Sensibility on parade: two artist-curated group exhibitions enlivened the dog days in New York's Chelsea, juxtaposing works old and new, familiar and obscure, and presenting radically dissimilar points of view - Summer Shows II

Art in America, Oct, 2002 by Carter Ratcliff

Among the best of the summer group shows in New York were two organized by artists. "American Standard: (para)normality and Everyday Life," at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, was put together by Gregory Crewdson, whose photographic tableaux appeared earlier in the season at Luhring Augustine. Nayland Blake, the sculptor, draftsman and video artist, assembled "Something, Anything" at Matthew Marks Gallery. Blake's show was about creatures--the quick and the dead, the silly and the sexy (or both at once), the slim and the pertly, the sweet and the nasty, and many that are just too odd to stand still for characterization. There were 105 two- and three-dimensional pieces on view, plus three films: Bi-Ways (1992) by Paul Shimazaki and Prescott Chow; John Waters's Desperate Living (1974); and The Right Way (1983) by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, in which two actors, one in a rat suit, the other dressed as a panda, roam the uplands of Switzerland and give their slant on the charms of animism, the quirks of individuality and other themes that run through the rest of the show.

In Blake's world, animals are all too human. Humans are everything from canine to amoeboid. The tour began with Nancy Grossman's sculpture Tilt (1990), a head completely sheathed in black leather, except for the nose. This sinister presence was flanked by two works on paper--a face by Ray Johnson and a mask by Saul Steinberg. Around the corner of the large platform, bisected by a freestanding wall, where Blake arrayed his treasures, there were more faces--a Starlet and a Self-Portrait in Walter Robinson's pulp-painterly style of the early 1980s, and the intricate, faux-Cubist construction Box Face, which Dan Basen built from a dresser drawer in 1969.

Next came a suite of paintings by Helen Meyer, all from 1950 and, according to legend, rescued from a Manhattan trash can. Painted on small pieces of canvas board in the manner of a nearly competent illustrator, they feature a hard-boiled dame with a mannish haircut, very possibly the artist's image of herself. In one picture, she turns a gimlet-eyed gaze on a curvy babe dancing with a mustachioed man. "Why," you can almost hear her saying to herself, "is a dish like that wasting herself on him?" In Blake's show, sexuality was all the livelier for being so various--gay, not gay, unfathomable. You could see Mike Kelley's Double Figure (Hairy), 1990, as the pelt of a stuffed toy with two heads or as a representation of sex between two creatures way beyond any definition of species, much less gender.

Miss Peet (1993) is Richard Shaw's wonderfully gawky figure of a striding woman. With her paint-can head and colored-pencil fingers, all exquisitely simulated in trompe l'oeil ceramic, she makes an argument for the belief, lingering from childhood, that life lurks in inanimate things. An assemblage by Betty Parsons, Untitled (Open Loop with Ball), 1982, gives a figurative presence to painted chunks of scrap wood. Elie Nadelman's papier-mache figure from around 1930 restated the theme of the body, and soon you had arrived at Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt's Allegorical Knick-Knack (ca. 1968-73)--a balcony built, with Rococo flair, from wire and plastic wrap, and occupied by a fat golden rat whose tail is about to be bitten by a skinny silver snake.

The show also included an ink drawing by Philip Guston, from 1974, which endows the hoods of his Ku Klux Klanners with the scale of buildings; original cartoon strips by the ultra-hip Kaz and the achingly unhip Ernie Bushmiller, creator of Nancy; and Edward Curtis's sepia photographs of Northwest Indians in ceremonial costumes of amazing furriness. At the far end of the gallery, two ceramic pieces by Ken Price stood on pedestals. Buxom yet phallic, they luxuriate in their smooth, mottled surface--one keyed to a cool green, the other to a hot orange. Both are remarkably reptilian.

The prevailing theme of Crewdson's "American Standard" is the house, sometimes populated sometimes not. Near Joel Sternfeld's serene photograph of a California subdivision devastated by a mudslide stood Keith Edmier's Jill Peters, a life-sized effigy of a young woman in skirt, sweater and untied shoes. Except for a wig of human hair, this object is all white. The effect is weird, and weirder still is the conjunction of the figure's grimace with her pigeon-toed posture. Whether she bares her teeth in pain or ecstasy is impossible to tell, though the atmosphere of the show leads me to suspect that she is experiencing some freaked-out variation on the American sublime. In Crewdson's world, figures and houses alike are not so much immersed in the infinite as alive to it. Buildings have the moods of sentient things.

The ranch house in Henry Wessel's black-and-white photo, Night Walk #28 (1995), faces the darkness with a sullen wariness. In the early evening of Stephen Shore's, Second Street, Ashland, Wisconsin, July 9, a 1973 C-print, the movie theater seems suffused with a dreamy calm. Whatever the mood, it is always tinged with loneliness. The premise of this show is stated at the outset by Edward Hopper's 1928 oil, Freight Cars, Gloucester. The shadowy freight cars are moving on. The frame houses in the middle distances will stay, though nothing keeps them there, it seems, but the inexorable force of a luminous melancholy.