In this week's Newly Reviewed, Max Lakin covers the following survey: Works by Alan Saret, a two-location retrospective by Jamie Nares, and turquoise and smoky brown acrylic panels by Robert Irwin.
East Village
Alan Sarrett
Until June 22nd. Karma, 22, 172, 188 East Second Street, Manhattan; 212-390-8290, karmakarma.org.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Alan Saret's delicate and chaotic sculptures and drawings – sensuously intertwined swirls of wire and colored pencil – were short-lived, but the result of a series of cerebral works promoted by Bykert, an influential gallery that gave the Post wide freedom. It was part of it. -Minimalist artists such as Brice Marden and Lynda Benglis. But even such looseness proved too restrictive for Saret, to the point where he hated being confined, often leading to acts of self-destruction. (He supposedly withdrew from a 1969 Whitney showcase because he didn't like the title.)
Saret's allergy to the gallery system led him to look for alternatives. After contributing to the 1971 India Triennale, he stayed there for nearly three years, immersing himself in his spiritual self-exploration. He began exhibiting in his studio and later built Ghosthouse, an outdoor mesh shelter in upstate New York, where he lived for several months.
It is therefore a small miracle that a survey of Saret's work from 1975 to the present is currently taking place across Karma's three galleries. Prophetic and kaleidoscopic works on paper combine Saret's mathematical studies with what appears to be religious sacred geometry, reminiscent of the I Ching and the Sefirot of Kabbalah. It is a complex composition thick with color, language and visual information in spirals and stars, like a schematic for achieving transcendence.
The most wonderful sublimities are Saret's “dharanis”, or silk ink drawings of lyrical and aphoristic koans in calligraphy. This picture was once called a mantra, but is now referred to as a daily affirmation in wellness culture. For Saret, this way of thinking was not a fad, but a deeply felt way of organizing one's existence. They are devotional objects rather than textual art, a reminder that real art is alive.
Midtown and Chelsea
Jamie Nares
Until June 2nd. MoMA, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; 212-708-9400, moma.org.
Until June 22nd. Kasmin, 297 10th Avenue, Manhattan; 212-563 4474, kasmingallery.com.
For nearly 50 years, artist Jamie Nares has been spending time speeding up, slowing down, staying in time, or refolding it. This two-location retrospective presents Nares' No Wave at MoMA and 40 post-minimalist films from the mid-1970s. And at Kasmin, you can see 100 works she created on paper after switching from Super 8 to brush, suggesting that her concerns remained the same even as her expression changed.
The most thrilling work is
Nares' 2011 film 'Street' is another. A three-minute scene of running through city streets with continuous, linear gestures slowed down into 61 minutes of dynamic humanism. It is reminiscent of the artist's 1988 untitled oil on wax paper. It is a wave-like gesture made without breaking contact, a brush stroke as a tracking shot. Many paper works behave this way. Nares' thick marks glide along the surface, inducing a state of ecstasy just like in her films. In both film and drawing, there is an attempt to find a still point in perpetual motion, and a recognition that that impulse is as impossible as it is inevitable.
soho
robert irwin
Until August 31st. Judd Foundation, 101 Spring Street, Manhattan; 212-219-2747, juddfoundation.org. Open hours: Friday-Saturday, 1-5 p.m. or by appointment.
In 1971, Robert Irwin installed a 12-foot-long acrylic column on the first floor of Donald Judd's SoHo studio, which captured light from the large windows on the south and west sides of the building. was a prism. Beginning in the early '60s, Irwin pushed the definition of art beyond objecthood, gradually reducing his work to distraction until he stopped producing sellable art. In 1970 he abandoned his studio in favor of what he called conditional practice. It is a subtle, almost imperceptible intervention in architecture to bring out the wonders of its visual potential. He viewed his own installations merely as real art “to make people conscious of their own consciousness” – a tool to induce awareness.
A follow-up version of that work, “Sculpture/Configuration 2T/3L,” first exhibited at Pace in 2018, is also on display in almost the same location (the hole in the floor from 53 years ago has never been filled and remains). The more advanced panel, consisting of two rows of turquoise and smoky brown acrylic, is beautiful, but its beauty is beside the point. It blends into the background, whether it's there or not. Sunlight catches a corner or flutters over the edges of a polyhedron as you move around it, joining and refracting the thrum of Soho to create something new.
As the installation progresses over the long term, the quality and effectiveness of natural light will change. It's a slow, moving distillation of Irwin's philosophy that remains antithetical to the art world's constant need for novelty. Irwin, who passed away last year, refined his broad vision to help us recognize the transient and see what has always been there for as long as possible.