This week in Newly Reviewed, Will Heinrich covers a show that displays the power of community, Morgan O’Hara’s obsessive documentation and Noah Jemisin’s phantasms.
East Harlem
‘Octopus & Others: Acts of Collaboration & Poetics’
Through Nov. 15. El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue; 212-831-7272, elmuseo.org.
In 1982, the artist Papo Colo orchestrated “Octopus: An Act of Sculpture,” a collaboration in the courtyard of El Museo del Barrio. It comprised a series of eight-foot plywood panels that Colo and other artists and poets from the downtown scene painted in black and white and displayed upright, connected with hinges, like a giant, accordion-style book.
There’s a fire hydrant by David Hammons, a faux brick wall of “I” statements by Vito Acconci (“I am a stevedore,” “I am a jeweler”), a Russian obscenity neatly lettered by the Soviet defector duo Komar & Melamid. But the particulars aren’t really the point. The effect of these and other disparate, more or less hasty efforts comes almost entirely from the fact that they’re all standing together.
In other words, it’s a piece about community — at once a record of a moment in the life of New York’s artists and museums and a visual demonstration of how such a network can transcend its parts.
An even stronger demonstration is the incredible flowering of related work hanging around the panels in the museum’s current group show “Octopus & Others: Acts of Collaboration & Poetics.” Deliberately blurred photos of Puerto Rican artists and activists by the artist Adál accompany Pedro Pietri’s free-form 1996 essay “Nuyoricans Out of Focus.” There are one-person anthologies of drawings, photos and other images by Amalia Mesa-Bain, who compiled her “Codex Amalia” by hand on one long sheet, and by Jorge Soto Sánchez, whose “El Paquete,” with its line drawings and appropriated images, was made possible by Xerox machines.
Andrea Moccio’s “Poesía blanda” slices a phone book into a strange and beautiful form that evokes the grain of an ancient tree, and a host of prints from the East Harlem workshop Taller Boricua are too much to see in a single visit.
Lower East Side
Morgan O’Hara
Through Sept. 26. Mitchell Algus Gallery, 132 Delancey Street; 516-639-4918, mitchellalgusgallery.com.
For more than 50 years, Morgan O’Hara has been carefully documenting the way she spends her time, often while observing or participating in jobs that don’t seem especially artistic.
One tall, narrow chart, included in her densely hung new show at Mitchell Algus Gallery, tabulates neatly, in day-by-day stripes colored orange, yellow, pink and green, a summer she spent with commercial salmon fishermen in Alaska. For every day there’s a tally of hours spent making art or doing “fishwork” and a two-word summary like “REST/SORT,” “MEND/HATE” or “WORK/ACHE.” Art production for the period peaked at 4.5 hours on July 1, 1988, but was more commonly zero; fishwork took as much as 15.5 hours on the 22nd, but the largest catch, 4,670 pounds, happened on the 15th.
Despite their idiosyncratic organization and sometimes fanciful colors, O’Hara’s charts aren’t just excuses to make drawings. Workmanlike in their execution and relentlessly specific, they’re clearly driven by an imperative to record information.
Still, what’s most striking about them is the sheer eccentricity of the information itself. A social scientist or fisheries expert, given enough charts like this one, might elaborate a theory of something or other. But what does that 4,670 pounds mean in itself? Altogether the work ends up functioning like a series of Zen koans, bombarding you with details until, if you’re lucky, in one sudden flash of insight, you find that you can see their primal mystery again.
Upper East Side
Noah Jemisin
Through Oct. 24. Donald Ryan Gallery, 15 East 71st Street; 917-740-3570, donaldryangallery.com.
Human and animal figures move through Noah Jemisin’s paintings almost like ghosts. A white outline floating against patches of orange and red in “Carnivore’s Dream” evokes a koi spotted underwater; above it, an equine shape bucks and a rooster hangs by the neck. Elsewhere a bearlike figure hunches across a partly unpainted canvas and burn marks applied with an iron commingle with vaguely figurative bulges and drips.
But what’s most striking about these phantasms is just how solid they are. Jemisin painted these works, nearly all of them in the late 1970s and early ’80s, with encaustic, which has a particularly evocative object-like feel. (You can find rows of captives in “Back Through Middle Passage,” but also abstract smears of peanut butter, chocolate pudding and creme fraiche.) He attaches real objects as well, like a burned piece of wood, to some paintings.
Even without such clues, though, it’s clear that the world Jemisin is painting is one in which forms change, fates vary, identity is just an idea — and all of it is equally real.
In “Fate’s Capriciousness,” a dry beige canvas is marked with a large, violent, multicolored V and a some glued-on clumps of pheasant feathers. A few white squiggles fly from the edges, a pair of white arrows signal significant moments, a splotch of lobster-pink on the left looks like blood, and a seam runs straight down the middle. It’s a spiritual diagram of sudden death: sticky, sordid, inexplicable.
See the August gallery shows here.
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