Back to Eden, at the Museum of Biblical Art (Barnaby Furnas on Fire)

Fred Tomaselli, "Study for Expulsion" (2000)

By Bryant Rousseau

The Museum of Biblical Art is one of New York's underrated art outposts, in one of the city's least-appreciated museum districts. The area around Columbus Circle, overshadowed by the performing arts at Lincoln Center, also includes two other Top 20 museums: the Museum of Arts & Design (a Top 10er) and the American Folk Art Museum.

Despite being located inside the American Bible Society's building on Broadway at 6lst Street, MOBIA, as the museum perhaps too trendily wants to be known, generally features exhibitions that emphasize earnest scholarship and avoid any sort of unwelcome evangelicalism or proselytizing. Still, I doubt we'd ever see Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" displayed here. And as a resolutely atheist New Yorker, I confess to always feeling a little awkward when entering the lobby--my god, what if someone sees me and mistakes me for a closeted Bible thumper?

The current show, "Back to Eden," on view through Sept. 28, is part of a broad trend where museums of every stripe are bending over backward to show audience-attracting contemporary art; the show's subtitle is "Contemporary Artists Wander the Garden."

I was curious about what we'd get--how much cynicism and irony would be served up, if any, and would we get A-list or G(od)-list artists, the equivalent of contemporary Christian rock?

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, "The One That Carries Fire"

By chance, the first of the 20 objects in the show that I chose to visit left me thinking, uh-oh, we might be in for a quick exit--but not because of an in-your-face religiosity. From a distance, and with my weak farsightedness, the style seemed familiar--was it a Matthew Ritchie? Up close, I saw it was work by an artist I've never heard of, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons. Nothing wrong with the large-scale, mixed-media drawing's swirling pinkish-reds, clump of actual hair and plant motifs, but "The One That Carries Fire" (2011)--that "One" would be the woman of color in the bottom rung of panels, from whose head a tree sprouts--was small-gallery ordinary and its theme struck me as only distantly related to Eden: a broadly mythic tree of life, more Earth Mother than Eve.

But then my eye was drawn to a large 7'x8' painting across the room. Before I really looked at the work, I glanced at the wall text--the artist was Barnaby Furnas, one of my favorites. The prospects for the exhibition immediately improved: So if artists of this caliber are in the show, what else am I going to find? Then I really looked at the painting--and it turned out to be a showstopper in every sense of the word: I spent the next 15 minutes absorbing the deep visual pleasures of "The Fruit Eaters" (2013), one of the best works I've seen this year.

Barnaby Furnas, "The Fruit Eaters" (2013)

Since I knew right away I was going to be spending some time here, I switched on the (free) audio guide, and the exhibition revealed another surprise: It had produced a top notch tour. Each work gets an oral essay, and each has an insightful artist interview.

Furnas proves a charming raconteur. In his telling, one of the punishments endured by humans after the expulsion from the garden is gravity, and he wanted this work to depict its effects. He combed his gessoed canvas, giving it grooves his transparent colors would flow through and puddle, producing an overall sense of a downward, distorting tugging.

The painting is rich in highlights: the sun-bright fruit, the juices dribbling down Adam's body and echoing Eve's watery, golden hair; the sinuous, seductive curves of the snake and its horned face (a face that Furnas says largely formed itself during the initial pour of paint); God Himself peeking from behind a tree, the old perv; two wholly original volcanoes spewing dark blue fumes (does any other story of Eden include volcanoes?); and a garden rendered in more opaque colors: The ground, as it were, grounds the painting. Furnas says he turned to Biblical stories looking for an inspiration for something new in our oldest tales, and he clearly found a creative spark in this story of creation. 

The rest of the exhibition, inevitably, pales next to this, but there are still plenty of interesting minor notes, from some major contemporary artists. And each stop is abetted enormously by the audio guide, which should win an award (why aren't there such awards?). Since each artist is allowed to speak in-depth about the work, no overarching curatorial argument emerges, but that's just fine. The Edenic theme is obviously an, ahem, fertile one for artists, offering multiple, exploratory avenues: the loss of innocence; cerebral (Tree of Knowledge) and sexual desire; feminism; the destruction of the natural world; and, of course, the chance to riff on art history itself, which has long tackled this subject. 

Masaccio's Expulsion (detail)

That's the path chosen by Fred Tomaselli, whose "Expulsion from Eden" (see work at the top of the post) takes its inspiration from Masaccio's 1425 fresco. Tomaselli's work features all his signature collagist moves: layers of resin in which are placed photos of insects, actual pills and paint. His usual trippy, fun, easy-on-the eye stuff. (Note to curators: Because Tomaselli's work invites such close viewing, you might want to wipe the dust off the surface every other day or so.)

Alexis Rockman, "Gowanus" (2013)

Man's corruption of the natural world is the too-blatant topic of Alexis Rockman's "Gowanus" (2013), a work I first saw in a solo show at his gallery, Sperone Westwater. The 72"x90" painting was inspired by a news story of a dolphin swimming into Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal, and quickly perishing in the toxic stew. The various visual elements represent a pastiche of Rockman's "favorite moments" of the canal (graffiti, drainage spouts spilling spooky liquids), and the canvas has a lot going on. Rockman's mother worked at the Museum of Natural History, and his frequent visits there clearly seeped into his aesthetic psyche: the painting has dozens of creatures (the museum helpfully has a guide to each), including a fishy composite made up of a zoo's worth of other animals, a la Arcimboldo. The composition is dominated by an oversize cat, a "cute monster," as Rockman says, with the rapacious habits of felis catus an apt stand-in for human depredations.

Jim Dine, "The Garden of Eden" (2003)

Sculpture and its currently more prominent cousin, installation, are the exhibition's main mediums, none worthy of exclamation, none too execrable (though one is close). In the rear of the main gallery (the museum only has two), Jim Dine's "The Garden of Eden" (2003) is the size and shape of a Japanese room screen, this one made out of steel and bronze instead of paper and wood. It's crammed with two of the objects he returns to again and again in his work, across mediums: tools and a headless Venus de Milo. The bright colors were too kitschy for me, but the backstory is touching: Dine spent a lot of time as a child in his grandfather's hardware store, which for him was an early paradise.

Lynn Aldrich, "Serpentarium"

And while Home Depot is seen by Dine as a great source for artistic material (and I agree with him), Lynn Aldrich takes a more typically negative, or at least anxious, view of consumerism: In "Serpentarium" (2002), she's created a vagina dentata-like bucket entirely out of garden hoses which, she notes, often have the color and texture of snake skin. To me, it's a one-note joke, but someone else disagreed: It's owned by mega-collector Peter Norton.

By far the most disappointing work in the show is from Mark Dion, an artist I admire enormously. His work usually puts a sharp, compelling conceptual twist on how the natural world is archived in institutions. In a

Mark Dion's four-legged snake

work commissioned for "Back to Eden," he offers a too-literal (and too-Literalist) interpretation of a snake before God cut off its legs. It honestly looks like something you'd see in the Creation Museum--which is probably Dion's point, but if any work needs a healthier dollop of irony to make it go down, this one does.

As is now apparently required by law, the show includes a smattering of video. The whacky and wonderful Pipilotti Rist has a shelf-size installation of fresh cut flowers in a vase, a watering can, and a soft-edged video playing on the vase of a woman's hands arranging flowers; the wall text says there are moments of eroticism and violence; I watched the whole clip and detected nothing of the sort. The piece, "Sparking of the Domesticated Synapses" (2010), is a bit of a

Pipilotti Rist installation and video

throwaway, and, as the mouthful of a title indicates, it's at best a stretch to include this in an Eden show. But the audio was again a saving grace--interesting to hear Rist say that she views the individuality of her camera moves as being as distinctive as an artist's brushstroke.

Nearby, and also out of thematic place, was a small bronze sculpture of a tree by Rona Pondick, "Dwarfed Blue Pine" (2009-10), with miniature casts of the artist's head at the end of branches. Note to curators: Not every artwork with a tree equates to Eden.

Rona Pondick, "Dwarfed Blue Pine"

The museum's small, second gallery was given over to a single video work: a psychedelic/spiritual muddle by (the unknown to me) Sean Capone, "1000 Paths (To the Divine)" (2014).   

But let me end on a positive note about a show which I left with generally good feeling (thanks mostly to Furnas): Two ink and acrylic drawings on mylar (always a great surface) by Naomi Reis, Vertical Garden (Falling Water) and and Vertical Garden (Weeds), from 2008 and 2007. Imagine Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic Fallingwater stacked as a modernist skyscraper, and you get the idea. The pair of works stand on their visual merit alone, but again kudos

Naomi Reis, "Vertical Garden (Weeds)" (2007), detail

for extra insight to the audio: the visible undersides of some of the structures have runic, or geometric shapes, that look like cracks. According to Reis, they were glitches carried over from the architectural software program she used to help make the drawings. She kept them because she liked the way they looked, and so did I. What to leave in, what to leave out--one of the essential questions of art.

The Rousseau Rating on a 100 scale for "Back to Eden": 79 (55 without Furnas and 46 without the audio).

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NSA & William De Kooning

A late William De Kooning painting (post-senility, some would argue) is clearly seen in the office of National Security Adviser Susan Rice's office during an interview with Lesley Stahl on the Dec. 22 broadcast of 60 Minutes.

An example of a late-era Willem de Kooning

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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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