The New Yorker – May 13, 2019

6 THENEWYORKER,M AY 13, 2019

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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LYLES & KING, NEW YORK; PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARLES BENTON

In 1972, Mira Schor, a graduate student in the inaugural class of the history-

altering feminist-art program at CalArts, was assigned to make a “self image.”

The result is a deftly sketched nude, which pairs text and image—now a

hallmark of the esteemed New York painter and writer’s visual work—and

leads viewers through a mythopoetic body scan: “My Brain Is a Shelter,” “My

Eyes Are Shelters,” “My Hands Are Shelters.” Visitors to Schor’s exquisite

exhibition “California Paintings,” at the Lyles & King gallery (through

May 19), are bound to agree. The class assignment is an outlier here; most

of the fifty-some paintings, made between 1971 and 1973, are jewel-toned

gouaches on paper, full of stories but empty of words. A collective portrait

emerges of the artist as a young woman, creating the world in her own

image. The pictures, with their abundance of succulents, moon phases, and

spirit animals, can also feel almost uncannily current—I half expected to

see one of the young Miras reading a Sally Rooney book.—Andrea K. Scott

AT THEGALLERIES

ILLUSTRATION BY SEBASTIAN CURI

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“Radicalism in the Wilderness”

Japan Society

This fascinating exhibition focusses on strains

of Japanese Conceptualism that were developed

outside of Tokyo, in the nineteen-sixties, by

artists geographically removed from the bet-

ter-known Gutai and Mono-ha movements.

The intriguing career of the Shimo Suwa-based

artist Yutaka Matsuzawa and his search for an

“invisible” art is charted in detail, from his early

interest in parapsychological happenings to his

later mail-art and text works, which were meant

to prompt meditative visualization. Striking

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it: Leontyne Price singing the “Habanera”

aria from “Carmen” on a five-minute loop.

The repetition provides sonic structure for

the sprawling, moving, untitled installation.

The trunks of two mammoth trees—a red-

wood and a Scots pine, felled after dying

on private land in California—rest side by

side on dollies, at the north end of the seven-

thousand-square-foot gallery, like a couple

lying in state. A dense tangle of the trees’

branches lines the eastern wall, as does a row

of benches. The lights are off, and the only

illumination arrives, along with perplexed

visitors, through a narrow aperture in the

wall, sliced from ceiling to floor in front of

a picture window. (Donnelly has rerouted

people from the standard entrance and exit.)

As Price sings, in French, “Love is a rebel-

lious bird,” thoughts turn to the speeds of

life—swift for a bird, slow for a tree—and the

increasing threat of human beings to the nat-

ural world.—Andrea K. Scott (Through May 19.)

Doreen Garner

JTT

DOWNTOWN In 2018, thanks to the efforts of

protesters, the city removed a Central Park

statue of “the father of modern gynecology,”

J. Marion Sims, who performed involuntary

surgeries on enslaved women without anes-

thesia. Garner makes the medical abuse of

African-American women the subject of her

illuminating work, countering such monu-

ments with mournfully gruesome sculptures.

For her début with the gallery, the Brooklyn

artist presents five chilling new objects made

of fleshy silicone, slick urethane plastic, and

synthetic hair, among other materials. In

“Olympia,” the black maid and the white

courtesan portrayed in Manet’s famous

painting are reduced to surreal sex organs

positioned on dark-stained wooden shelves.

“Betsey’s Flag”—its title a reference to both

Betsy Ross and to one of Sims’s unconsenting

“patients”—is a damning revision of Old

Glory’s stars-and-stripes design, sewn from

skinlike brown strips.—J.F. (Through May 26.)

Fairfield Porter

Cuningham

DOWNTOWN Eight small oil studies exemplify

the urbane nonchalance of this American

painter, who was also an influential art critic.

Made near the end of his life, while Porter

was teaching at Amherst College (he died in

1975, at the age of sixty-eight), the canvases

concisely capture his New England envi-

rons. A vista of trees, quietly resplendent

in their fall foliage, and a wintry scene of

the college grounds are fully articulated;

by contrast, one untitled work, identified

as a “view of large green tree,” is a blur of

speedy gestures, as if observed from a car

window. (Porter held tight to representa-

tional painting during the height of Abstract

Expressionism, but he wasn’t immune to the

movement’s appeal.) This compact show also

includes several spidery preparatory draw-

ings—nothing to write home about—and an

earlier, much larger portrait, “Jerry,” from

1955. Set at a breakfast table, it depicts the
      artist’s blasé teen-age son, dressed neatly for
      school but still in his slippers.—J.F. (Through
      May 24.)

images from a 1970 performance by GUN

(Group Ultra Niigata), titled “Event to Change

the Image of Snow,” catch the avant-gardists

spraying a snowy landscape with primary-col-

ored pigments, in the hopes of brightening

Niigata’s long winter and burnishing the

prefecture’s provincial reputation. The Flux-

us-inspired collective the Play is represented

by images of its “Voyages” series. For one of

these events, eleven members herded a group

of sheep from Kyoto to just outside Osaka; for

another, they launched a giant fibreglass egg

from a fishing boat. Intended to travel to the

U.S. on ocean currents, it has not been sighted

since 1968.—Johanna Fateman (Through June 9.)

Trisha Donnelly

The Shed

CHELSEA You hear this American artist’s pro-

foundly thoughtful exhibition before you see

This enticing pair is a reassuring testament to

the genre’s health.—Briana Younger (May 13.)

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