New YorkReview
Spirit Level at Gladstone Gallery
Written by Andrew Katz Katz
In the following room, Sarah Lucas’s four-foot-tall penises, which appear to be doused with Pepto Bismal, stand matter-of-factly in the middle of the gallery, as though they mysteriously sprouted up overnight. They’re ultimate gauge of potency, and they’re melting like popsicles.
In the next room, decrepit reclining nudes by Hans Josephsohn are brass, but they look like dull, dried mud. The figures, pocked by fingermarks, lie on their sides, on dirtied pedestals which look like victims of a basement flood. Pyramids of canvas, in a natural dye palette, hang on the walls with circular patches sewn on, by Alan Shields. The back wall contains a mural-sized suite of Amy Granat’s photograms of flowers; this room in particular might elsewhere verge on decorative cliché, but here imparts a genuinely sacred significance. Beyond that, on a wall leading into the far space, is Kim Jones’s “Mop 3”-- a mop head unwrapped and tacked to the wall so that it resembles a human scalp. The mop head is some sort of synthetic or animal hair; the skin of the scalp is painted yellow, pink, and blue, and resembles a brainy sinew. Its presence is least explainable, but in the context of the surrounding works, its bizarre treatment, and the allusion to peeling open a skull, feels like a revelation.
Andrew Lord’s series of hand-textured ceramic vessels are the next item one sees in the next room. Women’s heads open up to the sky, with braided handles folding in toward the skull. In one elevated platter, a small figure wades onto the plate, clutching onto a handle as though it’s a swimming pool handlebar. Like the hole in the head, the platter’s surface becomes an entrance into another realm. The 21st street space feels much more like a garage, where things have been left to rot. In the entrance of the 21st space, where the show continues, are paintings of what look like primitive mummy dieties by Hans Schärer. Here are several variations, in off-whites, blacks, and dirty, natural hues, all with pebbles for teeth. The paint is caked and cracking, as though the process of applying it were excruciating. On one of their mouths, nails are tacked in a circle around the lips.
Most of the work in the 21st street space is much larger- like Peter Buggenhout’s looming, 13-foot-tall, dust-covered sculptures, which look as though a tornado has swept up shanties and locomotives, and those wreckages calcified, and wore down to their frames. Sam Gilliam’s “Wall Cascade” and “Close to Trees”- two 19-foot-long, multi-colored swaths of fabric hang down from the ceiling, the size of small waterfalls- the material looks as though enormous vacuum cleaner bags had been emptied and hung to air out. In the far corner of the gallery is a chair and bucket for Kim Jones’s “Mudman.” Since the 1970s, Jones’s shamanistic “alter ego” Mudman has appeared in a nylon mask, a web of sticks, and coated himself with mud from a bucket- a response, some have indicated, to his own experience in the Vietnam War. The upstairs gallery is absurd pain-- photographs by Vienna actionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler-- depict bandaged and bloodied bodies, along with Al Hansen’s cigarette-butt Venus torsos on panels. Ugo Rondinone, who injects mundane subjects with the utmost significance (scholars’ rocks, olive trees, lumpy, oafish heads, and phrases like “Hell, Yes” and “Dog Days Are Over”) is similarly uplifting mundane-looking work. The 21st street half is a bleak and uncompromising aura of death, and the other feels like an answer: cognitive openings, passageways, and unlikely wonders. Is Rondinone playing God here? Definitely. But if he’s enforcing anything, it’s only a lesson on what art can do. --- Whitney Kimball is a New York-based painter and art writer.
A
Written by
Andrew Katz Katz
More stories
View all
THE MAGAZINE
Explore our magazine to discover exceptional artists
Call for Artists
Submit your work for consideration
New American Paintings is a juried exhibition-in-print and digital, presenting the work of 40 emerging artists in each issue.
Your gateway to new art
Discover tomorrow's art stars, today
PRINT + EARLY ACCESS DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION
$179/YEAR
DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION
$99/YEAR OR $10/MONTH
Each issue of New American Paintings features forty artists selected through our juried competitions—presented in a beautifully curated, full-color publication. Subscribers receive six issues per year, plus exclusive online access to current and past editions. Are you a collector? Consider our premium subscription and receive our museum-quality printed publication + access to each new digital issue two weeks before its general release.