Alex Gartenfeld

In his fourth exhibition at Harris Lieberman, Brooklyn-based artist Tommy White, who works primarily as a painter, displayed a dozen sculptures (all untitled, 2010) on a wide benchlike platform in the main room. Lumpy amalgams of plaster, wood, metal, and red or black leather, the works vaguely resemble deformed human limbs or body parts, and speak to figural representation at its most abject... Read more

With installations that convincingly mimic socially freighted interiors and archeological sites, Fujiwara questions the very concept of historical veracity... Read more

Cameron Jamie’s first New York solo exhibition looked back to medieval Austria, centering on 11 ornately gro­tesque wooden masks reminiscent of those worn, to this day, by villag­ers channeling Krampus (a kind of anti-Santa Claus) and his band of demons, who in December street revels sometimes playfully whip those—par­ticularly children and attractive young women—alleged to have been “naugh­ty.”.. Read more

In his current exhibition [on view through Aug. 21] at the Museo Civico Diocesano di S. Maria dei Servi, a 14th-century deconsecrated church in Umbria, Banks Violette forgoes an easy comparison of his frequently Gothic references with the sacred context. Instead, the artist riffed off the church's vernacular style—its warm ambient light and simple floor plan, not to mention the folksy devotional paintings stored in the basement. Installing his aluminum scaffolds and supports, which allude to the idolatry and spectatorship of a concert, the effect is one of surprising consonance with the implied reverence of the chapel... Read more

This was Nick Relph’s first solo show (after a decade collaborating with fellow British artist Oliver Payne), and he front-loaded it with his own six-page press release on the economic history of dyes. The exhibition, which encompassed works on paper and a three-channel video, made heavy use of the additive primary colors (red, green and blue), while focusing on a trio of themes: tartan plaids, Ellsworth Kelly and Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo. Many of the show’s pieces (all works 2010) re-present, with minor humorous alterations, the literal or metaphorical packaging—gift wrapping, exhibition posters, documentaries, corporate graphics—associated with these subjects... Read more

The artist is absent in the work of Barbara Bloom, but emerges periodically facilitated by potential for exchange offered by the art object. In her exhibition of sculpture currently at Tracy Williams, Bloom shows gifts in various manifestations: prior to the opening, the artist's young daughter opened a wrapped bicycle in the gallery, on the occasion of her birthday. The resulting work is a light-hearted, theatrical record of gift exchange: an opened box, scattered confetti and wrapped materials. These gifts rely upon the contracts of mutual knowledge and generate presence while de-stabilizing Bloom's authorial position... Read more

Last week saw two premieres in one night, as celebrated Swiss performance twosome Zimmerman & de Perrot debuted in New York with the ebullient "Gaff Aff" at the newly opened Jerome Robbins dance theater at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. "Gaff Aff" roughly means "Staring at a Monkey," which is a bit of Surrealist absurdity but also indicates the performance's themes of self-realization and civilization. The performance begins with a stunning series in which a cardboard box is expertly maneuvered by an invisible actor inside the box, who slides, skips and jumps fantastically; tricks us into thinking there is no one inside; and miraculously gets unclothed and clothed. Later we learn it was Martin Zimmerman all along... Read more

John Giorno's poetry proposes that anywhere you go, you can have an intense physical engagement with words. Since the 1950s, he's framed language with controlled, climactic line breaks and repetition, and an own affirmative speaking voice that, once it occupies your reading, warmly dictates your rhythm and interpretation... Read more

That the frozen of the image is always in part a memento mori for its subject is an endlessly complex trope of the last century, because of the parts of the object that remain alive. How various modes of documentation—video of film in conversation with photography, installation work—differ from straight photography is the subject of the Guggenheim's current survey from its collection, Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance. .. Read more

The tropes taken up by Peter Peri, a young British artist, are esoteric (cult objects; the career of his Constructivist grandfather) and unlikely (impossible perspectives by way of M.C. Escher). The sum total of these references is nostalgia for a time when eccentricity was a qualifier for artistic genius. There is, in turn, a fetishistic effect to the forms Peri creates, which have expertly rendered surfaces both slick and textured; his depiction of volume and recession is also adeptly controlled... Read more

Amateurs and the forgotten images they make are the source and subject of Marlo Pascual’s installations. Something of an artists’ artist (she was named a New Artist of the Year in Rob Pruitt’s recent Art Awards ceremony, without having had a substantial show or gallery representation), she has likely won recognition because of her cool but uncynically nostalgic use of appropriation... Read more

As has been discussed to the point of near-exhaustion, this year's Whitney Biennial of American Art was a stripped-down presentation in tribute to the newfound chastity of our financially- and politically-strapped times. The 2010 edition, curated by Franesco Bonami and Gary Carion Murayari, has fewer artists (55, down from 81 in 2008, when the show spilled into the Park Avenue Armory), and no theme, just the post-apocalyptic, post-linguistic "2010." Both curatorial decisions adopt the rhetoric of the "cross-section," or the transparent mirror to America... Read more

A fashion show generally begins with dead time as people file in, chit-chat, and have their picture taken. A publicist screams or a light is dimmed; men and women assume their hierarchical place in the rows, culminating in an approximately ten-minute organized procession of models up and down a runway (the announced occasion for the gathering); then the audience makes a mass exodus. Order builds, and then explodes as the audience becomes suddenly intent upon congregating elsewhere, another fashion show... Read more

Make the Secrets Productive devotes two rooms primarily to three decades of Joseph Beuys' free-standing sculpture, works that see formal interventions into the minimalist idiom and the vocabulary of war, and which are heavy and bodily while doubled or serial. With a mind both to the unfamiliarity of Beuys in an American context and the extent to which even familiar viewers know of the artist through his myth, the gallery's back rooms includes hour upon hour of video documentation from Beuys' perfomances and lectures... Read more