Steel Stillman is showing this image in a group exhibition at Show Room gallery in New York. For decades, he’s been shooting photos of random corners of his world, without any clear idea of what he would do with them. Now it seems he’s found out: Stillman has taken to crudely blacking out one feature of each image, leaving it poised on the brink of illegibility. Here, he’s blackened the drapery from one corner of a four-poster bed.  We’ve become so used to redaction as a bureaucratic intrusion on truth-telling that it’s hard to know what to do when an artist censors himself. Maybe, in a world that seems to be drowning in photos,  Steelman is mounting some quiet resistance to so much easy vision.

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Sabine Hornig’s fiendishly complex “photographic sculpture”, called “Mirrored Room”, is in her solo show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York. It’s a metal pavilion, a touch smaller than a bus shelter, whose glass sides house color transparencies of a vacant plate-glass facade in Berlin.  There’s an infinite regress of reflections: Real ones, now, of you and the gallery space in New York, which change as you move around the sculpture, versus other, fixed ones preserved from a past moment in Berlin – which, if you look closely, can be seen to include a reflection of the photographer taking the picture. There are hints here of the glass pavilions of Dan Graham and of Jeff Wall’s street-scene transparencies, but the combination is uniquely, brilliantly, Hornig’s. It messes with space, and time and image-making.

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Four stills from the brilliant nine-screen video projection called “The Visitors”, produced by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson and now showing at Luhring Augustine gallery in New York. One day not too long ago, Kjartansson and eight of his Brooklynish friends occupied nine rooms and sites in and around a shabby-chic mansion called Rokeby Farm, upstate in New York. Together (but apart), and in one 53-minute take, they recorded a slightly sentimental, nouveau-hippy song, each one contributing a separate musical line on voice, piano, electric bass, accordion, drums or some other classic-rock instrument. Rokeby Farm says that it is set up to “welcome bohemia and spirituality in all its forms”, and the video made there risks bathing in the same kinds of sentimental cliche. But as the sound weaves together in the gallery space, and the images remain discrete, you realize that Kjartansson’s  romantic excesses are perfectly balanced by his technophilic rigor. The technology seems to provide its own ironic gloss on the song’s mawkishness.

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Darren Almond shoots landscapes by the light of the full moon, including this one, titled “Fullmoon@Eifel.6” and now in his solo show at Matthew Marks gallery in New York. Of course, what’s most important about these images is that exposure times measured in minutes yield results that look like perfectly normal daylit scenes, or something very close. That means that the subject here is photography, its truths and deceptions, rather than nature itself. Any photo can be exposed and processed to affect the “reality” of its subject: A day scene could be shot to be as murky as any typical night shot. “Normal”, “correct” exposure is a notion imposed by us, not by the world being shot. 

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These are stills from Steffani Jemison’s video called “The Escaped Lunatic”, now on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem in “Fore”, a group show that presents emerging black talent. (Click on the image to watch a clip from the video). The video is straightforward but powerful: It presents a scruffy urban landscape, across which run a series of almost identical Young Black Males, and the action loops ad infinitum. Jemison says that the piece is based on early  silent-film chases, and sees the piece as being about “persistence and futility” amid cultural, social and geographic constraints. But I read it  differently: It seemed to be about the stereotypes we associate with running black youths, and the TV-bred image we have of them as always fleeing a crime, or perpetrating one. 

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This is a Damien Hirst “spot” print called “Ferric Ammonium Citrate”, done in woodblock and now on view at Carolina Nitsch in New York, in a show of all 40 works from the same series. It’s easy to see the project as a retro return to formalist issues of shape and color, of figure and ground and of variations worked on a theme. Hirst’s simple instruction-set – never repeat a color; place the spots one spot’s-width apart – does in fact yield surprising perceptual dividends, if you spend the time looking. On the other hand, it may be more interesting to see the series as a riff on market dynamics – as much about how the woodcuts sell as about what they look like. Hirst’s signature may be the deciding factor in any reading: The only function it plays, on the surface of the prints – there are 48 of each image – is to tie each one to the history of unique, certified, hand-made (or hand-signed) commodities. The messy signature actually detracts and distracts from a formalist reading of these otherwise pristine works.  But then, plenty of rigorous formalists, including Barnett Newman, also defaced their works by signing the front. Does that make their paintings comments on the market, or sell-outs to it?

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Singapore is so dedicated to tidiness that chewing gum is forbidden, or so goes an old cliché that, as it happens, is also a fact. The city-state also has strict rules about carrying open durians, the fruits loved by locals for their nauseous stink. Even the tiny food stalls in Singapore’s vast hawker centers, possibly its greatest cultural treasures, come stamped with health-department approval.

And now there are signs that Singapore’s rule makers want to disturb all this order with the mess of the avant-garde. Last month they threw their weight behind Art Stage Singapore, a commercial fair and festival of contemporary art. Also hitting its stride is Gillman Barracks, an old British military site that authorities renovated into a contemporary-art complex, with room for 17 commercial galleries and a nonprofit center. Stretching over 15 acres, Gillman feels like the white cubes of New York’s Chelsea scene transplanted to a polo club. “There’s an acknowledgment that for Singapore to be a developed society, arts and culture have to play a role ... We want to make art a bigger part of the lives of people here,” says Eugene Tan, the elegant Singaporean who runs Gillman for the Orwellian-sounding Lifestyle Programme Office of the Economic Development Board, which fosters the business end of art making. Singapore also has an eager Tourism Board, which sells local achievements to foreigners, as well as a generous National Arts Council, which helps fund artists and nonprofit spaces. There are plans for an absolutely massive National Art Gallery due to open in a few years. The bones of an art scene are there, clearly, but there’s still considerable doubt about whether any soul is in sight. Is a society that controls the chewing of gum likely to fill the half million square feet of its new museum with art that has bite? After all, this is a place where every exhibition and performance has to submit its plans and seek a permit from the censors at the Media Development Authority.

“The art is an adjunct, a barnacle to this whole tourist environment,” says Valentine Willie, a Malaysian art dealer and adviser who has had galleries across Southeast Asia and has been called the “mayor” of the scene there. He points out that Singaporeans love the term “controlled environment”—and that it applies to their art scene as much as to their air conditioning. When he put up one of his influential surveys of young Singapore artists, he was told he had to seek special approval for an image of a government official. He cites a nude performance piece that came to an unplanned end at the 2011 edition of the Art Stage fair and a gay-themed installation at the Singapore Art Museum whose erotica was censored. He points out that vexed issues of identity are at the heart of the most advanced works in Southeast Asia (this was true even at Singapore’s latest commercial art fair), and yet race, religion, and sexuality are the topics Singapore’s authorities take most exception to. “You are in the most educated country in the region, the richest in the region, and yet you can’t speak freely,” says Willie. “Art as commodity is their model.”

This is something you hear again and again in Singapore art circles. Even Tan, charged with helping that commodity succeed at Gillman Barracks, acknowledges that market forces have played too big a role on the Asian art scene: “When the market becomes too dominant, it affects what artists make,” he says. (Tan can hardly be accused of being a market lackey, despite his current position: his Ph.D. was on notions of time in conceptual art, and he has spent most of his career as a curator at nonprofits.)

This is Michael Benson’s “Northern View of Saturn and the Darker Side of the Rings” based on data collected from the Cassini spacecraft on May 9, 2007. It is now on view at Hasted Kraeutler Gallery in New York. You could say that Benson’s spacey images are too eye-catching for their own good – like a painting you’d see on the cover of an old sci-fi novel. But what interests me is the idea that, while these images purport to show the solar system “as it really is”, it seems that there’s a a fair amount of artifice and number-crunching involved in making them look that way. In that sense, they are indeed as close to a sci-fi painting as to the sunset you shot on your last vacation. The more cliched they are in their picturesqueness, the more obvious that becomes, and the more questions get raised about what pictures can show. 

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The WASP’s Landscape

Of course George W. Bush uses his weight room as a studio! In this picture of a picture, leaked along with a trove of family correspondence and photos, we see Dubya in his element. Wearing his down-home khaki shorts, a baseball cap, and a vest, he’s surrounded by mirrors so he can watch himself putting the finishing touches on his masterpiece: a painting of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in Kennebunkport, Maine, the WASP-y seaside town where Bush spent many childhood summers.

It seems that Bush is simply taking a stab at landscapes and ecclesiastical architecture. But New York’s art critic Jerry Saltz saw something else in the painting. “The architecture strikes me as real and imagined: a small central home with maybe an addition, and a large round silo. There appear to be two crosses atop this overall structure, one on the main house and a larger one on the silo. American Gothic indeed.”

As much as we’d all love to think that our very own W. was imagining his home with two large crosses over it (the religious introspection!), unfortunately Saltz really overanalyzed this one, though he deserves props for his own imaginative interpretation.

“Skylight 1” is one of my favorite pieces from Diana Cooper’s solo show at Postmasters gallery in New York, which locals have one more day to catch before it closes.  In this piece and others, Cooper takes a real feature of the Postmasters interior and shifts the place and shape it takes up.  This new tactic gives a firm, real-world grounding to the fantasy that Cooper’s always revealed in her work. It’s also a kind of homage to Postmasters itself: For almost three decades, in one space after another, owners Magda Sawon and Tamas Banovich have given artists room to do the most daring work they know how. It’s nice that there’s now work that’s about the room given.

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This image, titled “Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s Bathing of a Red Horse, State Tretyakov Gallery”, was shot by Andy Freeberg, and is now on view in his show at Andrea Meislin Gallery in New York. Freeberg visited Russia’s great museums, photographing the almost-babushkas charged with guarding the country’s artistic treasures. Even when Freeberg finds women whose look rhymes with their charges, or – as here – where contrast is the point,  what strikes me most is the size of the gap between lived life and the worlds found in art. Now what I’d like to see is a photo of a Chelsea gallerina standing by one of Freeberg’s prints, to see if the gap would be as striking.

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A neon piece called “Ba-O-Ba II”, made in 1969 by Keith Sonnier and now refreshed for a solo show at Mary Boone Gallery in New York. I’m old enough (just) to remember how neon seemed the Next Big Thing in the early 1970s, and plenty old enough to remember how out of place those neons seemed in museums in the 80s,  when we’d collectively decided that the way forward for art would have to do with content rather than color and shape, line and light. And now, after the passing of so many years, vintage neon’s looking good again, as the last but powerful gasp of the modernist tradition, and as more deeply rooted in social realities than we’d been able to see when first it went out of style. As Sonnier says in the press release, “Our type of work was somehow counter-culture. We chose materials that were not 'high art' …. We were using materials that weren’t previously considered art materials.”

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This image of Rudy Giuliani was done in glass mosaic by Nils Grossien, and is now in the show called “Playing with Fire” at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. It woke me up to a fact that I should have noticed long ago: Mosaic is the original digital medium. (My friends Alex Nagel and Chris Wood made good use of that fact in their great study of Renaissance ideas about time and the moment of creation.) Interesting, though, that Grossien made this piece in 1995, before most of us were thinking too much about the digital. Of course, using the digital and thinking about it are two different things: Not sure the mosaicists of Saint Mark’s in Venice were obsessed with bits and bytes.

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“Friday Evening”, painted in around 1920 by the Jewish-Austrian artist Isidor Kaufmann, who specialized in genre scenes of life among the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It’s on view in a permanent-collection show at the Jewish Museum in New York. Producing images so deeply entrenched in the European pictorial tradition must have been part of this community’s profound attempt at assimilation, although here that’s in interesting tension with subject matter that tries to assert its separateness. Neither assimilation nor separation made any difference in the tragic decades that followed.

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