![]() Some 20 years ago, English collector and puppet master of all things British, the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi spotted the work of then-22-year-old Jenny Saville, bought all the work out of her senior show, gave her an 18-month contract, and almost overnight this seemingly conservative figure painter began showing just how radical conservative painting can be. For her untamed, flowing show “More Comparisons,” in this excellent Tribeca outpost, Freeman places images together like a de Kooning sculpture with Kermit the Frog, a kissing couple by Picasso with two drunks kissing with their faces smashed together Cubist-like, an image of multicolored wall-mounted silicon dildos and a squadron of Twombly’s flying phalli - all to show us that this artist will not sit down or shut up, social-media shaming notwithstanding. ![]() Last year when I posted one of Al Freeman’s so-called “Comparisons” - her simple two-part collages where she compares two found photos or images from books and the internet, say Diane Arbus’s famous portrait of a naked man with his genitals tucked between his legs and a well-known picture of Chris Christie in a baseball uniform sporting what can only be called a camel toe - hundreds of people took to Instagram branding her “anti trans.” In fact her imagination was not vile, depraved, and hating (as the internet claimed) but amazingly alive to the nuances of vision and visual coincidence - pictures that rhyme or that seem to bring out things in other pictures or that simply provide wonderful frissons of delight. A number of years ago, Colen - who’s a very famous artist, has been on the cover of this magazine, has shown all over the world, and is represented by Gagosian - stopped me at a gallery and said, “Why are you so mean to me in your writing?” Startled, as I didn’t know him at the time - and still don’t - but I liked him immediately, I felt bad and said, “I’m not being mean, I’m just writing about my reactions to your work, none of which has dented or hurt your career at all.” It is an inert nullity.ĭan Colen’s 12 huge new paintings - of things like J.Crew and Land’s End catalogue details (why?), tree trunks against a blue sky that the press release says is taken from a still from the movie Bambi, and some swirly red shapes said to derive from Walt Disney’s Fantasia - certify that this artist is flailing, making art that tries to comment on color-field, minimalist, and Abstract Expressionist painting, channeling bad-boy tropes of appropriation, and being so beholden to Jeff Koons and Richard Prince that it almost makes you wince with embarrassment. No amount of press-release explanation - about how these nine large, ultraslick oil-on-aluminum panels are about the artist stretching, dividing, fragmenting, opening, or closing space - and no shortage of forced highbrow evocation of 17th-century Japanese scrolls, landscapes, cranes, gardens, historical themes, and “new technologies” - offset the dead retinal and emotional effect that this painting produces. It’s never a pretty sight to see an artist who’s usually as electric, challenging, and sparking as Urs Fischer lay such a visually, physically, and conceptually inert egg. Once upon a time, this piece was said to “interrogate” colonialism and appropriation, but whether or not its politics can still be gleaned at all, the thing is an impressive sight here in the middle of Chelsea - for about a minute. Huang Yong Ping’s huge, 20-ton sand-and-concrete re-creation of a neoclassical/colonialist Shanghai building fits the festivalist bill to a tee - and in fact was originally created almost 20 years ago for the 2000 Shanghai Biennale that marked the ascent of this now-well-known artist. ![]() So let’s read the tea leaves on the upper end of the food chain.Ĭritic Peter Schjeldahl coined the term “festivalism” in 1999 to describe the by-then already ubiquitous style of huge works produced by large teams of artist-assistants for big biennials and galleries, works that capture our attention for a frisky minute with their scale and ambition - and then almost instantly fade to blah. ![]() To coincide with several big art fairs and last week’s massive auctions, many larger galleries mounted shows of their bigger artists. Photo: Marlene Dumas/Courtesy David Zwirner ![]()
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