WHAT: “Another Look at Detroit: Parts 1 and 2”
WHEN: Through August 8
WHERE: Marianne Boesky Gallery and Marlborough Chelsea

WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: The city of Detroit has made headlines for unfortunate reasons and hopeful reasons this past year, its public image bouncing between a post-industrial ghost town and poster child for post-urban living. Todd Levin’s “Another Look at Detroit: Parts 1 and 2,” currently on view at Marianne Boesky Gallery and Marlborough Chelsea, doesn’t align itself with either — or any — preconceived notion of what Detroit was, is, or should be.

In fact, Levin says, in a lengthy curatorial statement about the show, “This is not an exhibition about geopolitics or macroeconomics or global finance. This is not an exhibition glorifying the misguided aesthetics of destruction porn.” He adds, “It is neither a feel-good exhibition trying to accentuate the positive, nor an attempt at organizing a proper historical overview of how a city was birthed and decayed.” Levin, a Detroit native and the director of the Levin Art Group, has pulled together some of the biggest names in art, and some not so widely known, in a personal collage of the city’s artistic roots, burgeoning present, and unknown future.

Featured artwork includes a painting by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, a sculpture by Nick Cave, ephemeral artifacts such as a 1959 Plymouth automobile advertisement, decorative work like Michael McCoy’s “Door Chair Prototype,” as well as pieces by Destroy All Monsters, Charles and Ray Eames, Bill Rauhauser, Dana Schutz, and more.

“This exhibition is a sprawling tone poem evoking the city where I was born and raised, a place I still feel deeply in my identity. A soliloquy by someone returning home, but not to the place they once knew,” explains Levin. Considering the fact that just yesterday, the Detroit Institute of Arts made headlines with news that some of the city’s biggest corporations will pledge $26.8 million to help save its historic collection, there couldn’t be a better time to pause and examine the city’s creative lineage.

Click on the slideshow to see images from “Another Look at Detroit: Parts 1 and 2.”

“Double Play,” a documentary film by Gabe Klinger running at Anthology Film Archives in New York City from July 18 through 24, highlights the unusual relationship between two artists, both of whom represent divergent filmmaking practices: James Benning, the legendary experimental filmmaker, and Richard Linklater, who’s carved out one of the most interesting Hollywood careers of the last two decades.

The hook of the film rests on the unlikely pairing of the two — one makes films starring celebrities within a system defined by capital while the other makes films largely on his own. But are the two artists really that dissimilar? They met when Linklater was a much younger man, just beginning his career as a filmmaker while sharing a role in the creation of the Austin Film Society, which he helps organize to this day. The first filmmaker they invited to town to show films was James Benning, who, as Linklater mentions in “Double Play,” showed up not long after with his film in one hand and a small plastic bag with a few articles of clothing in the other.

The two share formal interests as well. Duration is essential to many of Benning’s films, which utilize long takes and natural sound, and it’s easy to see his influence on “Boyhood,” Linklater’s latest film, which was shot over a 12-year period and derives much of its power through subtle shifts in time. Going back further, the languid pace of films such as “Slacker” and “Waking Life,” which avoid a narrative center in favor of a multiplicity of directions, hint at an experimentation far removed from the world of Hollywood cinema, in which Linklater is an active participant.  

The documentary traces these and other connections in interesting ways. Klinger’s camera, never intrusive, absorbs influences from the work of both subjects, making the film feel more like a collaboration between the three than an authorial vision by one. At certain moments the camera will hang back, remain static, and simply observe; other moments, it’s naturalistic and flowing with the action, following the two as they go for a hike, talk about their careers over a meal, and throw around a baseball. In the latter segment, another connection is discovered — both were star athletes earlier in life (Benning was also a math teacher before turning to film).

“Double Play” was produced under the banner of “Cinéastes de notre temps,” a French television program that aired, in its original incarnation, until 1971, before returning intermittently beginning in 1989. The episodes, many of which are now hard to find, have gained in stature among cinephiles over the years partly due to their obscurity as well as their uniqueness — many of the portraits were made by filmmakers about their contemporaries and avoid the typical structures of traditional documentary film. “Double Play” is a fine addition to this group, not only because of its subject matter — and someone needs to make a more in-depth film about James Benning, pronto — but because of how it expands our knowledge of both filmmakers and their work just by letting the two get together for a day and hang out.

SANTA FE — Those paying attention to the international biennial circuit for the past few years will have taken note of the absence of one in Santa Fe, where one of the first in North America was founded in 1995 at the kunsthalle known as SITE Santa Fe. Since arriving from the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore as SITE’s Phillips director and chief curator in 2010, Irene Hofmann has set out to reform the increasingly stale and predictable biennial format with a team of a dozen curators and advisors hailing from the Yukon to Argentina.

The new exhibition series “SITElines” is an ambitious reimagining that aims to crack open the rich field of contemporary art loosely inspired by the geography — physical, political, and social — of the Americas. The first installment, “Unsettled Landscapes,” opens to the public on July 20 and is on view through January 11. Curated by the Mexico City-based Lucia Sanromán; Candice Hopkins, of Albuquerque; and SITE’s own Janet Dees and Hofmann, the 60-some works represent an array of approaches as wide as the 33,000-mile territory.

One of the largest works in the show is “The Great Tree,” 2014, a 14-foot-tall sculpture carved from four tons of stacked newspapers by the Colombian-born Miler Lagos. Noting that the ceiba tree is considered mystical by several native cultures in Latin and South America, he said, “I liked the idea of how people in the Amazon would ask for permission to approach the tree and gain its knowledge. I wanted to connect print media with the material that supports its information.” The ceiba also appears in a piece by Johanna Calle, “Perímetros (Ceiba),” a new typewriter drawing on property ledger sheets that employs text of a 2011 agrarian reform law that attempts to restitute land to victims of displacement.

Ideas of mapping and bearing witness also come to the fore in works by Marcos Ramírez Erre and David Taylor, who are planting markers along the Mexico-US border as defined in 1821, the year the country gained independence from Spain, and in a video piece by Andrea Bowers, “The United States vs. Tim DeChristopher,” 2010. In the latter, the environmental activist explains how he was tried and imprisoned for buying public land in Utah put up for oil and gas rights in an auction he never intended to pay for, and the artist presents the parcels on which he bid.

Natural resources are at issue in Inigo Manglano-Ovalle’s “Well 35° 58’ 16”N 106° 5’ 21”W,” 2014, which plants a pump on the Santa Clara Pueblo and raises thorny questions of water rights in the desert. Luis Camnitzer’s “Amanaplanacanalpanama,” 1995, documents the US’s tangled involvement in building the Panama Canal.

Barbed humor enters with the Canadian First Nations artist Kent Monkman’s “Bête Noire,” 2014, a natural-history style diorama featuring his drag alter ego, Miss Chief, who slays Picasso’s bull with a pink arrow from her own loyal steed: an Indian motorcycle. Another Canadian artist, Charles Stankievech, offers the eerie and riveting film “The Soniferous Aether of the Land Beyond the Land Beyond,” 2012, made at Alert Signals Intelligence Station, the northernmost continuously habited settlement on earth. It has a correspondence with post-apocalyptically tinged photographs by Patrick Nagatani, addressing the environmental impact of New Mexico’s energy industry.

Some of the Caribbean artists in the show seek to upend facile assumptions of island paradise by exposing the effects of colonization and tourism. Deborah Jack’s “Bounty,” 2006, a grid of 30 light boxes showing slides of St. Maarten’s Great Salt Pond, the reason the island was colonized by the Dutch. Blue Curry’s “S.S.s,” 2014, erects a live video feed of the Nassau port, where as many as six hulking cruise ships dock each day, disgorging tourists before whisking them away. “I always saw the continued change in the port as a kind of sculpture,” Curry said. “Here, I am appropriating the ships and changing the port into an installation.” Special flags made of beach towels — as Curry noted, a “tool of conquest” in their own right — will be run up outside SITE to announce each ship’s arrival in a reprisal of former island custom. “Tourism limits a local culture from developing because we’re always performing,” he added — a parallel to Santa Fe’s own adobe-fied landscape.

To view highlights from the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, click here.

— Scott Indrisek rounded up five must-see gallery shows in New York.

— Ryan McNamara talked about his latest piece: a choreographed procession up the High Line set to a 1979 Jimmy Carter speech.  

— Sarah P. Hanson reported from New Mexico on SITE Santa Fe’s reimagined biennial. 

— Martin Gayford reviewed an exhibition of Dennis Hopper photographs at the Royal Academy.

— Alanna Martinez wrote about the fine art origins of master animator Chuck Jones.

— Scott Indrisek spoke with Wendy White, who channels soccer fever, Almodovar, and Madrid in her latest exhibition.

—  Architect Annabelle Seldorff discussed her work on the newly redesigned Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

— Jennifer Sullivan shared her current music play list in our latest installment of Studio Tracks.

This Week's VIDEOS:

HUDSON, New York — Nature and its complex relationship with man has always been an inspiration for Jason Middlebrook in creating his immersive sculptures. However, it wasn’t until his move to upstate New York that he began to find his artistic language.

“A teacher in graduate school told me I was conceptually promiscuous, which I always loved,” said Middlebrook. “I think every artist invents their own ways of making art.”

Middlebrook relocated his Brooklyn studio to the provincial spaces of Hudson in 2008. The abundance of trees and timber in the area led him to work with wooden planks, which he later started painting with vibrant geometric shapes while preserving the integrity and irregularities of the lumber. These immersive sculptural paintings are exempliary of his conceptual approach. Middlebrook loved being an abstract painter, even during his days at San Francisco Art Institute, and it’s the collision of the environment and art history techniques that became his signature oeuvre. “All these shapes are like man versus nature,” he said. “Nature is the form and man is the paint.”

It was this tension between the man-made and natural environment that prompted Middlebrook’s interactive installation at SITE Santa Fe’s biennial, SITElines 2014. He created a site-specific work, “Your General Store,” for which he transformed an old shipping container into a replica of a 19th-century barter general store. The interior of the container is lined with parquets of wood from trees around the region and merchandise, handmade or collected, by more than 40 artists.

SITE Sante Fe SITElines 2014 opens July 20 and runs through January 11 at 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Andrew Edlin Gallery’s current group exhibition, “Purple States” (through August 16), explores the still-controversial genre of outsider art, and stakes a claim for its practitioners that’s buoyed by the strong showing in this well curated show. Artist curator Sam Gordon envisioned it as the third iteration in a chain of “insider/outsider” conversations, following 1992’s “Parallel Visions” at LACMA and “Parallel Visions II” at New York’s Galerie St. Etienne in 2006. The programming for “Purple States” also includes poetry readings and other interdisciplinary events.

While outsider art remains fraught with sticky questions—is the genre just an excuse for collectors to champion and sell the work of mentally disabled, unsavvy, or otherwise disadvantaged creators; or worse, to mythologize their “noble” disadvantage while reinforcing the distinction between outsider artists and other artists?—Gordon approaches the subject with sensitivity. Here he pairs works by celebrated outsider artists with contemporary artworks to set up sprawling dialogues that cram the small space. The pairs are exhibited in close proximity, but picking out the matched works from the salon-style hang frequently requires recourse to the exhibition’s press release. The gallery’s owner, Andrew Edlin, has a vested interest in outsider art: His company Wide Open Arts purchased the Outsider Art Fair in 2012, and many of the works came from the gallery’s inventory.

As an essay accompanying “Parallel Visions II” observed that Americans’ relationship to outsider art is even more uneasy than that of Europeans. We like the idea of untrained artists achieving success through ingenuity and gumption. But this doesn’t exactly square with the fundamental elitism necessary to categorize an artist’s practice as outsider. The artists in this show span from folk artisans to the developmentally or mentally disabled (including several from the highly influential Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California) to self-trained painters. But the in/out dichotomy is sometimes subverted, for example, in the partnering of John Lurie, the Lounge Lizard musician and ultimate downtown insider, with the young painter Andrea Joyce Heimer, who is arguably his insider counterpart in this context.

There’s plenty of formal overlap between duos and it’s easy to see the relationship between Sabrina Gschwandtner’s textile-like Camouflage, 2012, made from repurposed 16mm film prints, and the Gee’s Bend quilt with which it’s linked. Yet by this same logic the couplings can occasionally feel superficial. (Does the creepily whimsical, deeply private outsider poster-boy Henry Darger really have much in common with the hyperarticulate, politically-driven practice of Paul Chan?) But when they work, as in the pairing of Brian Belott’s Bubbletag, 2014, interwoven socks pressed in glass, with William Copley’s joyful Super Bowl No. 2, 1969, it’s magical. The works’ cumulative exuberance makes them pop from the wall, a kinship of sensibility rather than formal or process-based similarity. 

A version of this article appears in the October 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine. 

SITE Santa Fe, the New Mexico-based art nonprofit, was launched in 1995 to organize the first international biennial of contemporary art in the United States. Since that time, SITE has expanded its programming to include thoughtful and innovative exhibitions year-round. Bruce W. Ferguson, the curator of that first show, spoke to Irene Hofmann, the institution’s current director, about how she has re-envisioned the biennial for a new era with a fresh format, the first installment of which, “Unsettled Landscapes,” debuts July 20.

How has the attitude toward biennials changed since SITE’s founding?

After nearly 20 years of presenting international biennials in a context that over time became flooded with others, SITE faced a crisis. Several essential questions had to be addressed: What is the purpose of SITE’s biennial? What defines its character, structure, and organizing principles? Who is its audience? In the process
of revisiting our history, we challenged all previous assumptions and expectations and ultimately shifted
the direction of our work.

What our conversations revealed is that after nearly two decades of the rise of SITE Santa Fe and other participants on the international biennial circuit, there is a growing dissatisfaction with the uniformity of the presentations of biennials, the limited pool of curators hired to organize them, the familiarity of “biennial art,” and the narrow roster of selected artists. One of the critiques leveled against the biennial format in recent years is its failure to deliver on the promise of true engagement with local communities and conditions. There’s also the related phenomenon of the “parachuting” curator and artist, who drop in at one location and deliver essentially the same type of exhibition and work as at others. This leaves visitors who travel widely to see contemporary art feeling jaded, and it leaves local audiences detached and disillusioned as outsiders step in to reflect on their histories and communities.

Tell me about the new format, “SITElines,” which I understand is a multisite, multi-curator, multiyear proposition.

“SITElines” introduces a long-term trajectory with three interrelated exhibitions over the next six years. Its collaborative curatorial structure will allow the inclusion of multiple voices and perspectives, from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego, with particular attention to under-recognized artists and perspectives. If the initial impulse for SITE’s biennial was to be innovative and forward-looking, to ignite a contemporary art audience and art scene in the region and beyond, and to be a vital voice in contemporary art, I would say that all those goals remain today. The new focus for our biennial, art from the Western Hemisphere, is inspired by the layers of history and culture embedded in Santa Fe itself. The area is a rich microcosm of the Americas: Before statehood, New Mexico was first—and in part remains—Native American land, and then, successively, a Spanish kingdom, a Mexican province, and an American territory. With SITElines, we link this fertile region to the rest of the Western Hemisphere, moving from an east-west axis to one that runs south-north. Rejecting the notion of homogeneity in the Americas, we recuperate multiple histories and cosmologies, looking to artists to help us reveal and understand points of view that have often been sidelined in the contemporary art world.

One of the most effective works or projects at the first biennial was by Francis Alÿs, including a mural that now resides in the Museum of NewMexico. Which artists or artworks do you foresee occupying that position in this edition?

There are a number of artists whose projects operate in a semi-permanent way. One example is a work by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle that explores the politics, legalities, and cultural complexities of water rights in the American Southwest. Well 35° 58’ 16”N 106° 5’ 21”W is a functioning well installed in the Santa Clara Pueblo outside the city. It has a locking mechanism, and a key provides control over this precious water source. The relative remoteness of this work and its connection to the land link it to earthworks and land art of the past, but unlike its predecessors, Well is not intended to be visited; in fact, after it’s installed, Manglano-Ovalle will transfer ownership of this sculpture to the owners of this Pueblo land.

Another work that extends beyond the gallery walls and the timeframe of our show is a long-term performative project by Pablo Helguera, who for years has been conducting extensive research in New Mexico’s historical archives. He has uncovered a series of captivating figures and events, including characters such as the hero/traitor Manuel Armijo, a past governor of Santa Fe; the influential madam known as Doña Tules, notorious for her popular casino; and the punitive expedition in search of Pancho Villa. Helguera has woven these figures and many fascinating historical details into a poetic musical that will be performed as part of our exhibition
and further developed and expanded in the coming years, perhaps growing in scope and ambition over time.

Themes of trade are close to the collective experience of all American peoples. Does SITElines address
the increasing role of the art market in any way?

Trade is an important theme in the history and development of the Americas, the political relationships between nations in the region, and the everyday lived experience in the Americas today. However, our show addresses trade as it relates to the land, rather than any specific economy like the art market per se. Artist Jason Middlebrook is opening a barter-only “store” that harks back to a pre-capitalist history and explores the potential
of an alternative economy.

Is your thematic overview relevant outside the region?

The themes of landscape, territory, and trade were not conceived as regional concerns but as complex interests shared throughout the Americas. Yes, these themes have strong and specific meaning in the American Southwest, but they also have great relevance in regions far from Santa Fe.

What strategies are you using for outreach to the immediate community?

A key step toward fulfilling our objectives of deeper audience engagement is the establishment of a new programming hub called SITEcenter. It will provide a theater for the constructive critique of the traditional biennial model that presents a discrete capsule of contemporary art every two years. Having SITEcenter allows us instead to privilege time, open exchange, and the accumulation of shared experiences and knowledge, with programming before, during, and after each SITElines exhibition. We are also partnering with select artists on long-term community-based or site-responsive projects, a kind of residency function.

What criteria did you use to choose the curators for “Unsettled Landscapes”? Has the array of international curators expanded the kindsof artists included?

In developing our curatorial team, which includes four main curators and five satellite curatorial advisers, we took many factors into account. Given that one of our primary goals is a commitment to diversity, we developed a team that reflects various cultural perspectives, nationalities, locations, generations, and approaches. Our curators and advisers come from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Spain, Venezuela, all over the Caribbean, and the United States and are based up and down the
North and South American continents and in Latin America. For the first installment, “Unsettled Landscapes,” the list of artists chosen by the four main curators and five satellite curatorial advisers indeed reflects this multiplicity of voices. 

A version of this article appears in the July/August 2014 issue of Art+Auction magazine. 

— Collector Liu Yiqian Drinks Out of $36M Cup: Chinese collector Liu Yiqian has drawn criticism for drinking tea from the record shattering $36 million “chicken cup” that he recently purchased at Sotheby’s. Many have taken Liu to task after an image of him delicately sipping from the porcelain cup was posted online. “It happened when I was paying,” Liu explained. “A Sotheby’s staffer poured me some tea. I saw the [chicken cup] and excitedly poured some of that tea into the cup and drank a little. Such a simple thing — what’s so crazy about that?” [WSJ]

— RIP Otto Piene: Artist Otto Piene, a cofounder of the storied ZERO group with Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker, has passed away. Piene’s work was chosen for Germany’s Venice Biennale pavilion in both 1967 and 1971. His work can currently be seen at the Neue Nationalgalerie and will be in the Guggenheim’s ZERO exhibition this fall. [Artforum]

— “Girl with a Pearl Earring” Will Never Travel Again: Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” has returned to the Mauritshuis royal picture gallery in the Hague after completing its most recent world tour — this time, for good. The painting will no longer be permitted to travel or go on loan to another institution, joining a long list of other famous artworks that have similarly found their final resting place, including “La Joie de Vivre” by Matisse, “Guernica” by Picasso, and the “Mona Lisa” by Da Vinci. The primary reason for this decision is concern for the health of the painting, which, due to the materials used, makes it extremely sensitive to temperature changes. [Guardian]

— Getty Acquires “Happenings” Archive: The Getty Research Institute has acquired Robert McElroy’s archive of more than 700 prints and 10,000 negatives documenting the “Happenings” of Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenberg, and others. [LAT]

— Moishe Mana Gets Profiled: The New York Times tracked down Moishe Mana, owner of Moishe’s Moving and Storage and the founder of Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, for a short profile. [NYT]

— How Much Do Curators Make? Following news of Germano Celant’s hefty salary for organizing a pavilion for the Milan Expo 2015, the Art Newspaper surveyed 40 international curators and biennial organizers to see how their paychecks stack up. [TAN]

— Lauren Wright will curate the next iteration of Denver’s Biennial of the Americas. [Artforum]

— California African American Museum executive director Charmaine Jefferson is stepping down after 11 years on the job. [LAT]

— The city of Miami has approved plans to build a museum dedicated to the Cuban exile experience. [Fox News]

ALSO ON ARTINFO

5 Must-See Gallery Shows: “Displayed,” “Purple States,” and More

Pushing Boundaries: SITE Santa Fe’s Reimagined Biennial

Conversation With SITE Santa Fe Director Irene Hofmann

Review: “Purple States” at Andrew Edlin Gallery

VIDEO: Dan Graham’s Sculpture at the Met’s Roof Garden

Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.

Ostensibly a thriller, and marketed as such, The Kills (Picador, slated for release in the US August 2) is instead a thoroughly weird and uncategorizable book (or, rather, collection of four books) that centers around an Iraqi waste-burning facility and a housing complex in Naples, among other things and places. Indeed, all it has in common with a genre mainstay like
the Bourne franchise is a certain geographic restlessness. “If I were a thriller aficionado, I’d be screaming,” House admits. “It’s a much slower book, and I’m trusting a reader’s going to be able to finish off what’s left untied.” It’s a suitably porous, untidy structure for The Kills’s basic topic, which is the clusterfuck of broken promises, mangled finances, and bureaucratic intrigues that constituted
the Iraq War. The many-tentacled octopus at the heart of it all is HOSCO, a Halliburton-style company providing all sorts of services to the occupying forces. As Geezler, one of its principles (and the closest character to a villain that The Kills has) explains, “We started out doing one
thing and we’ve ended up doing everything. I’m not saying we’re greedy. I’m saying we’re promiscuous.”

Book one, Sutler, introduces the titular character—under a HOSCO-provided pseudonym—a contractor who is plopped down in the Iraqi desert and charged with converting a wasteland of garbage burn-pits into a fully functional, utopian-leaning city. The only problem is that this project (dubbed The Massive, which is the title of the second book) doesn’t really exist, except perhaps as a pretense for siphoning cash from government contracts. House’s saga proceeds in a fairly straight line through the first two books—the life of contractors coexisting with the military, the daily dangers and boredom, the horrific health effects of breathing in medical waste incinerated with jet fuel—centering around a staggering embezzlement scheme. Sutler, the presumptive
fall guy, goes on the run.

There’s an abrupt tonal shift by the third book, which is set in Naples: The Iraq War plotline disappears entirely in the third chunk of the novel, and instead we’re in the middle of an Italian murder story, rife with false accusations, a mysterious pair of foreign brothers, and a basement chamber whose plastic-coated walls are covered
in blood. This third installment (The Kill, singular) was the first part that House wrote. He was inspired, he says, by the Italian thriller writer Leonardo Sciascia— specifically, the 1971 novel Equal Danger. While The Kill is fairly stand-alone, references to its story are dotted throughout the first two books, and the basic plot is an integral part of the final section, which is set in Cyprus. If this all sounds confusing, it is—but never in a ponderous way, and never at the expense of old-fashioned, plot-based entertainment, especially for the final, climactic book, which is particularly evocative and quasi-cinematic.

House—who received an MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago and was a member
of the social-practice-oriented collective Haha—has no direct connection to the world of military contractors, and while
he often travels to research his novels,
he has not been to Iraq. “It’s widely out
of my experience, that’s true,” he says.
“It was just post-Iraq War, with all the evaluation that was going on, and I started asking myself, Why was I so complacent, really?” It’s fitting, then, that much of The Kills has to do with responsibility, and with the shadowy task of assigning blame (and how that task is often obscured by the news media and official narratives). While the specific details in the novels are fabricated, House says they do hew closely enough to the type of scams that unfolded during the Iraq War, a situation that he says was “open to abuse—and in fiction you can explode those possibilities.” It’s
a world in which individual characters are often powerless in the face of a military-industrial machine that might never be reined in, despite heroic efforts. “It’s bigger than those intentions,” House says. “I was trying to play off scale—the same with [HOSCO henchman] Geezler: a small, destructive element, but equally as tiny against this massive, massive thing.”

In a typical thriller, the world is presented as an intensely complicated array of conspiracies, alliances, and stratagems, a thicket through which the protagonist runs, hacks, shoots, and kills. By the finale, the swamp of false leads and red herrings has generally resolved into something clearer: a bad guy, a victory, international terrorism foiled by a high-speed chase on a European highway. The Kills is more like a realist thriller in that it refuses to solve its own mystery
so cleanly. Its questions are fairly simple—who took all that money, and where
the hell did that person go?—but ultimately the world remains hugely complex, and unknowable, as always.

A version of this article appears in the July/August 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine. 

Upon entering the lobby of the Museum of Arts and Design, the visitor is met with unusual visual and aural stimulation: flowers fashioned out of tissue paper and metallic ribbon bloom along the stairway banister, bronze-hued metallic ribbons completely cover the elevator landing, and a sound work plays in the background. The foyer offers a dislocating experience — the unexpected vestibule display establishes an immediate break with Columbus Circle, just outside the museum’s doors. Upstairs, on the fourth and fifth floors where “NYC Makers,” MAD’s inaugural craft biennial that runs through October 12, is on display, the show nearly transplants the viewer to Brooklyn.

Many of the craftspeople and designers included in the survey of New York City’s craft community are indeed based in Brooklyn, and their contributions highlight the sheer variety of production undertaken in a borough that has become noted, derisively at times, for its artisanal chocolatiers and other such “hip” makers. Here, the borough’s representatives are less expected. For example, Flavor Paper, a company that manufacturers scratch-n-sniff wallpaper, has its wares pasted to the staircase shaft walls. But the participants are not limited to Brooklyn — there’s even an artisan from Staten Island in the show. “It was very important for us to include makers from all five boroughs, to make this a survey of all of New York City,” said Glenn Adamson, MAD’s new director, who oversaw the conception of the biennial.

More interesting, however, are the Manhattan-made products on display. In 2014, it seems unlikely that manufacture is still taking place in Manhattan. Yet the Manhattan makers in the show are all small-scale and often boutique producers, highly skilled craftspeople who rely on the quality, not quantity, of their work to operate businesses in the infamously expensive borough. Take, for instance, Miriam Ellner, who specializes in verre eglomise, a glass production process that dates back to pre-Roman times. Her 2014 screen, called “Fata Morgana,” is a vision in paint, gold leaf, and glass — otherworldly, but made nonetheless on West 26th Street. Interesting, too, are the clothes designed by Eckhaus Latta, displayed via fantastical collection videos directed by filmmaker Alexa Karolinski.

There are a great many objects on view in the MAD biennial — produced by nearly 100 makers from across the city — and at times the display appears overcrowded and the objects unrelated to one another. Yet unexpected gems appear throughout “NYC Makers,” and they offer a reminder that, for all the hype about Detroit, Los Angeles, and the like, New York still has a creative energy (and industry) to call its own.

Click on the slideshow to see highlights from MAD’s “NYC Makers” exhibition.

David Kennedy Cutler’s sculpture exists at a point where that medium rubs up against photography and performance. Consider a few of the transparent Plexiglas sculptures, made back in 2009, that are part of Lisa Cooley’s current group show, “Eric’s Trip.” Huddled in the center of the gallery, they seem to warp the very air around them. They were crafted out of simple 4- x 8-feet sheets of Plexi that the artist softened with an industrial heat gun, contorting the flat material in a process that he likened to “doing yoga and wrestling at the same time.” Their intensely hands-on production makes the sculptures both physical objects — ghostly, ethereal, but solid — and “documents of a performance, or of their own making,” he explained.

The pieces had their public outing at Cutler’s first exhibition at Derek Eller Gallery five years ago. While most young artists treat their solo debut as a chance to loudly trumpet their arrival on the scene, Cutler “wanted to do something the opposite — a quieter, poetic kind of gesture.” His aesthetic grew a bit noisier by the time of his second show at the gallery in 2012: a series of totem-like resin-and-mixed-media works that incorporated things like melted compact discs, or photographs of sidewalk oil stains that Cutler would physically mess with before burying them in layers of transparent material. His studio at the time was sited above the underground disaster-remnants of the Greenpoint oil spill, which pushed him towards considerations of such chemical toxicities, as well as “how the body engages with materiality.” 

Cutler’s newest works recall the form of the earlier Plexiglas pieces and continue to push forward the artist’s interest in what he terms “images as material.” Willful perversions of technology are also at the fore. There’s a hand-held scanner, traditionally used by research libraries, that Cutler exploits to capture myriad images — his wife’s legs; vegetables his mom ships him from a farm-share in Vermont; the black-and-white pattern of his bathroom floor; plaid shirts — which he then prints, rescans, and recombines into busily disorienting digital collages. “I’m looking for inspiration, but only in the extremely immediate realm,” he said. “It’s burrowing deeper and deeper into personal archaeology.”

Those recontextualized snippets of Cutler’s life are then given a unique, three-dimensional existence, thanks to the large-scale Epson printer that he’s rigged to print those images on both sides of thin, flexible sheets of aluminum. That pricey piece of equipment was snapped up by Cutler’s building-mate Glen Baldridge— it was being thrown out by Urs Fischer’s studio. Since it had landed in his lap gratis, Baldridge was fine with his friend taking some creative liberties with the machinery. “Glen calls it ‘hotrodding the printer’ — tricking it,” Cutler explained. “You have to learn its language. In a way it’s a little similar to the Plexiglas. You have this thing meant for one application — it only comes in these sizes and thicknesses, all of these constraints based on industrial needs — and you’re engaging with it to see what you can do with it as an artist.”

The resulting pieces — with their wild, all-over prints and mangled, almost violent shapes — conjure a variety of references and influences, from the work of Daniel Gordon and Ethan Greenbaum (both friends of Cutler’s) to photographic-sculptural experiments by contemporaries like Letha Wilson, or forebearers like Robert Heinecken. There’s also something of John Chamberlain’s brawny, smashed automobile aesthetic in the way Cutler shapes the aluminum. (“I bend it with my hand, I stab it with a chisel, tear it, twist it,” he said, also describing the process as a sort of sculptural version of Abstract Expressionism. “It’s pretty bodily. I get cuts all over.”)

For Cutler, the sculptures are a way to explore the charged psychology of living in a world flush with images. “I’m grappling with the way my mind is changing, based on how I spend my time,” he said. “Think about navigating through screens on a computer all day — that insane layering, and an engagement back and forth between real objects and images of objects. I’m trying to bridge the gap between that very flat, transparent experience, and how that experience uploads back into the real world.” Yet as concerned as they are with how he and his contemporaries process and make sense of an overloaded, digitally enhanced world, the works are also resolutely old school: the product of that aforementioned yoga-and-wrestling conception of conjuring an object from scratch. “I think about the sculptures in terms of how they should look, but they’re also just artifacts,” he said, referring to that ongoing struggle and exertion against the material itself. “It’s really in-the-studio navel-gazing, but that’s so much of how artists spend all of their time: You and some inanimate stuff, all day long.”

To view a selection of David Kennedy Cutler's work, click here.

— Corcoran Lawsuit Will Proceed: A Washington, DC superior court decided yesterday that the lawsuit brought against the Corcoran by those who don’t want to see the museum merge with George Washington University and the National Gallery of Art will be allowed to proceed. During a four-day hearing next week, the nine members of the advocacy group Save the Corcoran will have a chance to present their case. “It’s the right thing to happen, before you can dissolve an institution like the Corcoran — all of these questions should be answered,” said Jayme McLellan, an organizer of Save the Corcoran. [WP]

— Goldsmiths to Build Gallery: The University of London’s Goldsmiths art school, which is known for pumping out a generation of art stars including Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, and Antony Gormley, has announced plans to convert a nearby former public bath building into a public art gallery. Alumni have been asked to donate works for a fundraising auction at Christie’s that seeks to raise the £2 million needed to covert the space. Goldsmiths plans to announce an architect next week and projects that the space will likely open in late 2015. [TAN]

— “Casablanca” Piano Hits the Block: The piano from iconic film “Casablanca” is set to go back on the auction block at Bonhams after selling two years ago for $602,500 at Sotheby’s. This time around the estimate is at $800,000 to $1.2 million. The November 24 sale, which comes entirely from a private collection, is comprised of 30 items from the 1942 film including the doors of “Rick’s Cafe Americain” and a final draft of the screenplay. [AFP]

— Hirst Delays Art Space Opening: Damien Hirst’s art space in London has shifted its opening date to next summer, after Hirst announced plans to open the complex late this year. [TAN]

— New Prize in Belfast: Belfast’s Metropolitan Arts Centre (MAC) has launched a £20,000 award that already has a 25-artist shortlist. [BBC]

— RIP Tom Tierney: Tom Tierney, who is credited with reviving the art of the paper doll, has died at 85. [NYT]

— “Fifty Shades of Grey” director Sam Taylor-Johnson has photographed the interior of Coco Chanel’s apartment for a show at the Saatchi Gallery in September. [Telegraph]

— San Francisco non-profit Art City Project wants to put art up on every billboard in the city. [SF Gate]

— Dr. Kevorkian’s suicide machine is set to go on view at (where else?) the Museum of Death in LA. [LAT]

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