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NYC Shows - the Sublime and the Silly

May 26, 2009

Leon Ferrari and Mira Schendel

Ferrari

I recently saw two shows in NYC, one disappointing over-hyped extravaganza and one that was, for me, an almost life-altering surprise. Let me start with the good – “Tangled Alphabets”,the Leon Ferrari/Mira Schendel retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Ferrari, born in 1920 in Argentina and still living, was politically engaged and ferociously prolific. Schendel, born just a year earlier in Europe, emigrated with her family to Brazil and lived and worked in South America throughout her life.

Schendel

Ferrari

The show does not really make clear the extent to which the artists were in touch during their creative lives and I intend to do some research to find out, but the relationship between their bodies of work is immediately apparent when you approach the first room of this sprawling retrospective.

Schendel

Both use language as their primary visual building block, sometimes words in understandable script, sometimes calligraphic-like marks that have no independent meaning. They use the physical embodiment of language, sometimes as an act of love, sometimes as an instrument of fear and repression.

Schendel

Ferrari

They both work in both sculptural and drawing media and while they produced this art during the birth and high water mark of conceptualism, it is something distinct and apart; it is never bloodless and didactic, but always freighted with emotional power. This show is up until June 15 and you should levitate off your tush and see it. The bus to NYC is only $25.

Younger than J

more younger

Now for the bad news: “The Generational; Younger than Jesus” at the New Museum, featuring 50 artists from around the world aged 33 or less. I deliberately saw this show with two artist friends younger than me and one younger than Jesus and we all had the same reaction – ech. It’s just-out-of-art-school art, full of DIY photography and installations and we all thought that the ratio of interesting to dreck was about what you get on a floor of Artomatic.

young Steven Rhodes

Katerina Seda - good and young

The one piece we all liked was Katerina Seda’s “It Doesn’t Matter”, a collection of drawings of implements for sale long ago at the hardware shop, done by her grandmother at the artist’s urging to try to recapture some hold on life. Not much else in the show seemed to show genuine feeling of any kind. This sentence from Thomas Micchelli’s review in the Brooklyn Rail reflects my views as well: “The most telling part of the exhibit is that many of the works cannot be fully appreciated without the verbal dimension of the wall label.”

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