Four for Friday
Christopher Williams at the Neubauer Collegium, Maeve Coughlin at SULK CHICAGO, Judith Geichman at Regards, Richard Wetzel at Corbett vs. Dempsey,
Hello, this is the first iteration of Four for Friday, where (mostly) every Friday, I’ll be publishing four short-form reviews together in the hopes that either you’ll know whether to see or avoid certain exhibitions with the precious fleeting hours of your weekend or to chew on something that recently might have closed.
Christopher Williams: Radio, Rauhfaser, Television @ Neubauer Collegium
I love me some Christopher Williams, but this exhibition begs the question: When does a show get too dense for its own good? Maybe, the solution is luxuriating in appreciation for how well the work is presented? Afterall, the mode of presentation has been and remains tantamount to William’s practice, but I don’t think the obvious intentionality that each object on view is suffused with really makes room for a simple vibes-based reception of the work. (Though on another note I would love it if teenagers started identifying things as “a Christopher Williams aesthetic”) By showing the filagree of research materials surrounding William’s recent production of Inklusive, a radio play by Franz Xaver Kroetz one mode of presentation is exchanged for another, and the ante for how audiences interpolate the material is upped significantly. Amidst the vitrine running the length of the gallery smaller images of some of his best known works populate the vitrine running down the middle of the gallery, with an abundance of notes and archival materials from his research into Kroetz and the play in general. If anything the exhibition might just be a cipher for William’s practice writ large, and the press release seems to confirm this, nodding to a “manifesto-like quality”. Like all manifestos; however, the clarion call here is accompanied by a sort of archival glossolalia induced by Williams's fevered enthusiasm.
Williams is an artist who could be described as painstakingly sober in his means of communication, but also quite funny in what is being presented so frankly. The sign that says “MODEL” in stern brown paint leaves viewers free to consider it as many things, particularly an imperative, voguing amidst the archive, but it also hints at the exhibition as prototype or space for existing elsewhere at a grander scale. I started writing this review wanting to talk about how the show was like stale pumpernickel bread, something I enjoy when fresh, but now difficult to digest. As I was reflecting on my experience in the Neubauer though, I belatedly discovered a certain generosity in the work, and even what I hope for in every encounter with art: a small moment of magic. Behind the ad hoc wall built up near the stately fireplace was a what looked like a roll of the Rauhfaser brand wall paper the wall is clad with. I’m unsure why I loved it so much, but maybe because I liked the promise that there is more to come, I just wish I had been able to figure it out sooner.
Christopher Williams RADIO / RAUHFASER / TELEVISION closes today at 4pm
Maeve Coughlin: Someone Who Isn’t Me @ SULK CHICAGO
Maeve Coughlin’s decision to mine the internet for photographs taken by other Maeve Coughlin’s is a tongue-in-cheek way of turning Shakespeare on his head. Coughlin inverts “a rose by any other name” to “a name, by any other rose”, and uses this as ample justification for making her audience look at what would otherwise be incredibly boring images. Printed on chiffon and stretched like skin onto salvaged wood, each photo is marginally elongated, creating a subtle spaghettification effect that causes the eye to linger a bit longer on a given object, as if the images are being pulled between competing loyalties to the gaze of different Coughlins. Whether it’s a series of photographs from a middle school wrestling tournament, a selfie-friendly mural, Harry Potter World, or a very charming praying mantis, what is on view doesn’t exactly matter so much as how it’s on view.
The boxes Coughlin built to house the images oddly become the key part of completing the gambit Someone Who Isn’t Me sets out to capitalize upon. At first glance, they all feel like rather bulky frames, but they’re too sculptural to be successful as a background player. Instead, they’re more like pedestals that have over-identified with the object they elevate to the point of metabolizing it. I suppose that’s something of the nature of a name though, a kind of thing that’s meant to frame us ends up forming the basis of an identity that our actions end up framing instead. The wood for the boxes comes from random sources and others of everyday importance in Coughlin’s life: her studio, a store she briefly ran etc. Each of the armatures seems to keep Coughlin anchored to some sense of herself and her own experience amidst the vertigo of being all the Maeve Coughlin’s and none of them simultaneously, which I reckon is the source for the quiet anxiety that pervades the entire project.
Maeve Coughlin, Someone Who Isn’t Me closes May 18
Judith Geichman: The Floor, The Wall, The Space In Between @ Regards,
For better or for worse, the general condition of painting is largely the base index of the condition of art at a given time and place. Resultantly, art – if painting is to be any sort of an indicator – seems to be without any sense of consequence. Judith Geichman’s latest show at Regard feels like a rebuke against the sorts of ascendent, palliative impulses that seem to be du jour everywhere you look, but the work is so locked in I doubt that she has even noticed that everyone else seems to be slacking off.
Geichman’s work is incredibly cool, not because it’s aloof, but because there is an openly conflictual nature that it doesn’t make a fuss about over-playing or obscuring. Like the best pugilists, there is something balletic in the way space, rhythm and when to make a move are all negotiated in how the paintings falter and hit back in time. Large assemblages of paper ripple to the floor, creased, buckled, torn, bruised and glistening, one of them looks like a prime cut of bavette with the silver skin still on the beef.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a large unstretched canvas that was originally a dropcloth for several years worth of other paintings. It bears all the abscesses, scarifications, and accretions that time and labor slowly lent to the fabric’s surface, leaving it gnarly, crepuscular and reluctant to fully reveal itself. The painting is a consequence rather than a desired endpoint, and a such feels like something that feels
The real star of the show though is the least expected one, painted on the reverse of a raincoat. It’s a subtly perverse painting, the obsidian fabric strains like hide, the tension causing the surface to glisten when bared against the light. Viscous, milky flecks, stains and gobs of white paint dash across the surface at varying opacities, and the bottom right corner is daubed with a nearly imperceptible mist of bright red. The fabric still bears the impressions where it had been creased. The material’s memory makes the synthetic feel organic, and redirects the viewers’ eye through the channels the folds create. It’s a slow burning painting, almost easy to dismiss in comparison to some of Geichman’s more grandiose gestures, but once its kinks are detected it’ll hold your gaze like nothing else in the show.
Judith Geichman: The Floor, The Wall, The Space In Between closes May 25.
Richard Wetzel: Some Must Watch @ Corbett vs Dempsey
The science-fiction and entomological motifs found in much of Wetzel’s work find themselves being redeployed here for seedier, more lurid ends. Bio-organic forms resembling tubes, tentacles, claws, mouths, and oviposters are grabbing, gasping, gaping, choking and penetrating whatever other shape is nearest. The paintings are roughly the size of the viewers’ body, but the scale of whatever is being depicted wavers between the microscopic on one end and cosmic in a Lovecraftian register on the other. It remains to be seen if Wetzel’s appendages are looking to eat, fuck or to have their cake and eat it too, but the exhibition’s title Some Must Watch seems to relish in a dispassionate, clinical voyeurism.
The noxious day-glo gradation of colors that pulsate within the paintings feel as if viewers are in an observation room retrofitted with light fixtures from a truck-stop porno shop. In an indirect way, the images are kind of pornographic themselves insofar as pornography puts everything on display without keeping anything for itself. That is, there isn’t any sense of otherness.
As obscured and inhuman as the objects of Wetzel’s fascination are, everything here still feels oddly overdetermined, as if we are aware that some kind of decapitation has occurred – there should be more but that’s been foreclosed. As weird and unsettlingly erotic as these paintings can be at their best moments, they never really transcend the feeling that they’re just excuses to try a certain strategies for color and composition, which isn’t bad, Wetzel is a good painter because he allows himself to bliss out with these permissions, but I found myself wanting for something a bit more.
Richard Wetzel: Some Must Watch closes April 27
