This week in Newly Reviewed, Martha Schwendener covers Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s subtle humor, Jack Goldstein’s audio works and Pippa Garner’s gadgets.
Upper East Side
Sylvia Plimack Mangold
Through Jan. 25. Craig Starr Gallery, 5 East 73rd Street, Manhattan; 212-570-1739, craigstarr.com.
Pop Art and Minimalism emerged in the 1960s with a common focus. Deadpan and literal, these movements rejected the exuberant expression and mythological references of previous generations of artists.
Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s photorealistic paintings of rulers, measuring tapes, gridded paper and floor tiles in “Tapes, Fields, and Trees, 1975-84” at Craig Starr are about as banal and literal as it gets. And yet, there is a subtle humor in the seriousness and virtuosic precision of how she approached these seemingly absurd tasks.
“Painted Graph Paper” (1975) is exactly that: an exact rendering of gridded paper, a favorite medium of artists working in what the art historian Benjamin Buchloh famously called the “aesthetics of administration” reflecting bureaucracy and institutions in post-World War II society. “Taped Over Twenty-Four-Inch Exact Rule on Light Floor” (1975) is an acrylic-on-canvas painting that faithfully depicts industrial beige floor tiles and masking tape surrounding them. “A September Passage” (1984) seems to break from the office or factory world, featuring a clump of trees in a meadow. Even here, however, there is a postcard brightness to the scene, rather than, say, a landscape lit to induce romantic reverie.
In recent years, Mangold has applied her literalist logic to painting the same maple tree outside her studio in Orange County, N.Y., over and over again. Like the earlier works in this show, though, the canvases featuring that tree are never exactly the same. In an age of distraction and overwhelming information, her close, precise vision — and the implied humor about her approach — serve as calibrating beacons. Tapes, rulers and trees never looked so good, or meditative.
Upper East Side
Jack Goldstein
Through Jan. 18. Galerie Buchholz, 17 East 82nd Street, Manhattan; 212-328-7885, galeriebuchholz.de.
Jack Goldstein (1945-2003) was one of the leading lights of the so-called Pictures Generation, the first group of North American artists to grow up with television, and whose work was informed by the impact of mass media and consumerism. In the 1980s, he made large paintings that featured cosmic and military spectacles, which in turn resembled special-effects light shows. Before that, though, he tried his hand at conceptual art.
Just inside the entrance at Buchholz is “Untitled” (1970), a large stack of wood blocks that nods to rigorous, geometrically abstract minimalism. Photos of Goldstein taken by James Welling in New York and Los Angeles in 1977 and 1978 show him looking like a low-key glam rock star — not incidental in the years when Cindy Sherman and David Lamelas turned performing for the camera into a fine-art form.
The rear gallery highlights artworks made with typewriters and early computers, like concrete poetry, as well as Goldstein’s complete audio works on vinyl, which feature sounds like “The Burning Forest” (1976), “The Tornado” (1976) or “Two Wrestling Cats” (1976).
These pieces also allude to Hollywood and its arsenal of technical and psychological effects. Goldstein would use Hollywood effects in his short films, like “Shane” (1975) and “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer” (1975), which showed a famous dog and lion, respectively, barking and growling on repeat. The films, which presaged newer media like GIFs and memes, are not here. That’s probably a good thing, though, since this show offers a quieter side of Goldstein and many works most viewers will not have seen before.
Tribeca
Pippa Garner
Through Jan. 25. Matthew Brown, 390 Broadway, Manhattan; 646-410-2595, matthewbrowngallery.com.
The term “auto body,” applied to car-repair shops and the vehicles that move people throughout the world, takes on a different meaning with Pippa Garner, a trans artist who died on Dec. 30. Garner’s many jobs included car-magazine illustrator and industrial designer, and in the Whitney Biennial last year she showed a sprawling piece about her gender transition in the midst of consumerist culture, including the idea that the body is, she once said, “just another product.”
The free-flowing nature of designing and redesigning cars and human bodies underlies this survey of works at Matthew Brown. On view is a large-scale photograph of the Blaster Bra, which Garner showed off on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” in 1982: a brassiere with round speakers connected to a sound system in order to create a kind of personalized “human Muzak.” Other gadgets drawn expertly in pencil on paper include a subcutaneous airbag, a “Brat Rod” for spoiled children and a device for texting on the phone with your tongue while driving.
Southern California, where Garner lived for decades, is home to a long tradition of custom cars. And for her, there didn’t seem to be a huge distance between these sorts of modifications and other ones. “I was working with consumer appliances and products, and I thought, Hey, I’m a product too,” she once said. That view makes Garner’s work particularly prescient in a moment when the terms “auto” and “body” are in flux.
See the December gallery shows here.
