Wu Guanzhong: Better in Black and White

The promise of Chinese ink paintings inflected with a contemporary sensibility had me running to the current exhibition at the Asia Society: "Revolution in Ink: The Paintings of Wu Guanzhong" (on view through August 5).

Wu (1919-2010) taught at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, meaning his work was largely in offical favor, though he did encounter harsh criticism during the Cultural Revolution for looking back to China's past for inspiration and eschewing Social Realism.

The works in this show (mostly from the mid-1970s-2004) demonstrate a clear effort by Wu to bring together classical Chinese landscape motifs with modes of Post-War Western art, specifically Abstract Expressionism.

For the most part, these efforts are (an often cringe-inducing) failure.

Wu Guanzhong "Pines" (

In works like "Pines," Wu ruins his otherwise evocative naturalism--the various gray/black shades of the tree branches, touched with daubs of green needles are lovely--with jarring Pollockian splotches and skeins of florescent pinks and yellows.

Wu Guanzhong "Lion Woods" (1982)

He makes the same move time and again (see "Lion Woods" (1982) at right), marring what would be laudable achievements of form and subtle tonality with completely unnecessary toadying to contemporary tropes. It's an embarrassing insecurity--that his work needs a Western veneer to have value. It's like a Soviet Bloc dissident of the early '80s feeling he needs to sport a mullet to be cool.

Wu Guanzhong "A Big Manor" (2001)

When Wu is able to restrain his palette--resist the urge for an ungainly culture clash--the work in black-and-white only is wonderful, as in "A Big Manor" from 2001--clearly contemporary, but clean--untainted with chromatic distractions.

Wu Guanzhong "The Grand Canyon in America" (1990)

And when he works in earthen tones--there are, alas, just two such examples in the show--the results are stunning. "Grand Canyon," from a trip Wu took to the United States in the late 1980s, (almost) makes up for his mistakes.

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Ryan McGinley: Bestiality (Not That There's Anything Wrong With That)

Among all contemporary artists, Ryan McGinley has the best eye for--and access to--hot, frisky youths. His photographs of nude beauties of both sexes frolicking in nature and with each other may not be great art--but they certainly make you envious of the artist, who clearly is having a damn good time with his camera.

Classic McGinley: "Holding Hands" (2003)

He currently has exhibitions (through June 2) at both spaces of his gallery, Team, one of the holdout dealers still in Soho. I first stopped by the gallery's rather new annex on Wooster Street--and the pics in this exhibition, titled "Grids," were vintage McGinley, or at least as vintage as the work of an inchoate 34-year-old artist can be.

The photos are closeups of kids (teens to early 20s) at concerts, arranged in grids, the largest consisting of 80 faces in a 16x5 display. Many of the fans are bathed in the glow of stage lights, and their expressions are ones of pure rapture--they are in the church of late childhood: the rock arena.

Installation view of "Grids"

McGinley inarguably has a knack for capturing moments of pure bliss. And while I don't want to like his work and would prefer to be dismissive (out of jealousy for all the fun he's having, if nothing else), I often can't look away. Attractive kids, whose features span the array of post-racial America, evincing the joys of being 16, 17, 18? Not much to think about, but what's not to like? It's very easy on the eyes.

At Team's main redoubt on Grand Street, the thin, tattooed (and full-frontally nude) teens are there in all the photos, per the artist's SOP--but in this exhibition, they are joined by co-stars who add a beguiling twist to the McGinley formula: exotic animals.

Ibexes, boas, iguanas and lemurs are cavorting with their comely castmates against candy-colored backgrounds; a turkin and a porcupine are strategically placed to keep a pair of pictures rated as hard R instead of NC-17. Snakes slither in places where the sexually orthodox would disapprove.

In the most striking, borderline disturbing image, a marmoset clings to the pubes and penis of a heavily scratched and bandaged model; look closely (I did), and you'll see the creature's claws have a pretty good purchase on the dude's (lower) head.

What does it all mean? Does it matter? Nude teens+cute animals+major-museum-owned artist undoubtedly equals blockbuster sales.

But for those who insist on some sort of explanation, here's what the gallery's press release says:

"These photographs are studies in animal bodies, their strangeness and seductivity. As a collection, they highlight the similarities and differences between the various species’ anatomies, the familiarity and relative regularity of the human form providing a blank slate against which to read the animals."

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Pick of the Week: Sheila Hicks

This pick of the week is easy: Sheila Hicks' exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins, on view through June 2. The artist, born in 1934, has been making work for more than five decades; this is her first show at the gallery with perhaps the best taste in Chelsea.

Sheila Hicks "Androise" (mono filament, linen slate) 2005

Using interesting materials with great intelligence to make objects of unusual beauty is close to the pinnacle of art for me, and Hicks is a champion in this respect, deploying textiles (and the occasional stone or feather) to make sculpture/paintings that are exquisite: a Minimalist aesthetic that delivers with maximum effect.

Sheila Hicks (linen, porcupine quills)

Enough with the words. Just look.

Sheila Hicks "Masonry II" (linen) 1972-73

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Whitney Biennial 2012: One Room Only

This year's Whitney Biennial was the worst I've seen in my 20-plus years of attending, which I guess makes 10 versions.

At least part of the blame belongs to Jay Sanders, the show's co-curator and a director at a commercial gallery, Greene Naftali, through November 2010.Two the Biennial artists are in the Greene Naftali stable (Richard Hawkins, John Knight) --and neither are big-time-biennial worthy.

Another surprise, if not a disappointment, is the throwing out of the window the idea that the goal of the biennial--held at the "Whitney Museum of American Art"--is to showcase the best work being done by artists in the U.S. A good chunk of the featured artists are foreign-based--which is all well and good, but then let's change the mission statement ("the Biennial provides a look at the current state of contemporary art in America") to more accurately reflect this global reality.

While the sheer amount of low-quality work is hugely disheartening, especially compared to the triumph of the 2010 Biennial, there is one room that bats, if not quite 1.000, then around .850.  It's on the third floor, and three of its four artists deliver some of the biennial's best work, pieces truly worth spending some time with. The work of the fourth artist who shares the space is a little pedantic and obvious, but at least it's very of this Occupy Wall Street moment.

The three (neighboring) standouts of this year's Biennial:

Nicole Eisenman, "Breakup" (2011)

A sample of Nicole Eisenman's monotypes

Nicole Eisenman, who shows with Leo Koenig, is one of the best painters applying pigment today, and this gallery (on the far right as you enter the third floor) offers a few dozen of her mixed-media monotypes (each one of which gets a thumbs up) and one full-scale painting (pictured, right).

The same room also features work that, based on the lingering crowd it was attracting on my visit, would be a top contender for audience favorite. Sam Lewitt’s "Fluid Employment" demonstrates the unique properties of ferrofluid, a mixture of magnetic particles suspended in liquid.

Sam Lewitt, "Fluid Employment" (detail)

The material, invented by NASA, gathers into globs of black goo, with a Jello-like, quivering consistency, in the presence of a magnet.


Spread across a half dozen or so mats across the floor, the blobs (some in the form of what looks like a telephone cord), are gently activated by fans. The blowing air also speeds up the evaporation process of the material; Lewitt reportedly will come back each Sunday of the show to replenish the ferrofluid. The video at right (shaky; sorry) gives some sense of the material's motion and the work's size.

Luther Price slide

Still from Bill Morrison's "Decasia"

But the big, new discovery for me: Luther Price, whose handmade slides were a transfixing revelation. He uses mostly found film footage that he cuts up and reassembles; key to the art is the detritus that he also sandwiches between the two glass plates of the slide, embedding ants, flies and dirt onto the projected image. I couldn't pull myself away until I'd seen every slide--one of the best uses--and transformations--of found film since Bill Morrison's "Decasia" (2002). 

Kate Levant installation (detail)

The fourth artist in the gallery is Kate Levant, whose installation is made from scraps of buildings salvaged from a burned-down house in Detroit. Nothing spectacular here or original here, but the work at least has the merits of underscoring both the continuing housing crisis--and Detroit's emergence, thanks to ultra-cheap rents, as a hotbed for emerging artists.

Andrew Masullo "5030" 2008-2010

Before entering this area of the third floor, I happened to see first paintings by Andrew Masullo, work which briefly (by default) held the "Best in Show" title before I encountered Eisenman and Price. The bright, geometric canvases are hardly relevations, but after the onslaught of schlock that I endured before, these paintings came as a relief from the refuse that had preceded it.  

A sculpture by Michael E. Smith

Honorable mention: the sculptures of Michael E. Smith, debris-encrusted everyday objects which look like leftovers from a nuclear wasteland.

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Flip-Flop Feelings: Brice Marden, Dana Schutz, Marlborough Gallery

Three shows now on view at Chelsea galleries have upended some of my longstanding aesthetic assumptions.

I've loved Dana Schutz's figurative work from her first exhibition at Zach Feuer in 2004. Her bold, brushy, overscaled canvases typically have featured genuinely & wonderfully disturbing compositions: self-eating cannibals, grotesquely twisted and deformed bodies, operating rooms in Hell. Like a good movie or an even better dream, her best paintings are simultaneously funny and scary. Narrative is always implied, but the stories that are suggested leave plenty of room for viewer interpretation. Nudity and great color never hurt a painting.

The Good Dana Schutz: "Presentation" (2002)



The Bad: "Falling Cat 2" (2012)

But her latest exhibtion, her first at Friedrich Petzel gallery, is a big disappointment (see for yourself through June 16). The best pictures ("Piano in the Rain," the title of the show; "Building the Boat While Sailing") are just OK, instead of the mental-visual-emotional ravishments I expect. The weaker work ("Falling Cat 2"; "Flasher") is actually bad, or at least boring--two words I never thought I would use in association with Schutz.



The Boring Dana: "Yawn 4" (2012)

Appropriately, the exhibition includes a series of "Yawn" paintings, which is the response they elicited from me. The work feels mailed in; instead of feeling compelled to stare for hours, I found it easy to turn away.

Florian Schmidt "Immunity  10" (2012)

Ironically, in a case of cross-street competition, her former gallery, Zach Feuer***, directly opposite 24th Street from Petzel--has mounted (perhaps as a middle finger to its former star of the stable?), an amazing show by the early-30s Austrian artist Florian Schmidt (up until June 16).

The "Immunity" painting series, made with acrylic gel, lacquer, vinyl, cardboard and wood are stellar, but the standout work is a center-stage sculpture, whose title, "Spot," is a clue that there's a lot more going on with this seemingly all-white construction than what is initially revealed.
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Marden Surprise: "For Blinky" (2011) 

Brice Marden has never been one of my favorites. His Chinese-calligraphy-inspired canvases from the late '80s onward are nice, in a purely decorative way. The work that made him famous--his mostly monochromatic planes from the '60s--would, unfortunately, serve well as Exhibit #1 in any court case alleging that abstract art is all an intellectual fraud. I think this way-too-easy work took advantage of the Minimalism tide at the time and was made not from any inner artistic urgency--but to get girls. (To his credit, the artist--whose wife and purported mistress got into a cat fight last summer at Bar Pitti, which happens to be directly across the street from my apartment's front door--but dang I missed it--has almost admitted as much.)


Brice Marden "View" (2011)

 His current exhibition, though, at Matthew Marks (on view through June 23)had me circling the show not once, not twice, but three times. I couldn't get enough. Was Marden really having this magical effect on me? The work actually isn't radically different from what he's done before. It's the "canvas" he has used for his minimal color interventions: marble. The natural beauty of the stone, with judicious interventions of color, yield images worth yelping for. An extremely rare instance of an artist getting better with age.
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The Marlborough Gallery, it's pretty safe to say, has some of the worst taste of any big-name gallery--and Marlborough is big enough to have two mega-spaces in Manhattan, both on 57th Street and a two-floor space in the Chelsea Arts Tower. Botero, Chihuly, Grooms--three of the worst world-famous artists working today, and all belong to Marlborough. The exhibition that ended May 5 on the showcase first floor of the Chelsea space: "Curvae in Curvae," new corten-steel sculptures from Beverly Pepper, had me wincing in real pain; Richard Serra kept calling while I was there, asking for his style back.



Valerie Hagerty: "Headliess George
Washington With Table" (2012)

But upstairs, Valerie Hagerty's "Altered States" show, which also closed May 5, drew a respect-must-be-paid thumbs up: disintegrating, weed-infested carpet; a burnt and battered portrait (headless) of george Washington; a barnacle-encrusted armoire. The decay is expertly rendered, and the perhaps-too-implicit theme of American decline happened to coincide with my own misgivings about the country's future...
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*** I don't know the story behind Schutz's departure from the Feuer stable, where she was certainly paying a lot of the bills. The split might have been amicable. I do find it fascinating--the rationale behind some artist moves are clear: done for the greater exposure and prestige (like anyone upgrading to Gagosian)--but I feel I have a pretty acute sense of gallery pecking order, and I wouldn't put Petzel much above Feuer--maybe an 8.5 vs. Feuer's 8.0 on a 1-10 scale of gallery hierarchy (Gagosian being an 11). Petzel has a solid lineup of international artists of the upper-middling sort. But Feuer is one of the art world's most widely feted (if also shortest and hairest) young gallerists--arguably the epitome of cool.

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Henry Taylor: Skin in the Game

One of the many reasons I love PS1 is that it's one of the few museums that regularly introduces an old art addict like me me to talents with whom I'm not familiar. Case in Point: The Henry Taylor show on view now in the main, first-floor exhibition area through April 9.

Henry Taylor, "Huey Newton (2007)

The majority of the show is taken up with mid-sized paintings, mostly portraits and mostly of African-Americans. His subjects include athletes, both living and dead (Carl Lewis, Jackie Robinson); political figures (Huey Newton); his own family; self-portraits; and just plain folk whom he meets on the streets and whose look he likes.

Henry Taylor, "The Long Jump by Carl Lewis" (2010)

The style is faux-naif, with enough post-Modern touches (Carl Lewis is jumping at you, withe a white-picket fence and prison in the background) to make clear this is a trained, art-school grad. With so much black skin on display, I was reminded of something Jeffrey Deitch (former gallerist, now head of LA MoCA) told me in an interview: that no one paints black skin like Kehinde Wiley.

Taylor won't give Wiley (currently the subject of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum) a run for his money on this front, but I enjoyed the work, especially his use of unusual painting surfaces, including cereal boxes; and, in the second-best painting in the show, two side-by-side cigarette packs to form the "canvas" for a mini-self-portrait.

And collectors are certainly eating this up. I'm an avid reader of museum wall text to find out where the work is coming from, And a huge percentage of the Taylor paintings--I'd say north of 90 percent--are in the hands of private collectors. Very few are here "courtesy of the artist" or his gallery.

"Warning Shots Not Required" (rear left)

The best painting in the show? Hands-down: "Warning Shots Not Required," a 23-foot long giant that incorporates all of the motifs that recur in Taylor's work, including horses, prisons and, mysteriously, spaghetti.

"It's Like a Jungle"

But the best piece in the show isn't a painting, but a sculpture: "It's Like a Jungle" greets visitors in the exhibition's first gallery. It's a room-filling, highly vertical installation of brooms, buckets, black-painted jugs and bric-a-brac: a scary/inviting urban forest.

And in fact, PS1 does Taylor what is a huge disservice by emphasizing his painting. An exhibition on view until April 22 at a commercial gallery, Untitled on the Lower East Side, reveals Taylor to be a much more interesting sculptor/installation artist than he is a painter.

Henry Taylor, "March Forth"

The gallery (rapidly establishing itself as one of the best in town; it has been open now a few years and is batting 1.000 in my book--every one of its shows has been stellar) is covered in rich, brown dirt; in the center is an African hut made out of a wide array of scrap materials. It's a stunner.

Henry Taylor, "To Be Titled"

But even better: wall-hanging sculptures made entirely out of the black-painted jugs that make only a cameo appearance at PS1.

These jugs are amazingly evocative of African masks--found objects transformed, with just black paint and the right positioning, into powerful fetish objects. Spectacular.

--Bryant Rousseau

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Sculpture Center: Hidden Gem Is One of NYC's Coolest (and Scariest) Art Venues

I made one of my quarterly visits to Queens on Sunday, March 18, drawn primarily by the Henry Taylor show at PS1 (more on that in a later post), but I also swung by the Sculpture Center--one of my favorite exhibition spaces in the city.

Exterior view of the Sculpture Center

 If you don't like crowds or lines--indeed, if you like having art all to yourself--the Sculpture Center is for you. Down a side street about a 10-minute walk from PS1, the Center, housed in a former power-generation plant, rarely has more than a handful of visitors, and you're often the only one there.

I've been singing the Sculpture Center's praises for years, like in this post on Architectural Record's web site, a review of the "Happiness of Objects" which featured a 36-foot tall, 24-feet-wide, but just two-feet deep abode.

Interior view of the Sculpture Center

The main, upstairs space--with a soaring ceiling, brick walls and a column-free display area--consistently shows interesting work that tends to push the boundaries of sculpture. But what I really look forward to is the basement, whose exhibitions tend to conceptual extremes--and more important, it's probably the most unusual museum space in NYC.

I've only been truly scared in a museum twice, and both times were in this dungeon-like space: one of the unsettling shows featured a long corridor of locked doors and bright, white lights--very Shining like; the other involved walking through a pitch-black corridor, with odd drafts and disturbing sounds the only sensory experience.

The latest exhibition in the space, which just ended today ("You never look at me from the place from which I see you") was typically eclectic and heady. The best works took advantage of a pair of tunnels which veer off from the main corridors--they are creepy rooms, inevitably making me think of concentration-camp ovens whenever I see them.

Sculpture/installation by Takashi Hirosaki

In one of the tunnels: sculptural installations from Takashi Hirosaki, made of wire and scraps of construction debris. They looked like the sort of electric-colored spider webs you'd expect to see from the oversized, irradiated bugs you'd expect to live here.

Christine Rebet, installation view

The other tunnel: Sculptural maquettes of imaginary, unfinished monuments from Christine Rebet, work very close in concept and execution to objects by Iman Issa, currently on view at the New Museums 
"Ungovernables" Triennial.

Christine Rebet, installation view

The highlight of Rebet's work: a blue mask/face shield made out of what appears to have been a garbage can.

--Bryant Rousseau

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Chuck Close Has Face Blindness!

Irony of ironies--Chuck Close, perhaps the most-famous painter of the human visage of the past 50 years, apparently has "face blindness," according to the latest 60 Minutes--that is, he can't recognize famous or familiar people.

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Lichtenstein/China: Powerful Surprise

Roy Lichtenstein is an artist who's easy to like, but hard to love. I've always considered his bright, Pop confections, crafted with his signature Ben-Day-dots, cheery but shallow--worth a look but not a linger.

But my standard assessment was shattered by a show (through April 7) at Gagosian's 24th Street emporium of Lichtenstein's "Landscapes in the Chinese Style." I was utterly unfamiliar with these late-career paintings (and a few related sculptures)--and totally taken with them. I actually said "wow" out loud when I entered the main space.

Exhibition View: "Roy Lichtenstein: Landscapes in the Chinese Style"

It's a perfect combination for me: ink-on-silk-scroll Chinese landscapes are one of my favorite genres (and really the only work from before the 1860s that I get into) and to see them rendered with such an appropriate contemporary spin, was an enchantment.

Roy Lichtenstein, "Landscape with Scholar's Rock" (1997)

Lichtenstein's dots, in various degrees of opacity, are ideally suited to mirror the obscuring mist so central to the romantic melancholy that I shamelessly admire in the original inspirations. The patches of in-your-face color, judiciously used, give the paintings a punchy vibrancy that the ink scrolls, with their faded pigments and inevitable display in darkened galleries behind glass, never can achieve (although the earthy, faded tones are also a part of their appeal). The sheer size of Lichtenstein's paintings also work to their advantage and emphasize their art-of-our-lifetime provenance (the work above is 13 feet long).  

Once again, I find myself feeling in debt to Larry Gagosian. Though by many accounts a deeply unpleasant person, the man is owed a medal of some sorts for the string of hugely entertaining and enlightening string of exhibition wonders he has put on over the last couple years--everything from works from Bob Rauschenberg's private collection to Picasso and his muse Marie-Therese to a Manzoni retrospective.

(As a concluding footnote, while it's common to spot such semi-celebrity gallerists as David Zwirner or Andrea Rosen prowling their spaces, I had never laid eyes on the Great Man himself, despite many dozens of visits to all three of his Manhattan outposts.

Larry Gagosian

I finally saw him a couple Friday early-evenings ago, on the closing weekend of the Damien Hirst dot-painting travesty, leaving through the lobby his Madison Ave. flagship. He was alone, without the entourage I would have expected. I bowed slightly, as only fitting God; and was totally ignored, again only fitting. Still, his solo status made him a little endearing as he headed off for the weekend. A loner, like me?)  

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MoMA's Glenn Lowry Is a Pervert: Cindy Sherman

OK, so Glenn Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, isn't really a pervert--or at least, I don't know if he is or he isn't. But he did make quite a  risqué, sexually confrontational choice (some might say a "courageous" pick, in the current critical parlance) for his favorite of all the photographs by Cindy Sherman currently on display (through June 11) at MoMA.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #263 (1992)

His selection as Best in Show at the Sherman retrospective? A very Hans Bellmer-esque pic of two conjoined mid-sections of a male and a female doll (with two severed heads on the side for good measure). Saying the doll parts are anatomically correct doesn't do their graphic nature justice: the extra-hirsute vagina has a tampon string protruding from it; the male member sports a cock ring.    

How do I know this is Lowry's No. 1? He tells us so in a video. In a laudable touch, the museum has scattered QR codes around the exhibition which link to clips of various art-world heavyweights discussing the pics they most admire (though MoMA's spotty wireless connectivity makes watching an exercise in patience). You can view the 10 vids here.

Hans Bellmer doll (1936)

What I find interesting about  Lowry's full-frontal choice is that NY Times critic Roberta Smith, in her review, took the curators to task for not staging a "riskier, more rigorous" exhibition; Smith laments that "there are only three examples of Ms. Sherman's jarring sex pictures." Apparently, Lowry, at least, was ready for many more.

The image of the hairy hermaphrodite appears in the sixth gallery of the exhibition, the one set aside for Sherman's least family-friendly work (and the only ones where she herself is absent from the images): the photographs here include an old-lady doll with sausage links going where they don't belong; a pronouncedly pimply butt; and pics with plenty of flies and vomit.

The room also features the image I'd nominate as the show's breath-taker: Untitled #193 from 1989 that I've dubbed the Chocolate Beast (or Feces Face?) It's an unforgettable image that I couldn't stop staring at (raising suspicion among the guards); it definitely rewards extending viewing, with new details constantly revealing themselves (the fact that a face is hidden there isn't even immediately perceivable).

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #190 (1989)

My overall take on the exhibition? Sherman is one of the contemporary artists with whom I have the longest relationship. I first became familiar with her work in the mid-1990s when I was planning my own series of series of staged movie stills--until I learned that Sherman had beaten me to the idea by some 20 years.

So with nearly 20 years of experience with the work behind me, I went into the show feeling pretty confident that I had a solid understanding of her oeuvre and importance--but I was looking forward to spending time with an old friend.

And no, the show didn't really manage to surprise me or significantly alter my evaluation of Sherman (unlike, for example, a 2003 Lucas Samaras show of his self-portraits at the Whitney, which caused me to undergo a conversion from Samaras naysayer to worshipful kneeler).

But the show did underscore for me that Sherman's work delivers on that essential, contemporary art two-fer: the ideas driving the images are conceptually interesting--and they also succeed as purely visual objects.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #223 (1990)

And the curators earned my kudos for bringing to my attention a pair of crucial points: First, that Sherman, unlike so many of today's top artists, works alone. The makeup and prop placement alone must be grueling; but knowing that Sherman is going into these characters all by herself deepens for me the sense that these pics are created during a fraught psychic journey. 

I also appreciated that the curators' wall text points out just what a good actress Sherman is--always getting that mysterious smile just so.

Cindy Sherman, Film Still #27 (1979)

After a giant mural that greets visitors to the sixth floor (with a giantess Sherman in various awkward costumes), and then a sort of intro/ante-chamber room that gives one-off samples of some of her most popular series, the exhibition starts with a complete set of her 70 groundbreaking film stills. My own never-done series of staged scenes from imaginary movies would have included snippets of a script; Sherman's pics, unadulterated by titles or text, force the viewer to supply their on context--and are undoubtedly stronger for it.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #299 (1994)

It was the gallery after the film stills I enjoyed the most--a room dedicated to her Fashion series--work commissioned by major designer labels, with Sherman putting couture clothes on some of her most disturbed characters. I knew of the work, and had seen plenty of examples previously, but seeing eight of them together in close proximity really smacks you in the face with just how strange and striking the photos are (though you also get the somewhat depressing feel that not even Sherman can out-"subversivize" the fashion houses--the more edgy/ugly/anti-beauty the images are, the more happy the self-congratulating sponsors probably are). Look out for the image (Untitled #132 from 1984) where Sherman (in stripes) is a dead ringer for Ellen DeGeneres--or at least what DeGeneres would look like after a rough night.

The next gallery features Sherman's Centerfold series--arguably her strongest work, but too familiar for me to spark any frisson (I was jealous of those getting to encounter these for the first time). And as much as I admire these photos, I can't help but feel that they must have an even added meaning and power for women--that I'm shut out from fully empathizing with the emotions on display.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #92 (1981

Following galleries are dedicated to her Clown series--my least favorite, not because I'm one of those people frightened by clowns, but because I'm turned off by the garish, candy-colored background swirls; her (underrated) History pics; and then, closing the show out, her latest series: Society Portraits, pics of upscale matrons in their native environment.

But the penultimate gallery is worth a special mention. It's the only one not dedicated to a series but to a theme: the "uncanny, monstrous and carnivalesque impulses" in Sherman's work. We do get a lot more clown photos--but also one of Sherman's most beautiful and haunting, with which I'll close this post:

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #296 (1994)

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