oddly-proportioned columnar canvases (each about 76" x 7"), similarly asserts the canvas as an object—not unlike Frank Stella's early work. Also, like Stella, Butler's marks are sometimes laid down in tracks with slight space between them, as in Autumn Forest (Sixty-Three Trees) (2012). Without much over-painting, every step of his process is visible. This makes them performative in a way that feels both loose and fastidious—that is, deliberate and controlled but not precious or fussy.

Butler's consistent allusion to trees complicates all of this insistent materiality. The overall flatness is contradicted by the tree motif, which lets space—an intimation of sky—open up behind them. This implies a horizon line situated (with one exception) outside the frame. That is, these are trees that we are looking up at, an attitude suggesting, it would seem, a kind of reverence for his subject (or, perhaps, for his early 20th-century sources). Forty-Five Trees at Sunset (2012), for instance, seems, at first, almost like a grid painting or a mosaic before suggesting, gradually, the sense of light emanating through a forest. It also has a surprising, very evocative, sense of place. Like Milton Avery, he can wring a lot of atmospheric effect out of surfaces that would seem, initially, rather abstract. In fact, the best summary of Butler's work might be contained in the John Ashbery poem from which he garnered his title (Some Trees): "That their merely being there means something"—though, perhaps in Butler's case, the reverse. For all their "meaning"—their paradoxes, ambiguities and art-historical name-checking—we are left, in the end, with the specificity of their simple presence.

- Elwyn Palmerton