For Tamar Halpern, that leaves the space of abstraction and of imagery difficult to tease apart. Others, like Erin Shirreff and Sara VanDerBeek, transform photography into abstraction, but based on real sculpture and model architecture. Vieira's plaster fragments bring the Parthenon to industrial walls, while Esther Kläs's horizontal slabs form a broken pyramid. One, as with Brooks or Allyson Vieira, is the transformation of Minimalism into what Mark Dion might call urban archaeology. In fact, the show combines any number of interdisciplinary trends and favorite artists, to the point that I could almost have curated it myself. In art apparently, evolution can go through cycles and still clean house. Downstairs, Joanna Malinowska piles her polished imitation walrus tusks next to a washer-dryer as In Search of Primordial Matter. At the far end of the sculpture court, he stacks dumpsters like colored blocks, with flora growing on top, high overhead. Brooks's walkway gently twists and soars as an actual boardwalk never could, and it leads the eye from debris to greenery-much like his demented sidewalk in a gallery this spring. Not that uncertain progress means futility. For all the talk, big installations are giving way to smaller experiments, at the risk of no one breaking through. The entire show could serve as an allegory of the art world, where anything seems possible but success. It might be Mika Tajima, leaving paintings on a rack as if waiting for someone to display them. It might be Alex Hubbard on video, puttering around his studio without ever quite appearing, much as in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. In practice, almost every work involves repeated starts and inconclusive endings. One gets a third chance on entering the building and at least a fourth heading into the basement tunnels. Even if we could, we might find ourselves trapped like criminals on a scaffold. Its "observation deck" at the end overlooks pretty much nothing anyway, give or take people like me wishing we could climb up. David Brooks picks up where it leaves off with his Buried Boardwalk-except for the mountain of gravel that blocks progress. It blends into the debris on a dead-end street, and I missed it entirely on my way in. SculptureCenter, a few plywood stairs by Matt Sheridan Smith and Nikolas Gambaroff lead exactly nowhere, other than into a blank wall. ![]() "Knight's Move" has more than one false start. I want to urge artists to see past resentment-and to the real dilemma. Consider " Knight's Move," a show so close to the mix that I myself might have curated it. They bring hope, but also fears for art's meaning and vitality. Modernism and Postmodernism collide, mix, and explode, including old and new media alike. The dominant art of today is not a trend at all, but a drift. I, too, am exasperated at trendy, trashy exhibitions, and one has every right to lose hope as a struggling artist, but the populist outrage is disturbing and self-defeating. It rose to a furor after two assaults on installation art in The New York Times by Roberta Smith-and it is wrong all the same. It drove the month-long exhibition "#class," which turned a gallery into a class on the art world. Their feeling of exclusion ran through reactions to art fairs and the 2010 Whitney Biennial. If I learned one thing this spring, it is that. Obviously I am kidding, but plenty of artists are not. Or maybe enough receipts from enough Lower East Side bars. Line up some credentials first from the vast conspiracy of dealers, museum curators, and academic theorists. But the young, naked, and ever so photogenic cast of Ryan McGinley at Team was unforgiving. It was crushing all the same, so around the corner I went, to plead personally with the official cool committee. You would, too, if you could just get there first. I can see why, too, when so many New Yorkers are lining up in front of me to celebrate the departure of Jeffrey Deitch for LA MOCA. ![]() He combines Pop Art portraiture with what look like posters for the next 3D film release. The artist has ascended from upside-down maps to textbook awesome. ![]() Okay, I can see why Deitch Projects had to set such strict rules for its next to last show. I wanted to like Jules de Balincourt in April, honest, but I was just not cool enough. ![]() In New York City Knight's Move, Art Trends, and Resentment
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