Overperforming, Underperforming, and Doing It Right
Tauba Auerbach, Jason Fox, Barkley Hendricks, intriguing Bookforum rumors, and Resident Evil
Last week I watched Tenet. I’m not proud of this; Christopher Nolan is one of those dumb-people-think-is-smart filmmakers. Yet I’ve seen most of his movies, so maybe I’m the dumb one. I like sci fi, I appreciate FX, and I love a film maudit: Tenet was, if you remember, the summer blockbuster of 2020 that never happened thanks to Covid. The tragicomedy spoke to me. Also there’s something annoying about Nolan, and I guess I like being annoyed. I am in the art world, after all.
If you’re interested—and I promise I will bring this around—Tenet is basically time travel James Bond. The mechanics of it maintain only a limited amount of internal coherence, which is fine; the movie is refreshingly (and unexpectedly, for the director) casual about the multiple selves running around and specifics of human bodies moving backward in time and the present self going back in time to help out the old self so the old self even manages to survive into the present, or is it the future? And so on. The whole thing eventually turns itself into a Mobius strip and spins you around in enough circles to get dizzy. Like a cult initiation ritual in a blacked-out room, it induces the idea that you can’t escape fate no matter how hard you try.
Tauba Auerbach’s just-closed exhibition at Paula Cooper was called Free Will. As the press release narrates, the work issued from Auerbach’s earnest desire “to be convinced of the reality of free will.” Perhaps she could have saved herself the trouble of making the show by watching Tenet. To me this sort of insoluble question is a canard. Is there free will? You’re going to keep acting like it, aren’t you? Is criticism dead? I hope so, because then maybe you’ll shut up about it.
Nevertheless, Auerbach, the art world’s Christopher Nolan, found this question a productive springboard for their latest body of work. Like Nolan, Auerbach is technically exceptional, fond of science brainteasers and pristine surfaces, and absent a human touch. So who cares if free will exists, right, if it gets you started on some flashy, overcoherent, no-but-actually work.
Unfortunately the work is not, to my mind, good—a series of monochromes based on microscopic photos of bubbles in the process of continuously dissolving and becoming; a group of sculptures made from latticed glass beads according to some unelaborated maths; some glass works that I’m sure contain the sophisticated encoding of formulae but that could just as easily fit into the museum’s gift shop as the museum itself. It’s all intricate but inert, has the seeds of a geek session on Reddit (no r/Tauba as of yet, unfortunately). The show has a midcareer feeling—it’s went-to-the-office kind of work that would look great over a reception desk.
I know I should applaud Auerbach’s intellectualism, their searching quality. Sometimes I do appreciate the surfaces. But their work could use a little more fiction, a little less science.
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There are equal and opposite ways to make a bad show, of course. For example, just around the block there was a Jason Fox show at David Kordansky.
Unlike Auerbach, whose appeal makes a fair amount of sense, I’ve long been nonplussed that people whose opinions I respect like Fox’s work. Me, I always get him confused with Brian Calvin. Fox is an East Coast guy but his lysergic trash digging has always seemed very LA to me, very ’90s CalArts. (He’s a 1988 Columbia MFA, in fact.) The self-awareness connoted by the signature clown nose that puts a figurative bow on some of his paintings—including on a work in the new Kordansky show—has never earned his slacker posturing any bonus points with me. Maybe it was everyone wanting to be Krebber for a while there, but I lost patience with the underperforming component of dandyism some time ago.
Not that Fox underperforms deliberately all the time. He isn’t indifferent to composition and other painterly verities. He likes a good translucent layer. Intellectually though he seems lazy. I know he’s trying to create provocative leaps of logic or sensory disorientations Dada style, but in this show, his skull face on a rasta singer, his guitar-riffing crocodile ain’t it. The guy in a hockey mask taking a shit? Jason from Friday the 13th, self-portraiture in the I’m-a-loser-baby mode: a Beck revival I could surely do without.
I was well down the block when I thought, as I so often do, that maybe I was being kneejerk. There were those smart people I know who like Fox’s work. Maybe it was better stoned, I thought, saracastically. Then I remembered I had half of a joint in my breast pocket, so I smoked it and turned around. I can testify that Fox’s show is better stoned but not that much better. The work in the vestibule, a portrait formed by four monochrome cartoons of monsters layered over one another, is the apex, high-quality stoner Picabia.
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I very rarely venture to galleries high, the reason for which immediately manifested itself when I ran into a former colleague on the street, flashed him a literal peace sign, and attempted to give him a hug. Our conversation was brief, but we agreed that the Barkley Hendricks show at Jack Shainman, which I had seen just before Fox, is fantastic.
I had thought of Hendricks as a painter, but when you enter the gallery you find the walls covered in photographs. Turns out he studied with Walker Evans and carried a camera around with him all the time. Shainman cleverly introduces you to Hendricks qua photographer with a group of images from his TV Series of the late 1980s and 1990s, seemingly taken from a favorite seat at a bar in New Haven, CT. The imagery on the monitor skips across time, evoking the dreamy haze of television and the barroom both—The Wizard of Oz, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, Richard Nixon’s departure from the White House, the OJ Simpson trial, the Anita Hill hearings, the Miss America pageant of 1997. A jackalope forever hangs in the frame, giving the proceedings an air of absurdity, a sense that humans make things a little grotesque no matter how serious the events.
With this implicit comparison to Lee Friendlander’s Little Screens, Hendricks is placed on photo-pantheon footing where he seems right at home. The rest of the show, mostly from the 1970s, likewise evinces the virtuoso range of postwar America’s more well-known photographers with rakishly cropped street shots of cars, engaging portraits of passersby, candid pics, and landscapes. There’s an appealing sexiness to the show. A suite of three semi-nude shots in a cozy bedroom from 1979 depict a woman and the artist deshabille in a mirror (though he does allow himself to wear a bathrobe). A shot of what looks like a zigzagging segment of the Great Wall of China features in the immediate foreground a pair of stilettos that frame the whole vista, counterposing the feeling of being alive and human to the crushing weight of history, with the pun on arches surely intended.
Journalism
Last week the doyen of the New York literary scene, Christian Lorentzen, scored a nice byline in the Washington Post with a eulogy for Bookforum. The piece was cogent and characteristically well written; it also struck me as a little odd.
After all, Bookforum folded in December, gleaning lots of anguished RIPs at the time (including one by me). Why publish another paean in April? I immediately began joking that it was a ploy to get Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post, to plunk down and resuscitate BF.
Then, more conspiratorially, I thought, Could the op-ed be a little pump-priming for some development to come, a bit of petal-strewing PR to keep the magazine’s demise in the public eye? Surely if any hero were about to enter the stage, Lorentzen would know.
Le Cinema
Last week I also saw Resident Evil. At a matinee. Like I told you, I’m not proud.
Lowkey I’ve been fascinated by the franchise for years. It’s patently garbage, without much serious critical attention (a nice piece in the New Yorker by Daniel Engber excepted). It’s never been culturally ascendant, yet it’s been popular enough for six installments to have rolled out from 2002 to 2016 and rack up an aggregate $1.2 billion gross. And there’s a romantic twist: the architect of the series, Paul W. S. Anderson, is married to its zombie-slaughtering star, Milla Jovovich.
The Roxy, perhaps Manhattan’s most eccentric arthouse (the inscrutable Cinema Village excepted, and all hail Spectacle on the other side of the river), was incredibly showing Resident Evil in 35 mm. On old film stock, the movie had a disorienting grain; between that, the bad zombie make-up, and the technology-run-amok aspects, I occasionally felt like I was watching a lost action movie from the early ’80s. The glowing reds and purples did warm up the screen though.
It seems like I’ve seen the entirety of the Resident Evil series in fifteen-minute chunks on cable TV while visiting my family or spending the odd night in a hotel room. But the plot of this first installment was only generically familiar—amnesia, a rogue computer, rogue researchers, roguish rebels against the implacable status quo, diabolical viral and genetic research, unlimited ammo and narrow escapes. My only disappointment was that the film is set in the charmingly named Raccoon City, and auteur Anderson gave us nary a raccoon.
Wine
Mingaco Blanco de Campesino 2019. Knowing a sucker when he saw one, the guy at the wine store told me this one was weird. I took out my wallet immediately.
Produced in Chile, Mingaco’s Blanco de Campesino is weird. The grape is the unusual Muscatel de Alejandra. Fresh out of the bottle, the wine is floral with a splinter of mint, a thread of vanilla, and a little cidery tang. What mounts as one begins to drink is its tree-sap pungence; it reminded me of the Greek varietal Roditis. The aftertaste isn’t exactly trying to win you over, suggesting that a little of its aging time was spent in an asphalt barrique; as the wine opens further the nose is less flowers and more gunpowder. All of which made me like it more, of course. A treat for connoisseurs of difficult beauty.
Music + Fashion
Respect and best of luck to the old but on-his-game junkie with the orange JBL Bluetooth who got on the J train at Canal Street. He looked to be in his 60s, caved-in cheeks and a gray goatee, with a sheerly fabulous ensemble: a pristine Yankees fitted cap with the gold sticker on a brim so flat you could carry martinis on it; a black zip-up hoodie patterned all over with Billionaire Boys Club logos; perfectly draped pegged heather gray sweats; and a great pair of Air Maxes in brown, umber, white, and two shades of green with orange piping at the ankle.
For midday, the guy was a little turnt (speaking sartorially, of course). He took a seat and began withdrawing objects from his pockets one by one—loose change, which he disdainfully tossed to the subway-car floor, only to retrieve it and place it on the seat by his side; a small container that he caressed with his thumbs; and a pack of Marlboro Lights, from which he drew a cig that was summarily stashed elsewhere on his person. After Fat Joe, we listened to this track. He got off at the Myrtle-Broadway stop, naturally, leaving the coins for the next person to ride.
