Back from a New York trip, I offer herewith speed reviews. (No write-up more than 101 words!) Herewith, the first installment:
Minima Moralia: Any Chelsea exhibition featuring Samuel Beckett (yes, that Samuel Beckett) and a title from Theodor Adorno is made to order for the theory crowd. Words take the day: Matias Faldbakken’s “visual abstractions” investigate language “through a process of suppression of letters and sentences” (gallery speak for marking up plastic rubbish bags?). Glenn Ligon paints and neons text, most notably from James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. In Bruce Nauman’s work (drawings, his Good Boy, Bad Boy video), language breaks down and poetry (sometimes) emerges. The Beckett? A video of Not I, wherein a woman’s mouth, in close-up, spews out her life story.
(Marvelli Gallery, 526 West 26)
Stop Motion: Mining the notion of frozen time, Allan McCollum and Keith Edmier invoke the eruption at Pompeii and its excavation. In McCollum’s grid of 16 identical casts of a watchdog that died in Pompeii, each is oriented differently, rotated just a bit in relation to its neighbor to create an illusion of movement. Edmier’s Adonaïs contains basalt (hardened volcanic magma) casts of two human hearts. Unlike the dogs, each heart is unique, “excavated” from the artist and a friend through MRI imaging. Though also stopped in time, they too create the illusion of life as one swells with blood, the other contracts.
(Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 535 West 22)
Next Up: Speed Reviews 2: The Fabricators
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