Talent will out when summer rolls around in the commercial galleries. Many think of it as the season's downtime, but after ten months of exhibitions in which the artists are put on their mettle, it really is down to the ingenuity of gallery staff to ensure that they're summer show is an event. Stock shows tell of lazy exhaustion, but some group shows can hint at the presence of the kind of curatorial talent that major museums would love to acquire - if only they could afford it.
Take David Zwirner's show, 'a point in space is a place for an argument' (until 10 August). In one respect it exemplifies the chief pitfall of the gallery group show: intellectual over-reach. Feeling starved of the kudos that accrues to the public museums for most of the year, the commercials gorge themselves on big ideas when the chance comes. Zwirner's have borrowed the title of their show from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and proclaim to be examining how the art object has arranged itself in space over five decades. The ambition is vast, not to say somewhat nebulous, and yet the quality of the work in the show is outstanding, and by its close you feel the gallery has made a fairly impressive attempt to tackle their problem. There is a mounds of latex by Lynda Benglis, coloured in acrid hues; a tiny glass box sculpture like a ruined Victorian jardiniere, by Paul Thek; string constructions by Fred Sandback, and newer interpretations of Sandback's territory by Al Taylor; chunks of concrete presented as monuments by Isa Genzken, and the signature coloured sticks with which Andre Cadere used to negotiate the world. There's new and old, mainstream and fringe, and, remarkably, it mostly coheres.
Paul Thek, 'Fish Tank'
Marian Goodman's summer outing, 'Equal', that is, to the real itself (until 28 July) sounds equally ambitious. Curated by Linda Norden, it considers the avant-garde assertion that new circumstances require new forms. Apart from a ravishing video animation by John Gerrard, 'Dust Storm' (2007), it gets off to a rather rocky start, with a series of monchromes by Rudolf de Crignis that seem to belong elsewhere. But then there are works which appear to zero in on a problem: John Wesley's 'Phenomena' (1983) remembers the first Gulf War with aircraft shown flying over buildings. Then there is Roni Horn's compacted ball, 'Black Asphere' (1988/ 2006) hinting at the need for weight in the rendering of the real. An early video by Chris Marker spans over the uglier episodes of early twentieth-century history. And, finally, in 'Phat Free' (1995/1999), David Hammons kicks a bucket along the Bowery by night in a powerful film that has the street lights bleeding across the screen. Whilst gesturing at the poverty that has always been synonymous with that street, Hammons seems also to recall Dr. Johnson's famous refutation of Bishop Berkeley's idealism, when he kicked a stone and said "I refute it thus". By the time you return to the beginning again, Crignis' monochromes don't look quite so out of place after all: they're just another way of responding to the balance of materialism and idealism.
John Gerrard, 'Dust Storm', 2007
Indeed, this theme is at the forefront of the more tightly focused show, 'Substance and Surface' (until 31 August) at Bortolami Dayan. It is rather like the inverse of the very glossy, gothic, Malevich-inspired show at White Cube in London in the summer of '05. Instead of taking its lead from Malevich's 'Black Square', its inspiration is the white, gravelly surface of one of Piero Manzoni's 'Achromes', the aim being to discover how various artists have staged these monochrome lo-fi materials. Rather than highly finished windows on transcendence, the monochromes are humdrum but eerie. Paul Lee cuts around the border of an old towel to let the inside fall down, creating a black flag. Jim Lambie coats a mattress in silver vinyl tape to create 'Y-Footo' (2002), an object simultaneously shiny yet degraded. And Eric Wesley uses sand from Malibu beaches to make a series of sheets of sandpaper, sweetly titled '26 Miles of Cynic Beauty' (2003-6). It's intriguing, following the varieties of tone that can be summoned from low materials, yet one might often object that some artists here are simply using high production values to salvage the ordinary materials, thus circumventing the problem. Thilo Heinzmann's 'o.T.' (2007), for example, consists of a sensually smooth sheet of aluminium through which he has pierced a jutting crystal. And Piero Golia's has made very slick drama by presenting a rectangular, box-like, plywood construction from which a swirling white form extends as if it were paint spinning off the surface.
Eric Wesley, '26 Miles of Cynic Beauty, 2003-2006
Sand from Malibu beaches, glue, paper on masonite
Exhibitions which allow themselves broader, more accommodating themes, might seem to have a greater chance of success than the latter; really, however, they only call for a different kind of care to make their themes distinct. And one cannot tie a broad theme to a topical matter and hope that that will substitute for care in selection and hanging. This is the problem that besets 'Agitation and Repose' (until 17 August), at Tanya Bonakdar. Curators Sabine Russ and Gregory Volk declare that the 'agitation' of their title is caused by 'a grinding war'; however, the artworks they have chosen, though they might be interesting, don't really tie the ideas together. Rainer Ganahl's 'The Apprentice in the Sun' (2006) shows a video of an insanely dangerous bicycle ride against the traffic in Bucharest. 'As Time Goes By' (2007), one of several works by Via Lewandowsky, comprises an office clock which shows the right time, but whose face is spinning quickly backwards. And Diana Al-Hadid's 'Portal to a Black Hole' (2007), one of the show's most remarkable objects, makes an architectural construction out of the pipes of a church organ, a spiral staircase and a roof like the crowning dome on a temple. This bespeaks torment and hell very effectively, but others elaborate the ideas too literally: in a series of videos by Roman Signer, objects are exploding, gales of grass blowing up through the floor of an interior, and model helicopters hover over people in bed.
Diana Al-Hadid, 'Portal to a Black Hole', 2007
wood, plaster, fiberglass, cardboard, plastic and paint
'The Lath Picture Show' (until 11 August), at Frederick Petzel offers a more peculiar case of the troublesome big theme. The title is amusing and the premise sounds ingenious: it sets out to find equivalents in art for that basic building block of construction, the lath, and to examine what they might do. Jorge Pardo has responded simply and elegantly, if a little predictably, with 'Shop Plywood' (1989), a length of birch plywood given beautiful embellishment with olive ash burl veneer. Others show how the idea might be tweaked: Richard Artschwager's 'Sliding Door II' (1967) understands a lath as any kind of pre-fab building component - why not the door that slides back and forth as on this wall based sculpture? Or we might see equivalents of the lath in Fischli and Weiss's polystyrene copies of typical studio materials: here, the odd if aptly titled "___" (1993-4) consists of a representation of a piece of wood, a coffee cup and a take-out tray. The problem, though, is that the idea of the lath is something of a red herring; what the show is really talking about is the notion of repetition, and that leaves its field of view far too broad.
Richard Artschwager, 'Sliding door 11', 1967
Formica on wood with metal handles
Over the last twelve months D'Amelio Terras have proved themselves unable to mount bad exhibitions, and so I expected much of 'Circumventing the City' (until 10 August). Its topic is certainly inspired: there have been volcanic upheavals in Chelsea in recent years, and now with the high profile greening of the old defunct railway that runs through the area, the Highline, it is only set to continue. Thus D'Amelio Terras have turned their eyes to their neighbourhood and gathered work that sums up the changes. Valerie Heggarty's 'Cracked Wall' (2007) threatens a severance through the gallery, as if the earth was tearing apart. David Brooks' 'graphite dolman site' (2007) is equally dramatic, suggesting that hunks of oily graphite had slammed into a wall like meteorites. And Nicole Cherubini's 'Amphora' (2007) made the most beautiful bauble out of the idea of a cement mixer, with the container layered in different glazes, worked into undulating textures and pocked with grotesques. But there were more humdrum responses: Sarah Braman's 'Step Out' (2007) is a workaday formalist sculpture knocked up from found furniture. And, above all, one wants specifics to balance out the poetry; the kind of charting and quantifying that old fashioned Conceptual out might have brought to the table, the show seems the lesser without it.
Nicole Cherubini, 'Amphora', 2007
ceramic, terracotta, porcelain, luster, yellow crystal ice, wood, enamel and fake gold and silver chain
Foxy Production is another gallery which has had an impressive season - and with considerably less resources than some in Chelsea. Their summer effort, 'Solar Set' (until 10 August), bears out that ingenuity once more. The work, in fact, is not the strongest, yet it elaborates a context which makes every contributor shine. It takes its title from a box work by Joseph Cornell from 1958, in which the artist collected solar statistics, spherical objects and images of the sun. Foxy, however, have reimagined this cosmos as the disenchanted virtual terrain of the internet, a place vast enough for us to reach out and summon back all that we used to think the heavens might hold. Siebren Versteeg's 'The One You're With' (2007) is perhaps most emphatic about this, consisting of a wall montage of photographs randomly downloaded from Flicker, the online photo library. Like a pinboard in a college dorm, the pictures are twisted and upended and obscured as if there were seas of them (which of course there are). Takeshi Murata's video, 'Untitled (Pink Dot)' (2007) makes something volcanic and painterly from all this information, processing footage from violent films into a gushing river of forms. Sly Stallone's Rambo appears, slowly pumps his gun, and then dissolves into colour. The place, in all this, of Olga Chernyshevna's film 'March' (2005) isn't too clear, given that it's simply a comic look at post-Communist parades in Russia, but Tony Labat returns to the point in a series of amusing digital prints which fuse abstract painting with figures, among them, bizarrely, a Sikh Elvis.
Siebren Versteeg's 'The One You're With' (2007)
Public institutions are meant to be able to best the galleries at this sort of thing, but this summer not all have proved able, and sometimes that's because some have agendas which are just as distorting as the financial needs of the commercial galleries. '21 Positions' (until 25 August) at the Austrian Cultural Forum, boasts a survey of recent Austrian video and photography, yet really it is just a ruse to decorate the corridors of the Austrian Cultural Forum with pictures which promote the country as young, techy and tolerant. Lois Renner's photography of a paint splattered drum kit in an airy loft space is typical: pretty but inconsequential. Paul Albert Leitner derives similarly easy colour effects from wet, neon-lit streets. And Lois Hechenblaikner extends the mood in a series of pictures of alpine tourist resorts by night: figures faint as ghosts drift across a golf course while spotlights blaze like stars. True, there are some fabulous moments. Two bizarre still lifes by Clegg & Guttman depict chewed chicken bones against a moody, silver-foil backdrop. And Manfred Willmann's series 'Das Land, from 1981-1993', presents a piercing and unsettling panorama of changing rural life in Austria, with pigs' heads in buckets, crucifixes and growling dogs. Unfortunately, though, Clegg and Guttman are already renowned, and Willmann's series, also famous, is the only work included from before 2000, making one doubt that '21 Positions' has anything new to say.
from Manfred Willmann's series 'Das Land'
Thierry Goldberg Projects have much more modest quarters to unfold an exhibition than most of the others I visited, and yet 'The Atrocity Exhibition' (until 28 July) makes good use of its material, hinting at grand breadth whilst simply giving four artists a platform to show work about destruction. Ahmed Alsoudani's charcoal drawings are the most remarkable: furious, somewhat cartoon dog-fights roar in scenes reminiscent of de Kooning and Ralph Steadman. The energy makes the details of the scenes somewhat obscure, but the way that energy is orchestrated makes the scenes cohere powerfully nonetheless. Molly Larkey adds to the comic mood with sculptures depicting rather bulbous, gold and silver mushroom clouds. Ben Grasso's large-scale drawing 'Stars and Stripes' (2007) points to the obvious preoccupation which lies behind all this: the stars are flung into the air while aircraft bob and weave and shards fly into the sky. And, taking a more gentle outlook, Wendy Heldmann's paintings of ruined Modernist buildings give them an aqueous look, as if they had been dissolved rather than destroyed.
Ahmed Alsoudani', 'Opened Ground', 2007
charcoal pastel and acrylic
on paper, 80 x 105 inches
Finally, one feels that The Queens Museum have a difficult task in contrast to others here, and one sympathises. Out in the sticks - as far as Manhattanites are concerned - they need to host big names to attract an audience, and yet they need to speak to the local community as well. 'Generation 1.5' (until 2 December) seems to achieve those twin goals nobly with a large show of work by leading figures exploring the experiences and fractured identities of artists with mixed backgrounds (Queens is a supremely polyglot neighbourhood). Rirkrit Tiravanija is typical: the man has lived in Argentina, Thailand, Ethiopia, Malaysia, Canada, the U.S. and Germany: thus he exhibits his facsimile 'Passport, Untitled 2006 (Passport 3)', a sprawling document of his travels. Shirin Neshat's draws on the myth of Scheherazade from the Arabian Nights for her film 'The Last Word' (2004), reflecting on the intrusions of hostile, macho regimes. And, in one of the most quietly poetic installations, Lee Mingwei splits up footage of a quartet playing the music that the Czech composer Dvorak created on visiting a Bohemian community in Iowa. Then, for his 'Quartet Project' (2005/7), Lee relays it on four screens huddled against the wall: all you can see in the darkened room are the reflections from the footage; approach the screens to look more closely and they fade to black. Chasing after origins is a fool's game.
Shirin Neshat, 'The Last Word' (2004)
Morgan Falconer
Morgan Falconer is a journalist and critic. After an age spent immersed in 1920s New York as a graduate student, the result now props up his computer, and today he writes about contemporary art and culture for a variety of publications including Art Review and Modern Painters.
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