Retracings—Cecily Brown, Lucinda Childs, and Bruce Springsteen

As much as we seek out the new, there are moments when retracing becomes essential. In the past week or two, I've experienced work by three artists of different genres who have retraced in wide-ranging ways.

Untitled (Paradise), 2014

Cecily Brown: Rehearsal

In what is, unbelievably, her New York museum debut, 80 of artist Cecily Brown's watercolors and sketches comprise an exhibition titled Rehearsal (from the French word "rehercier"—to achieve understanding or mastery by retracing) at The Drawing Center through Dec 18. This highly focused show, curated by Claire Gilman, is a collection of reworkings by Brown of source material, including Goya, Brueghel, animal bestiaries, and even a Jimi Hendrix album cover. In the process of her retracings, she can isolate subjects or clusters, creating intriguing incomplete compositions; add sheets of paper when she runs off the page; and even work without glasses, or with low resolution imagery, to blur perception and and allow an absorption of general massing and color balance. Seeing her "rehearsals" of the album art for Hendrix's Electric Ladyland (in one example, she overlays it with another artwork), provides some insight into her painting compositions, which seethe with unspecific, irrepressible life.

Canto Ostinato. Photo: John Sisley

Lucinda Childs: A Portrait

Childs' dancers can perform a passage, and then etch and re-etch the same, or similar, one again and again. Each phrase is beautifully crafted to move the dancer in a direction, or back, swiftly and with an effervescent flow. A quickly extended arabesque can be counterweighted by arms tossed overhead, effectively braking the impetus. The repetition can be hypnotic; a sudden change of direction or added move lends unexpected drama (not unlike such a musical shift in a composition by Philip Glass, a frequent collaborator). A Portrait, at the Joyce, was composed of eight repertory dances spanning the decades since 1963, when she created conceptual works such as Pastime—consecutive brief vignettes, including one in which a seated dancer, enfolded within a stretchy length of ecru fabric, assumes a sculptural position, straightens her body langorously, and shifts angles. Radial Courses (1976) features four men walking rapidly in circles; two break apart to leap and turn, and rejoin the circuits, or turn to head the opposite way. In a work from this year, Into View, an intense light pierces through the upstage scrim, like the sun cutting through fog. The dancers pair up for a change of pace, the women doing fanning leg lifts or ducking under their partners' arms. Childs is a master of retracing, using it as a framework for her intricate, mesmerizing movement structures.   

Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run

Another type of retracing is telling a life's story. Springsteen's autobiography, Born to Run (Simon and Schuster), recounts his path to becoming one of our generation's biggest rock stars while maintaining a strong connection to his working class New Jersey brethren. I confess that I've never bought an album by him—a consequence of his music being ubiquitous in life, whether on the radio or blaring from someone's stereo loudspeakers. Nonetheless, I do seem to have unconsciously absorbed the words to many of his songs, and some of their rough-hewn poetics reverberates in his book's prose. He knows how to write, and the ease of the syntax makes the book a pleasure to read (plus, he drops in title or lyric quotes, a kind of game within the story). A bonus of retracing a musician's life in the age of Spotify is being able to play, and doubly appreciate, the songs being read about. 

Ferran Adrià—Revolutionary Alchemist

Ferran Adrià Plating Diagram, ca. 2000-2004. Colored pen on graph paper

Courtesy of elBullifoundation

There's some unavoidable deflation upon entering the Drawing Center's Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity exhibition, because after all, reading about food can't compare with eating it, even if you're talking about some of the most conceptual edibles ever made. But once you get past that, there's much to glean from this show of notes and sketches about the revolutionary Spanish chef's theories and inventions that helped him to create nearly 1900 new dishes. Not only does it draw attention to the food itself, but the craft of plating—combinations of flavors, as well as sculptural and graphic composition.

The works on view, through February 28, range widely: plating diagrams (above), genomic theory diagrams about the history of cuisine, a vitrine of colorful plasticine sculptures showing the shapes of food presentation, tools adapted for elBulli's "molecular gastronomy." Large photographic murals of the kitchen and interior of the now-closed elBulli create an interior room which houses several panels of drawings (the lowest of which are difficult to see unless you're a mouse). If some of the theory seems a bit pretentious, consider what it must have taken to craft "quinoa helada de foie-gras de pato con consomé." And there is little fussiness about many of the drawings, done in a naive style with colored pens, or written in what could've been haste or fervor. 

Ferran Adrià, courtesy elBullifoundation

Supporting the main exhibition, in the downstairs lab, the film 1846 screens, which shows every dish created at elBulli, as well as a film about Adrià's participation in Documenta. There are references to Bullipedia, a nebulous database of practice and theory currently in process. And on the lighter side, in the stairwell hangs a portrait of the chef by Simpson's creator Matt Groening. And if you didn't catch the film documentation of the food, a set of volumes with glamour shots of the restaurant's meals sits in the lobby. After that, you'll surely be primed to wolf down a liquid olive or vegetable foam.  

Geometry and Strange Fish at the Drawing Center

Sean Scully, Untitled, 1975. Acrylic & tape on paper, @23x31". Courtesy Neo Neo York, Inc.

The Drawing Center's two exhibitions, through November 3, offer a satisfyingly balance of minimal and baroque. Changes and Horizontals, a series of studies and paintings by Sean Scully features grids of horizontal and vertical stripes. Of particular interest are areas where the stripes overlap, the increasing density of certain quadrants or thirds, the subtle palette consisting primarily of greys and rusts. Some typewriter drawings are also on view, a rare look at Scully, a master of geometry, dabbling in text.  

Alexis Rockman, Study for Tiger Vision (19 TV Bio Fish), 2011, gouache on black paper, 9 x 12"

The rear and lower galleries contain drawings primarily of sea creatures by Alexis Rockman, done for Ang Lee's Oscar winning film The Life of Pi. Rockman's naturalist studies have been a fixture on the art scene for years, but these came as a surprise as I was unaware that he had been involved in the blockbuster. These striking gouaches pop as if lit with black light, featuring critters of neon hues with exotic embellishments. 

Alexis Rockman, Study for Tiger Vision (7 TV), 2011, gouache on black paper, 9 x 12"

A video in the downstairs gallery shows an amazing sequence in which a whale breaks apart into a dozen animals, which swim away. A couple of talks with Rockman about the works are scheduled: The Animal Vision (Oct 17), and Conversation on The Life of Pi (Oct 29).

Blurred—Make that Erased—Lines

Olivia Ancona. Photo courtesy The Drawing Center

Artists commonly erase lines, a necessary step in the creative experimentation process. To some, it's an end in itself—Rauschenberg erased a De Kooning drawing. Perhaps as a result of not erasing enough lines, I've seen an artist destroy, with an X-Acto knife, several paintings deemed failures. (Painful to watch.)

At the Drawing Center earlier this week, Susan Hefuna and Luca Veggetti expanded on the ideas of negation and memory in a collaboration titled Notationotation. Hefuna used white chalk to make a grand drawing on the wooden floor of the main gallery; it resembled a loose fishing net. (A lovely show of Hefuna's drawings hangs in the back gallery, through Sep 20.) This process was videotaped and shown on the wall during the performance, in addition to footage of a Broadway intersection, where incessant occupation and displacement occurs. 

The human erasers were three articulate, lithe dancers: PeiJu Chien-Pott (a Martha Graham company member), Gabrielle Lamb, and Olivia Ancona.performing movement by Luca Veggetti. Wearing black socks below sleek pleated black pants and grey tank tops, the women slid their feet along the chalk lines as if walking on high lines  Particulars of Veggetti's style repeated: wing-like arms held in tension, feet in forced arches, deep lunges, high extended legs. (And for once, the habitual, trendy socked foot in dance performance—of which Veggetti is a proponent—was completely justified.)

While the dancers' workmanlike concentration and efficiency made for a poetic, if brief performance, the behavior of the crowd held some interest as well. We were allowed to move about at will while the dancers worked. The audience clustered and expanded around each dancer, grudgingly moving a foot or so when a dancer tried to claim a line to erase. Whether it was just New Yorkers being New Yorkers, or human nature, who knows—we became an indispensable, resilient element in the performance. 

Sargent Watercolors at BMA; Fiorini at Drawing Center

John Singer Sargent, Corfu: Lights and Shadows, 1909. Translucent & opaque watercolor with graphite underdrawing, 15-7/8 x 20-7/8". Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Hayden Collection—Charles Henry Hayden Fund

The Brooklyn Museum has a dazzling exhibition opening today—John Singer Sargent Watercolors—on view through July 28. Put it on your must-see list.

On view is the BMA's collection of 38 Sargent (1856—1925) watercolors, purchased as an entity from his 1909 debut exhibition in New York, combined with that of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, totalling 93 works (including nine oil paintings). The subject matter focuses on exotic foreign locales including Venice, the Alps, and the Carrara quarry in Italy; Syria, and Corfu. His deftness with color, rhythm, and light perfectly suit the medium of watercolor. Some of the humblest subjects take on a monumental quality—laundry drying on lines, a tramp, gourds. He captures the chaos and magic of the Grand Canal in Venice, and the steely gaze of a Bedouin. 

You can practically smell the aromas and feel the aridity in his works. Breathe deeply.

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Ragazza che piange (Crying Girl)1960. Pencil & aluminum enamel on
paper. 19-5/8 x 27-1/2"
Courtesy the artist

Also opening this week is Giosetta Fiorini: L'Argento (b. 1932) at The Drawing Center. This less-known Italian artist whose work falls into the Pop vein favors painting on paper and canvas in silver. A round framing device serves as a de facto viewing lens; glam women in sunglasses are frequent subjects. Feathery sketches evoke Twombly, a trio of enamel paintings on the entry wall conjure Warhol.

A series of sketches in the rear gallery are among the most fascinating. They depict landscapes or houses in a distant, abstract way—with a giant arrow, or defined by negative space. The tone of the show feels light, but the consistency and unique vision of this artist linger. 

Alexandre Singh—Content, Sublimated

Alexandre Singh, Assembly Instructions (The Pledge- Marc-Olivier Wahler), 2011. 

Framed inkjet ultrachrome archival prints and dotted pencil lines, 21" x 30", 

#21 from a set of 43. Courtesy Sprueth Magers: Berlin and

London; Art: Concept: Paris; Metro Pictures: New York; Monitor Gallery: Rome.

Alexandre Singh's The Pledge, at the Drawing Center through March 13, is a sprawling octopus of a show that includes "Assembly Instructions" (or "proxy portraits") of seven "pledges" from different fields. Singh interviewed his subjects on various esoteric topics, fictionalized the interviews, created associative drawings or appropriated imagery, xeroxed them and framed them in Ikea's finest, and hung them, connected by dots.

Don't follow? Well, therein lies a significant problem with this elegant looking show. It's so mediated and multi-layered that by the time the viewer's eyes meet the art, the content is so far removed that it's essentially out of reach. Conceptual art can be rewarding, but if it's this distant from whatever it's trying to say, it's frustrating. Additionally, he uses jargon to explain the project (see all those words in quotes above), which only obfuscates things more. The pledges include people like filmmaker Michel Gondry and neurobiologist Leah Kelly; laminated excerpts of their interviews with Singh are available for reference, but as each subject's material is separate, it's not convenient. There are no wall labels (a laminated map is also available) which makes for a clean look, but it's an acknowledgment that the message is secondary to Singh's overall aesthetic.

The dream-like imagery evokes the Surrealists—birds, the tower of Babel, Picasso, ballet dancers, Bill Murray, and a deconstructed Greek key motif, to name a few. Surely many of the references are explicated in the interviews and in the exhibition catalogue, which has several essays (including one by curator Claire Gilman), but it's impractical to expect the typical viewer to access and focus on these materials. It might even be preferable to walk through knowing absolutely nothing about the backstory, and let the myriad images knit their own associations in your brain. 

Ignacio Uriarte, BIC Transitions, 2010, BIC pen on paper, 16 drawings, each: 11-13/16" x 16-9/16". 

Courtesy of the artist and Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona. Photograph by Simon Vogel.

In contrast, Ignacio Uriarte's Line of Work, consisting of primarily formal ideas, is on view in the back gallery. This compact selection of mostly ball-point pen drawings purportedly riffs on the banality of office life, but his deftness with line and density is breathtaking. Who knew that Bic made inks that could create such subtly differing hues? This should no doubt breathe life into tasks that might still involve ballpoint pens. 

Now what about computers?