Recent Shows: Kara Walker, Wayne Liu, James Wendell, and The City Reliquary

I went to the Kara Walker show at the Whit­ney for the sec­ond time this week­end. I’m glad I went a sec­ond time because the first was totally over­whelm­ing. I feel like so much has been said about her work that I am not sure what I could add. Her use of a for­mat of the period, the sil­hou­ette, to be so explicit is haunt­ing, espe­cially given the silhouette’s inher­ently eva­sive nature. Amer­i­can view­ers, who are steeped in the dynam­ics pre­sented in her work, on a whole have no prob­lem fill­ing in the blanks, attest­ing to our own inti­macy with the tragedies Walker explores. The series of water­color reflec­tions after receiv­ing the MacArthur Fel­low­ship (and the accom­pa­ny­ing crit­i­cism) incor­po­rates the com­pli­cated rela­tion­ship of artist to art to art world to racism to sex­ism. The lay­ers just keep stack­ing up an rein­forc­ing themselves.

The Chelsea Mar­ket is cur­rently graced with Wayne Liu’s show “China, You are a Lucky Star.” Wayne is a friend from ABC No Rio’s dark room, though he now works at ICP. The show con­sists of some 40 images from a one month trip to China. The black and white prints are abra­sively pho­to­graphic with grain and blur printed on expired paper. Wayne is look­ing at a mod­ern­iz­ing China. He iden­ti­fies him­self as a voyeur look­ing in. The visual tex­ture of the images stands in con­trast to the emo­tional tenor. The images repeat­edly focus on indi­vid­u­als, sin­gling them out of the crowd or catch­ing them in iso­la­tion. They are con­tent to glide between the gritty mod­ern­iza­tion of their coun­try, and the aggres­sive pho­to­graphic style. The show is up till the begin­ning of March.

James Wen­dell is dis­play­ing a por­tion of his long term project eye­blink at The Half King. I know James from Mag­num Pho­tos, and Magnum’s influ­ence is evi­dent in James’ work. The crisp, inti­mate images of daily life explore the act of look­ing as an indul­gence in and of itself. James explains that there is no theme or story. Pho­tograph­ing becomes an expe­ri­en­tial mode. The vari­ety of sub­jects, from a snarling dog to women play­ing with a gar­den hose, hold together under the per­sis­tent delight of a photographer’s gaze.

A friend brought me to The City Reli­quary on Sat­ur­day, which had me totally giddy. This lit­tle museum houses New York City arti­facts, from old tokens, to pieces of land­mark build­ings, to exces­sive statue of lib­erty col­lec­tions. The hap­haz­ard assort­ment of items and facts heeds more to indul­gence and obses­sion than accu­racy. A sug­gested dona­tion of $1 is requested as you go through an old turn­stile into the one room museum, packed with curiosi­ties. One case showed an assort­ment of items gleaned from sub­way tun­nels, such as a very old shovel and an old drill bit. Another case detailed the devel­op­ment of the token and metro card sys­tems, includ­ing a Sil­vester J. Dubosz token, which dis­played this city commissioner’s ini­tials in the mid-1980. He was fired when the covert ini­tials were dis­cov­ered. There are bot­tles of water from var­i­ous water ways about the city. I could go on. It was delight­ful. In the back room, they had just installed an exhibit of vin­tage kiss­ing pho­tographs. We got a sneak peek. The open­ing is on Fri­day. You should go. Work­ing the museum that Sat­ur­day after­noon was Lulu Lolo, an Italian-American play­write and per­for­mance artist. She showed us pic­tures of her per­for­mance in Italy play­ing Mother Cabrini. We talked about the Col­lyer Broth­ers and Brook­lyn his­tory and old news­pa­pers. Lulu Lolo has a few pieces on the Ital­ian Amer­i­can Net­work per­form­ing Ital­ian superstitions.

I love New York.