Boom, Destruction, and Austerity

Gabriel Orozco, Kitty Kraus, and Urs Fischer

Many people have the feeling that something has gone wrong with contemporary art. They see only conceptual art and theory, when artists have moved on to more impulsive creation—and self-creation. They see only overblown installations, just when galleries and museums are cutting back.

For all that, museums still hype young artists and midcareer retrospectives. With Gabriel Orozco, Kitty Kraus, and Urs Fischer, that means disappointments. Each has strong roots in the austerity of late-modern art, including minimal art, Fluxus, and others. However, each struggles to fill a museum. And this time the struggle is not part of the show. Put it down to big art in a time strapped for cash, and expect more next time from each artist.

Extravagance, geometry, and decay

As 2009 came to an end, two of art's most flagrant realities were bound to collide. I had spotted them (and in fact drafted this) before they become the uneasy couple of two popular reviews by Roberta Smith. But Gabriel Orozco embodies them both. The artist, now forty-seven, could well be the child of their collision.

Think first of mammoth installations redolent of destruction? Like Pipilotti Rist earlier this year, Orozco tames MOMA's atrium. This time an entire whale skeleton hangs from above. He excavated it from Baja California, on commission from Mexico's libraries in 2005. Then he covered it with graphite arcs. It took six thousand pencils.

The skeleton, Mobile Matrix, looks anything but mobile. On the same floor, in the galleries for works on paper, Samurai Tree Invariants looks anything but invariant. Over the course of nearly seven hundred digital prints, five rectangles change color while circles in primary color spread like elements in a video game. They appear together in miniature on an entrance wall, as a tight grid lacking two corners. It runs peacefully, too, on a video monitor. Then a healthy selection takes over the room.

Think instead of the austerity of art in a recession? Upstairs, Orozco greets visitors with an elevator cab with just two buttons, both for the first floor. It, too, is clearly not going anywhere fast. Then comes a shoebox on the floor, in a room almost to itself. Around the corner, one meets nothing but four yogurt lids—one each to a blank wall. Their four colored circles make even Minimalism seem excessive.

Other work combines extravagance, decay, and austerity. The artist personally rolled a large ball of Plasticine along the streets of New York until it acquired its coat of black grime. He sliced the heart out of a Citroën DS lengthwise, turning an emblem of motion into a sleek, silvery toy. Naturally the dissection means that it is missing its engine.

If this sounds all too contemporary, think again. The black ball appeared in Orozco's previous show at MOMA, in 1993. So did My Hands Are My Heart, the impression of the artist's hands in red modeling clay. The white shoebox appeared in that year's Venice Biennale, where it punned on the white box of a gallery—and the limited space available to him. The yogurt lids appeared the next year, as the entirety of a show at Marian Goodman. Conversely, the largest work dates from a decade of boom and austerity.

Spit, dirt, and Minimalism

However, the whale, its circular matrix, and the room of digital prints also recall a sparer esthetic. Like Sol LeWitt, the Mexican artist sets a pattern, leaves it to assistants, and lets it overflow the limits of perception. He also relates it to organic form and organic materials, a theme of the older work as well. Living things grow, but they also die. The transparent yogurt lids, framed by colored plastic circles, even bear expiration dates.

The themes of ordinary objects, flight, dysfunction, and the fragility of human life give Minimalism and conceptual art a human side. They also enter into an early construction of four bicycles. A big black balloon fashioned from inner tubes looks like a wrecking ball. They suggest an artist's daring, but also an artist never fully in control. They also suggest an artist obsessed with vivid, momentary insights. At his best, he can share those perceptions with others as well.

Orozco seemed self-conscious from the very start, with his 1991 red-clay heart. If the elevator cab feels a little cramped, he made it exactly his height. (Fortunately for you and me, he is fairly tall.) He had to become more self-conscious, though, in 1997. Recovering from a collapsed lung, he covered a human skull with a black-and-white grid. Again pushing Minimalism's rigor toward conceptual art, he lets the rectangles change shape, to follow their projection on the three-dimensional surface.

In a sense, he never did recover. A midcareer retrospective often feels premature or suspect—as it does for another critical darling, Urs Fischer at the New Museum. Orozco's virtually stops over ten years ago. Most of the work dates from the early 1990s. So does the exuberance. The bicycles might have tumbled into place, but he is no longer riding the streets or digging up dirt.

His early abstractions bridge art and nature, pattern and decay, concept and materials. They began with spit. More and more, though, the abstraction takes over, like a digital Jennifer Bartlett. At the show's end, a huge table also holds miscellaneous sculpture, molded into cake with green and white icing, CDs, and whatever else strikes his fancy. It offers a peek at the artist in his studio. It also offers an artist struggling without the edge of conceptual art and appropriation, as if to prove (sorry, Roberta) that old-fashioned media and the hand-made count for little after all.

My favorite sculpture (also exhibited back in 2002 in "Tempo" at MOMA QNS) pays homage to Dada, but runs quietly amok. From 1995, it fills an oversized chessboard of elegant wood with nothing but knights. Horses Endlessly Running alludes to Marcel Duchamp, with his love of chess—but all with pieces that never follow a straight line and will never get stuck in place. Like Fischer's, this show seems too large, ambitious, and empty, and few will last an hour at either one. At least, unlike Fischer, Orozco refuses to gloat, to pander, or to follow straight lines. Even the great white whale is covered with black circles.

Crying over spilled ink

There has been so much ink spilled over Joseph Beuys that I hate to add any, not even virtual ink. Kitty Kraus does, though, and right on the floor. It makes a notably spare display in a Guggenheim tower gallery.

Kraus admires Beuys and Arte Povera for their transformation of humble materials. More than they, however, she stresses the act of transformation, linking her to both conceptual and process art. The ink literally spills across the floor. Her installation, part of the museum's "Intervals" series, began as a light bulb within a block of frozen ink. As it melts, it passes from puddle to pattern, leaving the bulb at one end of an irregular stain. One might mistake its black, pierced by white streaks of the floor, for a drawing or a rubber peel.

Beuys liked bulbs, too. In fact, he relied on a fixed stock of materials to create a personal myth. He related his rolled and piled felt, fat, and steel to tales of a German soldier's endurance in World War II. The narrative places the artist's suffering at the center of both the work and of modern history. The unfamiliar look of the thick, heavy materials in a gallery reinforces his aura of a shaman. They keep out the viewer, where they once might have kept out the Russian winter.

As an American and a Jew, I had problems with this history, for all its acknowledgments of the costs of state aggression. The Soviet Union did not invite the Nazis to a winter carnival. Salvador Dalí and second-generation Abstract Expressionism had pretty much spoiled the roles of shaman and suffering artist anyway. For all the work's resemblance to Minimalism, Minimalism had all but cast them aside for good. Myth and cryptic narratives had themselves come under suspicion. Yet Beuys gave Minimalism a human edge that proved justly influential.

Kraus keeps her fellow German's worst aspects, his hermeticism and shamanism, and discards the weight and geometry of his materials along with the myth. She also discards the history, apart from the history of a block of ice, but no harm done. A woman born in 1976 has to find it remote. But that does not leave much. I like the thought of defacing the Guggenheim, and I like the thought of a wall drawing shifted to the floor. But it still does not look like much or mean much, and there is no crying over spilled ink.

Of course, other artists since Jackson Pollock have made a mess on the floor—like Jonathan VanDyke, who makes it look as though paint had spilled from completed works of abstract art. He dismantles the art object even while insisting on its "objecthood," in 3D. As for melting, Spencer Finch creates art from a colorful spiral of candles on the floor. Each day of the year, he lights another, with one to grow on. The Brain – is wider than the Sky quotes Emily Dickinson and alludes to her frenetic pace of production. The allusion hardly means much, but at least Finch roots process art in shapes and cycles on the scale of human lives.

The demand for spectacle

When Urs Fischer dug a pit in his gallery in 2007, one could easily miss something: its foundations lay not just in Greenwich Village bedrock, but in Minimalism and conceptual art as well. He was making a spectacle of himself for an overheated art scene, but something more solid, too.

The demand for spectacle had reached the point that I tried to give the movement a name, "trashing Chelsea." He was excavating beneath, but he was still way over the top. Just as when he broke through walls at a Whitney Biennial, he was playing the bad boy making art for bad boys with money. Yet climbing in was scary all the same. It gave an exhilarating awareness of one's surroundings and one's place deep within in the art. Like a proper Minimalist, Fischer displayed the gallery alone—and then some.

Now he gets the run of the New Museum, and he struggles to fill it—or even to empty it. Every one of its three floors speaks of excess. And not one bears a trace of either literalism or surprise. This time, his art is everything you wanted in a museum and less. It could be a commentary on the art market, were it not so market conscious. Besides, this is not the time to buy.

Along with the principal theme, each floor tosses in something extra. It might be a bus seat with a birthday cake, a skeleton kicking a cardboard box, a pink lamppost, or a violet soft piano. (Take that, Pop Art!) The artist seems to worry that you will want something more, like props from a Tim Burton movie—which just happen to be on display at MOMA. And well he should.

In fact, the only real challenge is getting in. Just one elevator stops on the second floor, which has no stairway access, all in the interest of crowd control. Not that one should expect crowds. But who knows what the wrong people might do? That means you and, apparently, me.

On the show's first public evening, the elevator opened for a while on the wrong side (the front). It left me face to face with the back of a temporary wall. After all this buildup, was that it? If so, not a bad conceptual artwork. But no, the elevator eventually recovered, and the museum just means to protect Fischer's fifty-odd chrome monoliths from the slightest mar, to the point that a guard made me put away my pen and stop taking notes. Pleading the needs of the press did not help—especially the wrong kind of press.

Conceptual tongue-lashing

One does not often think of metal slabs as vulnerable. Fischer is probably anticipating the market for a proper sheen once the show closes. In fact, a leading collector of his work, Dakis Joannou, will take over the joint for its next show. The New Museum should be ashamed of itself. From an alternative museum devoted to what others excluded, it has become a flashy venue devoted to incestuous relationships. Call its stacked boxes a vicious circle.

Intriguingly, the bad boy has named the current exhibition after Marguerite de Ponty. Stéphane Mallarmé adopted that feminine identity as a fashion writer. Fischer's work here harps on the theme of consumption. In images from food to product lines, he identifies art with a luxury good. The show's signature piece, a tongue, even looks like a Rolling Stones logo.

Like a Stones world tour, the work boasts of its excess. The curator, Massimiliano Gioni, claims that it required "25,000 photographs and over twelve tons of steel." One would hardly know it. Some of the fifty chromes play on their dimensions, with images of British phone booths and skyscrapers. Others stick to product promotion—and still others, like a desktop computer or CD case, do both. Either way, they seem to have taken shape by rote.

Visitors starting instead at the top will first encounter five more shiny totems, but of a more ancient lineage. The rocky shapes recall monuments from Great Britain. Fischer made small clay models, and one can make out hand prints. This will shock only someone who thinks that public sculpture never relies on maquettes, computers, and assistants. Perhaps the manufacture of the giant aluminum lumps would hold more interest if the lumps did. But the show's most elaborate boast comes on the floor in-between, with the emptiest display of all.

At first glance, it holds little more than bare walls the color of Tom Waits's "monkey-shit brown Chevrolet." Actually, Fischer has papered the space with exact images of itself, and the color comes from photography in low lighting. That sounds impressive, except that the illusion of bare walls looks bare of illusion. Photography is not exactly trompe l'oeil painting anyway. (Maybe if he had papered the elevator with the blank opposing wall—and papered that wall with the elevator.) Otherwise, the work at hand consists of a small hole in the wall, and the tongue I mentioned sticks out whenever someone approaches.

A hole invites one to imagine another space entirely—perhaps the space of Fischer's previous work. In practice, enough people gather round that the tongue keeps wagging, and it takes a stretch to call the art interactive. (Well, one can always stick one's tongue out right back.) Is the Swiss artist doing more than sticking his tongue out at art, like a five-year-old dragged to the museum? Fischer has scaled down the bad boy's creative rebellion along with the size of his hole. I hope he and others learn to let art's concepts, spaces, materials, and dangers speak again for themselves, to see once more conceptual arts in the plural.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Gabriel Orozco ran at The Museum of Modern Art through March 1, 2010, Kitty Kraus at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through January 6, and Urs Fischer at The New Museum of Contemporary Art through February 7. Jonathan VanDyke ran at Scaramouche through November 1, 2009, and Spencer Finch at Postmasters through November 28.