INVISIBLE GEOGRAPHIES: NEW SOUND ART FROM GERMANY
The Kitchen

This exhibition of curious, amusing, and, in one case, beautiful works by four German sound artists illuminates invisible electromagnetic forces and converts unhearable sonic resonance into audible form. Exposing the currents and contours of contemporary life, they challenge conventional boundaries of “visual” art.

Jens Brand’s installation is a send-up of the electronics showroom. Plastic chairs and potted flowers are arranged before a map of the earth and display stands for the G-Player4 and G-Pod, two electronic gadgets whose slogan reads: “The earth is a disc” (G stands for global). Both instruments play the music of our planet, with its topography, as read by satellites and converted by computer algorithm, treated as the grooves of a record. At sea level, the earth is restfully silent; as mountains rise and fall, it wails a tune of crackling static.

Christina Kubisch’s “New York Electric Walk” (2006) also finds music in unexpected places. Her specially designed headphones detect sounds emitted by electromagnetic fields and allow the visitor to discover a new side of Chelsea. You may feel a little self-conscious parading around the city’s art district with this bulky contraption hugging your ears, but there’s no other option if you want to hear the street’s low-level electric drone, the beelike buzz of neon, the lively electromagnetic bustle of corners, or the inexplicable, unexpected shrieks and cries of the pulsing city.

The highlight of the show is Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag’s sublime “GAMMAgreen/xsea-scape” (2006), a white room containing several objects related to the theme of the wave. A small photograph of the Baltic Sea taken near the artist’s childhood home hangs on one wall. Printed using a process that involves uranium nitrate, the image emits gamma rays, which, when read by a nearby sensor, become cricketlike chirps (a tiny light on the far wall flashes with every peep). From the opposite wall, a speaker releases sound waves so low that you not only hear but also feel the throbbing bass. Finally, a lamp with a green gas bulb floods the space with a soft glow reminiscent of the sunset flashes over the ocean that Jules Verne once dubbed “green rays.”

While it is hard to say whether the works in “Invisible Geographies” represent a glimpse into the future of art or an idiosyncratic technology-driven corner of contemporary practice, in the case of “GAMMAgreen” the distinction hardly matters. Here is a work as emotionally resonant as it is electronically resonant, as conceptually complex as it is technically complex. The dense green hue, nagging chirps, and insistent waves reference the low-level radiation that is the invisible backdrop of our everyday lives, a theme of particular significance for an artist who grew up in East Germany not far from Chernobyl. But as with much genuine art, this installation challenges viewers with sly ambivalence. When you stand in its green glow, everything outside — the rest of the gallery and, by implication, the world beyond — seems colored a pleasant rosy hue.

— David Grosz

Until October 14 (512 W. 19th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-255-5793).

DAMIEN HIRST: CORPUS: DRAWINGS 1981–2006
Gagosian Gallery

For all his bad-boy posturing, British artist Damien Hirst shows himself to be an inveterate, if child-like, scribbler in “Corpus: Drawings 1981–2006,” the current retrospective of his drawings at Gagosian Gallery uptown. With more than 200 sketches, diagrams, and preparatory drafts, the show presents a decidedly un-Spartan artist turning to drawing as an integral part of his creative process.

What’s often lost in his torrent of selfobsessed expression and juvenile marginalia — lists, bad puns, and crude affirmations — is an appreciation for the intrinsic character of drawing, what John Ruskin called “dirtying the paper delicately.” The traditional role of drawing as a means of coming to understand what things look like, and thus to render the world through the subtlety of line, falls largely outside Mr. Hirst’s irreverently sensationalist purview.

Yet it’s there in one of the earliest drawings in the show, “Study After Delacroix” (1981), a woman’s half-turned face deftly rendered in a notebook. Its articulated attention is echoed in “Crucified Cow” (2001), a tiny drawing of a side of beef out of Chaim Soutine or Francis Bacon, and alluding to Mr. Hirst’s own “Natural History” series of formaldehyde-encased animal carcasses.

The morbid and icily sterile character of that work is captured in the preparatory sketches. From the 18-foot tiger shark in “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” (1991), represented by an early collage, to the hapless sheep of “Away From the Flock” (1994), represented by a literal illustration, the drawings of these realized pieces come off not as exploratory sketches but as simple descriptions made to pass on to fabricators.

The core motifs found in Mr. Hirst’s realized work in fact reoccur throughout his drawings: skulls, sharks and other animals in vitrines, pharmaceutical items, and religious iconography.

Among scraps of paper worked over in pen or watercolor are diagrams for his “spot” paintings, canvases filled with dots no two of which are ever the same color. Though their meticulous organization is worked out on several sheets of graph paper, Mr. Hirst famously relegates the actual painting of these to assistants.

Most of the drawings find him keeping to that simple logic: that it is the conception, not the execution of an idea, which constitutes the creative act.

In the clarity of his sketches for unrealized projects, however, Mr. Hirst shows a marked ability to communicate ideas with an economy of means. The strength of the show lies in this window onto a complex artist’s methodology.

The drawings range from the obsessive-repetitive to the trivial, with most somewhere between the practicalities of explaining something and the emotional purges found in adolescent journals. Over a whimsical drawing of a brain, for example, Mr. Hirst writes, “Insanity is the most beautiful thing in the world” — the kind of bathos one finds over and over.

— João Ribas

Until October 28 (980 Madison Ave., between 76th and 77th streets, 212-744-2313).

MARK INNERST: NEW PAINTINGS
Paul Kasmin Gallery

Two subjects dominate this exhibition of new paintings by Mark Innerst: urban spaces, which though it is rarely explicit are clearly depictions of New York, and views of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, the world’s longest twin suspension bridge. The former have glazed surfaces that shimmer with luminous color, the later a more muted brilliance, as if seen through a dim haze. But both sets of paintings evince the same distinctive sensibility that makes Mr. Innerst’s work so memorable.

Looking at these images, the viewer is confronted with a paradoxical sensation, a curious blend of nostalgia for a lost past and childlike excitement for an unknowable but magical future where all is possible. Mr. Innerst’s New York is the black-and-white metropolis of the first half of this century, the empire city of a less jaded age. But it is simultaneously the place of impossibly tall towers, shadowy streets, and traffic jams recessing to the horizon that still evokes in the newly arrived foreigner a mixture of awe and fear. In the bridge works, there is a similar, though quieter, tension between a dream world of light and clouds and a harsher reality of cold steel and scraping cars.

The New York paintings are the most impressive in the show. Standouts include “Midway I” (2006), whose exaggerated yet elegant verticality creates a Mannerist Manhattan; “Lift” (2006), which pits a tall, lean crane before a backdrop of looming towers and fiery orange sky; and “Nocturne I” (2006), which stares down the deep ravine of an avenue between sheer skyscraper cliffs to the gray night sky.

From one painting to the next, the compositions of the bridge paintings are nearly identical, but shifts of color and level of detail generate a variety of impressions. “Pastorale” (2006), which renders the bridge in muted orange before a pale sky, has a hazy late-afternoon feel. The more precise “Twin Spans” (2006) brings to life the trees and metal poles in the foreground and the packed lanes of cars crossing the bridge. Its energetic, slightly loopy palette — the bridge and trees are reddish purple, the sky a gray green — paints a surreal, caffeinated vision of these grand, inseparable steel twins.

— David Grosz

Until October 7 (293 Tenth Ave. at 27th Street, 212-563-4474).