It was at 10:46 on Friday, September 16, 2005 that New York bid adieu to conceptual art. Your intrepid gallery chronicler was there for this historic art event. The catering was quite good, I am happy to report.

The location was Pier 46, to be found at “Hudson River Park at Charles and West Streets.” West Street? Hudson River Park? A Pier? Come again? Yet there I was, a cab ride later, greeted with the chasm of a construction pit. Once known to the world as the corner of the West Side Highway and Nowhere, this axis mundi was now in the final stages of bearing the fruit of a shimmering architectural specimen, soon to be revered as “165 Charles Street by Richard Meier, with apartments ranging from $1.15 million for the 682-square-foot studio to $18.5 million for the 4,551-square-foot duplex penthouse.” I dropped to my knees.

It was in the shadow of this residential heaven and the adjacent “Perry West” towers (also by Meier, also fabulous) that the art world was about to see what it, too, had only once dreamed about. And so I proceeded across the West Side Highw—, that is, “West Street,” to Pier 46, a shady little park built atop, yes, a pier! Who knew?

It was, oh, 10:06 at this moment. I sat down at a picnic table overlooking the Hudson River and some place called Jersey City, a glass of complimentary mint iced tea in one hand, my Whitney press kit in the other. Soon my fellow art-presbyters assembled round. The tailoring was dandy. Check. The microphone tested out at the nifty plexiglass podium. Check… . Forty minutes and two sparkling waters later, it arrived.

There, in the water, was a small rectangular barge—quite small for a barge, actually—in the tow of a red tugboat tootling along at five knots up the Hudson River. Astride the barge, as best we could discern, was constructed a very large metal planter’s box—there was no other name for it. In this box were situated fifty tons of dirt, another eighteen tons of hay, and on top: trees (maple, beech, birch, bur oak, sycamore, dogwood) and shrubs (witch hazel, chokeberry, hydrangea, blueberry, sumac). I have the New York Times’s Randy Kennedy to thank for this last bit of information—his culture-page megaspread on this once-in-a-lifetime, timed-to-the-minute event appeared in the morning paper timed to the minute of this once-in-a-lifetime press preview.

As the barge drew closer, more details appeared: three charming boulders, packed in the earth just so; some moss; a cozy path meandering down the middle. Even the cables holding up the sapling trees you might find in, that’s it, Central Park. Ecce Smithson. “Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island,” posthumously realized from a sketch made thirty years ago, had arrived.[1] And we were there. And it was cute.

“Cute” was not my word for it. That was the coinage of Adam Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum, speaking to us as the tugboat driver hauled Floating Island on some impressive turns around the pier. The cameras snapped. The artist’s widow, Nancy Holt, issued some nice words about the project and how she and Smithson used to live just blocks from where we stood, back when it was the corner of the West Side Highway and Nowhere, and when Pier 46 was just a pier, and when Smithson used to collect detritus at the water’s edge. Now, thanks to progress, those celebrities (Calvin! Nicole!) in Richard Meier’s glass towers can spy Smithson’s creation without leaving valhalla. They can bike where Smithson used to pick up trash. And when they look out, they will see “cute.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, conceptual art sought to mortify the flesh of high modernism. Smithson, a St. Jerome, chose the abnegations of the Great Salt Lake and the displacement of familiar places for his penance. “Floating Island,” a “non-site,” was likewise intended to disrupt our own assumptions—this time our familiarities with Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park. (Smithson’s draft for the project is now on display at his Whitney retrospective, which I reviewed here last month).

But Smithson could not have assumed that the culture he modeled himself against would, thirty years later, become Smithsonian. The Richard Meier towers, overlooking the once rundown New York waterfront, on the outskirts of civilization, are multi-million-dollar non-sites—the displacement of Park Avenue to the edge of nowhere. At a moment when nowhere is somewhere and somewhere is nowhere, can a bit of conceptual art on an itty-bitty barge look anything but cute?

We’ve got the mortifications of the flesh down. Now the question is, what about the flesh? It is a topic in which more than a few contemporary artists are hard at work. Philip Pearlstein at Betty Cuningham, Jordan Wolfson at DFN, and Philip-Lorca de Corcia at PaceWildenstein, all on view this month, begin their investigations with that old warhorse, the academic nude.[2]

One hears a common refrain about the work of Philip Pearlstein. To which I say, yes, I do believe Philip Pearlstein changes from show to show. Incrementally, perhaps. Maybe the answer is I don’t really care, so long as his paintings of nudes mixed in with the oddest of bric-à-brac remain at such high levels of quality. I find that at every Pearlstein show I notice something new. In his intelligent essay for the Cuningham catalogue, Alexi Worth writes: “the paintings’ affect could now zigzag wildly—from the human models’ bored languor, to the tchochkies’ clownish excitement … [the juxtapositions] acknowledged, and even parodied, the sexual vulnerability that had always been implicit in Pearlstein’s art.” Pearlstein tweaks his output not in his application of paint—he’s used the same signature style for decades—but in how he orchestrates the theater of the nudes. The catalogue includes some illuminating photographs of Pearlstein at work—his models as still as any life in the room. It is on canvas, however, that their spirit becomes animated by interactions with the humor, innuendo, and tactility of Pearlstein’s props. The results are a pleasant alchemy. I don’t complain.

Not so, alas, with Jordan Wolfson, of whom I knew nothing until seeing his gallery announcement. I came with high hopes. In reproduction, Wolfson’s tableaux of director’s chairs and supine nudes appear bathed in a swimming pool of light—the shimmering atmosphere flowing into every facet of his scenes. But in the originals, this effect fades into an aqueous screen, a dingy barrier between his nudes and chairs and us. Colors become muted. The hazy paintwork appears clichéd. Wolfson is exhibiting for the first time at DFN after a decade in Israel. My hope is that he learns from the small scale and color saturations of his work in reproduction, and brings his paintings forward into our direct experience. Pearlstein shows what you can do with foreshortening and theater, not to say a more direct translation of paint to flesh. Even competing with the strangest of objects, Pearlstein’s nudes always win out. With Wolfson, not so.

Take away Wolfson’s screens and Pearlstein’s toys, and more than a bit of modesty, and you end up at de Corcia’s latest work. Across the street from Cuningham, de Corcia has photographed a different kind of model. His “exotic pole dancers” are part French Academy and part How the Other Half Lives. In oversized and clinical revelations, de Corcia’s tempts us to choose between the nude and the naked. Is this art composition or sex trade? Elegant or repellent? But the answers become obvious. Tatooed, pierced, muscled to the point of masculinity, with feet filthy from labor (Juliet Ms. Muse [2004])—these nudes give way to nakedness. This is not a sensational roadshow: it is a pitiful display that reveals everything but femininity, a lesson of how nakedness destroys the nude.

Uptown, for a few days in October, one can still catch the end of Jean Hélion’s run at the National Academy Museum.[3] Hélion was a French painter who emerged in the 1930s as a manifesto-writing abstractionist, only to repudiate his ideologies in favor of realism, nature, and the nude at just a time that abstraction was reaching its zenith. During the Second World War, Hélion became a prisoner of the Germans, escaped back to the United States (where he had been living before the war), and wrote the bestselling book They Shall Not Have Me in 1943 about the ordeal. The same title might have been applied to his aesthetic career. His mid-life Wrong Way Up/A rebours (1947) pits the flat representation of an abstract canvas on one side against a voluminous nude spinning out of the picture plane on the other. The trajectory for Hélion is clear: out into the viewer’s space and the real world. The path he took was not, perhaps, as clearly delineated as this show suggests: representation took many different forms for Hélion, from Léger-like shapes in the 1930s and 1940s, to a Norman Rockwell realism in the 1950s (represented by only one painting here), to preternatural acrylic colors and a freer brush stroke in the 1970s and 1980s. At almost every stage, Hélion became an inspiration for American artists, first as an abstract painter working at A. E. Gallatin’s Gallery of Living Art, then as a member of the representational Jane Street Group (where he met Leland Bell, Louisa Matthiasdottir, and Nell Blaine). The drifts in the narrative add to Hélion’s accomplishment, once he cut the lines of the abstraction tugboat.

This month’s chronicle ends with no ordinary flesh, but with “the flesh of My flesh.” In what might be a telling gambit, Lawrence Salander this month opens the doors of a new gallery devoted not to contemporary art, but to Old Master and Renaissance painting and sculpture, in addition to nineteenth-century work.[4] To say “gallery” might give the wrong impression of this space. Located just behind the Frick Art Reference Library, the new flagship Salander-O’Reilly Galleries is something much closer to a museum, with undoubtedly the largest private exhibition space for Old Master sculpture in America. A Bernini Corpus Christi is but the crown of the collection. This is not work by a member of the latest MFA class. It is a masterpiece touched by God. Flesh and the mortification of the flesh are reunited at last.


Notes
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  1. “Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island,” by Robert Smithson, was on view from September 17 through September 25, 2005. Go back to the text.
  2. “Philip Pearlstein” opened at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, on September 15 and remains on view through October 22, 2005. “Jordan Wolfson: Recent Work” opened at DFN Gallery, New York, on September 14 and remains on view through October 15, 2005. “Philip-Lorca de Corcia: Lucky Thirteen” opened at PaceWildenstein, New York, on September 8 and remains on view through October 8, 2005. Go back to the text.
  3. “Jean Hélion” opened at the National Academy Museum, New York, on July 14 and remains on view through October 9, 2005. Go back to the text.
  4. Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, for Old Master and Renaissance art and sculpture, opened at 22 East 71st Street on September 23, 2005. Go back to the text.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 24 Number 2, on page 53
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