This week in Newly Reviewed, Travis Diehl covers the ramblings of Tinmantis, Jill Magid’s politics, a gory group show and Erin Johnson’s look at Lawrence, Kan., after “The Day After.”
Lower East Side
Tinmantis
Through July 25. Foreign & Domestic, 24 Rutgers Street; 929-426-4978, foreigndomestic.io.
Tinmantis, a mysterious, pseudonymous artist who works out of a garage in suburban Charlotte, N.C., combines the logorrhean wit of Raymond Pettibon with the fluency of a meme account admin, cranking out one cutting cultural observation after another.
This exhibition features 10 paintings on oversize poster paper, but given more gallery space, there could be hundreds. Their motifs favor aliens, medievalism and druggy doodles, delivered at formidable scale and intensity. One painting of a fortification includes a drawing of a car’s remote door lock, described like a spell: “when I click this … it locks.” Our society may possess amazing technology, but we haven’t outgrown the appeal of seeming magic.
Other works blend fandom and mockery. One picture features realistic chrome auto decals of Jeff Koons’s rabbit and balloon animal sculptures, while another praises the “imperial majesty” of the edgelord artist Jordan Wolfson.
The paintings on view also include nods to black metal, William Blake’s visionary illustrations of Dante’s hell and Philip Guston’s “hoods” paintings. Overall, the show addresses viewers the way people soliloquize online, hoping (knowing) that others are watching. Tinmantis enumerates the world’s grim checklist: Text on one of the first works lists general tragedies like addiction and despair, as well as searing personal loss: “death of my parents,” “death of my brother.” Check, check, check.
Chelsea
Jill Magid
Through July 17. Olney Gleason, 509 West 27th Street; 212-563-4474, olneygleason.com.
The Supreme Court’s decision reaffirming birthright citizenship and the country’s 250th birthday both coincide with an exhibit of work by Jill Magid focused on one particular ritual of U.S. democracy: the Rose Garden public address.
Several wall works, sculptures and neons engage with the vulgar patriotism of executive orders and speeches from 1973 to the present (during Magid’s lifetime). A set of drawings in calligraphic text (penned by Pat Blair, a former White House chief scribe), like tag clouds, convey the frequency, in official transcripts, of applause, booing and moments of silence, among other tropes. Many of these same words appear in neon signs hanging in the main gallery that glow on and off, as if choreographed to some ghostly master speech.
Magid pays special attention to a peculiar piece of presidential swag: the signing pen. A large frame in the gallery contains facsimiles of a few mostly symbolic executive orders that pertain to the artist’s life (and millions of others), as published in the Federal Register, on subjects including motherhood, Judaism and the arts. Magid signed each below the presidential signature, then framed the pen she had used, too. Ronald Reagan’s 1986 declaration of a national day of Jewish Heritage, for instance, is mounted above a pen engraved with the phrase, “Now, Therefore, I am Jewish.”
The work asserts Magid’s citizenship, and her stake in government; at the same time, the artworks demonstrate a kind of impotence, where the political gestures available to the average American feel more like spectatorship or consumption than effective participation.
Two bronze casts of the artist’s heart, made from a medical scan, sit on short Corinthian columns, bought — per the framed certificate of authenticity nearby — from the “White House Gift Shop” (there is a privately owned business by that name, but it has no connection to the government). A third heart sits on a low set of marble stairs, pointed toward the neons, as if listening to the silent speech.
Chinatown
‘New Grotesque’
Through July 26. Management, 39 East Broadway; 347-494-0438, management.nyc.
This collection of meaty horrors features sculptures and paintings in a gory, gothic vein. There are impish characters with big pointy ears and multiple teats lounging on an angled rod in the sculpture “Chimeras (Evelyn, Marian),” by Linda Marwan. In Willehad Eilers’s painting “Das rote pferd,” a thoroughbred is getting drunk. The overt violence and bleakness carry undertones of sex and humor.
The show has one especially rare attraction: “Le Chant de Maldoror,” a large drawing by Sibylle Ruppert, a Swiss artist known for depicting psychedelic hybrids of muscles, leather and machines. This irrational combination of glistening anatomy evokes a Surrealist exquisite corpse; rendered in white pencil on black paper, the details can seem revolting as they resolve, but the overall effect is of fascination. See this specimen while you can: Ruppert, who died in 2011, has never had a solo show in the United States.
Lower East Side
Erin Johnson
Through Aug. 1. Essex Flowers, 19 Monroe Street; essexflowers.us.
Basically anyone alive in Lawrence, Kan., in 1983 remembers it like yesterday — few people could forget the time they survived a nuclear attack.
Not a real attack, fortunately, but the filming of “The Day After,” a prime-time TV movie that meant to hammer home the terrible reality of Cold War brinkmanship gone wrong. The production employed thousands of locals as extras, dressed up like the walking wounded, covered in “ash mixture” and prosthetic burns.
In Erin Johnson’s multichannel video, several of the survivors recount their ordeals of radiation poisoning and emotional shock, seemingly still in character. The mayor recalls feeling powerless to help the weary thousands. The town archivist flips through grisly production stills.
Nobody mentions the film, and it’s eerily easy to become absorbed in their descriptions of the dead and dying civilians, forgetting they’re discussing a staged mass casualty event. The artist told me she first filmed the piece in 2018 but held off releasing it because of simmering political anxiety. Unfortunately, it seems that work about nuclear holocaust will always seem timely.
See the June gallery shows here.
