Dr. Lakra at the Drawing Center

Installation views of "Dr. Lakra" at the Drawing Center, New York, February 24, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]





How is it possible that Dr. Lakra has never had a one-person show in New York? The Mexico City–based artist is one of contemporary art's most reliable, unrelenting showmen, and his work has been rampaging around the international circuit for more than a decade. Moreover, his drawings — which are often vintage pinups precisely détourned with elaborate tattoos — have a tendency to eviscerate neighboring works in group shows. It rarely seems to be a fair fight.

Regardless of the reason, that long-overdue Lakra exhibition arrived on Thursday, thanks to the Drawing Center, which also happens to have been the first institution to show his work in New York, back in 1995. Currently at the start of an admirably ambitious expansion project, the museum has handed over to the artist the Spencer Brownstone Gallery, at 3 Wooster Street, and he has responded with a tantalizing, trippy site-specific stunner that makes his wild 2010 outing at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, look comparatively restrained.

Black and brown blobs ooze around the gallery's walls and billow up into large clouds in some places, serving as frames for drawings on paper that present various indulgences: a glass of liquor and a hulking tribal artifact, for instance, or nineteen (I counted) naked young women staring out of a swirling chocolate fog. Elsewhere, Lakra's black and brown smoke morphs into subtle and supple portraits of androgynous figures or monochromatic silhouette cartoons of naked women or masses of unidentifiable organs that almost pulse and undulate on the walls.





Under the previous New York City mayor, Lakra's drawings may have provoked at least a moment of political grandstanding. They show a naked woman bending over and urinating, a topless woman smoking a long cigarette, and various women kissing. Admittedly, the taboos and private fantasies they deal in are largely those of straight males, but they can never be quite reduced to those interests. Lakra's work literally represents not only art's inherent erotic potential but also its use as a guard again death. There are plenty of pornographic elements, sure, but long shadows, snakes, and skulls are always just a drawing away.

Joe Bradley, Drawings, at The Journal Gallery

Exterior of The Journal Gallery, 168 North 1st Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, February 22, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]


Joe Bradley, Untitled, 2010. Graphite on paper, 8.5 x 6 in. each


Two gentlemen examining the work closely


Left to right: Joe Bradley, Untitled, 2010. Graphite on paper, 11 x 8.5 in. Joe Bradley, Untitled, 2010. Graphite on paper, 9 x 6 in.


Joe Bradley, Untitled, 2010. Ink on paper, 11 x 8.5 in.


The crowd, early in the evening

"Some people seem to get a lot out of them and some people think I am full of shit and they’re just terrible," Joe Bradley tells Stephanie LaCava in an interview in the Paris Review, describing the divisive opinions his paintings engender. It seems inevitable that Bradley will soon be saying the same about his drawings, since the ones that went on view at The Journal Gallery at a crowded opening on Tuesday evening are very much from the same playbook.

Graphite outlines of human figures in some suggest the boogieing silhouettes of dancers that starred in Bradley's just-closed Canada show, and an abstract geometric drawing, below, is an almost exact study for one of the anthropomorphized monochromes in his 2008 Whitney Biennial show, though it is dated 2010. Look around and you will spot a deranged-looking clown, a swastika, and a penis in the process of ejaculating: there is plenty on offer to offend. Bradley's work is often easy to dislike, and it sometimes appears to beg for that response, as it does here. And yet, as he says, opinion is divided. I have talked to plenty of smart people — artists mostly — who find his art genuinely entertaining and even liberating. (This topic has come up frequently over the past month.)


Joe Bradley, Untitled, 2010. Graphite on paper, 12.5 x 8.5 in.

Mostly I'm baffled, but there is one drawing I particularly like, an ink on paper that shows a clown and a penis, with a line curving up and away from the latter. The only color — which touches the body part and the clown's nose, lips, and hair — is a faint orange-brown that could be from spilled coffee. Various jotted notes are visible from the opposite side of the paper. Look at it for more than a moment, and the simple scrawls appear weirder and more sophisticated than they did at first. The clown's nose curls up onto the bald top of his head, and his hair bursts in a single blob from the back of his neck. Everything is floating in space, thrillingly unresolved. Conjured from almost nothing, it asks that you give each similarly spare piece a second chance.

Brian Lund, A Very Real and Very Dark Time, at Smith-Stewart [Review]

Brian Lund, Selected Edit Cuts from Sweet Charity and Lenny [detail], 2008

If you squint in front of Brian Lund’s latest series of drawings, his colorful, wiry masses of lines and shapes begin to look like Rorschach figures stripped of their flesh, rendered as angular skeletons. Eyes wide open, closer to the pieces, which are alternately tacked to and framed on the walls of Smith-Stewart, even more curious things appear in the form of text and notations: sequential numbers that snake around the paper, blocks of hatching, repeating patterns of circles, squares, and words. “Charity hope valentine” appears over and over again in one piece. “Lenny Bruce” is sprinkled liberally on the page.


Brian Lund, Selected Edit Cuts from Sweet Charity and Lenny, 2008

The drawings, one learns on consulting the press release, are the result of Lund translating the “vast editing systems of Hollywood films into abstract compositions” using his own system of notation. Here, he takes Bob Fosse’s films as his foundation. His impenetrable vocabulary suggests Cornelius Cardew’s musical scores from the 1960’s, which stretched and morphed the basic units of Western musical notation. Like Cardew’s Treatise, the viewer is left to make sense of a score littered with only barely recognizable figures. A few passages make sense; others yield only static.


Mark Lombardi

The key difference between Lund and Cardew, of course, is that the former is working after the fact, building a record of a completed work. Are we supposed to be able to piece together a narrative by looking at the work? (Could this be visual art’s Dark Side of the Moon / The Wizard of Oz moment?) By providing numbers (some marker of time, cuts, or frames?), Lund seems to be teasing a chance at legibility. Maybe we can work it out if we look a little closer. His work, then, sits somewhere near Marc Lombardi, whose overflowing schematics lead to a similarly fractured language and stifled relations.  Their drawings denote the boundaries of all closed, specialized languages.


Cornelius Cardew, Treatise [page 3], 1963-67

As rigorous as Lund’s conceptualism is, the controlled effervescence of his work (one thinks of Julie Mehretru) is what allows him to avoid crafting a vapid tribute to 1970’s systems art. Asked to diagram one of these films again, it is hard to believe that Lund would perfectly recreate every element of the complex network of signs and lines. Here, the artist mediates the system. Forced to toss out the foundational text, one gets the impression that he would still want to make exactly these types of drawings. If he gets bored with film, that’s good news.


Cornelius Cardew, Treatise [page 183], 1963-67

Brian Lund: A Very Real and Very Dark Time

Smith-Stewart

53 Stanton Street

New York, NY

Through March 1, 2009

Kay Rosen, Scareful!, at Yvon Lambert - New York

Kay Rosen, Removal from Office, 2007-8.

Last chance: Kay Rosen, Scareful!, at Yvon Lambert closes January 3, 2009.

The last two parts of my Top 10 of 2008 are coming up, along with a compendium of year-end posts from other places, and a review of Barbara Probst at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.