What makes a good painting? I like to be persuaded by sensitive lines and colors that articulate the unspeakable: thoughts behind a face, mood and ambience of the place; and how everything tells one and many stories at the same time.

I have enjoyed Hope Gangloff’s works at Susan Inglett today. Her paintings show clear influence from Elizabeth Peyton. Both artist paint people within their close circles. You could feel the intimate connections between the painter and the sitter through the pauses in the formation of the brushstrokes. The figures are so quietly alive that give the illusion as if they are moving.

In this new series of works, the lines are refined and affective; narrating the real and the imagined personhood at the same time. Though her references to early 19th century figurative painters such as Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt are obvious, she manages to pull a fresh approach that subvert the historical and makes it her own.

Unlike most art objects, her paintings live and breath life. The compositions are edgy yet personable, allowing her subjects to jump to live at every glance.

Walking into the three-wall projection of Bill Viola’s Pneuma (1994-2009) at James Cohan is like stepping inside someone’s memory. Images of people and places blur their way in and out of the videos. The pictures are reduced to their minimal representation. Their formation emerges as swiftly as they dissipate. Not much to see but an experience of confusion, chasing dematerialized images. White noise in the room both attracts and distracts me from the visual. The immersive ambience and the mythical quality of the work mimic a hermetic void where everything seems familiar (from black and white movies) but nothing makes sense.

Viola’s works have always been about the fleeting quality of time and how it contains human emotion and experiences within the timelessness of nature.  In an interview he had with Gerard Wright of The Sydney Morning Herald in 2008, he talked about the experience back in 1973 when he encountered the Death Valley for the first time, how the vast landscape makes him feel  ‘connected deeply to the entire cosmos and at the same time you are mortal and you are fragile and inconsequential.’ That ties in with the whole body of his oeuvre.

In Pneuma, it is as if time is layered and lost. The images are the ghosts of lost times: lingering. They are empowered only by the potency of our minds to make meaning out of recognizable images. I can’t help but imagine being a 90-year old woman reminiscing on the past but quite unable to grasp hold of it…mixing realities I experienced with movies I have seen…

Erich Consemüller Untitled (Woman in B3 club chair by Marcel Breuer wearing a mask by Oskar Schlemmer and a dress in fabric designed by Lis Beyer). c. 1926 Gelatin silver print

Bauhaus represents a magical time in the history of applied art and architecture. Exchanges between avant-garde minds could almost be compared to the practice of open source today. Mutations and adaptations from each others’ experiments in lines, form, color, and technology brought unrelated ideas and materials together in elegant and formidable manners. The show at MoMA, Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshop for Modernity, totally captivates my fascination.

In 1919, under the auspice of Walter Gropius, the School of Applied Arts merged with the Academy of Fine Arts in Weimar Germany. Avant-garde artists such as Paul Klee, Josef Albers and Vasily Kandinsky joined the faculty, working alongside master craftspersons to guide students in workshops.

The exhibition begins with the Schedule for the Winter Semester 1921-22 (1921) by Lothar Schreyer for the school. The inter-changeable properties of this functional collage sets the tone for the whole show.

Josef Albers Scherbe ins Gitterbild (Glass fragments in grid picture). c. 1921 Glass, wire, and metal, in metal frame

The exhibition is divided to five sections, chronicling the 14 years during which the school went through changes of leadership, mission, beliefs and political eras. Walking through different sections feels like browsing on the internet. It is almost impossible to just look at one work without being distracted by its relationship to the others.

Paul Klee Maibild (May picture). 1925 Oil on cardboard nailed to wood with original strip frame.

I find myself ‘clicking’ away, jumping back and forth from different objects and images, enjoying seeing all the connections that present themselves as if a game of chess.

Josef Hartwig Chess set (model I). 1922 32 pieces, wood and felt. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Coming away from the slickly designed historical show, I muse on the divide between the disciplines of art and design:  one deals with chaos, the other pursues order. Artists propose problems, designers aim for solutions. Art is mostly about the intangible and the absurd: existence and mortality. Design takes care of pleasure and comfort. Or in our time, branded living and guilty pleasure…

William Cordova, 'Laberintos' 2009

Today I decided to throw out a whole stack of Artforum that I have given shelf space to for the past 3 years. It’s time the tenants are evicted. Hm… but it was not easy. I flipped through them this morning, finding articles I would have wanted to read, and pictures that I don’t remember seeing. Realistically, I seldom read a magazine after 3 days that they are delivered. If nothing interests me at first flip, they almost would not ever again.

That leads me to think of William Cordova’s show: Laberintos at Sikkema Jenkins. He has created a maze with old vinyl covers, questioning the relationship between the culture we consume and the reality we live in. Andrés Estefane’s proposes, in his article accompanying the exhibition, that the artist is offering preliminary answers to the following question:

Is the labyrinth a chaotic construction in which one becomes lost or an extremely ordered space from which one never escapes?

This question brings me back to the contemplation of the matrix. Where am I or you placed within the matrix of information and pop culture? Do I have autonomy over where I situate myself?  My Artforum question pops up again. Is my bookshelf somewhat like this maze? Am I overpowered by what I experience and possess? I feel so small not even able to cast out the ghosts: the cobweb of irrelevant and excessive information.

Thankfully, a series 100 small drawings placed over 3 walls at the gallery calls me out of the moment. They resemble fragments of thoughts, tracing Cordova’s work process over the past 3 years. Mark makings, line drawings, cutting and pasting of found images, hand-made paper strips… are creating layers of fascinating dialogue between the images. I find myself going back and forth, with no intention to look for context, I have enjoyed following the enigma of the undefined.

West 21st Street between 10th and 11th Ave

In the spirit of Halloween, lets take a look at monsters and ghosts evoked by anonymous street artists in Manhattan… Happy Halloween!!!

Right next to Comme des Garçon on 22nd Street

Artist of the Year: Mary Heilmann

Curator of the Year: Connie Butler, MoMA

Writer of the Year: Jerry Saltz

Group Show of the Year, Gallery: Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns? Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York

Group Show of the Year, Museum: Pictures Generation, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Solo Show of the Year, Gallery: Manzoni: A Retrospective, Gagosian Gallery, New York

Solo Show of the Year, Museum: Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Museum of Modern Art, New York

Exhibition Outside the U.S.: Jeff Koons Versailles, Château de Versailles, France

Lifetime Achievement Award: Joan Jonas, Kasper Konig

Rob Pruitt Award: Cynthia Plaster Caster

Urs Fischer, 'Untitled', 2009, Cast aluminum and paint

A lilac piano is melting inside a mauve room, a butterflied croissant dangling from the faux ceiling, a tongue suddenly protrude from a hole in the wall… then through a white light passageway, you come into encounter with anonymous grey objects of gigantic proportions, obstructing your vision. Momentarily, you feel as if the ground underneath you has shifted, you are but a mini-you soon to be swallowed by the transgressive force…

Such is the remnant of my experience to Urs Fischer’s solo show at the New Museum. The artist has created quite a buzz in New York, especially for his show Who’s afraid of Jasper Johns at Tony Shafrazi last summer. There, Fischer photographed an exhibition in the gallery, and subsequently created a real-size replica of the show by printing the pictures on wall papers and applying them back onto the original walls. Currently in the New Museum exhibition, he applies the same technique by photographing the 3^rd floor gallery, then cover the entire space with photo-wallpaper. He even made a faux ceiling that replicates the original.

Urs Fischer, 'Cupadre,' 2009, Fishing line, croissant, and butterfly

Characteristic to Fischer’s practice, everything in the show is destabilized: orientation, reality, history and memory. Strangely enough, though the exhibition is filled with objects, it yields an objectless experience.  It is flavorful like bubblegum, leaving behind a heightened sensation of unrealness.

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I was enjoying my walk down in the Lower East Side when I stumbled upon this group show: Urban Sensitivity curated by Mako Wakasa for Gallery 128. Yuukyuusai’s Armadillo, a half-monster, half-puppy-doll soft sculpture stares out from the window. I’ve always liked monsters. Japanese filmmakers portray them as destructive beasts with somewhat clumsy demeanor. So they always retain a degree of cuteness.

I naturally wonder if this sculpture has been inspired by Godzilla, the world famous Japanese monster first portrayed in Ishirō Honda’s 1954 movie of the same name. But Armadillo is no monster. It is Yuukyuusai’s alter-ego. She wears it to walk around Tokyo, interacting with people and the environment.

Armadillo belong to a series of the artist’s wearable sculptures. They serve to mediate between her desire to interact with people and the intention to remain anonymous. Though her performance behavior reminds of the cosplay subculture, her approach is distinctly individualistic. Cosplayers dress up as fictional characters depicted in popular video games and graphic novels; it is a fan-based phenomenon.

Yuukyuusai conceives of her own imaginary characters to explore different aspects of her persona.  She does not allow other people to wear her costume, clearly defining the boundary between self and others, preserving the inner space of Armadillo as private and sacred. Her works bring to mind the American artist Kim Jones who wears sculptures made of clay and wood in his performances to mediate between his alter-ego and the public. While Jones portrays a god-like / shamanistic presence, Yuukyuusai operates on a much more personable level. I really enjoy the girly sensibilities of her sequined outfit; as well as the clunky big head that carries a dignified selfness in an uncompromising presence.

Erin Shirreff, 'Roden Crater', Video still

In the spirit of Roden Crater’s mysterious reputation, Erin Shirreff has created video composed of hundreds of images imagining the changing light and shadows cast upon the dormant volcano in the remote Arizona desert. Roden Crater is James Turrell’s lifelong project (since 1972) anticipated to be unveiled in 2010. (That is also a mystery as of today.) Shirreff projects artificial lighting on a photograph of the landscape, resulting in sequential images that narrates a fictitious documentary of the day and night sky. For someone who has absolutely no experience of the desert, it looks rather believable. At times, I even thought, what kind of natural phenomenon would have caused such a blotch of dark shadow in the sky?!

By observing light, we are gazing into the history and fluidity of time: past, present and future.  Along this line, Shirreff has created a series of reductionist sculptures. Angular objects leaning against the wall are made in the shapes of shadows she found on other objects.

It was not a specific work that attracts me to the show but how the space is defined by a the line up of sculptures along the wall in the intimate environment of the Lisa Cooley Gallery, leading in to the Roden Crater at the far end. A sense of pilgrimage is instantly ignited.

Robin Rhode, ‘Color Chart’ (Detail), 2004-2007

The South African artist is one of the first who creates life-size performance based ‘manga’. Combining single-frame animation and street performance, Robin Rhode creates narratives using chalk, movement and spontaneous collaboration with passers by.

His Color Chart, a large scale  wall installation consisting of 192 (8 x 10 inches) c-print, is part of Perry Rubinstein’s fifth anniversary show The Law of Fives. It’s been four years since the gallery first brought his works to New York in 2005. I have since developed a fond following of the artist’s fresh approach to art and life. His works, influenced by hip hop, street art and sports, are strongly rooted in his dialogue with the community he grew up in. His straight forward approach and eloquent body language open up a whole new dimension for choreographing narratives.

Next month, Rhode collaborates with Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes in a new project Pictures Re-framed, re-interpreting Mussorgsky’s epic piano suite, Pictures at an Exhibition. The duo has been working on the project for several years. Andsnes is expanding the original composition while Rhode will introduce his films and drawings into the performance. Pictures Re-framed will debut here at Lincoln Center on Nov 13.

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