Shadow Play

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Now that the new New Museum of Contemporary Art’s inaugural group exhibition of installations and collage, “Unmonumental” — its coming-out party — is over, the institution is getting down to the business of solo shows. The first major exhibition of abstract paintings by London-based artist Tomma Abts (b. Kiel, Germany, 1967) takes up the museum’s third floor; and the first extensive exhibition in America of New York artist Paul Chan (and the premiere in this country of Mr. Chan’s complete series, “The 7 Lights“) begins in the museum’s lobby and continues on the fourth floor.

These two shows feel very different from the previous sprawling group installations at the New Museum, as well as very different from each other. And they give us a better sense of what is possible in the museum’s galleries. I was not initially impressed with the inaugural installations, or with the artworks’ relationship to the museum architecture. The New Museum’s tall, narrow galleries, which feel less like museum spaces, and more like wide lobbies off its rambunctious, lime-green freight elevator, tend to swallow up the art.

Coming off the third-floor elevator into the spare, airy installation of 14 of Ms. Abts’s small abstract paintings is at first to be pleasantly surprised. Divided symmetrically into two groups of seven, the show, organized by Laura Hoptman, is reminiscent of those severe, understated exhibitions mounted in Mary Boone’s Chelsea space, in which, under a cathedral ceiling, a single work must hold an entire wall. Because the canvases are small (each is 18 7/8 inches by 15 inches) and the gallery is broad and soaring, the paintings initially assume the responsibility of taut, muscular structures that can command a large arena.

As a group, Ms. Abts’s paintings are handsome. But individually they fall completely apart. Ms. Abts is the recipient of the 2006 Turner Prize, which, awarded by London’s Tate Britain, is Great Britain’s highest art honor. What Ms. Abts makes are not paintings but, rather, illustrative, decorator abstractions. Her work, which is in opposition to Germany’s ongoing upsurge of Neo-Expressionist figurative painting, is at the forefront of an abstract movement here and abroad, a movement whose canvases — without tension, light, muscularity, or internal sense of purpose — are designed to sit there quietly on the wall and colorfully accent the spare Modernist furniture in your sleek urban loft. Her paintings — limp, mild-mannered, and decoratively tasteful — are corporate abstraction. Each work has a color range — red, brown, yellow, olive, white — and each canvas has a dominant ribbon-like, zigzag, or curvy arabesque. Sometimes Ms. Abts fractures the rectangle, as in “Fewe” (2005), or she introduces layers, translucencies, geometric shapes, or three-dimensional elements; but what she ends up with are representational paintings in which lines and shapes, seemingly lit from above, create a layered space dominated by shadows.

Mr. Chan (b. Hong Kong, 1973, and reared in Omaha, Neb.) creates poetic shadow play of a very different kind. His earlier works included “Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization (After Charles Fourier and Henry Darger)” (1999–2003), the engaging fairy-tale animation, with overtones of the Golden Age, genocide, and the apocalypse, in which Darger’s darlings inhabit a world that moves from sheer delight to sheer devastation.

In 2005, Mr. Chan embarked on a series of large-scale digital projections, “The 7 Lights“(2005–08). The artist’s “1st Light” (2005), which was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, was arguably one of the most understated and impressive works in the politically leaden exhibition. Organized by Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum’s show offers the complete series, beginning with “1/2 Light” (2008), which is projected on the doors of the lobby elevator. Drowned out by the light pouring in from the street, however, “1/2 Light” is faint and not nearly as impressive as the full-floor installation.

To come off the elevator into the darkened fourth-floor gallery is to be immersed in an eerily hypnotic world of wall and floor projections. The show is a hopscotch series of trapezoidal windows of fluttering, shadowy darks and colored lights, in which objects drift and float, as if in underwater debris fields. In each of the best works, “1st Light,” “2nd Light” (2006), “4th Light” (2006), and “5th Light” (2007), Mr. Chan explores themes — war, devastation, destruction, and rebirth — in subtle and dreamy worlds that suggest crystal-ball visions seen through an antique magic lantern. The video collages, each of which is 14 minutes long, layer, intermix, and play off of one another, as if images were dropping down into the floor and reappearing in another projection.

Mr. Chan is at least a major/minor poet when it comes to keeping mystery and the commonplace dancing, or tethered, elegiacally together. His melancholic videos, which move in color from sunrise to sunset, suggest the passage of a day; taken together they could refer to the seven days of the week or to those of creation. But they actually work best when they eschew particular “big” ideas, and keep the viewer swimming or adrift in a vague sea in which you encounter odd and ordinary objects — a cell phone, a grand piano, an automobile, or a folding chair; an apple, a gun, a spider, eyeglasses, flocks of birds, or a dog with wagging tail spinning, like Toto, into the vortex.

Usually a single form anchors a scene: in “1st Light,” an electrical pole with dangling wires that suggests a crucifix on Calgary; in “2nd Light,” a tree being blown by gale-force winds. The tree, whose leaves transform into tattered clothing, eventually becomes barren. As with most of Mr. Chan’s works, it suggests a cycle leading toward desolation and devastation. This is reinforced in videos in which human figures fall or drift through space or water or wind; or in which guns repeatedly drop and disintegrate. Some of the videos are more heavy-handed and literal than others; and often the most engaging images are those that, like Rorschach tests, suggest numerous readings — such as continents, clumps of earth, birds, weapons, flora, and fauna.

The exhibition overall, a mixture of works on paper and digital projections, however, is uneven. Mr. Chan, who has a gift for narrative, for rhythms, and for layering images in his videos so that they register like flashes of memory, cannot really draw very well. When he collages, or puts charcoal to paper, the results are amateurish and cloying, sentimental and academic. He loses that inimitable, dreamy movement and poetry. His collages feel like so-so 2-D design projects, and his illustrative drawings look like formless illustrations made from photographs — the kind of pretty, worthless, dexterous exercises students do in their freshman year high school art classes.

The first work to greet you on the fourth floor is “Score for 7th Light” (2007). “Score for 7th Light” is made up of a grouping of 15 framed lined music sheets, on which torn pieces of black paper, resembling musical notes, have been glued to suggest the movement, or score, of a video projection. The work, which is actually the final version of the “7th Light,” toys ironically with the idea that a “score” both is and is not the music. It and the other works on paper add variety and the odd idea to the exhibition, but they are negligible aesthetically. The works on paper, along with the illustrative short video “Untitled (After St. Caravaggio)” (2003–06), in which the objects in a drawn trembling basket of fruit rise individually upward until the basket is empty, end up cluttering the purity of Mr. Chan’s vision as a video artist.

This exhibition represents a talented voice, but one that is pulled equally between poetry and gimmickry; between making banal statements and immersing viewers, setting them adrift or a-fall, in beautiful, hypnotic stews. What he will do next is anybody’s guess. Mr. Chan is an artist who can transform himself, and I look forward to his next incarnation.

Until June 29 (235 Bowery at Prince Street, between Stanton and Rivington streets, 212-219-1222).


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