Byline: Carrie Paterson

Joy, transformation, transcendence—all lofty goals of early abstract expressionism—are exalted in the present tense at The Shed in the world premiere collaboration of three major 20th-century artists, now in their sunset years.

This stellar exhibition is marked by the long history of painted depictions of the divine and at the same time informed by flash mobs, minimalism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the brutal modern history of Eastern Europe, and not least, Gerhard Richter’s signature experimentation in layering and tooling paint. Haunting musical works by Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt—revolutionary composers known to set spines tingling—and the patient talent of filmmaker Corinna Belz (dir. Gerhard Richter Painting, 2012), who translates the artist’s methods into the video medium, complete this participatory hybrid techno-performance, which deprives the observer’s position of neutrality.

The collaboration takes place over 60 minutes in two rooms: a vestibule gallery featuring a tear-jerking and haunting “alleluia” song cycle by Pärt (Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fátima [Three Little Shepherds of Fátima], 2014) that erupts a cappella from singers scattered among the unwitting audience, and a second, larger gallery with Richter and Belz’ immersive floor-to-ceiling video accompanied by a live orchestra playing a world premiere by Reich, written specifically for Richter’s video—but based on Richter having listened to Reich’s structural experimentation over decades to inform his painting.

While the viewer’s experience is linear, in its totality Reich Richter Pärt is a cycle, repeating hour after hour, day after day, for two straight months (alternating performers from Ensemble Signal, the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus). This linear/circular dichotomy is the epicenter of the work and entwines the audience within an existential contradiction endemic to the human life cycle, which we experience both as creators and observers to phenomena of beauty.

In the first gallery, Richter’s columnar digital prints, inspired by his algorithmic work/book Patterns (2012), applied to the 15-foot-high walls as architectural elements, reference Richter’s fascination with stained glass. The metaphor of a house of worship extends to large, wall-hung tapestries based, like the video in the next room, on his 2016 abstract painting 946-3. Made through the algorithmic splitting, doubling and folding of segments of Richter’s paintings, these patterns are like Rorschach tests or marble, once moving, now static objects of contemplation.

Yet they are unsettling. Rothko’s Chapel (completed after the artist’s suicide in 1970) comes to mind as an after-affect of the exhibition, when the Richter/Belz video of the second gallery has played out. Seemingly an apex to Richter’s production, it provides a way to conceptualize his life’s work in light of his advancing age but without his hand or presence. Multitudinous “color bars” bracket the Richter/Belz video, and as the painting’s abstract color imagery is woven and animated through cutting and layering, its mesmerizing, vibrational energy communicates spiritual yearning while Reich’s accompanying ode-to-joy memorializes Richter, as if postmortem. The climactic resolution of the video’s ornate patterning back into strata of color recalls a speed Paul Virilio might refer to as the logical perception of war, but also suggests the artist foreseeing his own endurance after death. We recall Belz’ interview when Richter reveals he never again saw his parents after leaving East Germany to become an artist, his past like a shadow in the many paintings and images he has destroyed on this path to envision a joyful, transcendent future—bringing his audience to awareness: this awaits us all.

Three immersive films from Africa about political and cultural resistance use tropes of the Imaginary from Fanon to Lacan to challenge inherited postcolonial mindsets.

Kudzanai Chiurai presents a gorgeous, disorienting series of seven tableaux dramatizing the agony of Zimbabwe as a young nation. Colonial capitalism, as much as religious fervor and sectarian violence play throughout the intensely stylized scenes. With a mesmerizing soundtrack directed by João Orecchia, We Live in Silence (2017) proceeds at perhaps five frames-per-second so that we linger on every eye-blink, laugh or bodily twist. With men given perfunctory roles in violent scenes as members of the Army, priesthood, militia or victims, the innate objectification of the camera on the female lead clearly collapses woman/nationhood, seemingly uncritically, especially regarding the display of her body. A nod to the important presence of women in the guerrilla movements of the early 1980s could partly salvage this reading (cf. the film Flame—1996, Ingrid Sinclair), but the final banquet, where (male) bodies are shot and beaten brings home the point: the national imaginary, theatricalized by the artist, is a national emergency.

Mikhael Subotzky’s 3-channel installation WYE (2016), viewed from reclining beach chairs on a floor of sand, lulls us with the sound of ocean waves into considering how a techno-surveillance state commands the Imaginary to meet the accords of post-apartheid society. Set in a past-present-future somewhere on the coast near Johannesburg, rotating films show an early European explorer’s treasure uncovered by a present-day Caucasian lighthouse keeper with the help of a scantily paid black laborer. We learn of the keeper’s future embodiment as a kind of Black Mirror-like virtual teaching aid after he willingly (?) submits to the “Body Emancipation Project,” which renders his confessional email exchange with a friend visible in all key strokes: but the fear of black faces in Jo-burg (“a powder keg”) is deleted; the “incident” that happened to a mutual friend—deleted, yet the black man who assisted him still “came out of nowhere,” leaving the suggestion that Africa will again be a place to dream about occupying, without bodies, as it was before history’s repercussions.

The strongest piece in the show is by filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa, daughter of author/activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who actuates a “Decolonizing the Mind” by inviting viewers to share a meal with a chorus of faces in the Niger Delta. A dozen screens set upon individual tables display the visceral chewing of local dishes from start to finish. Like Instagram photos from eager foodies, high establishing shots of each plate cut to a person eating pumpkin leaf soup, roasted snails, pounded sweet potatoes or yard apples with spicy nut butter. The stoic expressions of finger-sucking locals (no utensils) resist becoming “spectacle” because Table Manners (2014–ongoing) is interrogating the viewer. Shell Oil production and global consumption has polluted Ogoniland, sickened people, and bred decades of violence (including Saro-Wiwa’s father’s execution). The tables are turned, and through the indelible, inscrutable images of the Ogoni faces before us engaged in a simple act of eating, we see their resolve to remain on a land shadowed by bloodshed in order to imagine its future.

Lauren Satlowski’s four new paintings at Odd Ark situate us squarely in our anxious feminist moment. Their landscapes are creepy, with tinges of the natural; their delicious surfaces bounce the gaze around like the mise en scène for Spielberg’s child-android in A.I. and their colors flare like a Kubrickian operatic interlude.

Each work features a female caricature, humorous and strange, distinctly out of place yet a fitting “object” in her element. In Feather Bowling (all works 2018), the first of three 40” x 30” panels, a Venus of Willendorf/astronaut figure emerges from a dark primordial slime. A golden light kisses her body’s surface, like the afterglow of a neon sign that makes puddles green at night. The amount of refractive surfaces and colors are slippery for the eye, and in looking for meaning one falls into pits or fissures of light. A holographic cartoon of a woman’s face floats on the object’s surface. On the figure’s arm we can barely register the reflection of… is it the painter? Or is Satlowski rendering painting itself as a character?

In Seagull, a vacant doll perches on a rock as the Western or Martian sun sets on an infinite landscape we cannot see. The doll’s frozen face is engulfed like an Arctic explorer in a puffy pewter-colored hood, dead to light and decorated with nineteenth-century floral flourishes. Her Amelia Earhart red aviator-scarf shimmers triumphantly out of focus, and her Captain Hook appendage is shocking. We stare but are non-essential. She is the survivor.

The helmet flowers from Seagull are reprised as a conjoined twin figure on a single stem in 91.5 Los Angeles, a nod to the USC classical music radio station. The neon yellow flowers are more evocatively figural than the black costumed woman with pendulous breasts onto whose hand the flowers weep glowing fragments. Satlowski handles this light, and specifically its autonomy, in a way that marvels at paint’s ability to be more than the light it reflects. It is somehow essential yet mutable; we project meaning there, but its materiality escapes.

Satlowski’s figures, in these paintings as well as in her gouache on paper paintings in the back room, appear as ciphers in a fluid medium. Each painting refutes a simple answer about identity and fixability by emphasizing the hypnotic element of paint and its psychedelic, transmutable potential. In several of the gouache on paper works—pages from a future or past book—this relationship to light is amplified by a naked and hunched female cartoon who fishes with her hands through eddies of rainbows. The moment of apprehension is elusive and maybe psychotic, as in the smaller painting Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They’re Not All Out to Get You, when an examination of Satlowski’s “Id” character “Robber Girl,” who carries a cartoon sack over her shoulder, reveals it’s painted on a thin white veil covering an image to haunt law-and-order types, The Joker.

This is Satlowski’s humor and her critical strength. She’s playing around, but the game is serious and has implications for both painterly and contemporary political issues.

Two short films in “Solar Rhythms” at Tanya Bonakdar open Tomás Saraceno‘s proposal for thermodynamic collaboration and remaking human relationships to the Earth. 

The first, taken during Saraceno’s ambitious, record-setting flight in White Sands, New Mexico with his D-O AEC Aerocene sculpture/balloon (2015), has the home-movie quality of a Robert Smithson film. Saraceno joins forces of sun and wind as romantically as Smithson did earth and water, to achieve the first pure solar flight.

But Saraceno is an artist-scientist whose innovations extend from aeronautics to arachnology. If it wasn’t clear already from his Hanging Gardens–Cloud Cities (guest artist, Artillery 2011), which have lofted participants on transparent cushions at major museums, then the threads in his films (hot air balloon tethers) and his Calder Upside Down mobiles (2017), ballasted with a hemp rope and stone, draw us closer to the spider’s world, the complicated geometry of its webs (seen in the complicated hand-tied Zonal Harmonic, 2017), but also its employ of nanotechnology to escape gravity.

In another darkened room, three skeins of woven spider silks about eight-feet long undulate to tones played over a loudspeaker in Sounding the Air, an ongoing project. Harvested from spiders in Saraceno‘s safekeeping (with three full-time assistants and ample food) the webs present a philosophical conundrum about human innovation. Future space elevators made of similar proteins could extend our living capacities into the stratosphere and beyond. But social stratification, Saraceno’s work suggests—despite its starry-eyed idealism—weighs us down. His solution? Open-source his discoveries, which include spider web analysis and 3D modeling, home balloon kits (Aerocene Explorer, 2015–) and an app (Aerocene Float Predictor, 2015–) that simultaneously tracks suitable air currents for ballooning and, by extension, global warming. Also: challenge FAA regulations and reclaim the desert, where technocrats, power companies, and power brokers aim to make solar factories and launch pads for our collective survival.

Saraceno’s second film, Diving into the Ocean of Air (2017), documents Aerocene Explorers flying over a contested lithium extraction site. The film reminds us why our devolving social structures in the “enlightened” information age still prevent us taking to the air in this utopian way. Over Salinas Grandes salt lake in Saraceno’s native Argentina, his Aerocene sculptures are looming kites visually reflecting the human misdeeds and terrors that have occurred in the stretches of desert below, specifically in neighboring Chile during Pinochet’s junta. In the mind’s eye, reflecting on the black balloons as if they are film screens, we imagine the thousands of people disappeared with no trace, the desert a black site of the most extreme degree. Lest we forget, hot air balloons were first used in French-Anglo warfare [see: Falling Upward: How We Took to the Air by Richard Holmes]. As Saraceno’s abstract forms quietly steal over the desert like military drones, they gaze down (as do the film’s cameras) instead of floating away from the troubled planet. But then, using no power except the sun, when nighttime comes these balloons of hope, or despair, will fall. The Earth remains our tether, our heads in the sand.

Romanian-born, having lived through the tragic absurdities of communism, Geta Bratescu represents the strongest blending of conceptual rigor and narrative impulses. Her wide-ranging oeuvre encompasses drawing, sculpture, video, performance, collage and animated film. In the first room at her Hauser and Wirth exhibition, a Venus-of-Willendorf-like river stone (Woman, 1969) paired with a phallic floor sculpture (Untitled, 2000) emerging from black velvet that one could easily imagine in the grip of Louise Bourgeois, sets the pace for Bratescu’s subjects: body, earth, and the female maker/creator/dramaturge.

Earthcake (1992), better than any Bruce Nauman video, features the artist, in Kabuki makeup, as she constructs and eats a mud pie. Another black-and-white video whose title translates as “The Hands. For the eye, the hand of my body reconstitutes my portrait” (1977) is a montage of short clips of the artist’s hands moving objects, drawing and smoking. It is shot from the POV of a head-mounted camera likely illustrated in one self-portrait from the photo series Alterity (2002–11)—a thoroughly absurd headgear with antennae of foam, something you’d expect from Mike Kelley. But the sensibility is pure Ionesco, also Romanian by birth: to wit, she’s dressed him up, that existential father figure, by painting a clown nose on a photograph of him (Ionesco—The Clown, 1971).

The liminal outsider figured by the tragic clown becomes star of the exhibition in Bratescu’s 10-minute animated film Aesop’s Walk (1967). In short untitled “fables,” Bratescu sketches one indefatigable character whose long “walk” starts in Roman times (the costumes, the beard) and ends in the Romanian dark ages (night skies, prisons, pits), having circumvented oppressive forces, death and even the grim reaper, sometimes through accident or despite his naiveté. The humor in the work is as outstanding as Bratescu’s charming flat renderings on stark, knockout-color fields. It’s not hard to watch several times in a row.

Aesop’s Walk, with its simplified forms and one particularly animated bouncing ball that leads the narrative forward, queues the primal components of Bratescu’s later collage Poem(2012) and series of series Game of Forms (2010–15). Under the rubric of disarming play, she modulates shapes opposing one another, gathering forces, being encircled (The Lines and the Circle, 2012), flocking, swaying, sharpening. The works’ jocular nature is an afterimage of a youth spent under the thumb of censorship, where mute forms could be coded as stories, morals, lessons in resistance—her lightheartedness, probably considered a damnable offense in some company.

Though Magnets in the City (1974), her proposal to install massive magnets in New York parks to remind people of forces working against them, is maybe too polite (why not disrupt the traffic by pulling car bumpers off too?), it demonstrates that the artist sees her subjects—us—with great sympathy. 
Go with your wits about you to Geta Batescu’s The Leaps of Aesop but prepare to be disarmed by this nonagenarian’s extensive explorations. Like flies drawn to the eyes of an admirably old mare, we find only a moment to ruminate on each accomplishment before she blinks us away.

Vija Celmins’ work is best when you are caught by surprise—don’t read the manifest, just board the ship. Sublime encounters open quiet pathways to deep consideration of the now-octagenarian artist, her times and her legacy.

Celmins’ exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery is steeped in matters of gravity in 40 years of her later works. Notably absent is her brief fascination with the age of televised war. Frank Sirmans’ writing (Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964–1966 [Yale, 2011]) should be called upon just for background—white noise—if only to remind us how Celmins has long considered art’s ability to fix death’s image.

Born in 1938 in Riga, Latvia, Celmins’ life has been circumscribed by war. Occupied by the Soviet Union until 1991, Latvia was an eastern outpost of the Nazi concentration camp system, a site of horrific executions by Einsatzgruppen death squads who left tens of thousands of Jews, Communists, and other “undesireables” in mass graves, yet the mention of Jews killed was forbidden by Soviet authorities. How can Celmins’ work be read against “suppression”? Many won’t know that Celmins was invited to create a work for the Hall of Witness at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; though not ultimately selected, her work, like that of Christian Boltanski, has a relationship to Holocaust memorials and, I posit, Riga’s adjacent Bikerniecki Forest, where a constellation of broken pillars memorialize the disappeared.

Celmins’ large canvases picture layers of deep space. Using thinly gesso-embedded stars, she pushes the comfort of a flat “readable” surface. These Hubble-like “windows” as in Night Sky #24 (2016), present galaxies so old they may be gone entirely. But our relationship to time obscures this from us. What do we learn from the errant paint-glop/star that wanders around the edge of the canvas? Looking at Celmins’ magnificent Blackboard Tableau (2007–15) installations of twinned chalkboards—one found and one fabricated—we find other indexical, extra-dimensional details like the gum of duct tape removed, copper nails buried with past force, scratches that mars the finish. The human hand wrote its sign, and it betrayed its violence. Lingering at the edge of the boards is the chalk’s ashen semi-solid state, somewhere between permanence and trace, memory and matter, the sign and its disappearance. “Little object a.”

The rhyme between the paintings and the blank slate of the tableau questions the impulse of energy required to start the language/universe over again. What would be different? What would be copied? What is inevitable?

The standout of the show is Two Stones (1977/2014–16), each palm-size and of a mass comfortable for a paperweight and place roughly 90 degrees to each other, where two hands seemingly just set them. The “real” pinkish granite echoes the stars with its white and black flecks, while the other, its twin made of bronze and painted, suggests only weight is the difference. But it’s impossible to know which is the mirror. It’s not just an inside joke or reprise of art’s nature/culture theme. The stones ask about the nature of time in reference to human flesh and ambitions, and suggest how possible it is to free energy with the sound of the two being struck together. Which will survive? The stone, or the artist’s great clap in an otherwise astonishingly silent oeuvre?