Works That Play With Time

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/arts/design/drawing-center-reopens-with-guillermo-kuitca-show.html

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The distance between youthful and venerable, like that between experimental and traditional, can seem to pass in a flash. The flash is 35 years in the case of the Drawing Center, which opened as a hopeful newcomer in SoHo in 1977 and reopens with museum status in the same neighborhood next week, after a year’s renovation and expansion.

The upgrade gives the museum, housed in a 19th-century cast-iron-and-limestone building on Wooster Street, more than twice the space it had, with two galleries on the ground floor, a third in the basement and offices tucked away upstairs. The design, by Claire Weisz of the New York firm WXY Architecture & Urban Design, is solid, attractive and conventional, a description that also applies to two of the three inaugural exhibitions.

The largest is devoted to the Argentine painter Guillermo Kuitca, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1961, lives there still and has been an international presence since the 1980s. His semiabstract pictures are often based on maps and architectural plans, including theater interiors (Mr. Kuitca has worked as a set designer) and domestic spaces (he sometimes paints on mattresses rather than canvases). The human figure rarely appears.

In the past I’ve had problems with his painting, finding it ponderously operatic in its imagery though oddly unincisive and unresolved in tone. His recent work at the Drawing Center makes a stronger impression, partly because it takes irresolution as its premise and builds on it.

In the early 1990s Mr. Kuitca began to repurpose unfinished paintings that he had abandoned as misfires. He took each reject, stretched it over the top of a circular table in his studio and began to add to it, bit by bit, in deliberately circumscribed three-month or six-month sessions. It’s work of this kind — recuperative, exploratory, time based — that we see in the exhibition “Guillermo Kuitca: Diarios,” organized by the Drawing Center’s executive director, Brett Littman.

Each of the show’s 17 pieces, which date from 2005 to 2012, has been treated as a kind of giant notebook page, which the artist has covered with cartoonish doodles, jotted-down names and telephone numbers and notes to self, and scraps of paper, preserving the everyday flotsam that has passed through his mind and through his studio within a given time.

The accumulation isn’t entirely unregulated. Traces of the original paintings are still visible and to some degree determine what added ingredients went where. But over all the new mixed-media pieces come across as open-ended exercises in improvisation and experimentation, with the process concluding almost arbitrarily when the allotted time period is up and a new piece is ready to be started.

With their dense randomness, the Diarios feel more vivacious, organic and complex than Mr. Kuitca’s earlier paintings. And considering the successive, back-to-back production of the works, their stylistic variety is remarkable. One dated May 25 to Oct. 20, 2005, is a fireworks display of rich color. A second, done between Oct. 20, 2005, and March 14, 2006, is all cool white and blue, like Earth seen from outer space. Its successor, begun on March 14, 2006, resembles a blackboard marked with chalk.

And Mr. Kuitca’s instinct for dramatic images is still with him. In one piece the latticelike form of a genealogical chart, left over from a discarded painting, has been festooned with loosely stroked vegetal and insectlike forms, as if the family tree were lying in a grass field teeming with life. In another a ghostly image of an opera house interior, formed from slivers of cut white paper, is punctuated by a tiny cloud of shredded red paper, like a spritz of confetti.

Certain works, especially those with floating cartoon heads and eyes, call to mind the brilliant, diarylike drawings of a great earlier Argentine artist, Alberto Greco (1931-65). But Greco was a radical, driven soul; his manic images jab like expletives. Mr. Kuitca is a more traditional sort of artist, and the Diarios, with their dynamic of slow, ruminative addition, make steadiness rather than brilliance their strength.

In conjunction with its interior expansion, the Drawing Center has announced the start of a long-term initiative to exhibit Latin American drawing. Mr. Kuitca’s appearance is part of that plan; so is a concurrent solo show of recent art by the Colombian artist José António Suárez Londoño.

Mr. Londoño, who was born in 1955 and lives in Medellin, is a revered figure in his home country, though still little known here. Like Mr. Kuitca he is involved in a time-based project. For several years he has been systematically producing a drawing a day based on books he is reading, most of them diaries (Franz Kafka, Paul Klee), fiction (W. G. Sebald, Ovid) and poetry (Blaise Cendrars, Patti Smith). He has so far completed some 5,000 drawings, contained in 65 pocket-size notebooks that he refers to as “yearbooks.”

His exhibition, organized by Claire Gilman, a curator at the Drawing Center, has a small sampling, including illustrations for Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and poems by Arthur Rimbaud. In almost every case the connection of illustrations to texts is oblique, making the drawings essentially independent works. And they offer many pleasures. The style is fine-grained, the images imaginative, the miniature scale appealing.

There’s really nothing not to like, which turns out to be a problem; most of the work is pleasing to the point of being precious, even when the texts illustrated are not. It’s nice to see that cruel, sexy Ovid bring out the vinegar in Mr. Londoño’s art. Maybe a different selection of notebooks might give a different impression of his work over all. We won’t know until we get a larger show.

The third of the inaugural offerings, “In Deed: Certificates of Authenticity in Art,” installed in a basement gallery called the Lab, is the oddest, and the most interesting, to think about if not to look at. Put together by a pair independent curators, Susan Hapgood and Cornelia Lauf, it’s an assemblage of historical documents, some of them drawings, some not; some, technically, not even art.

The show basically traces, over 50 years, the practice by which artists have sought legal ways to control ownership of their work, whether in selling it or promoting it or controlling its fate once out of their hands. In every case signed contracts that establish authorship have become de rigueur.

Some certificates of authenticity, like those used by Judith Barry and Haim Steinbach, are straightforward: one-page descriptions of the work in question signed by the artist.

Others are more complicated. The French artist Daniel Buren’s contract, lengthy and written in serious legalese, includes the stipulation that he will have a say in how and where the work is shown even after it has been sold, and that this right will extend to heirs. Mr. Buren is a Conceptualist, and the arrival of Conceptual Art in the 1960s threw standard definitions of ownership, authenticity and art to the winds. Suddenly an empty gallery or a conversation or a set of instructions, or the idea behind any of those, could be a work of art, irrefutably, if the artist signed a contract saying so.

Through contracts Sol LeWitt authorized the creation of wall drawings under his name but executed, in his absence, by trained assistants. Ben Vautier, the Fluxus cutup, signed contracts verifying to collectors that he was indeed the creator of the works they had purchased, one of which took the form of Mr. Vautier kicking a particular person — presumably the collector could specify whom — “in the posterior with my special shoe.”

And just as art could be brought into being by contract, it could be contractually removed from circulation. When a collector, the architect Philip Johnson, did not pay Robert Morris for a work he had ostensibly purchased, Mr. Morris drew up a certificate of deauthorization that officially withdrew all aesthetic content from his piece, making it nonexistent as art.

But long before any of this, it was Marcel Duchamp who simplified everything by turning the certificate of authenticity itself, and by extension the artist’s signature, into art: you composed it, signed it and sold it, or, in his case, paid your dentist with it.

Some viewers may find “In Deed” a bit too dry and hands-offish for a drawing show, but a reading of the excellent, witty catalog, full of historical truths that illuminate new art today, should remedy that. And in any case, it’s exactly the kind of show that big museums and commercial galleries don’t give us and that the new-old Drawing Center should consistently accommodate.

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, SoHo, reopens on Thursday with three exhibitions: “Guillermo Kuitca: Diarios,” “José António Suárez Londoño: The Yearbooks” and “In Deed: Certificates of Authenticity in Art,” through Dec. 9; (212) 219-2166, drawingcenter.org.