Pippa Garner, “Misc. Pippa”
Matthew Brown Gallery | 390 Broadway
Through January 25, 2025
Pippa Garner's work was deservedly featured in this year's Whitney Biennial, but I was disappointed by how the artist's work was awkwardly isolated in the museum’s third-floor gallery, which always feels like an office-building hallway leading to the bathrooms. Walking into Matthew Brown Gallery in Tribeca was a relief; “Misc. Pippa” shows us what could have been at the Whitney. The California-based artist, who began by modifying appliances and cars, before turning to surgery and hormones to transform her body, is equal parts comedian and inventor. In 1982, she appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (she was then presenting as a man), wearing a midriff-baring “Half-Suit” and later showing off her prototype of a high-heeled roller skate.
It's this character from decades ago who we see in Un(tit)led (Your Waiter Pippa), n.d./2024, a large-scale, color photograph of the artist as a bow-tie-wearing server in a mustard jacket, holding a pink ceramic tea service with two hands, while a third arm—a prosthetic—lifts a tray of cocktails up high. The various sculptural objects gathered here create their own sensory landscapes, such as a chair covered in toilet plunger suction cups (Suctionaire Chair, 1989/2024) and a square block of hair (Pubic’s Cube, 1982-83/2024) that sits on a plinth like a mad mashup of Méret Oppenheim and Donald Judd. (The object description confesses that the hair is fake). Gender play, altered anatomy, and gadgetry are through lines in Garner’s slapstick, visionary work.
Lee Mary Manning, “Kiss of the Sun”
Canada | 60 Lispenard Street
Through January 11, 2025
Lee Mary Manning's third solo presentation with CANADA sees the artist refining and expanding their signature practice of point-and-shoot prints juxtaposed or collaged in their own frames. Though there are no moving pictures here, Manning may best be understood as akin to a filmmaker in the mold of Jonas Mekas; they are always shooting a continuous film, it seems. Manning is deeply attuned to the choreography and poetry of the city, with its interplay of macro and micro, and the irrepressible force of nature always threatening to sprout through the cracks and into the sunlight. It’s a pleasure to live in Manning’s New York, to see it as though looking over their shoulder. In “Kiss of the Sun,” we get just a glimpse at an edit, or a series of outtakes, from an ever-evolving cinematic project.
The work has grown busier and more textured over time, with more images in frames here, and an influx of non-photographic elements, such as patterned cloth or corrugated cardboard. The robin’s egg blue-backed composition, News From Nowhere (all works are from 2024), incorporates a plastic bag with dried flowers among artfully blurry Polaroids. But two of the strongest works are single large-format photographs. On which the lonely moonlight sleeps, shows a park bench overgrown with weeds, and Single Stroke Broadest Brush, captures a hand on a ledge at night in front of dark body of water. In The Unsophisticated Arts (For Mary H.), a set of photos makes one collaged snaking line: from a large-format print depicting a braid descending from the back of a head until its plait is diverted by a small photo of child’s slide, which extends down further to a third photo of a necktie all together charting a tube-like form. As with the many visual trails Manning makes traceable, I’m happy to follow along.
Alex Katz and Matthew Barney, “The Bitch”
O'Flaherty's | 165 Allen Street
Through December 19, 2024
I love New York, I found myself saying as I left a show I expected to hate. There are paintings here, on the second floor, by the nonagenarian Alex Katz (big, monochromatic, orange-on-white works) and industrial-seeming sculptures by Matthew Barney. (Is that a jockstrap made of lead, Teflon, and petroleum jelly hanging from the wall?) But the exhibition’s raison d'être is the video playing across three monitors on the ground floor of the raw space, above the bar that serves as the gallery desk.
The multichannel film, by Barney, provides a rare glimpse of Katz at work in his studio as three cameras track and record his movements. (He’s shown working on the aforementioned orange paintings.) It could be a canonizing project, watching the old lion stalk through his studio, instead, it’s a hilarious and delightfully weird subversion of that idea, as the recorded audio is spiked with exaggerated Foley effects. The paint slurps across the surface, the brush thwacks the canvas. It’s more Buster Keaton than one of those ponderous documentaries that casts an aging painter, like Anselm Kiefer, as an alchemist performing some mysterious rite.
Why did I think I was going to hate the show? It’s called “The Bitch,” a provocation both tired and puerile. (“Two Dicks” might be more fitting.) The video is titled DRAWING RESTRAINT 28, 2024, situating it within Barney’s ongoing (since 1987) performative series wherein physical restraints challenge and restrict his ability to make marks. Here, the impediment may be time itself and its impact on the aging body. (Is time the titular bitch?) A sense of humor and an element of self-parody turns macho posturing, long a feature of Barney’s oeuvre, into gold. It’s a must see-event that closes soon. Bonkers but brilliant.
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