REVIEW OF EXHIBITIONSNEW YORK

Mel Chinat Frederieke TaylorLong a student of cross-culturalhistory, Mel Chin, in his recentwork, demands that atten-tion be paid to the survivors ofconquest—here natives of theCongo, Sierra Leone and NorthAmerica. In checklist notes for thepieces in the exhibition, he refersto the works—made of materi-als relevant to his narrative—as"Lamentations." Among them is amonumental, elaborately carvedand gilded "trophy frame" thathe dedicates to King Leopold IIof Belgium, who colonized theCongo in the mid-19th centurythrough a program of tortureand slavery. Making profits fromorganized trade in diamonds,rubber, ivory and minerals,Leopold's campaign anticipatedthe tortures of the civil war thatravaged Sierra Leone from 1991to 2002, a period of senselessatrocities and military oppression.

In the 12-by-7-by-1'/2-footSAFE (2005-06), a trophy frameis substantially boarded over withplanks and nails. The upper edgeof the planks traces the course ofthe Congo River, and the frameitself is carved with representa-tions of diamonds, lumber, gold,rubber, human flesh, whips, ivoryand animal skins. The nails recallnail-studded African artifacts ritu-ally transformed into objects of

Mel Chin: SAFE, 2005-06, wood, nails,paint and canvas, 144 by 64 by 18 inchesat Frederieke Tayior.

healing and peace. Chinnotes, "No nails couldkeep them safe from Leo-pold II. A lamentation onthe continuing tragedy thatis the Congo." Within theframe a largely obscuredpanoramic landscapepainting by Chin depictsthe working oppressed.

More to Tell (for SierraLeone). 2005, consists ofa segment of peeled blackwalnut log measuring 8V2by 2 by 2V4 feet that incor-porates as a base a short-wave radio tuned to theonly radio station in SierraLeone. Chin warns, "Ifyou avert your eyes fromher severed hands hervoice will be lost forever."Small speakers set Intotwo truncated branchesreference the amputeesof a terrorist campaignduring the country's civilwar. An incised replica ofan African mask specifically forwomen is mounted near the top.

Made of cast bronze, an OldWorld art material, and pipestone,the traditional substance of NativeAmerican peace pipe bowls,Shape of a Lie (2005) is describedby Chin as "a psycho-biomorphicportrait of a lie." Various abstract-ed elements in the 70-by-29-by-54-inch work pass through a free-standing wall. According to Chin,a lie begins with a toehold in reali-ty. Represented in a length of cast

bronze, the lie rises through— the gonads to gather energy.

It is then tied up in the gut,where it is first felt, represent-ed as a bronze spherepierced by a spike. The liespits through a bronze orificeto the wall's other side,emerging as a tongue ofcarved pipestone to representAmerica's first lie.

These objects, presentedin a 2006 survey exhibitionof Chin's work at the StationMuseum of Contemporary Artin Houston, were shown atthe gallery along with draw-ings on multiple materials.

—Edward Leffingwell

Pierre Bismuth atboth Mary Boonegalleries and TeamThree shows of work by theBrussels-based French art-ist Pierre Bismuth revolvedaround themes of fame.

Left to right, Pierre Bismuth; Art in America, pp. 11112 and Arttorum. pp. 25/26, both 2007,inkjet print on vinyi mounted on aluminum; at Mary Boone Ciieisea.

advertising and brand recogni-tion in the art world. No strangerto celebrity himself—he sharedan Oscar for the screenplay ofEternal Sunshine of the Spot-less Mind (2004)—Bismuth isnot a dour scold about com-merce in art. His playfully ironicinterventions take such formsas large-scale tourist photosgraffitied with the name of oneor another currently prominentartist. For example, "DamienHirst" and "Maurizio Cattelan"are spray-painted on photos ofthe American flag; "ElizabethPeyton" and "Richard Prince" arescrawled on nighttime cityscapes;and "Olafur Eliasson" is paintedon the silver door of a garage.

These works were shown atMary Boone uptown in an exhibi-tion titled "Most Wanted Men,"which perhaps alludes not onlyto the FBI posters but also tothe project created for the 1964World's Fair by Andy Warhol,Bismuth's most important ances-tor in negotiating the conceptualbridge between celebrity and art.Bismuth asks us to locate artisticpersonae amid the mix of thepurely self-promotional graffitist'stag and the bland, generic expres-siveness of the tourist's postcard.He makes further mischief withartists' names in wallpaper thatcovered an adjacent room withindiscriminate, but somehowplausible, combinations of artists'first and last names (Ed Buren,Marcel Nauman, Andy Ruscha).An installation about putting a

name rather than a work on thewall, it was also about employ-Ing art—particularly the widelycollected variety—as decor.

In a reversal of another sort atMary Boone in Chelsea, repro-ductions of advertising pagesfor Bismuth's shows from theMarch issues of Artforum andArt in America were blown up tofreestanding 18-foot-high slabs.With a cheeky reference to theostensible purity of grandioseminimalist constructions, theseobjects transformed the gal-lery into a promotional tool for ashow in which advertisementsthemselves took center stage.

The most compelling work onview, one that offered more thanart-world blagues, is Follow-ing the right hand of. . . (2007),shown at Team. In this projectedvideo of John Huston's 1961 filmThe Misfits, every gesture of themovie's star, Marilyn Monroe,produces a thick animated blackline, which forms a dense skeinthat eventually obscures thewhole image. Bismuth here tookhis cues, perhaps, from two otherstar vehicles: Hans Namuth's filmof Jackson Pollock painting, shotfrom beneath a glass plate asthe artist covered it in drips andpours, and Henri-Georges Clou-zot's movie of Picasso at work,filmed in part from behind a trans-lucent painting surface that con-ceals the artist, though his brush-work is visible. Without any of theponderousness such a descriptionmight imply. Bismuth's remade

video is about how star poweroccludes our interest in the objectitself, wiping out an esthetics ofart with an esthetics of fame.

—Jonathan Gilmore

Andy Yoderat WinklemanLight-conductive iead crystalgives to the newest sculpturesof Andy Yoder a translucencyappropriate to these playfuidigs at the iess-than-transpar-ent monied classes. The glasselements of the project—fragileportrait busts—were said to bethree years in the making. Yoderconceived and cast them to rep-resent Wal-Mart mogul SamuelWalton in sapphire blue, optimumconsumer Martha Stewart in leafgreen and developer DonaldTrump forever amber, each headlarger than life at about 24 by 10by 16 inches. Placed on simplecylindrical pedestals at respectfuldistances from one another, theyradiated with the glow of votivecandles, as though lit from within.The easily identified figures weretopped with clearly defined coinslots: the portraits are piggy banks{though sealed for this exhibition).

Further sending up his famoustargets, Yoder represents miracu-lous appearances by the subjectsin three watercolors on paper,each head roughly 12 incheshigh. Martha of the Leaf locatesStewart's face in insect-gnawedtrails on an aspen-shaped leafattached to a branch against ayellow ground. Yoder finds Waltonamong the stars of Sam Nebulaand portrays Trump in a slice ofbread for Donald of the Toast.

Further addressing the themeof money, Yoder offered MoneyTree Quilt (2007), following a

traditional Amish pattern and,according to gallery materials,alluding to his own family back-ground. At 88 inches on a side,the quilt is made of what appearsto be new cotton cloth and fea-tures a central chevron represent-ing leaves and branches set in adiamond-shaped field against ablue ground. Although framed andapparently machine-stitched, thequilt retains a sense of the intenselabor necessary to the project-

Playing with scale in the man-ner of Claes Oldenburg, Yoder'srecent sculptures include the 31-by-31-by-87-inch Licorice Shoes(2003), made of licorice, siliconeand Styrofoam, and a large-scalepipe, not included here. In themid-'90s, he fabricated Victorian-style side chairs in cast brassreminiscent of works by JeffKoons and Sherrie Levine. Yoderis a graduate of the ClevelandInstitute of Art in his natal city andthe Skowhegan School of Paint-ing and Sculpture. His Grain byGrain (2005)—commissioned forthe Cleveland Foodbank—con-sists of a mosaic wall of 160translucent cast-resin tiles, eachcontaining a single slice of bread.

—Edward Leffingwell

Andreas Kocksat Jeannie FreilichThis was a show made entirelyfrom paper—paper as sculpture,paper as relief, paper as instal-lation. But never paper as meredrawing surface. In delicate"paperworks," as he calls them,German artist Andreas Kocksrepurposesthe medium; hisimaginative riffs on its proper-ties and possibilities are rootedin handicraft, and installed incareful attunement to the archi-

View of Andy Yoder's exhibition, showing (left to right) Donald, Martha and Sam,all 2007, lead crystal, 24 inches high; at Winkleman.

tecture of the gallery. This exhi-bition included paper "cutouts"that colonized the walls with aseeming organic spontaneity, aswell as rectilinear "reliefs" (notthe right word, but these worksdon't adhere to any traditionalformat) for which Kocks "carved"the surface of thick watercolorpaper, using a razor blade orExacto knife. The barely raisedpatterns thus created on the flatpages are augmented with silveryrubbed graphite or watercolor.Both approaches employ patient,artisanal methods to build up for-mally complex surfaces. Together,the wall-consuming installa-tions and the feathery, almostimperceptibly detailed carvingsdescribed visual extremes.

The main space was given

s:

mural. Paperwork (f310 (2003)climbed a narrow wall near theentrance. Its layered cutouts,painted with white acrylic, conjureda column of smoke or clouds, andwere also vaguely floral—thoughfar more abstract than the illusion-istic "cannonball." While Kocks'scutout murals engage the physi-cal scale of both viewer and gal-lery, his "carved" compositions,examples of which occupied theoffice, are as intimate as any min-iaturist drawing. The notion thatpaper is a surface for drawing isplayfully discarded in his work.Like many artists before him, nota-bly Matisse, Kocks makes paperitself function as line and shape,in work confined not by the pictureplane but by the space of a room.

—Kirsten Swenson

AndraaB Kocks: Paperwork #703 (Cannonball), 2007, graphite on watercolori i t t e n s i o n s variable; at Jeannie Freilich.

over entirely to Paperwork #703(Cannonbali), 2007. Conceivedas a site-specific installation, itwas made from intricately cutand constructed watercolor paperapplied to four of the gallery'swalls. The painstakingly elaborateinstallation captured a pattern ofsplash marks, suggesting that thefloor was a pool of ink into whicha cannonball had plunged, or intowhich someone had done a "can-nonbatl"—that jump intended todisplace and spray as much liquidas possible. Layered waves ofgraphite-coated paper rose andappeared to slosh up the wall,with stray droplets scattered tothe ceiling. The most impressiveeffect was conceptual: the senseof a void, of the room's utteremptiness, was achieved throughthe elaborate depiction of animaginary event's consequences.

A second and far smaller paper

Daniel Burenat Bortolami-DayanThis installation of eleven 1966canvases by Daniel Buren was arevelation, a kind of missing linkin the career of the French painterturned conceptualist. Under theinfluence of Art Informel. Burenhad liberally splashed and stainedhis canvases in the early 1960s,gradually confining his forms tovertical stripes by mid-decade.But like so many artists of hisgeneration, he had by then cometo feel that the act of paintingwas itself problematic: executedin the hermetic space of theartist's studio, it was private andessentially apolitical. So in 1966,Buren purchased some boltsof canvas printed with coloredstripes, discrete lengths of whichhe stretched and framed. But hedid not yet forgo paint altogether.

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