ArtSeen
JOE FIG Project Room and Work in Progress
P.S.1 – MoMA
PROJECT ROOM
PLUS ULTRA GALLERY
WORK IN PROGRESS | SEPTEMBER 14 – OCTOBER 14, 2001
In Project Room, a three-person show at P.S.1, and in Work in Progress, a solo show at the new and very small Plus Ultra Gallery, Joe Fig presents his dioramas of artists in their studios. In a funny conflation of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Hans Namuth, we see a bulky de Kooning out at East Hampton with his slippers and overalls, pre-Alzheimer paintings stacked around him. Barnett Newman relaxes with a cigarette in a chair before a few tableaux, contemporary artist Steve DeFrank considers his containers of Lite-Brites, and a sickly Matisse snips colored paper for the collages as he lies propped-up in bed. The P.S.1 show includes only the dioramas, and none of the photographs that seem at least an equal part of Fig’s endeavor.
The dioramas are impressive in their detail: everything feels accounted for, down to the dirty floorboards and each hair in the paintbrushes. Plus Ultra includes only one diorama among the photographs, and it is built into the wall; one cannot, as at P.S.1, walk all the way around the piece to examine it from different angles. This restriction adds to the way the space is experienced, and makes the interior and exterior lighting appear much more miraculous. When they are freestanding, the dioramas feel oddly unresolved, literally unwilling to take a position. They appear crafty, and much more like objects than discrete moments. The photographs further liberate the works from their objecthood, allowing the scenes to expand into narratives. Objects blur out of focus, obscuring, at least initially, the awkward details that root the pictures firmly in artifice. One thinks of a host of references, including Thomas Demand, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Laurie Simmons, and the various Miniature World-type tourist attractions. But the kind of ontological games Fig plays with his photographs find their earliest expression in Victorian allegorical studies in which the photograph’s elegiac properties are manipulated. Artists like Henry Peach Robinson set up Neo-Gothic tableaux of women actors of funeral biers, taking advantage of our trust of images (which at that time was yet unharmed by digital technology) to collapse living and dead. Time is caught, and its passage disregarded. The other profound effect of photography, of course, is its contempt for scale. This is what truly separates Fig’s photographs from their dependent models. It is true that there is something enjoyable in discovering those moments where Fig isn’t quite able to flawlessly scale down the materials of our world to the world of his artist-subjects. But by opening up the scale, the photographs enlarge the scope of Fig’s project. We are allowed across decades and/or distances into these private moments, and once we figure out the proof, can come and go as we please.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Looking Back, and Forward, as Ma-Yi Celebrates 30 Years of Innovative Work
By Billy McEnteeMAR 2020 | Theater
The Obie and Lucille Lortel award-winning theater company started out in 1989 producing solely the work of Filipino American writers; while that has evolved, so has the theaters definition of what a Ma-Yi play is. And thats a strength: in a company whose ethos and blessings are fortified by its creators, each new playwright brings with themto Ma-Yis numerous productions and artistic programstheir own world and experiences to expand and delight the companys evolving landscape of thought-provoking, envelope-pushing American plays.

Printmaking and Studio Work
DEC 19-JAN 20 | Critics Page
I have difficulty imagining what my work today might be, or look like, if I had never made prints. I take for granted so much of the experience made possible by the printing process that subsequently circled back into my studio, that I find it impossible to sort it all out and remember, let alone understand, what comes from where.
Grace Notes: Pam Tanowitz and Simone Dinnerstein’s New Work for Goldberg Variations
By Rachel StoneFEB 2020 | Dance
The ushers at the New York City premiere of choreographer Pam Tanowitz and pianist Simone Dinnersteins New Work for Goldberg Variations at The Joyce Theater warn me that the program is 75 minutes75 minutes!with no intermission. Its possible they have to tell me this, but either way, the length of Bachs Goldberg Variations (which, apocrypha alleges, he composed in 1741 as an anti-Scheherazade to help an insomniac count finally sleep) intimidates.

Artists Choose Artists
By Joyce BeckensteinDEC 19-JAN 20 | ArtSeen
Every three years, the Parrish Art Museum curators relinquish their decision-making powers to a team of well-established artists who judge a competition. Artists Choose Artists is an exhibition of works by seven jurors and 21 selectees. For this fourth iteration the jurorsLillian Ball, Ralph Gibson, Valerie Jaudon, Jill Moser, Alexis Rockman, Lucien Smith, and Allan Wexlersorted through 300 online portfolios and visited selected studios of artists residing within local zip codes. In prior years this arduous exercise raised the question, how do artists who are not curators choose? This year, jurors tended to pick artists whose work resonates with their own styles, their choices and juxtapositions uncannily and unexpectedly raising intriguing and urgent issues.