Joseph R. Wolin

The four-man Austrian collective known as Gelatin (or sometimes Gelitin) has a bad-boy reputation for its shambolic, often debauched installations that usually seem like illustrations of the second law of thermodynamics. So it comes as no surprise, really, to find that while its latest outing initially appears to be a fairly staid—if funky—exhibition of freestanding sculptures, all is not quite what it seems. The 40-odd gestural blobs in clay, plaster, wood and ceramic that sit atop a mad miscellany of pedestals were molded, so a gallery handout tells us, by the artists’ private parts. They formed tubular orifices—flanked by impressions of body hair and accented with viscous, milky glazes—in various works by literally fucking the material. And they made the phallic extrusions that emerge with tumescence from a number of knobby objects by shoving clay up their—well, you get the idea. The podiums for these comically indexical lumps range from minimalist stands to an upturned bentwood chair stuck in a flowerpot. One plaster-cast number resembles a misshapen torso sporting an erection like a classical herm. The playful abjectness of the plinths make a travesty out of a modernist tradition of sculptural bases that goes back to Constantin Brâncuşi while also invoking Gelatin’s compatriot Franz West and its gallery stablemate Rachel Harrison. Juvenile and ostentatiously macho, Gelitin’s pieces are also scabrously critical: A gray ceramic dick sticking up from a multicolored, snakeli

One World Trade Center gets star treatment in Enoc Perez’s recent paintings: Perez created his compositions by laying oil stick drawings face down onto silver-leafed canvas to imprint the gritty pigment, and seen from below, the building repeats and stutters like a misregistered reproduction. The effect recalls Andy Warhol’s Double Elvis, and like that icon of celebrity, Perez seems to want to make our newest landmark into an object of veneration. But Perez is also conjuring memory and history: One World Trade Center’s echoing image often evokes the Twin Towers. He relegates the new structure’s optimistic reflectiveness to the background, leaving the edifice itself matte and crusted. In some panels, tarry black dominates, leaving the impression of something burnt and ravaged. In more colorful versions, Crayola blues, greens and yellows appear sickly instead of exuberant. In Perez’s hands, the august presence of the subject comes off as jittery and moody—a vision of the shiny present haunted by the past.

George Stubbs (1724–1806) was England’s greatest painter of hunting scenes, horse racing and other manly pursuits. This exhibition of loans from the Yale Center for British Art shares its gallery with the Met’s 18th-century British portraits, which is fitting, as Stubbs’s paintings focus on the characterization of both man and finely muscled beast. “Gentlemen Going a Shooting,” a set of four paintings from the 1760s, features sequential incidents of a hunt, with one capturing a bird being shot out of the sky. Freeman, the Earl of Clarendon’s gamekeeper, with a dying doe and hound (1800) pictures a huntsman delivering the coup de grâce to a wounded deer as his dog looks on. All the works here essay a pastoral mode to glorify the pastimes of yesteryear’s 1 percent (something rather alien to the image of today’s billionaire vulgarians), suggesting that the past remains a foreign country. But Freeman’s ineffable strangeness, moody and bloody, evokes an anxiety that feels somehow contemporary.

David Wojnarowicz is usually remembered as a firebrand, raging in his incendiary art and writings against the hypocrisy and cruelty of American society. He was especially vituperative towards the homophobia and malignant neglect that precipitated the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s, which decimated gay men and the downtown New York art world, and killed the artist himself in 1992 at 37. But this beautifully curated retrospective does more than just give us the raw power of his jeremiads: It balances them with the romantic, poetic and visionary side of his work that is too often forgotten.   David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978–79, Photograph: Courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W., New York.             Wojnarowicz grew up suffering abuse in a broken home and survived his teenage years as a homeless sex worker. Keenly attuned to callousness and injustice, he made himself the measure of all things in his art. In an early series of photographs, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978–79), Wojnarowicz took black-and-white photos of various friends wearing a photocopied mask of the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) as they went about their business—riding the subway, eating at a diner, shooting up, masturbating in bed—making it appear as if Rimbaud himself was living a wastrel life in the city. (In something of a cruel irony, both the artist and his subject were the same age when they died.) Though Wojnarowicz never wore the mask himself, the

As with The Met Breuer’s exhibit “Unfinished” two years ago, “Like Life” appears to equal parts thematic omnibus and compendium of oddities. Filling two floors with seven centuries of figurative sculpture that strive for realism of one sort or the next, “Like Life” feels at times like an exercise in flaunting the Met’s skill at prying rare objects from European museums. An El Greco sculpture from the Prado in Madrid? Check. An 18th-century life-size anatomical Venus from Budapest? Check. The clothed skeleton of English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), his head reconstituted in wax, from University College London? That’s here, too.     Greer Lankton, Rachel, 1986 Photograph: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY         Despite the cabinet-of-curiosities vibe, “Like Life” ultimately triumphs as a radical rethinking of how the Met presents contemporary art within the context of its encyclopedic collection. The show starts with the idealized whiteness of classical statuary, based on the Renaissance taste for scrubbing excavated Roman marble. Admirably, the show addresses the adverse effects of that predilection on ideas about race and beauty, both through wall texts and works like Fred Wilson’s The Mete of the Muse (2006), which pairs reproductions of an ancient Egyptian goddess in black and an Aphrodite in white.   John Gibson, The Tinted Venus, ca. 1851–56 Photograph, Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool         Nearby, The Tinted Venus (circa 1851

Winner of the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, LaToya Ruby Frazier works in the superannuated tradition of the documentary photo-essay, the kind that once filled Life magazine. Three different bodies of her black-and-white prints fill Gavin Brown’s capacious Harlem digs, and while they may belong to a now-fusty genre, they manage to seem both fresh and compelling.   Shea Cobb with her mother Ms. Renee and her daughter Zion at the wedding reception standing outside the Social Network Banquet Hall 2016 2016 Photograph: Courtesy the Artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York/Rome         On the ground floor, the series “Flint Is Family” (2016–17) chronicles the ongoing crisis in the predominantly African-American Michigan city through the experience of a single family: Shea Cobb; her young daughter, Zion; and her mother, Renée. The images show the Cobbs and their community struggling to deal with a poisoned water supply: Shea brushing Zion’s teeth with bottled water in her bathroom—a close-up of a trusting child, her mother’s hand jutting into the frame to carefully pour liquid from a clear plastic bottle into her mouth—pictures a moment of tenderness made all the more poignant by the specter of government malfeasance. Though the genre of socially conscious photography doesn’t get much traction anymore, Frazier revives the form by drawing intimately close to her subjects.   Grandma Ruby, 2007 Photograph: Courtesy the Artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York/Rome  

David Hockney’s career is well known enough that this new retrospective provides few revelations. What this glorious exhibition does offer is a concision that emphasizes the themes found throughout the 80-year-old artist’s production.   David Hockney Cleaning Teeth, Early Evening (10 PM) W11 1962 Photograph: Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo, Norway, © David Hockney         As a student at the Royal College of Art in London in the early ’60s, Hockney emulated the Abstract Expressionists but queered their machismo with the addition of bathroom-stall graffiti. And though he was never really a Pop artist, he tapped into the zeitgeist by including flattened figures and consumer products. Cleaning Teeth, Early Evening (10pm) W11 from 1962 boldly pictures two fetuslike men in the 69 position with toothy maws, their penises comically replaced by spurting tubes of Colgate.   David Hockney, A Bigger Splash, 1967 Photograph: Tate, London, © David Hockney,         Hockney moved to Los Angeles in 1964, and the paintings he made there cemented his reputation. Setting modernist office towers against palm trees or depicting languid naked young men in showers, bungalow beds or shimmering swimming pools, the expat artist created quintessential images of the SoCal good-life, most notably in A Bigger Splash from 1967. Flat and geometric, save for some shrubbery and the Expressionist splash from the title, the piece pictures the pool and the diving board of a pink midcentury house under a clo

As Donald Trump provokes a backlash against a laundry list of marginalized groups, many museums have commendably stepped up with programming aimed at countering the reactionary tone of the current administration. Think about this exhibition, then, as a salvo in the rekindled culture wars. Featuring more than 40 artists and collaborative groups, “Trigger” grows out of the idea that what we talk about when we talk about gender has shifted from a fixed and simple binary to something multiplicitous, contentious and unstable.   Tschabalala Self, Mane, 2016 Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Thierry Goldberg, New York         But given the dynamic provocation of its title and the urgent charge of its topic, the show comes off as a surprisingly lugubrious affair. Despite a smattering of stellar works and an admirably diverse list of artists, too much here fails to engage, or is too tangential to the subject. The exhibition seems undercooked—more like one of New Museum’s shambolic Triennials than a thematic show with a persuasive curatorial thesis. For instance, though Nancy Brooks Brody’s series of “Glory Hole” paintings—netlike organic grayscale grids with flashes of color so subtle they appear more illusory than real—are exquisite and mesmerizing, their precise connection to gender mystifies this viewer.     Justin Vivian Bond, My Barbie Coloring Book, 2014 Photograph: Courtesy the artist         When gender actually factors into the work, it often serves as a way to positio

This Curious sleeper of a show centers on the eccentric career of Joséphin Péladan (1858–1918) a French writer, art critic, dandy and mystic. At the end of the 19th century, he invited an international coterie of artists to exhibit at the Salon de la Rose + Croix in Paris, an annual event that launched Symbolism as an art movement. Organized around Péladan’s version of Rosicrucianism, an amalgam of Catholicism and esoteric occult ideas, the Salons espoused social and aesthetic conservatism, mythic themes and mysteries.   Pierre Amédée Marcel-Béronneau Orpheus in Hades, 1897 Photograph: © Claude Almodovar/Collection du Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseille         Hung on dramatic oxblood walls, the show’s largely unfamiliar offerings are in turns fey, pretentious, silly and so grippingly weird you can’t look away. Even though much of the work seems irreparably kitschy, the feverish zeal with which Péladan and his followers searched for the spiritual in art still comes across. An imposing 1895 portrait by Jean Delville pictures Péladan as a sort of Byzantine priest pointing heavenward. Delville, in fact, created some of the most compelling images here. In The Death of Orpheus (1893), for instance, we see the poet’s severed head as it’s borne along on a bejeweled lyre onto a beach. A knockout drawing titled The Idol of Perversity (1891) prefigures a thousand heavy-metal album covers with its image of a fierce woman wreathed by snakes. She radiates wanton sexuality, an image that il

Like that of Edward Hopper, the work of Alexander Calder is a mainstay of the Whitney’s collection. Every few years, the museum trots out another exhibition that attempts to put a new spin on one of these two warhorses. (In fact, it held joint shows of Calder and Hopper only three years ago.) This year’s model focuses on Calder’s use of movement, the defining quality that cemented his sculptures’ place in art history. In 1931, Calder invented mobiles, graceful arrangements of wire—sometimes strung with weightier elements of metal and wood—so precisely balanced that a touch or even a light breeze sends the individual parts turning or swaying in space. They quickly became worldwide museum fodder, and their bastard stepchildren hang everywhere from airport terminals to babies’ cribs.   Alexander Calder, Aluminum Leaves, Red Post, 1941 Photograph: Jerry L. Thompson, Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, © 2017 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society, New York         The Whitney devotes its entire top floor to 36 of Calder’s works, from early experiments with motorized parts—many newly restored and operational for the first time in decades—to a single stabile, the large freestanding sculpture The Arches (1959), to which a wall text gamely imputes “implied movement” because it looks different from various angles. The stars of the show, however, are the unmechanized mobiles—both the standing variety, with moving components sprouting from a base, and the fa

It’s hard to think of much art being made today that hasn’t been touched in some way by Robert Rauschenberg’s protean work of the 1950s and ’60s: the heady decades when he restlessly experimented with just about every artistic genre and medium—and invented several new ones in the process. His copious output proved hugely influential, not only for the development of Pop Art but also performance, Conceptual Art and interactivity. His achievements, however, did not occur in a vacuum but were fomented with friends and colleagues, as this engrossing but imbalanced retrospective takes great pains to point out. The show sprinkles works by Rauschenberg’s spouse (Susan Weil), lovers (Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns) and fellow travelers (John Cage, Andy Warhol) among his own; it also includes a number of videos documenting his performances and collaborations with dancers and choreographers such as Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. (A large projection of Brown’s 1983 Set and Reset, with Rauschenberg’s theatrical design and Laurie Anderson’s music, is particularly captivating.)   Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955–59 Moderna Museet, Stockholm, © 2017 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation         Rauschenberg (1925–2008) famously wanted to bridge the gap between art and life. Early in his career, this meant deflating the Mandarin aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism by adding bits of the real world to painting, which is to say, by entirely conventional collage. But by the time he made his most ico

★★★★ The leftist German cultural critic Walter Benjamin remains best known for his enormously influential essay on photography, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” But his magnum opus, The Arcades Project, on which he worked for more than a decade, was left incomplete when he committed suicide in 1940 while fleeing the Nazis. What survives is a collage-like text that intersperses Benjamin’s writing with quotations from other authors. It centers on the covered pedestrian “arcades”—proto-shopping-malls—of 19th-century Paris as a meditation on the origins of the modern era.   Walead Beshty, American Passages, 2001–2011 Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, © Walead Beshty         The Jewish Museum’s exhibition evokes Benjamin’s unfinished tome and extrapolates from it, grouping works of contemporary art under his thematic chapter headings—or “convolutes”—and filling the walls with appropriated texts, compiled and artfully typeset by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith. The project, like Benjamin’s, is hugely ambitious and rather esoteric, but almost surprisingly, it never runs off the rails to become academic, pretentious or dull. Curators Jens Hoffmann and Shira Backer deserve credit for their tight orchestration, which makes the show like a good book: It takes time and a lot of reading, but the experience proves entrancing.   Nicholas Buffon, Katz’s Delicatessen, 2017 Will Ragozzino/SocialShutterbug.com, courtesy of the artist and Callicoon Fine A

★★★★     Robert Colescott, The Three Graces: Art, Sex and Death, 1981Whitney Museum of American Art with permission of the Estate of Robert Colescot         The 1980s are back, not just in terms of the appalling triumph of a certain short-fingered vulgarian but also given the increasing attention museums and galleries are paying to artists from that decade. The Whitney’s salvo in this ongoing reappraisal is a collection show highlighting the museum’s holdings of big names from the period, along with lesser knowns who are perhaps all the more intriguing because of their lower profiles.   Julia Wachtel, Membership, 1984Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, © Julia Wachtel, courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee New York         Painting made a big comeback in the ’80s, partially as a swing away from the Conceptual Art, video, performance and other modes that marked the 1960s and ’70s. However, without much curatorial attention to the historical circumstances—or even to the specifics of pigment on canvas—the focus here feels contingent on another factor that’s as relevant now as it was then: a booming art market.   Julian Schnabel, Hope, 1982Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, © 2016 Julian Schnabel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York         The medium’s roaring return nearly four decades ago came on a wave of Neo-Expressionism, represented in “Fast Forward” by variants that look toward art history on the one hand and to pop culture on the other. Julian Sch