Gordon Matta-Clark at the Whitney Museum

A retrospective of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark could not fail to pose a serious challenge to any museum attempting such a task. By its very nature - conceptual, often-site specific and, in an unfortunately high number of cases, impermanent - the work defies the strict limitations of institutional space. It is a credit to the Whitney then that this show is a success. The work is astutely curated in a manner that emphasizes the focus and coherence of Matta-Clark's work without sacrificing its urgency and socially engaged dimensions. The show is experienced almost as a puzzle, the disparate pieces we initially encounter, coming together to form a cohesive vision of living space in transformation, freeing itself from embedded practices and institutionalized constraints.

The centerpiece of the show, and the work that one first encounters on entry is 'Splitting' from 1974. It is the best known work and here we have not only the familiar documentation on collaged silver gelatin prints but also the four corners of the house on display. These, along with other large pieces of masonry from various projects, add a visceral element that is lost with the simple viewing of photos.

Matta-Clark was himself aware of this as evidenced by his method of collaging photographs . With this move away from simple representation, the sharp edges and non-intuitive manner of their construction comes to echo the fundamental undermining of accepted structures at work in 'Splitting'.It is a process of disorientation and re-orientation, what Matta-Clark himself attempted to label as 'Anarchitecture', that we see again and again throughout the show.

The Armory Show Part 2: Photography

There seemed to be a huge selection of photography available at the Armory and much of it large-scale work of a consistently high quality. First up: Enrique Metinides at the Anton Kern Gallery. Metinides is best known for his accident and crime-scene photography. Metinides' work is notable for his use of wide angle lens and daylight flash, which result in action photos that are strangely static. But the pieces on show that I saw were a departure from the work I associate with Metinides. Two diptyques, the works which alas I could not find on an internet trawl, juxtaposed images of people with images of physical space. The exceptional feature of this was the close relationship between the lines within each pair of photos. At a purely formal level the photos were almost identical, yet in content they differed not only in degree but in kind.

At the Project NY Gallery Coco Fusco impressed. Arguably not a photographer, strictly speaking, the photos on view here document Bare Life Study 1, a group street performance using routine methods of humiliation in military prisons as choreography. The phrase 'bare life' is a reference to the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who argues in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life that modern politics works by de-individuating people - a process of reducing them to a basic biological entity, one that can be tracked, identified and, ultimately, tortured. As such he sees modern politics as a culmination of a process that found it most overt manifestations in the concentration camps of WWII. Fusco's work emphasizes the role of humiliation in this process and seeks to overcome the marginalization of detainees by presenting her work as performance. Confrontational and aggressive, the documentation gains strength from the urgency of the project.

Catherine Yass at the Alison Jacques Gallery displayed large-scale photos mounted in light boxes. The work has a stillness and is scrupulously composed, clearly representational with no ambiguity as to subject matter but by virtue of the light box and use of filters it has an unearthly, otherworldly feel. Lars Nilsson's photograph 'Midway on our life's journey, I found myself in a dark wood' (2002) at the Milliken gallery also has an otherworldly feel, achieved through a meticulous staging of his imagery (see it at http://www.millikengallery.com). Both provocative and unsettling, the photo draws as much attention to the viewer as to itself, with it's suggestions of voyeurism and observation. It's rich palette however detracts somewhat from the power of the imagery, by placing it in an almost fairytale environment. This merely serves to blunt the tension in an otherwise strong work.

Bellwether Gallery obviously have great confidence in Trevor Paglen as he was their sole artist on show. Perhaps this is understandable as his photos undeniably have a power, one that is greatly increased upon closer viewing. Shot with a high powered telescopic lens, the photos record the comings and goings of CIA aeroplanes as well as documenting alleged CIA black sites.
The work is highly charged, its nature emphasized by the surreptitious nature of the photos, and it succeeds in concretizing aspects of a new social geography that is often denied by those involved. Like Willie Doherty's work on the North of Ireland, we see that nothing is neutral and little is innocent. The nature of visibility and invisibility is also interrogated here. For the work suggests that invisibility is less an ontological determination but more a question of proximity. If we cannot get near such sites, who is to say they are there? What is real and what is not becomes radically subjectivized and open to negotiation - or abuse.

At Peter Blum Gallery the photos of Kimsooja stood out, as did Sabine Hornig at Galerie Barbara Thumm and Elger Esser at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. The latter's filtered and sometimes painted over pictures are almost classical in their attention to balance and measure. The yellow filter is also reminiscent of the autumnal colors favored by Turner in his landscapes. Other honorable mentions were Ryan Gander's photos at Annet Gelink Gallery, utilizing pieces of silver affixed to the images; Olufur Eliason's incredible set of 42 photgraphs documenting the changes on a single view over 24 hours and Frank Thiel's images of decaying surfaces at Sean Kelly Gallery.

The Armory Show Part 1: Drawing

So, last weekend I went to my first Armory show to watch the feeding frenzy that is the New York art market. It is a vast affair with many, many stalls representing all the major New York Galleries as well as those from across the globe. As such, walking through it is a rather draining experience. It is impossible to see all the galleries in one visit, especially at the day goes on and more and more of "the public" (as Darragh Hogan from Dublin's Kerlin Gallery rather disdainfully put it) arrive, querying the prices of work in tones meant to suggest that, 'why yes, I might just have $300,000 to buy this Thomas Ruff photo'!

The most surprising thing for me, though this is based solely of my lack of experience of Armory shows was the amount of old work for sale at the fair. It seemed like every second stall had a few Robert Mapplethorpe photos up for grabs. Of course it is the preserve of the other more alternative fairs like Pulse and Scope to concentrate solely on younger, less established artists, but it is still surprising to see so many established artists like Damien Hirst being represented by work that is 10 years old or more.

The fair is also dominated, understandably enough, by product orientated art and of this, illustrations and drawings were certainly to the forefront. It is of course apparent from even a cursory trawl through galleries in Chelsea and Williamsburg that drawing is the achingly hip art-form of the moment. And I must confess to being for the most part unimpressed by such work, especially the more colorful, busy work that apes the obsessional detail of outsider artists like Madge Gill or Martin Ramirez. The drawing on show here seem to lean broadly in two directions - geometrics and cartoon. David Zwirner Gallery unveiled their prize scoop - a series of works by Robert Crumb, but there was also the stylistically looser, yet more self-conscious work of Michael Cline at the Daniel Reich Gallery. Peres Projects from Los Angeles had work by John Kleckner (above)- technically impressive but somewhat vacuous. Claims situating him in a mannerist tradition are well and good but his work reminds me of nothing so much as 1970's prog rock album covers - things best forgotten.

A more adolescent and angsty style (also hip commodities at the moment) can be seen in the pastels of Moyna Flannigan at the Sara Meltzer Gallery. At their best they have a grotesque, exaggerated feel akin to the paintings of John Currin, while at their worst they are like illustrations to a smutty version of 'Alice In Wonderland'.

Examples of the more geometrically inclined works could be seen at Pierogi Gallery. Michael Schall's graphite on paper drawings (below) are, again, impressive but somewhat empty upon sustained examination. His imagined worlds are actually surprisingly unimaginative, bearing strong marks of a kind of David Lynchian industrial chic, but cleaned and sanitized to such an extent that the drawings undermine their own internal logic. These are stuctures devoid of any human touch and as such lose all sense of either foreboding or aspiration that might otherwise have been attached to such images.

Of all the drawings I saw, those that appealed most to me were the works of Markus Amm at The Breeder Gallery. Their simplicity and clarity are an antidote to the more over wrought work of his contemporaries. However, since then I have seen a larger body of his work of his online and it is apparent that his drawings in color lean towards an increasing content. Nonetheless these too manage to work against the odds.