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.
--------

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.
--------
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...
--------
*** 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.