Tonight: Much Ado About Gabriel Orozco

The tightly edited survey of Gabriel Orozco's major works, on view at MoMA, is an exercise in calculated futility made to illustrate the artist's oft-repeated aim to frustrate, "the expectations of the one who waits to be amazed." What beauty one may see in Orozco's work is often easy to miss: the simplicity of a suggestion, the rawness of humble materials, the surgically precise alteration of readymade objects, the near infinite permutations of color and shape in a formulaic painting practice. The results are often equally nonchalant and aggressive.
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Filling in the Dots

Tauba Auerbach's dizzying, opt-art minded work draws influence from many sources, from the stark graphic designs of Alexander Girard to Guy de Cointet's linguistic musings. Working across a variety of mediums, her current show of large-scale paintings, photographs, and sculpture, Here and Now/And Nowhere at Deitch Projects, has a grand white elephant as its centerpiece. It's a two-person pump organ, which, dressed as cult priestesses Auerbach and her friend Cameron Mesirow (aka Glasser) played to a rapt audience of a few hundred people during the show's opening. Auerbach and Mesirow designed the instrument, which like all proper white elephants is for sale (when the organ sells, a second one will be crafted for the artists' personal use).
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Robert Longo Surrenders the Absolutes

Robert Longo has at times been an art world darling and a target of critical derision, the latter being a fate few artists would hope to suffer. There are several examples of comparable contemporary giants of American art -- Ed Ruscha, Richard Prince, and Christopher Wool come to mind -- who worked steadily until the market for their work took off. For them it was an early retirement with benefits, sainthood in the same life. Longo deserves his due, yet perhaps it's a good thing that he still hasn't received it. "Surrendering the Absolutes," on view through Saturday at Metro Pictures, should be considered a major turning point in an already well-worn career.
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Guns and Knives: Robert Lazzarini Suspends Disbelief

If New York City could be compared to Florence in the throes of the Renaissance then Robert Lazzarini could be from either world, a Renaissance maestro of yesteryear or a commercially successful artist of this year. Much has changed in the march of art history, but many formal techniques such as the study of perspective, the long-time linchpin of a fine arts education, has been abandoned for the brave new world of post-studio practice where art is made not by a practitioner but by a fabricator. In his latest installation "Guns and Knives," which is on view through the summer at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut, Lazzarini has created objects with show-stopping effects — they’re less Medici, more The Matrix. This gro… Read More