New York Gallery Round up

Tyler Coburn

May 13, 2013

For the entirety of the year, Lili Reynaud-Dewar will only make and exhibit bedrooms. Her current exhibition at CLEARING, New York, contains the requisite furniture, though the French artist seems less inclined to follow in the theatricality of Claes Oldenburg’s Bedroom Ensemble (1964) than to meditate on the conditions necessitating that an artist make a bedroom of an exhibition. As Frieze New York adds yet another stop on the art fair circuit, Reynaud-Dewar’s exhibition reminds us of how artists must also negotiate the migratory and the local, the studio and the home. These subjects are also brought to bear on contemporaneous outings by Edgardo Aragón, Alex Hubbard, and Paul McCarthy. That we are some years from the apex of theorization on the globalized artist, in other words, does not mean that our cultural practitioners are any less implicated in cosmopolitanism’s waxing demands and effects.

Reynaud-Dewar’s bedrooms reflect both the general condition of a migratory artist and the specific challenges faced by women, who are particularly impaired, she claims, by the imperative to have and keep a home. If Virginia Woolf forcefully argued for the cultural and literal room for women to work, then Reynaud-Dewar suffers from the inverse dilemma of having no shortage of exhibition rooms and yet none that could be properly called her own. The artist’s encounters with domesticity only last the length of an exhibition or residency, and perhaps their very ephemerality affords her incisive view on the spatial bounds of artistic life. “I AM INTACT AND I DON’T CARE” at CLEARING, for example, includes a fountain spewing black ink into a queen-size bed; its risible premise is more than corroborated by the willfully schlocky manufacture, which cites inspiration in the world of things, of bodies, and of desire incarnate. Splattering its white sheets with creative surplus, the sculpture nods to the artist’s copious literary heroes and, more directly, to the touchstones in her ongoing work with race. On a nearby flat screen, a blackened Reynaud-Dewar mimes Josephine Baker’s dances in the Vienna residency studio, exhibition, and collection halls of the Belvedere. She has previously expressed admiration for Sun Ra’s rerouting of origins, though throwing one’s voice to Saturn carries a far different register than dancing in the style of a racialized other.

While Reynaud-Dewar’s sincere investment in racial history bridges obvious divides, Edgardo Aragón’s work is borne of an intimacy with its subjects and locales. The self-described “offspring of economic devaluations and state bankruptcy and pillage,” Aragón (born in 1985) traces the unfolding effects of Mexican neoliberalism within families, across generations, and for working communities, deliberately shifting focus from Mexico City to regions like his home state of Oaxaca. Tesoro [Treasure] (2013), the eponymous centerpiece of his first New York gallery exhibition at Laurel Gitlen, takes form as two rows of tables displaying photographs of the jewels and keepsakes of ten Mexican families. Modest testaments to accumulation, these collections are also marked by signs of financial straits and dismal economic periods, when jewelry carried more value than currency: a chain necklace in one photograph, for example, has been scavenged of all but two links. In the back gallery, Aragón’s video La Encomienda (2013) captures an informal chorus of young men singing into the mouth of an old gemstone mining cave in Oaxaca. Comprising mining protest slogans from throughout Latin America, the song gauges the histories and reverberations of this contentious site. A variation, sung by a lone performer, will sound the shallow depth of the Tiffany flagship store’s façade in the coming weeks.

From A Room of One’s Own to a bar of one’s own: such is the liquid courage on offer at Alex Hubbard’s second solo exhibition at Maccarone, “Magical Ramón and The Five Bar Blues,” spread over two spaces. Five retrofit shipping crates contain all of the necessary fixings, from a built-in keg and liquor supply to the swinging saloon doors, bar stool, and foot rests that can help a good drunk lean into it. In certain circumstances, the cramped quarters can only do so much to accommodate their props, and Hubbard is compelled to halve a beer neon, for example, rather than forgo a necessary part of the mise en scène. As the exhibition title makes clear, such charming effects thinly belie the melancholia of these units, eliciting consideration of why present circumstances might compel such alienating extremes—and recalling past depressives like Montgomery Clift, who famously built a one-man bar into his New York townhouse. Little else in the show rises to this synthesis of pathos and form: Hubbard’s urethane casts of trash agglomerations have grown sedate since their aerobic performance at Eva Presenhuber’s Zurich gallery a few months ago, though continue to offer impressive homologies to his process-intensive videos. The press release describes a new series of works as “glib portrayals of current painting,” in which Hubbard sets bare and resin-coated linen in gilded antique frames, mounted with cast urethane abalone-shell sconces that illuminate the surfaces. Perhaps success can be measured in how closely the works resemble their targets, which is to say that the satire of disingenuousness here is barely differentiable from disingenuousness itself.

This critique, of course, could also be leveled at Paul McCarthy’s eighty-foot-tall, inflatable Balloon Dog (2013), presently taunting Jeff Koons outside of the Frieze New York tent. The sculpture is by far the dullest jewel in the Los Angeles artist’s crown, which over the coming months will be set with multiple exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth and a massive installation at the Park Avenue Armory. At press time, the artist had already plopped down the massive bronze Sisters (2013) in the Hudson River Park, scandalizing and titillating joggers and cyclists with the grisly aftermath of a Snow White sculpture session gone awry, in which the heroine and her wooded friends were made to suffer like the saints. The violence grows muter at the 18th Street gallery, owing in part to the stately black walnut, which indexes the transmogrification of Disney tchotchkes, first into digital hybrids and then analog forms. From Heidi to Pinocchio, McCarthy has long symptomized the mainstays of Americana, and in the dimensionless field of virtual design, he finds a potent new analogy for the ambient and unceasing projections of our cultural phantasms.

We will conclude with McCarthy poised to Cromwell the New York art world, Aragón following the chain links to a Fifth Avenue flagship, and Reynaud-Dewar en route to her next bedroom. Even Hubbard seems to have harnessed the global flows; his bars may offer the coffin comforts of boozy dead ends, but these dead ends are ready to ship.

Category
Gender, Race & Ethnicity, Globalization
Subject
Neoliberalism, Mexico, Public Art

Tyler Coburn is an artist, writer, and teacher based in New York.

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