Enough at the Table for All
On Sunday, no fewer than 12 exhibitions opened at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. "We have a big building," one staffer chuckled when I noted the superabundance of shows. Indeed they have filled every inch, down to the basement boiler room. Of course, with so much art, just about everyone will find something to kick against. But, taken as a whole, it is one of the better seasonal installations this institution has assembled in some time.
As for general themes and trends, one might point out a curatorial focus on abstraction, taken both in its broadest and more local, painterly senses, as well as a penchant for rooting in the corners of postwar art history.
Inside the sprawling, old school building, one first encounters a wall of Terry Richardson's grainy, black-and-white photographs documenting, in superior snapshot style, the Los Angeles punk scene of the early 1980s. It's a light hors d'oeuvre, though the tenor shifts immediately into high, and highly intellectualized, seriousness with the nearby "Organizing Chaos," a group show of works that, according to the wall text, investigate "notions of chance and determinism."
If you like art that's so abstract there's little to see, you've found the place: That's because many of the pieces in this fascinating exhibition are works of sound art. Although the most physically imposing is Luke Fowler's long video "Pilgrimage From Scatter Points" (2006), which looks into the improvisational Scratch Orchestra, the show's presiding spirit is John Cage, represented here by his famous "4'33"" (1952), a score directing the musician not to play for the duration of the piece.
Two of the strongest works here, both DVD projections, provide a more concretely sensual experience. The 1969 film "Rundown" depicts three of artist Robert Smithson's interventions in the landscape: It records the shape and progress of glue, concrete, and asphalt as they are poured over various outdoor sites. In "Guitar Drag" (2000), at once a sound and video piece, Christian Marclay hooks up an electric guitar to an amp, and "plays" it by dragging it behind a pickup truck.
The surprising retrospective "Peter Young: 19631977," the first solo exhibition in this country for this American artist, offers a somewhat more traditional approach to abstraction. The artist, who deserves far more attention than he has received, began working in 1965, with raised dots of acrylic paint a red grid with different-size yellow squares in the center on wall-mounted, cereal-size blue boxes, proceeded to large linear, geometric abstractions on canvas, and returned to dot paintings in the years following.
In 1970, Mr. Young's travels among the Boruca Indians led him to make stretchers from sticks, and the resulting paintings look somewhat like tribal shields. Psychedelic Rorschach paintings, for which he folded large canvases in half, followed and were then succeeded by densely patterned grid abstractions. All of this fascinating work causes one to wonder what he's up to now.
It's worth mentioning, too, the shaped-canvas abstractions in American Joanna Pousette-Dart's "Red Desert" series, all from the last three years, and the French artist Pip Chodorov's 16mm film, also dealing with abstraction, "Faux mouvements (Wrong moves)" (2007). Each work occupies its own gallery.
The British artist Linder's collages offer a sort of counterpoint to Mr. Richardson's photos. A punk and post-punk scenester, Linder is exhibiting her work for the first time in America. Unfortunately, however, her collages and photomontages seem simplistic black-and-white images of naked women with binoculars or cameras pasted over the face in one instance, roses pasted over the faces of naked women in another even when compared only to other artists employing collage in a feminist idiom.
Speaking of feminist art, Jim Shaw's "The Donner Party" (2003) must be the most disturbing and hilarious instance in the history of that ism. Based in part on the Donner Party's 1846 journey across the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which of course resulted in cannibalism, Shaw's version cannibalizes and parodies and celebrates Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party," the 1979 room-size milestone of feminist art currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum. "The Donner Party" forms part of a wildly imaginative, kitschy, and lurid series of works including painted portraits, faux thrift-store paintings, and a video, all on view based on "Oism," a fictional 19th-century cult supposedly founded by a woman in upstate New York.
Mr. Shaw's levity certainly balances out the sober-minded investigations of abstraction on view here. With their live flies and hypertrophic spikes, the Brazilian artist Tunga's sculptural environments employ not levity, but perhaps a sort of gruesome humor. I was particularly affected by the "nightmare club," where flies trapped inside of tall lamps buzzed, projecting their shadows on the walls.
Elsewhere you'll find an installation by Lee Quiρones, an exhitibion of mostly paintings by the Hamburg-based artists Dorota Jurczak and Abel Auer, and a solo show of Jack Whitten's paintings. Throughout the museum are projects by national and international artists. Among my favorites were Victor Alimpiev's video "Sweet Nightingale" (2005) and the collaborations of Jim Denevan and Ari Marcopoulos, the latter photographing the former's enormous drawings in sand.
If that's not enough, "Orpheus Selection: In Search of Darkness," a murky group show of work in virtually every medium by some 22 artists, occupies the basement boiler room. Once you ascend into the light from these infernal regions, having now endured the gestational process of taking in huge amounts of art, you will, no doubt, feel yourself reborn.
Until September 24 (2225 Jackson Ave. at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, 718-784-2084).
