IS ANYBODY REALLY THERE?

Marlene Dumas’ summer show at David Zwirner gives great pleasure. These are paintings, scenes that would be impossible to execute, and even imagine, in any other medium. Although some are rendered in oil, some in acrylic and some in ink wash, all have the lyrical rush of watercolors, with loose brushstroke and color that seeps into the field. Dumas paints commandingly. Different pieces, at different moments, recall Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon and Francesco Clemente. They vary in quality. Some are inescapable, monumental; others feel like sketches completed on deadline for the show’s opening.

Most of the paintings are portraits. About a dozen are full-size canvases showing figures head-to-toe, and dozens more are on small sheets of paper showing faces and other body parts. Many of them feel as if they capture a real person. There are flashes of particularity and eccentricity in individual faces (a gasp, a sneer, an awkward smile) and figures (arms crossed, lips parted, legs akimbo). And yet the softened brushwork lends them all a fleeting immateriality. Dumas seems to render her subjects after observation but gets at something else. These people feel bodiless, weightless, effectless, like figments from personal memory or poorly-remembered dreams. Like the paintings themselves, it’s the spiritual rather than the physical in them that allures.

Marlene Dumas, Omega’s eyes, 2018, Oil on canvas, 23 5/8 x 19 ¾ inches (60 x 50 cm). Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery.

August 12, 2018 by Nalina Moses

JUST TOO MUCH

So many everyday products are conceived without a drop of design intelligence (e.g. paper cups, hair clips, printers, windows) that it seems rude to complain about objects that are over-designed. But as consumers become more design-savvy, brands are putting extra efforts into product design that don’t always add up.

A few years ago, when Apple launched their smart watches, the company had reached a point of design fatigue. After a string of inventive, innovative devices (i.e. the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad) the Apple Watch felt unnecessary, as if had been developed in response to market research rather than genuine need. It looked less like a technological instrument than an expensive amulet strapped to the wrist.

Like Apple, Dyson uses product design to elevate their products to the level of luxury goods, but their design ethos takes the opposite approach. While Apple uses a restrained palette and flush joinery to create an aura of opulent, intelligent minimalism, Dyson exaggerates the joining of disparate materials and parts to create an image of advanced mechanical functionality.

That sensibility is now approaching caricature. The brand’s Small Ball Multi Floor upright vacuum cleaner is cartoonish, with parts in unharmonious colors and awkward proportions. The design calls the user to marvel at the suction mechanism with an enormous clear canister, and the swiveling brush with an enormous purple ball joint. The brand would like to present the vacuum cleaner as an iconic machine, like a small car. What does this repositioning accomplish, if the object is so ungainly that one keeps it hidden in the closet?

Dyson Small Ball Multi Floor upright vacuum cleaner.

May 30, 2018 by Nalina Moses

A PORTRAIT OF THE MAN

The David Bowie retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum has been organized as a long rambling walk, with artifacts from his extraordinary career displayed within half-hidden nooks and narrow passages. There are amazing things to see: the space-age Pierot costume from the Ashes to Ashes video, the lyric sheet from The Jean Jenie, diaries from the Berlin days. Visitors receive headsets that are synced to micro-zones within the galleries, cueing clips from relevant songs.

As a monument to the artist, the show is unpolished. The spaces are dark and uncomfortable, and the exhibit design is inconsistent. Objects that fans are familiar with, like CD and album covers, are hung up front, at eye level. And objects that fans would want to examine more closely, like Aladdin Sane costumes, are mounted on platforms, behind glass, or twelve feet above the floor.

As a testimony to the person, however, the show is true and moving. What grips one are videos from Bowie’s television and stage appearances. These are shown untouched, in their original format, in low resolution, grainy, shadowy, or pixellated, some on CRT monitors. The outdated formats speak powerfully, and poignantly, to the eras in which Bowie was working, before Instagram, gay marriage, and everyday cross-dressing.

Throughout his career Bowie was clear-eyed, gentlemanly, and sincere. In a television clip from the 1960′s he pleads tolerance for men who wear their hair long. In an MTV interview from the 1980′s he asks a reporter, politely, why the channel doesn’t feature black artists. And in the exhibit’s final gallery, in vintage film footage, he performs as Ziggy Stardust. Despite the studied outrageousness of his costume, makeup and hair, the beauty of the songs, and his connection to them, shine through. There are no false notes. Bowie wrote beautiful songs and performed them, meaning every word he sang.

Still from video from David Bowies’ song “Life on Mars?”, directed by Mick Rock, 1972. Suit by Freddie Burretti.

May 22, 2018 by Nalina Moses

COMPUTER WORLD

Walking into the small skylit gallery at the Gagosian uptown where Urs Fischer’s new serial painting Sōtatsu is hung, I could only think, A computer has been here. The work consists of nine door-sized aluminum panels that have been printed digitally and rendered manually with epoxy paint. The initial panel shows a warm interior scene, with a sofa, bookshelf and a black cat, that’s gradually abstracted in the panels that follow and then, in the final panel, interpreted as a pretty cloudscape with two small black birds.

The panels have a remarkable soft, super-flat, burnished finish, like that on a gentleman’s metal watchband; they feel expensive. They make magnificent decorator art, and would look fantastic on the living room walls of a bare white postmodern beach house in Malibu or Southampton, where there is a very real possibility they will end up.

But these aren’t paintings. The structure of each image is digital, fundamentally two-dimensional, and that shows right through the skillful color renderings. These pictures offer no depth, imaginative or dimensional. They aren’t windows into new worlds; they’re fields of color on a printout.

Urs Fischer, Sōtatsu, 2018 (detail), aluminum, epoxy resin, double sided tape, and screen printing ink, 9 panels, each: 94 ½ × 71 inches (240 × 180.3 cm) © Urs Fischer.

May 21, 2018 by Nalina Moses