May 21, 2004

Robert Indiana; Anish Kapoor; Daniel Richter

'From the Classroom to the World'

'Hine, Ulmann, Strand, Arbus and the Ethical Culture Fieldston School'

New-York Historical Society

2 West 77th Street, Manhattan

Through July 18

This un-snappily titled show makes a pitch for the influence of the progressive, high-minded Ethical Culture Fieldston School on four famous American photographers: Lewis W. Hine, Doris Ulmann, Paul Strand and Diane Arbus. Founded in Manhattan in 1878 by the reformist educator Felix Adler and home of the first free kindergarten in the city, the school is now celebrating its 125th anniversary.

Adler (1851-1933) was profoundly concerned with the plight of the underprivileged, particularly children. The school, an offspring of the New York Society for Ethical Culture that he established two years earlier, had the strong mission of inculcating spiritual and societal values in its genteel student body. In 1901 Hine (1874-1940), a young man from a working-class background in Wisconsin, was hired to teach nature studies and geography.

Asked to use the camera as a recording tool on field trips with students, Hine tapped a lode of unsuspected picture-making talent in himself and, with his own zeal for societal reform, went on to become one of the great documentary photographers of the poor and oppressed in the United States.

Strand (1890-1976) joined Hine's after-school photography club in 1907 and was the only one of the other three directly mentored by him. After Strand's graduation, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz helped him add an aesthetic dimension to the social awareness promulgated by Hine. A master at composing exquisite images of natural forms and landscapes, Strand also recorded what he saw as the nobility of "plain people."

Ulmann (1882-1934) enrolled in a teacher-training course at the school in 1900. Although she didn't pursue photography until she studied with Clarence White at Teachers College of Columbia University, her social consciousness was apparently given a boost by her time at Ethical. Like Hine, she went on to become a dedicated documentarian, sensitively recording black, American Indian and Appalachian cultures. Arbus (1923-1971), who received her only formal schooling at Ethical Culture, from 1928 to 1940, started out as a fashion photographer. By the late 1950's she had arrived at her own vision of the odd, offbeat side of humanity that made her famous,

The show begins with a group of rather dull, posed group shots of activities at Ethical, mostly by unknown photographers, like "Sixth Grade Pupils at Work on Their Class Project, a Patchwork Quilt Intended as a Contribution to Relief." Then it segues into representative work by each of the four photographers.

Here are Hine's poignant studies of overworked, exploited children; Ulmann's soft-focus shots that impart an almost religious significance to the ordinary activities of down-home people; Strand's close-ups of individuals from various countries, imbued with a strong sense of national character; and Arbus's intense, voyeuristic observations of the outsider side of everyday life. Does the work of these photographers bear signs of Ethical Culture Fieldston's — and Adler's — impact? Possibly, if you look for it. In any case, the phenomenon of these four significant talents emanating from one small think-well-do-good school can't be denied.   GRACE GLUECK

Robert Indiana

`Peace Paintings'

Paul Kasmin

293 10th Avenue, at 27th Street

Chelsea

Through May 29

Robert Indiana is best known for his "Love" logo, which eventually became a postage stamp. He has been painting Pop-style, signlike compositions that address more or less urgent topics since the early 1960's. Some have been existentially general, like diamond-shaped pictures bearing the words "Eat" or "Die." Some have been politically specific, like his painting "A Divorced Man Has Never Been the President."

Mr. Indiana's new paintings address a theme that has been much on people's minds since Sept. 11, 2001: peace, or rather the absence of peace. Each diamond-shaped canvas features a circle, like a life-saver, bearing block-lettered sentences about the loss of peace: "Peace falls in terror," "Peace dives in oblivion," "Peace plunges in despair." Within each circle is the familiar forked peace sign. The paintings also look like traffic signs.

The combination of the high-contrast colors, sharp edges and centered, mandalalike compositions packs significant visual punch, while echoes of Mondrian and the hard-edged geometric painting of the 1960's add art historical resonance. The sentiments expressed may seem at first too general to be very affecting, but the way these pictures recall the Vietnam era politically as well as stylistically is evocative. They should be reproduced as posters and disseminated around the nation.   KEN JOHNSON

Anish Kapoor

Barbara Gladstone

515 West 24th Street, Chelsea

Through June 25

Anish Kapoor is the master of a certain sculptural paradox. He creates abstract works that have a powerful and luxurious physical presence, but he builds into them seemingly immaterial dimensions. The appropriately titled "Whiteout" is a rectangular, all-white structure with four concave sides. Because of the whiteness and the seamlessness of the surfaces, it is hard to tell how deeply the sides recede; space seems to expand inward to an impossible extent. It's a hair-raising effect that James Turrell has used in walk-in installations.

The exhibition's biggest piece, "Carousel," is a wide cylindrical volume in stainless steel. It is horizontally divided, revealing a white core holding the upper half aloft. Looking in, you behold another seamless white interior of unexpectedly indeterminate extent. A third illusionistic piece, "Vortex," is a shiny black circle built into the wall. It recedes inward like a whirlpool toward a deep, dark apparently bottomless hole.

Does Mr. Kapoor's play with viewer perception amount to more than just trompe l'oeil entertainment? Without it, he is still a suave form-maker, as shown here by relatively minor stainless steel sculptures that cannily blend the geometric and the biomorphic. But the illusionistic works are richer; you might read the combination finite exterior and indefinitely extensive interior as a reflection of our eternally mysterious human experience of a finite body and an infinite mind.   KEN JOHNSON

Red Grooms

Marlborough

40 West 57th Street, Manhattan

Through June 5

Tibor de Nagy

724 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street

Through May 28

Red Grooms is famous for bumptious environments that seem to knock you over and lick your face, like large, undisciplined dogs. It's impossible to avoid such aggressively proffered affection, but you can emerge from the encounter feeling somewhat slimed. The works in Mr. Grooms's two current shows, his best in several years, avoid such antics. They provide a fresh glimpse of his formidable formal intelligence without betraying his essentially populist sensibility.

In "New Works in Wood" at Marlborough, Mr. Grooms is working primarily in what might be called lap-dog size, focusing on small painted wood constructions. Both the scale and the material suit him.

The facets of the cut-out and minimally whittled wood enhance his vigorous brushwork. The ability to see the scenes all at once, which accents the visual oscillation between two and three dimensions, is eminently satisfying, whether the subject is a double-decker view of the Wollman skating rink, an homage to Ralph Earl's 19th-century portrait of Andrew Jackson or a minimal evocation of four men entering separate taxis in Busby Berkeley synchronization. The streets and denizens of the artist's beloved New York City are prevalent, along with a deli and a barbershop, and are usually surveyed from the exhilarating angle of a low-flying bird.

In "The Private World of Red Grooms" at Tibor de Nagy, Mr. Grooms leaves town, relaxing in watercolor on trips with family and friends. A tourist boat on the Seine, passengers on a train in Shanghai, sunbathers on a beach on the Greek island of Patmos figure in these solid, skillfully rendered scenes. Interestingly, the best works here are landscapes devoid of people, including a sweeping view of a valley in the South of France and a field visible through an open window.   ROBERTA SMITH

Rico Gatson

Ronald Feldman Fine Arts

31 Mercer Street, SoHo

Through May 29

A lot of young artists are mining the 1960's these days. Some focus on its trippy, rock-saturated visual culture. Others, like Rico Gatson, are into other things. His multipart video piece "History Lessons," projected on all four walls of the front gallery at Feldman, has the percussive pulse and flash of a light show. But the music it is keyed to is an early Bob Dylan protest song, "Only a Pawn in Their Game," written after the murder of Medgar Evers in pre-Flower Power 1963.

The song accompanies just one section of a 10-minute video composed of images of racial violence and racist stereotypes lifted from existing films, including W. D. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" (1915) and news clips of the Watts riot in Los Angeles in 1965. Mr. Gatson has run all his material through a kind of digital blender, producing kaleidoscopic sequences that reveal their meaning only gradually. The perceptual delay is effective; it adds the suspense of discovery to a vision of history as a destructive form of popular entertainment.

If Mr. Gatson's approach is more than usually didactic, he also turns didacticism itself into a joke: the lyrics of the Dylan ballad are illustrated, phrase by phrase, with snappy images, like nursery rhymes on a children's television show. Given the shortness of historical memory evident in American contemporary art, not to mention in the culture at large, this primer approach is altogether apt.

"Clandestine," the second part of the show, is made up primarily of all-white or all-black paintings, which look abstract from a distance but carry politically loaded images as reliefs made of lines of raised dots. One is a target; another an American flag; a third a skull and crossbones, the symbol for poison (and also for the secret society Skull and Bones, to which President Bush and Senator John Kerry belonged at Yale, where Mr. Gatson did graduate work).

He made effective use of this Minimalist-style painting as part of a video installation at Triple Candie last season. And there's no question that Minimalism's ideological dark side is ripe for serious probing. But the paintings at Feldman are too conceptually simplistic to make a forceful revisionist case.

In fact, "History Lessons" isn't revisionist either: basically, it gives us information we already know. But it is forceful; once you start looking, you have a hard time pulling back.

The same is true of Fred Wilson's extraordinary short film "September Song" (2003) at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Immediacy of involvement is one of the great formal advantages of film, and, as we're gradually learning, of digital art. Mr. Gatson, as historian and technician, is a master of both.   HOLLAND COTTER

Daniel Richter

`The Morning After'

David Zwirner

525 West 19th Street, Chelsea

Through June 19

The strain of being a hot youngish painter, especially a male German one, shows in the New York gallery debut of Daniel Richter, who is 42 and lives in Berlin and Hamburg. The show's 11 large dystopic works continue the artist's distinctive palette of lurid fluorescents and toxic darks, his post-apocalyptic mix of images from art history and the daily press, and his polymorphous, watercolorish painting techniques (Munch to Polke to Poons) that reiterate the anything-goes mood of violence, threat and dislocation.

In the nearly life-size images here, rearing Delacroixesque horses do battle with one another or with packs of dogs; irradiated figures mass into mobs that may or may not be friendly; and a scantily clad circus performer in top hat and boots wends her way through a field of milling Rottweilers. Backgrounds alternate between shattered, often Munch-like trees or office-building plazas.

It is, as usual, all relative. Compared with examples of Mr. Richter's work seen in recent art fairs here and in Europe, the colors in these new paintings, all from 2004, are pedestrian. The ambiguities feel canned, suggestive of a few too many viewings of "Blade Runner" or "A Clockwork Orange." (An albino gorilla in a wheelchair? Another, a dark one, carrying a white chicken down some dungeon steps? Please.)

All but one of the paintings here are reproduced in a catalog that was published for a survey of the artist's work in Toronto. The catalog reproduces additional, earlier paintings, which look more interesting than the ones here. Mr. Richter's efforts also suffer in comparison with the work of some of his contemporaries, especially the faux-social realist style of Neo Rauch.

Perhaps the images in this exhibition remain too close to their photographic sources. An exception is the bearded blond nude, of undetermined sex, in "The Astounding Comeback of Dr. Freud," the craziest painting here.   ROBERTA SMITH

Tony Feher

`The Wart on the Bosom of Mother Nature'

D'Amelio Terras

525 West 22nd Street, Chelsea

Through July 2

Tony Feher makes wryly poetic and visually enchanting sculptures from the least promising of materials. His palette includes plastic and glass bottles and bottle caps, foam packing material, bent wire, fruit baskets, soda stacking crates, Windex and other colored liquids, marbles, colored string, crushed aluminum foil and stones. What he does with these and other materials requires no manual skill. He puts disparate things together or performs simple operations that produce something surprisingly more than the sum of its mundane parts.

Building a two-foot-tall pyramid of the green plastic baskets used to sell strawberries is not, in itself, such an unpredictable idea. But the visual effect is remarkable. As the layering of the semitransparent baskets appears denser toward the center of the pyramid and fades around the outside, the whole has a luminous, almost dematerialized appearance.

"Red Into Blue" consists of about a hundred brown glass bottles of various sizes, gathered together in an oval formation. Half the bottle openings are stopped by opaque red marbles, the other half by blue marbles. The combination of colors, glassy surfaces and percussive compositional rhythm is captivatingly sensuous. There is political resonance in the red and blue marbles, too.

Looking closely at a collection of perforated, metallic, shell-like forms pinned to the wall, you see that Mr. Feher used a hole-puncher on potato-chip bags and other sorts of snack bags, then simply turned them inside out. It is inspiring to behold something so ordinary be so magically transformed by such transparently economical means.   KEN JOHNSON