Dear Reader,
Art reviewed below.
Martin Puryear – “Martin Puryear” – Matthew Marks
I came to this show pre-punkt and by my own expectations at that. There was a time when Martin Puryear was my main guy. In 2006 I wanted so badly to know how to Make Things Well and he was my sculpturecraft ideal. His works were visibly handmade, fussy but not pretentious, cartoony like Noguchi but a little creepier, honest Americana wood and rawhide dread with a bulbous sense of humor. I held a dramatic belief about funny shapes minimalism which I no longer hold. Puryear was an ostensibly “abstract” artist who knew about the World and History and Real shapes not just Fake shapes and still had time for humblehand mastery.
Seventeen years later and with a marginally better understanding of the material processes by which art comes to exist, I am only marginally less impressed. Seven high-flex Sculpture concepts across two galleries. Wood, marble, cast bronze, iron, and aluminum. I most like to see what Puryear does with wood, I don’t think the bronzes are as special. When you’re elder statesman Martin Puryear at Matthew Marks you can get anything you’d like cast in bronze, I’m not impressed. You could create something that couldn’t possibly be permanent, precarious sticks folded over themselves, connected by twine and tape, and cast it in a single metal chunk to survive an apocalypse. Not Martin’s fault but I’m skeptical of the Bronze-flex. I think it’s a conservative anachronistic idea about what the most Serious Sculptures should be made of. I think it’s a little Extra. Over and over I hear that artists working in wood and foam and paper and less “archival” materials are asked by their gallery if they can work in Bronze, and you can see this reflected in the world, especially at art fairs. “Wow, it’s bronze, huh.” It’s 2023! Things are made of plastic now you ren-faire twits. If all you care about is your objet surviving an apocalypse, I can’t help you.
Anyway, the five pieces in the big gallery are very impressive and beautiful. The silver wood head lightbulb sculpture is a favorite because while it feels like impossible wood-behavior, invisible joinery, optical illusion, uncanny appearance of weight distribution - it retains its fundamental woodiness and you can see the electric sander marks all over the thing, emphasized by its graphite soak. The upside-down cross sculpture with the aluminum stag skull is a little Chrome Hearts/Rick Owens lux-goth for me. I know that’s not who Puryear is but that’s what I see. Dave Navarro could have this in his house for sure.
The main event of this show, for me, is a sculpture in the smaller gallery called New Voortrekker from 2018. It’s rare to see Puryear generate such literal object-imagery in his work. There’s a li’l truck pulling a skeletal carriage with a trippy spiral staircase and a speckled mirror, demented settler dollhouse world. It’s on a pedestal that is hinged at one end and propped up with a smooth wooden ball. The chunky unvarnished truck shape sits in its own wheels, covered in unerased pencil marks. It’s chunky and delicate, it’s narrative, it’s creepy, it’s sweet, it’s a puzzle. Frankly it rocked me. There’s also a very nice bronze sculpture in this gallery, so, sorry to bronze, unlike you I am imperfect. Pretty great show!
Arthur Simms – “The Miracle of Burano” – Karma
Henni Alftan – “Visitor” – Karma
I like these Arthur Simms sculptures a lot. Stiff woven armatures of scrap wood and bamboo, wire, twine, glue, little plastic toys and debris, bottles. Some are supposed to be recognizable forms (a boat), while others are just complex biomorphic trash ziggurats. It’s worth noting that some of this hatched architectural wood-weave is similar to the forms Puryear casts in bronze at Marks. Simms sculptures show their age, their patina, they are not outside of time. “Archival” is just a construct, man. The press release calls these works “devotional” and I get that, they feel whipped up, ecstatically snowballed into being. Inspiring capture of moment and material, here here.
I think these Henni Alftan paintings stink. Decorative art for people that aren’t looking that closely. The imagery is almost totally generic, basic symbolism writ large: eyes, matches, windows. The colors are dusty and faded-dull like old photos or Instagram filters. Anyway, I got up real close to these, believing that surely there had to be something in there for me to like. Sometimes a painting with a polite Soft Effect is nice texturally, up close, a delicate science. Not so with these. If it’s not about the Paint, is it about the imagery? Is this painting as a means to an infographic or illustration? Nah. (I see a lot of “arty” “moody” movies like this, large-target drifty wordless symbolic or even generiplatonic imagery and the director hopes the audience will fill in what’s deep about it. Denis Villeneuve is guilty of this, I think.) I’m guessing that if I were this artist, I would be sick of getting asked about Alex Katz. Don’t worry, I won’t!
Peter Fischli – “Ungestalten” – Reena Spaulings
This gallery moved since my last visit. They managed to find a space just as elegant/weird/crumbling as their last one! A pathetic forest of gray traffic light hangman sculptures flickering on and off in a dim and skylit concrete room. The works are made of wood and paint, craft materials, hobbyist electronics, painted to look like busted metal and I think there’s some real metal too? They are meticulous in their own way but not flashy, despite literal flashing lights. The work is confusing, it feels coy, the labored over hair tussle that looks like it rolled out of bed. Is it supposed to be beautiful? Who is buying these and where will they live? There are little flat photocollage works depicting incidental shaving foam squirted around Fischli’s neighborhood like so much glittered snow. The photos are adhered casually to oddly shaped panels of shiny metal that were so flush to the wall, I was confused about how they were hung. There’s a sound piece coming from a grate outside, instrumental post punk band practice, a little audio simulatrix-theater. The press release says the work “creates the illusion of an active basement practice space in Los Angeles, where basement spaces are nonexistent.” To which I say: I grew here you flew here, my elusive Swiss boomer. Keep the basements of my city out of your clever little mouth. We don’t need your tutorials in eurosubterranea. Overall, I think this show is over my head but potentially meaningless. It’s cool to be confused? 6.6/10.
Tom Friedman – “Cocktail Party” – Jeffrey Deitch
My first time in Deitch’s little corner satellite space. My patience run thin for a conceptual prankster, my expectations for this one are nil. My immediate impression is that the gallery literally stinks, it’s too hot, moist. I see the creepy uncanny party-sculpture in front of me and think maybe there is conceptually spilt actual sticky beer floor, one of my all time least favorite smells. The work is a socializing group of life-size mannequins. They are different races, gender identities, and ages with unique personal styles and purposes at the function etc. There weren’t too many patrons at Deitch besides my friends and I and it was notable how many times I mistook these sculptures for real people, especially since they look so little like real people. I bet it was especially disconcerting in a room full of people at an art opening, catching glimpses of these lanky undead through and behind real party-goers. Their faces are rictus-kid of Garbage Pail, every limb is a little too long. It’s silly and light and too-soon and legit icky and there are lots of little details to account for, microinteractions between the characters and hints of a world beyond the sculpture. This piece looks fun to make and think about and it made my skin crawl but it tickled me, so I appreciate the impact.
Friedman’s other works are not really worth mentioning, especially in the sticky shadow of “Cocktail Party.” Two vaguely figurative shiny sculptures, very Deitch, and then around a corner and up some stairs, there’s a projection of an endless horizontal game of Pong and an imitation old timey safe. This is also the site of the leak that was stinking up the gallery. The hot ceiling was visibly waterlogged, sagging and splitting. Check for mold?
Mark Manders – “Writing Skiapod” – Tanya Bonakdar
Three rooms of soft blue and gray and beige sculptures on pedestals and in vitrines and on the floor, and a chair and some wall works with fake newspapers containing…all words at random? “You mean like the whole dictionary? Wow.” Manders’ touch feels lighter here, a tonal mood board for more substantial sculptures he might want to make in the future. If I’ve got to a see a rendered head sliced into clever sections, I’d rather look at Matt Monahan tbqh. The show takes its name from an installation in a side room that’s got Mark Dion/Broodthaers energy. Skiapod is an obscure mythological figure (more like category within mythology?) reclaimed by Manders and it’s a guy with one big foot from the waist down. There’s a slide projector and vitrines showing fake historical representations of this foot-guy and the room has a sort of craft paper 90s conceptual art about accounting-for-data paranoiac vibe. Is this foot-guy real or what? A framed series of false faxes add context. This room is fine and it’s cute and it’s certainly more imaginative than the rest of the work in the gallery.
This show is conservative. Pastel colors are the hallmark of the noncommittal centrist and this show can verify. Mark Manders work always gives me the creeps (pejorative). When his peaceful fascist necropolis imagery is diagrammatic and horrible, I’m a little more open to it, but when it’s subdued and especially decorative, it rubs me the whole wrong way. 3.4/10 because I liked some of the foot-guy imagery and I am a nerd so I like forged historical documents.
Merideth Hillbrand – “TENDER” – New Low
Six rectilinear wall works all constructed according to the same set of rules, most hanging, one leaning. An exercise in concise language. Each piece is a rich and varnished dark wood frame divided into (x) number of sections, backgrounded with mirrors and foregrounded with colored aluminum discs. Text, laser cut on the back side of the colored discs, reflect any number of words in the narrow space of the mirror, but they don’t resolve into anything particularly legible, which is not a complaint. I see war and intimacy, the “official language” of governments. Heavy stuff for formal sculptures in cute colors, but this content is hidden away in the dark and you must come close to get implicated. Having to approach and peek in the mirrored crevasse to read the text is physically engaging in a way that appeals to me. I like when an inanimate object makes me move my body. This work is infographic poetry like Ken Lum, Sarah Charlesworth, Haim Steinbach, Ricky Artschwager and even people like Dan Graham and Albers. This work is about how signification functions while signifying, while decorating, while being both familiar and totally alien/useless. It’s very lightly about currency, I think. Manders could dial down his meaningless word static and learn something here.
The variation is subtle (font, phrase, color, number of panels, length) but each piece stands on its own, supports its own problem to solve. It’s an intentional “series” without feeling totally crass, or at least there’s something about IKEA in this work that makes it okay. This work is not not cynical. I would go so far as to say that this work is kind of dark. This work will be too dry for some people and in some ways, it is too dry for me, but it bossed me around the space and was rewarding in different ways from different vantage points. They would look very nice in a home with other art, more confusing and vaguely like useful interior design. The flavor is confounding/inviting, secret messages, a spoonful of sugar. The show is closed but here’s hoping for the next one.