George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "A Conflict of Minimalist Interests" @wsj by Lance Esplund

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "A Conflict of Minimalist Interests" @wsj by Lance Esplund

'Breda' (1986) Bill Jacobson Studio

Beacon, N.Y.

Retired New York artist Carl Andre is a founding father of American Minimalism—a postwar movement of utopian abstraction so spare, clean and reductive that you could mistake its paintings for blank white canvases and its sculptures for empty packing crates. He's also among the contemporary art world's greatest living conundrums.

Carl Andre:

Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010

Dia:Beacon

Through March 2, 2015

His austere, human-scaled sculptures usually comprise numerous pieces of unaltered industrial building supplies such as bricks, stones, two-by-fours, lead pipes, square metal plates and blocks of concrete or rough-hewn timber. Specified numbers of these nearly identical units are usually laid flat on the floor or ground and lined up end-to-end, back-to-back or stacked and combined in various permutations. Unjoined and untransformed, they are arranged with mathematical precision, by human hands, with only gravity to hold them in place.

At Dia:Beacon—Minimalism's mecca on the Hudson—you may not immediately recognize some of Mr. Andre's works as sculptures, as in his signature flat-plate, metal-grid carpets such as "46 Roaring Forties" (1988). A rectangular floor arrangement of 46 one-foot-square steel plates, it's literally a pathway, and the only place in Dia where visitors are encouraged—challenged—to walk on art. "Actually," Mr. Andre has repeatedly stated since the 1960s, "my ideal piece of sculpture is a road."

Born in Quincy, Mass., in 1935, Mr. Andre lives in Manhattan, where his work has been shown at the Paula Cooper Gallery since 1968. He stopped making art in 2010. Although Mr. Andre has been widely exhibited and collected in Europe, he hasn't had a retrospective in the U.S. since 1978-80.

Curiosity stirred, then, when the comprehensive retrospective "Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010" was scheduled to open at Dia. Co-curated by Yasmil Raymond and Philippe Vergne, the show will travel to Madrid, Berlin and then Paris. At Dia, it promised to be definitive—especially when the reclusive Mr. Andre temporarily came out of retirement to help install it.

Commanding a battery of enormous sun-washed galleries and bolstered by Dia's superb permanent collection of sculptures by Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson and Richard Serra, the Andre retrospective is methodical, handsome and perplexing—verging on clinical. In its blatant simplicity and transparency, it's among the most agreeable and undemanding assortments of objects I've ever encountered in a museum. But few major exhibitions have left me feeling as ambivalent. If you believed that a five-decade survey would finally illuminate Mr. Andre's oeuvre as either poetic or prosaic, you may discover, as I did, that it plays cagily in the margins. At times this show inspired keen sensitivity and Zen-like calm; at others it left me cold, bored as a stump—often within the same sculpture.

Without question, Mr. Andre is serious. A suite of videos at Dia show him waxing philosophically about art and painstakingly arranging his stripped-to-the-bone sculptures. He obviously cares. Or does he? Mr. Andre considers himself the first "poststudio" artist. Many of his sculptures' mundane materials can be factory ordered and installed by curators and collectors, and then disassembled and stored when not on view. (If you were so inclined, you could re-create your own Andres at home.)

One of his early assemblages, the unassuming and ephemeral earthwork "Joint" (1968/2014), can be seen slumping and decaying in the middle-distance from Dia's panoramic windows. Offhand, even charming, "Joint" consists of an uninterrupted 252-foot-long tawny column of 126 hay bales laid side-to-side, bisecting Dia's south field. Though stationary, "Joint" seemingly creeps up a gently sloping grassy hill, hugging the ground like a single-file exodus of grazing yellow sheep.

Inside Dia, "Sculpture as Place," self-effacing yet passive-aggressive, is not chronological but, rather, beautifully scattershot. We get walloped with understatement in near-gymnasium-scale galleries that offer a whole lot of not much at all. Mega-Minimalist sculptures waddle among ancient temple ruins, primitive dwellings, monuments and totems; graveyard, loading dock and lumberyard.

In "12 Mixed Pipe & Track Run" (1969), a forlorn line of slightly bent, rusty steel pipes suggests a giant whip or the massive severed tail of the nearby corner-hugging sculpture "9th Cedar Corner" (2007)—a tightly packed triangular grouping of 45 36-inch-tall, 12-by-12-inch blocks of Western red cedar. Elsewhere, waist-high solid-timber walls nearly barricade passage through the museum. In the 91-unit ziggurat "Triskaidek" (1979), similar timbers are stepped high against Dia's wall, suggesting flying buttresses or a pyramid face. And coiled across Dia's floors are wide bands of copper, lead, magnesium, tin and zinc. Luminous, they interrupt expanses of worn, warm-wood floors like whirlpools or mammoth snakes. Likewise, Mr. Andre's flat-plate-metal grid sculptures conjure reflecting pools.

But Mr. Andre's art eschews analogies. I sense he wants each abstraction to be what it is: nothing less; nothing more—even in "Breda" (1986), which refers to the 1624-25 siege and fall of the Dutch fortified city during the Eighty Years' War. "Breda" comprises 97 bricks of Belgian chalky-bone-blue limestone arranged in a column of crosses. It suggests a machine-tooled dinosaur spine, crenellated parapets, headstones and a long manned rowboat. But "Breda" never lets you forget the bare fact—the facelessness—of its humble materials and its modest manufacture, which brings me back to my conflicting responses to Mr. Andre's art.

Mr. Andre began as an erstwhile Dadaist and writer of Concrete Poetry. Displayed here are more than 200 of his visually dense, geometrically constructed typewritten poems, some of which resemble Dadaist graphic design or weavings, as well as several of his early, small, amusing Duchampian Readymades. Other inspirations include the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi, and Mr. Andre's employment in a factory and as a conductor for the Pennsylvania Railroad. A trip to Stonehenge cemented Mr. Andre's desire to pursue sculpture. But the irreverent Readymade—not the singular, enigmatic beauty of Stonehenge or the pared-down essences of Brancusi—is the core influence behind Mr. Andre's cool Conceptualism.

Heightening awareness, "Sculpture as Place" reminds us that the repetition of almost anything can get at the essentials of art. At Dia, I became acutely aware of distinctions among different wood grains, knots and textures; among different colorations and striations in individual bricks and stones. I compared the temperature and shimmer of various metals; the densities among pine, aluminum, concrete and hot-rolled steel. But I recalled that I've had equally expansive experiences perusing aisles of goods at the lumberyard and the hardware store.

Ultimately, Mr. Andre's store-bought, chance-based oeuvre is a gamble, if not a gambit. Provocative yet evasive, his sculptures demand too much and too little: They ask that you question what is and isn't art. But they don't do much else. En masse, their militant informality conveys distance and neglect—dumbing down sculpture to its least common denominator. Art is a dialogue among artist, artwork and viewer. In Mr. Andre's monumental Minimalism, objects are multiplied but not transformed. There's little sense of call-and-response. The artist, in absentia, leaves viewers to do most of the heavy-lifting.

Mr. Esplund writes about art for the Journal.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Recycled History" @wsj RICHARD B. WOODWARD

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Recycled History" @wsj RICHARD B. WOODWARD


'A Gold Merchant/James Bond' from 'Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima)' (2010-2011) Rennie Collection

Chicago

'Metamorphology," the needlessly forbidding title of Simon Starling's midcareer retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is a well-intentioned word designed to express what a shape-shifter the British artist has been.

His engagement with transformation was first widely observed in 2005 when he won the Turner Prize, in part for "Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No. 2)." A documented performance as well as a feat of carpentry, it involved his remaking an old wooden German shed into a boat, piloting it down the Rhine River, then hammering it into a shed again once he reached Basel, Switzerland.

There, in a museum, the leaky structure resides. (It hasn't made the Atlantic crossing. To plug this hole in the survey, Mr. Starling's first major U.S. museum show, the curators have substituted a more recent nautical adventure.)

As with many Conceptual artists, a lengthy wall text is required for his pieces to make sense. Some visitors may continue to feel, even after learning about all the Modernist art-history references that guided his hand, that the destination isn't worth the trip.

Not that you need a graduate degree to be impressed by Mr. Starling. Convoluted though his thinking can be, his art has evident respect for labor and skill, avoids sensationalism and mockery, and invites serious reflection, even laughter. The environmental warnings embedded in many pieces are never doctrinaire.

His primary concern is archaeological. He wants to expose, as senior curator Dieter Roelstraete puts it, "the accrued histories of things." The fewer than 20 works here—sculpture, photography, film and video installation—faithfully represent Mr. Starling's whirring, digressive mind.

Take, for instance, the five platinum prints in "One Ton II" (2005) in the first room. The scene in the photographs is a pit mine in South Africa. The weighty title, we are informed, refers to the amount of ore that must be disgorged from the earth to extract 28.3 ounces of the precious metal used to make these prints.

In other words, what we see in a work of art is, in part, the materials that compose it, and those in turn are the residue of human muscle and ingenuity, and of economic forces and industrial processes we should be more aware of.

Born in England in 1967 and living now in Copenhagen, Mr. Starling studied at the Glasgow School of Art, an institution famous for training artists to be attuned to the social context of making and exhibiting art. (During the past 15 years its graduates have dominated the annual Turner Prize. The list of others from there who have either won or been short-listed includes Douglas Gordon, Nathan Coley, Richard Wright, Martin Boyce and Karla Black.)

Mr. Starling tries to be cognizant of place when designing or installing his art. "Bird in Space" (2004), made for one of his New York gallery exhibitions, refers to a landmark legal case from 1926 when Constantin Brancusi's bronze sculpture was seized by U.S. Customs and taxed as a functional metal utensil. In 1928 a judge ruled in Brancusi's favor, a decision that opened the door to artists eventually having the right to declare almost anything a work of art.

Mr. Starling's updated version consists of a 4,900-pound slab of steel that leans against a wall. The skinny pedestal for this massive object, which could be a 1970s-era Richard Serra, is a trio of helium-filled inflatable rubber bladders. Lettering on the slab declares it came from a foundry in Romania, Brancusi's birthplace. What isn't visible is that the metal was imported into the U.S. only after years of deal-making over steel tariffs by unions, world-trade organizations and politicians, including George W. Bush and Tony Blair. By extension, probably every object found in any museum in the world is there not only to showcase artistic talent across the ages, but also because behind-the-scenes forces, including tax laws, have fostered their collection and display.

Mr. Starling often tunnels so deeply into art politics that any chance of having a more direct communion with an audience is lost. "Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima)"—an installation from 2010 combining a 30-minute narrated video projected on a screen with carved wooden masks on sticks—has more walk-on players and heavy themes than a PBS miniseries. Selected here for its relationship to local history, it alludes to Henry Moore's sculpture "Nuclear Energy" (1964-66) at the University of Chicago, installed to commemorate the site of the world's first nuclear reactor. Not content with that episode for drama, Mr. Starling braids it together with the stories of art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, Ian Fleming and James Bond, financier and art collector Joseph Hirschhorn, and Colonel Sanders. Interwoven with their biographies is a Noh drama about a 16th-century Japanese nobleman.

It's not that Mr. Starling fails to connect the dots between, say, Hirschhorn's shady uranium investments in Canada and Modern art and the atomic age; it's that the tale is better suited to an essay or a novel or a documentary film. The Japanese masks of the characters, which we see being carved in the video and which occupy one half of the room, are superfluous.

"Autoxylopyrocycloboros" (2006), among Mr. Starling's most popular works, is more effective and compact. Marking his return to the water and to reclamation, it's a 4-minute slide show that chronicles his 4-hour ride in a small wooden steamboat on Scotland's picturesque Loch Long.

He had rescued the antiquated craft from the bottom of the lake. During the course of his trip, Mr. Starling and his fellow crew member ruthlessly dismantle the boat, sawing off the gunnels and then working their way down, feeding boards into the stove that powers the engine. By the end nothing is left but the floor, and the boat sinks again to the depths of the lake.

With a title that joins Greek words for wood, fire and circularity, the piece has been read as a caution against our heedless use of the earth's resources. But it could just as easily be seen to be in favor of Cold War energy solutions; Loch Long is also home to two of Britain's nuclear submarine bases. Environmental politics aside, it's also like a silent film comedy: Laurel and Hardy go to sea.

Mr. Starling's career, according to the jargon of some curators, has been about "interrogating" Modernism. With its numerous allusions to Marcel Duchamp, Brancusi, Moore and other 20th-century artists and movements, his work is clearly well versed in the divagations of history. He has a scholar's nose for luminous facts that have been dimmed or buried by time.

But to walk through a show of his is like being assigned to read commentaries when you'd rather be spending a few hours with the original. Long before Mr. Starling and his mate burned their own boat, Buster Keaton stripped the wood off a train to power it in "The General," as did the Marx Brothers in "Go West." In the past, those who created funny bits about the paradoxical need to destroy things to survive were called entertainers, while anyone who does the same thing today, more self-consciously and less humorously, is called a Conceptual artist.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

"Hail, the Postwar Avant-Garde" @nytimes by By KAREN ROSENBERG

PURCHASE, N.Y. — About halfway through the 20th century, the international postwar artists who called themselves the Zero Group tried to hit the reset button. As they saw it, modern art had been irretrievably damaged by two world wars. The only thing to do was start over.

“The Art of Zero: Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker and Friends,” at the Neuberger Museum of Art, takes us back to that clean-slate moment. Its artworks soothe and pacify with flickering lights, gentle kinetic movements and endless variations on the white-on-white monochrome.

This concise 22-piece survey also whets the appetite for the Guggenheim’s big fall exhibition “Zero: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s,” opening in early October, the latest effort by American museums and galleries to address this branch of the postwar avant-garde. (Just last year, the Guggenheim explored the Zero-related Gutai movement.) Founded in Düsseldorf in 1957 by Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker, Zero was at heart a reaction to (some might say a repression of) Germany’s role in the Second World War. The word “zero” expressed, in Piene’s words, “a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning.” It had a major impact on a slightly younger generation of German artists, such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, who looked askance at Zero’s ethos of renewal and clarity (even while taking to heart its aversion to Expressionism). But the movement was not exclusive to Germany; it crossed borders, linking up with French Nouveau Réalisme, Italian Arte Povera and American Minimalism.

Photo
Günther Uecker’s “Column of Nails” (1964).CreditDavid La Spina/ESTO

More recently, Zero works have been turning up in droves at art fairs and in commercial galleries. (You suspect that this has as much to do with the clean, design-friendly look of the work as with its historical importance.)

Contemporary artists have also gravitated to Zero Group techniques, making rigorously formal abstract “paintings” with quasi-industrial materials like wood, nails and fabric. A sense of context has been lost, along with some of the more transient aspects of the movement: the manifestoes and one-day exhibitions, the use of ephemeral substances like light and smoke.

The small Neuberger show, organized by Avis Larson, the museum’s assistant curator, can’t quite recreate the Zero Group atmosphere. But it’s an unexpectedly rich, artist-driven selection. The works are drawn mainly from a subset of the Neuberger’s collection, the George and Edith Rickey Collection of Constructivist Art, assembled by Rickey, the American kinetic sculptor, and his wife. Many of the works on view were received as gifts or in exchange for artworks by Rickey; a few are personally inscribed.

Several are kinetic works powered by motors or magnets or both. (Most are timed to go off on the hour and the half-hour.) One or two need to be activated by the guard, like Hans Haacke’s “Slow Bubble” (1964-68), a small Plexiglas column containing a bubble of air trapped in a thick liquid; when the column is upended, the bubble rises.

Photo
"Atmosphère Chromoplastique No. 86” (1961), by Luis Tomasello, who became affiliated with Zero while in Paris.Credit2014 Artists 

The show has an enchanting set piece, a blue-walled gallery holding three works that twinkle, rotate and squirm. One is a newly restored light piece by Piene, which has not been seen in three decades; titled “Neon Medusa” (1969), it’s a spherical arrangement of 449 orange glow lamps (each one attached to a single gooseneck rod). The lamps, on timers, blink on and off so as to create varying impressions of sculptural volume.

It’s shown alongside a smaller light work by Piene, the pierced-brass ball “Little Light Satellite (Honolulu Model),” and Gianni Colombo’s elegant “Lo Spazio Elastico” (a suspended wire cube that becomes an animated wall projection with the help of motors and a spotlight).

Surrounding this room are paintings by Zero artists and their associates. A couple of works remind you that some “friends” of the movement are much better known today than its official founders; a Lucio Fontana “Spatial Concept” from 1968 — a pristine white canvas with three long vertical slashes — is prominently installed at the show’s entrance. (In the same firmament as Fontana, though not represented here, are Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni.)

Many other names, however, will seem relatively fresh to American viewers. One of the most astonishing works is a sensual twist on the monochrome grid painting by the Nul (Dutch for zero) artist Henk Peeters, made of cotton balls flattened by a thin veil of white silk.

Another rediscovery is the Brazilian artist Almir Mavignier, whose small, precise, optically confounding abstractions are among the few works in the show to use bright color and actual paint. Like the show’s other Latin American artists, the Venezuelan Jesús Rafael Soto and the Argentine Luis Tomasello, Mavignier became affiliated with Zero while working in Paris in the 1950s.

It will take a bigger show, like the Guggenheim’s, to map out the various global branches and offshoots of Zero. But “The Art of Zero” is an excellent primer, with enough urgency and dynamism to capture a moment compared by Piene to “the countdown when rockets take off.”

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Fischl Paints Art Fairs With Oils and Acid" @wsj by ANNA RUSSELL

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Fischl Paints Art Fairs With Oils and Acid" @wsj by  ANNA RUSSELL


'Art Fair: Booth #1 Oldenberg's Sneakers' by Eric Fischl Eric Fischl/Mary Boone Gallery, New York

For some, contemporary art fairs are places to see and be seen. For New York-based artist Eric Fischl, they're more like a series of bad dates. "It's like speed dating," he said. "People try to make instantaneous assessments."

Mr. Fischl, whose large-scale figurative paintings have long been fixtures on the contemporary art-fair circuit, has spent his four-decade career in the art world hiding out from such places. Nevertheless, in 2012, he picked up his camera and headed to Art Basel Miami Beach.

The resulting series, "Art Fair Paintings," will be on view at London's Victoria Miro Gallery from Oct. 14. The pictures offer sharp, often humorous takes on the contemporary art world. At age 66, Mr. Fischl casts a wry eye over the oddballs and sophisticates that wander the galleries in his dozen or so new works. "I finally decided to face the reality, which is that this is my milieu," he said.

Known for erotically charged suburban scenes, Mr. Fischl gained recognition in the 1980s with works like "Bad Boy," which depicts a young boy standing before a naked woman (his memoir from last year carries the same name). More recently, he has painted portraits of friends E.L. Doctorow and Steve Martin, sprawling beach scenes and large group portraits.

At auction, his works have sold in the high six figures or above (he set a personal record with his painting "Daddy's Girl," which sold for $1.9 million at Christie's in 2006). But at his home in bucolic Sag Harbor, where he lives full-time with his wife, the painter April Gornik, Mr. Fischl said he still feels like an outsider in the art world. He dislikes the crowds and the lack of space for quiet contemplation at art fairs. "It's so anti-art, it's a nightmare," he said.

"We don't have a lot of great places to go look at art," he said. "It seems like everything has to be shared by a crunch of people and a pressure to hurry up and get it."

Mr. Fischl went to Art Basel Miami Beach in search of "characters," he said. At the fair, he wandered the booths snapping pictures of interesting people. He photographed a woman in a flowing red dress and a man in dark sunglasses with his arms folded. He later visited Art Southampton, Frieze Art Fair New York, and gallery openings for additional material. At his studio, he used Photoshop to cut and paste the images into collages he found dynamic or compelling. These compositions became the basis for the large-scale canvases.

Eric Fischl, 'Art Fair: Booth #4 The Price' Eric Fischl/Mary Boone Gallery, New York

In one, "Art Fair: Booth #4 The Price," fashionably clad men and women mill about chatting or tapping their phones distractedly. Behind them, an enormous portrait of a naked woman by Joan Semmel goes nearly unnoticed. "They're texting, they're photographing, somehow they're mediating their moment," said Mr. Fischl. The title is a play on the Ken Price sculpture in the center of the group.

Mr. Fischl finds humor in the works but also said they're about "artists' intentions, artists' desires to connect, and how short that will fall." Art fairs create "a tension that I like as a dramatic moment," he said, "everybody at cross-purposes."

Painting the fairs has also been a technical challenge for the artist. The white-cube architecture of the booths presents new spatial problems, and trying to recreate the artwork on display—like the dusty orange and blue lips of an Andy Warhol "Mao" portrait in "Art Fair: Booth #16 Sexual Politics"—has expanded his color range beyond his usual palette.

One woman he followed through several display areas at Art Basel Miami was photography student Mariel Lebrija. On the day he photographed her, she wore a flat-brimmed hat and funky shoes and stopped to look closely at many of the works. Ms. Lebrija, 24, was surprised to see herself in one of Mr. Fischl's paintings over a year later at Frieze New York this past May, where a few of the paintings from the series were exhibited. "The first thing I recognized was my clothes," she said. "It was really funny."

The artist's longtime dealer Mary Boone, of New York's Mary Boone Gallery, said she sees echoes of his earlier work in the social commentary the new series offers—though this time it's directed at the art world. "He's pointing out there's a certain vanity to it," she said.

The timing of Mr. Fischl's show offers an added wink: it opens just before Frieze London. "People can go to the art fair and then they can come to my show and see what they look like," he said.

George Lindemann Journal "Brazilian Artist Beatriz Milhazes Takes Center Stage in the U.S." @wsj Kelly Crow

George Lindemann Journal "Brazilian Artist Beatriz Milhazes Takes Center Stage in the U.S." @wsj Kelly Crow


The Works of Beatriz Milhazes

Brazilian painter Beatriz Milhazes's explosive botanical scenes will be on display in her first solo museum show in the U.S. at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Above,'São Cosme e Damião,' (Saints Cosmas and Damian), 2014 Beatriz Milhazes/James Cohan Gallery, NY

Beatriz Milhazes's explosive botanical scenes have been coveted for years by collectors throughout South America and Europe, but on Sept. 19, the Brazilian painter will open her first solo museum show in the U.S. at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

The exhibit amounts to an official debut for the museum, the former Miami Art Museum that gained a new name when it moved into a sleek Herzog & de Meuron-designed building last year. PAMM has since held several group shows, but Ms. Milhazes's "Botânical Garden" represents its first retrospective, organized by its chief curator Tobias Ostrander.

Mr. Ostrander said he chose Ms. Milhazes because her Spirograph-like paintings of overlapping blossoms, stripes and unfurling leaves will likely resonate with audiences in Miami's climate—particularly the city's growing Brazilian diaspora.

The 50-work show also comes at a time when the artist appears to be moving away from her signature bouquets toward compositions that feature more geometric shapes and straight lines. "Beatriz's art was always sensual and dizzying, just sensory overload," Mr. Ostrander said. "She's moving more and more toward purely geometric forms."

From a market standpoint, her decision could be a risk. Over the past decade, major collectors have gravitated toward her more-is-more arrangements—in part because the cheeriness of her canvases seemed to match Brazil's economic rise. In May 2008, Buenos Aires collector Eduardo Costantini paid Sotheby's $1 million for her rainbow-hued "Magic" from 2001, tripling its high estimate. That painting will be part of the PAMM show, along with flowery pieces lent by heavyweights like German publisher Benedikt Taschen, Austrian philanthropist Francesca von Habsburg and Washington lobbyist Tony Podesta.

Ms. Milhazes, speaking from her studio in Rio de Janeiro, said her shift toward abstraction is actually her artistic equivalent of coming home—because the story of 20th century Brazil hinges heavily on geometry. Ms. Milhazes, who grew up in Brazil during an era of dictatorship, said her peers rarely got to see much contemporary art. But her mother was an art-history professor, so she learned about Brazil's latest art trends. Her family revered the Brazilian modernist painters of the 1930s, but the local art scene in the 1960s was all about the Neo-Concrete, a movement that prized art made using principles of geometry or movement rather than covering canvases in brushstrokes. Neo-Concrete stars included Lygia Clark, who cut shards of aluminumn to make origami-like sculptures, and Lygia Pape, who strung rows of gold thread to create obstacle course-like installations.

She knew about these Neo-Concrete artists, but she yearned to paint. Her first artist crush was Henri Matisse. In college, she studied journalism by day but took art classes at night and reveled in making collages from bits of fabric and colored paper. She attended Rio's carnivals and parades and took inspiration from the effusion of ruffles and undulation. With her parents' blessing, she started painting flowers with lacy curlicues in hot, Fauvist hues—but "I always felt like an outsider," she said.

Her painting methods also stood apart. In 1989, she began experimenting with how to create a painting that could ape the stacked look of a paper collage, with some elements hidden behind others. Her eureka moment hit when she used acrylic to paint on a clear sheet of plastic, then used glue and pressure to transfer her designs onto canvas. Sometimes the design flaked, but she liked the decayed look such "mistakes" produced, she said. Nobody in Brazil was applying this decal-like process to fine art, and it became her breakthrough.

She has built a glossary of motifs to lay and overlay, and the PAMM exhibition charts their evolution. In the early 1990s, her works contain tribal references and Baroque designs like ruffles, beads, and flowers; later, she adds Pop elements like hearts, peace signs and fruity headdress shapes that nod to her compatriot Carmen Miranda. The market tends to favor the "exploding circles" series that followed in the next decade, where works like "The Son of London" revolve around blossoming dahlia-like forms.

Two of the three new works in the Miami exhibit hint at where Ms. Milhazes could be headed, led by "Flowers and Trees." Gone are the frills and fruit, this canvas evokes a forest comprised almost entirely of circles. Ms. Milhazes, a former math teacher, said "there's always been structure" to her paintings; her new works simply reveal more of the scaffolding.

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "The Stuff of Life, Urgently Altered" @nytimes by HOLLAND COTTER

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "The Stuff of Life, Urgently Altered" @nytimes by HOLLAND COTTER

Sculpting With an Eye to Color

David Hammons’s “African American Flag” — with its Pan-African red and black stripes and green field of black stars — floats high over the sidewalk outside the Studio Museum in Harlem. Originally created nearly a quarter-century ago, it has become an identifying emblem for a museum dedicated to nurturing the careers of artists of African descent.

In 1980, Mr. Hammons himself was the beneficiary of that nurturing. A Los Angeles transplant still little known in New York, he was chosen that year to participate in the museum’s annual artists-in-residence program, which provides on-the-premises studio space, a stipend and a culminating exhibition. Today, he’s a star, the program continues, and work by its latest graduates is on view in a show called “Material Histories: Artists in Residence 2013-14.”

All three of its artists are, in more ways than one, Mr. Hammons’s heirs. Like him, they take race as a subject, one as critical as ever, as the news keeps reminding us. And they address that complex theme in a variety of subtly polemical visual languages with sources in popular culture.

Language itself, viewed as intrinsically racialized, is Bethany Collins’sprimary material. It’s the very substance of the inconspicuous centerpiece of her work done over the past year. Called “Colorblind Dictionary,” it’s simply a found and well-thumbed 1965 edition of a Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language in which the artist, who identifies herself as biracial, has carefully erased, or scratched out, all mentions of the words “black,” “white” and “brown.” As you flip through the book, paper shavings fall from the pages like dust.

She applies a comparable editing process to dozens of framed tear sheets from a 1987 issue of The Southern Review, a venerable literary magazine published by Louisiana State University. The contents of the journal itself are neither programmatically about the American South nor about race, but Ms. Collins, born in Montgomery, Ala., in 1984, turns its pages into a metaphorical play of black and white by inking out sections of printed text and isolating references to the writers Elizabeth Alexander, Derek Walcott and Carl van Vechten.

Finally, she cuts language loose from obvious meaning in two abstract paintings. Both, despite strongly worded references to race in their titles, are ethereal looking, with clusters of alphabetical characters written in light-blue pencil on a dark ground, like smudges left on a blackboard, or barely legible nebulae seen in a night sky.

The basic language in Kevin Beasley’s sculpture is body language, or the compressed traces of it. Several pieces in the show are made in part from clothing worn by the artist or someone he knows. An urn-shape sculpture from 2013 incorporates a floral-patterned nightgown of a kind favored by his grandmother. A 2014 wall hanging consists of a shag rug encrusted with studio debris, sealed in clear resin and festooned with soft-sculpture globes made from bunched-up underwear.The work looks at once abject and extraterrestrial, like mysterious, vacuum-packed matter from some other universe. It also has connections, direct or otherwise, to art history, specifically to a style of dense, street-derived assemblage made by John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Dale Brockman Davis and other members of a group of black artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and ’70s, of which Mr. Hammons was an integral member.

As was the case with some of those artists, Mr. Beasley’s output often has an aural dimension in the form of live or taped music. In 2012, he filled the Museum of Modern Art’s atrium with an earsplitting, bone-rattling multitrack soundscape composed from the layered voices of dead rappers like Eazy-E, Guru and Biggie Smalls. Sound doesn’t figure in the Studio Museum work, at least that I could detect, but layering does. So does a sense of vitality generated by objects that look both ruined and precious, pulled raw from the gutter but tenderly detailed, as if they’d been touched a lot, which they have.

Abigail DeVille’s big, busy, conglomerate sculptures speak street talk. Almost everything that went into their making — shopping carts, cinder blocks, plastic bags, clothes mannequins — was harvested from the neighborhood surrounding the museum. She combines the material in very intricate ways, but still leaves the components warm with their individual histories. (An installation she made for the group show “Fore” at the museum in 2012 included cigarette butts from her grandmother’s home in the Bronx.)

Now in her early 30s, Ms. DeVille has been exhibiting in the city for nearly a decade and developing increasingly refined and cogent forms of sculpture and installation. Her work at the Studio Museum, some of her best so far, leans in a distinctly sculptural direction, with “ADDC Obelisk” being the show’s tour de force. It is a 15-foot-long skeletal version of the Washington Monument, tilted on its side, propped up by box springs, its innards exposed, revealing tangles of rope and wiring, chicken-wire walls and mannequin limbs in illogical combinations.

As with everything Ms. DeVille does, the piece is expansively theatrical. (She has done stage design, most recently for the Peter Sellars production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Stratford Festival in Ontario.) But it’s deliberately shaped and self-contained enough to make a statement, which I take to be a political one: about the attention deficit of an American government that allows monumental degrees of racism to fester under its very eyes.

The exhibition, organized by Lauren Haynes, an assistant curator at the Studio Museum, also has the closest thing to painting I’ve yet seen from Ms. DeVille, an abstract collage assembled on pieces of Sheetrock attached to a gallery wall. The main material is paper, plain but imprinted with rubbings she made of the surface of local streets. With areas of drilled perforations and the addition of a brightly colored but paint-flaking found door, the result looks like a giant, distressed Anne Ryan collage, an aria to art history and to the story of everyday urban life. Its title is “Harlem Flag.” A salute to Mr. Hammons? My guess is yes.


George Lindemann Journal "A View of the Heavens Needs Some Retouching" @nytimes by WILLIAM GRIMES

George Lindemann Journal "A View of the Heavens Needs Some Retouching" @nytimes by WILLIAM GRIMES


“Meeting,” by James Turrell, at MoMA PS1. CreditMatthew Septimus/Museum of Modern Art, PS1

Just over a year ago, MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art’s outpost in Long Island City, Queens, quietly shut the door on one of New York’s most beloved works of art. “Meeting,” James Turrell’s room-size installation whose roof opens to the sky, on view since 1986, has been closed to the public as the museum and the artist decide how to restore it.

“We are going to get it back as close as we can to the original state, but we want it to be easier to maintain and use less power,” Mr. Turrell said in a recent interview.

What to do, when to do it and how to pay for it have been the subject of intermittent discussions, interrupted by the demands of Mr. Turrell’s booming career. When Alanna Heiss, the founder of PS1 and its director until her retirement in 2008, commissioned the work back in the late 1970s, Mr. Turrell was known primarily on the West Coast and in Europe.

In the last decades, his increasingly bold experiments using light to shape space have captured the imagination of an ever-widening audience. Last year, his work was celebrated in three retrospectives, at the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

Meanwhile, at PS1, “Meeting” languished. The work, in a former classroom on the museum’s third floor, is a chaste, minimal environment, a conscious allusion to the Quaker meeting houses that Mr. Turrell visited as a child. The central feature of the work is a rectangular cutout in the ceiling, framing the waning light and weather. (The room opens at 3 p.m.) Concealed tungsten light tubes emit a carefully modulated orange glow, intense around the edges of the opening, paler on the walls. Wooden benches with inclined backs line the walls in this environment mixing daylight and artificial light.

On his website, Mr. Turrell leads with an explanatory remark about his work. “I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception, and in some ways gather it, or seem to hold it,” the comment runs. “My work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing.”

When Mr. Turrell was in New York, supervising the Guggenheim retrospective, he paid a visit to “Meeting” and proposed a restoration and an upgrade. The drywall around the opening in the ceiling needed a touch-up. The walls, because of multiple repaintings, needed to be taken back to their original state. In the late 1990s, a second layer of flooring and carpeting were added to the room.

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Crowds arriving for a summer party at MoMA PS1. A favorite, James Turrell’s “Meeting,” is closed for restoration. CreditJulia Gillard for The New York Times

“We need to adjust the height of the benches, or lower the floor, to restore the original distance,” said Peter Eleey, PS1’s curator and associate director of exhibitions and programs. “Now, your legs are a little higher, and it alters the sitting posture slightly, which changes your angle of vision.”

The movable steel cover for the ceiling has been a vexing problem for decades. Early on, it was hand-cranked by museum assistants, who would race to the roof when rain began to fall. (At one point, a wall switch was installed, giving collectors and curators who visited the work in its early stages the impression that the roof cover worked automatically. It was purely for show.) A mechanism with a moisture sensor, which was tried for a while, could not distinguish between high humidity and actual rainfall. Mr. Turrell has proposed a more advanced device, similar to the ones on new cars, that reacts only to water droplets.

Perhaps the most critical change involves lighting. In other projects, Mr. Turrell has abandoned incandescent lights and achieved the effects he wants using LED lights, something he has proposed for “Meeting.” “Going to LED will make it easier to repair and maintain, while using less energy,” he said.

The scope of the work and the financing are still being discussed, with Mr. Turrell radiating can-do optimism, and the museum hedging its bets. Mr. Turrell said that the actual work could be done in well under a year, once city permits are obtained. Although a firm to carry out the restoration has not been named, Janet Cross, of Cross Architecture, would seem to be the obvious candidate. Ms. Cross has worked with Mr. Turrell since the late 1980s on many projects, notably his magnum opus, the transformation ofRoden Crater, an extinct volcano cinder cone near Flagstaff, Ariz., into an artwork exploring Mr. Turrell’s ideas about light and space. She also did the renovation on his garden-level floor-through apartment on Gramercy Park West, now on the market for $2.85 million.

“One question is, what’s the difference between conservation and renovation,” Mr. Eleey said. “In each case, as James proposed things, we had to ask ourselves, would this change the nature of the work, as opposed to restoring it?”

The costs remain unknown, as do the means of covering them. Mr. Turrell has suggested that the owner of the work, Mark Booth, might step in and play a major role, and perhaps donate the work to MoMA, to boot. Mr. Booth, who took MTV to Europe, helped Rupert Murdoch get his British cable network off the ground, and later served as the chief executive officer of the jet-rental company NetJets Europe, is an avid collector. Recently, with his wife, Lauren, Mr. Booth donated “Gard Blue,” Mr. Turrell’s innovative 1968 light projection, to the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, Mr. Booth’s alma mater. Mr. Eleey described the proposed participation of Mr. Booth as “a nice idea.” Nothing, he said, has been decided. Mr. Booth did not return calls seeking comment.

Ken Johnson, writing in The New York Times in 2011, described a late-afternoon visit to the room, when the skylight framed a drifting puffy cloud and a bird in flight. Staring into the center of the frame, he wrote, “an aura of intense orange appeared around the edges of the blue rectangle. A lighter shade of orange light coated the walls of the chamber, creating a gorgeous contrast between the warm glow of the inside and the royal blue above, wherein a single bright star twinkled.”

Mr. Turrell, recalling the long and arduous gestation of “Meeting,” said, “This was a piece I was pleased to make in those days, and PS1 was a place where you could do things like that.” He received a small amount of grant money to make it, but reached into his pocket to bring it to completion.

“It was probably the best investment I ever made,” he said. “A lot of people wanted to do things with me after seeing it.”

"Picasso Museum to Reopen at Last, With New Leader" by By DOREEN CARVAJAL


Laurent Le Bon, president of the Picasso Museum in the Marais district of Paris. After years of drama-filled renovations, it is to reopen on Oct. 25.CreditAgnes Dherbeys for The New York Times

PARIS — With his horn-rimmed glasses and charcoal-gray suits, Laurent Le Bon is an unlikely Zorro to rescue the long-closed Musée Picasso here in the Marais quarter.

When the state appointed him president in June and dispatched him on this emergency mission, French headlines hailed Mr. Le Bon in the name of that fictional masked outlaw who battled tyrannical officials. And riffing on an English translation of his last name and his reputation for diplomacy, curators in the international art world called him Larry the Good.

His task: reopen the museum’s regal 17th-century mansion after five years of construction and renovation, with several missed start dates and an employee revolt that led to the firing in May of the previous president on the grounds of autocratic management.

“I don’t think I’m Zorro,” said Mr. Le Bon, 45, who presided over the opening of the Centre Pompidou Metz, that museum’s branch in northeast France, in 2010 and is a specialist in the art of 16th- and 17th-century garden design. “I don’t believe we are at war. There is no conflict. My method is very simple: to assess the situation, to read what has been produced and to listen.”

Photo
The museum is housed in the 17th-century Hôtel Salé. Among the innovations are a new pergola in the garden. CreditAgnes Dherbeys for The New York Times

The Picasso Museum, in the Hôtel Salé, has had its public space more than double to house the largest collection of Picasso paintings in the world and is now scheduled to open on Oct. 25, which would have been Picasso’s 133rd birthday.

On Sept. 20 and 21, visitors will get a free preliminary peek at the empty mansion and its grand staircase, extravagant Corinthian pilasters and cupids before some 500 paintings are hung, including some from Picasso’s personal collection. In the meantime, Mr. Le Bon is waging a charm offensive, including reaching a preliminary accord with the ousted president, Anne Baldassari, a Picasso scholar who had invested much of her career in the museum.

This week, the ministry of culture and Mr. Le Bon were wrapping up an agreement to bring her back as a curator for the opening exhibition that she had already planned. (She was claiming a form of copyright on the arrangement of the paintings.) Her lawyer, Henri Leclerc — who made the novel claim — said he would not comment.

Mr. Le Bon has also reached to the broader circle of people affected by the expansion and has sought to mend frayed relationships, including some with Picasso’s descendants.

This state-run museum, started in 1985, owes its existence to the Picasso family, which donated a trove of more than 5,000 artworks after the artist’s death in 1973 under a law permitting heirs to contribute art in lieu of tax payments.

When the management shake-up happened, Claude Picasso, the artist’s son and a member of the museum board, erupted in fury, scorning any replacement as an impostor. However, since Mr. Le Bon’s appointment, Mr. Picasso has muted his criticism and declined to comment about the opening.

Mr. Le Bon met with him and also visited Maya Widmaier Picasso, the artist’s daughter by his mistress — and frequent model — Marie-Thérèse Walter. Soon after that encounter, she offered a public demonstration of her support for the new leadership with a gift of Picasso sketches and a partial drawing of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire that matches the other half, which is owned by the museum.


The choice was calculated to deliver a message of harmony, according to her son, Olivier Widmaier Picasso, a filmmaker in Paris who produced a documentary, which will air on local television, about the family and the museum. “It symbolizes reunification,” he said. “We walk in the same direction. My mother was sad to see that her father’s work had become a hostage in this story. She felt that people at the museum were like survivors on a raft, and they didn’t know whether we were against them.”

In addition to wooing the family, Mr. Le Bon hosted a flurry of personal and group meetings. The strategy was meant to turn the page on what the French press at one point called a psychodrama that figured in the departure of the most recent culture minister, Aurélie Filippetti. She was criticized for being slow to handle the museum affair, while costs soared to 52 million euros (about $68.3 million), and a string of employees left.

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The museum has a new aluminum staircase. CreditAgnes Dherbeys for The New York Times

Mr. Le Bon met with the employees, the local union, gallery owners and neighbors miffed by the endless construction. There is now discussion underway about changing the metal pergola facing a garden and public space that provoked neighborhood criticism.

François Margolin, a documentary filmmaker and a neighbor who, together with a local preservation group, lodged complaints about the museum’s construction permits, said he met with Mr. Le Bon and came away impressed with his collegial style, an impression shared by the union.

“He is not egotistical,” Mr. Margolin said. “He has real experience opening museums. He is more open and has a method of working with other people, listening to the opinions of others. He is really professional.”

Beyond the neighborhood, Mr. Le Bon has also initiated contact with major French museums that had had frosty relations with his predecessor after she spurned some requests for Picasso art loans. In October, he is lending three Picasso works to the Musée d’Orsay for its exhibition on the theme of the Marquis de Sade, and he is planning more loans to museums in France and New York. Loan fees for some of the works, which had traveled for years on the international exhibition circuit, had helped finance the restoration. Mr. Le Bon said he expects to produce more revenue through touring exhibitions, in part because the museum is expected to finance more than 60 percent of its annual budget, which has not been set yet by the government.

“It’s a public collection and does not belong to me,” Mr. Le Bon said on Tuesday in an interview at his office. “I am delighted that we have such a huge stock in reserve. And I also am glad that there are people that want to use it for great projects. That’s part of our métier: collection, exhibition.”

On Tuesday, the scaffolding that laced the mansion was gone. Police stood guard, barricading the passageway except for trucks transporting the first Picasso artworks to arrive after a long absence. President François Hollande is expected to inaugurate the museum as part of a round of high-profile openings. (The Louis Vuitton contemporary art center, designed by Frank Gehry, opens the same week.)

“It’s like preparing a play, or a film, or a musical spectacular,” Mr. Le Bon said, recalling how he was moved to tears when the first person walked in the door of the Centre Pompidou Metz “An opening is magic.”

In this spectacle, the stars making a reappearance include Picasso’s gigantic work “The Pipes of Pan” (1923), from his neo-Classical period, along with the works from his personal collection, by Renoir and Gauguin, a gaunt self-portrait from Picasso’s Blue Period, in 1901, and his grand collage “Femmes à Leur Toilette” (1938). The works by other artists will be housed in a luminous room with exposed beams natural light and a sweeping view of Paris.

Out of habit, some neighbors in this medieval neighborhood are bracing for further delays, but Mr. Le Bon insists that the grand double doors will open on time and that the museum has restored its serenity.

“It’s certain that it will open,” he said. “That’s for sure. This is my job and my passion.”

George Lindemann Journal - "A Daring Duo Portrays a Divided Britain" @wsj by Mary M. Lane

George Lindemann Journal - "A Daring Duo Portrays a Divided Britain" @wsj by Mary M. Lane

'Astro Star,' by Gilbert & George, is at the White Cube gallery in London. © Gilbert & George/White Cube

Strolling through East London three years ago, Gilbert & George stumbled on empty nitrous-oxide gas containers that young partygoers had used for a euphoric high. To the artistic duo, the cans looked like miniature bombs. At the same time, they were noticing on the same streets a growing group of English-born Muslim women clad in all-covering black shrouds.

Gilbert & George decided to explore this contrast between rebellion and conservatism, and the result is "Scapegoating," 123 photographic collages featuring gas canisters, posters promoting strict Islamic law and veiled Muslim women.

"Scapegoating" is "about capturing a schizophrenic London," said Gilbert Proesch, 70, who became romantically and professionally linked with George Passmore, 72, after they met at St. Martin's School of Art in 1967. They have put up half of the collages at London's White Cube gallery until Sept. 28, while a second installment opens on Sunday at Paris's Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.

Gilbert & George are now almost household names in Europe. Their local pub bears a large mural honoring them. They have won the prestigious Turner Prize, represented the U.K. in the 2005 Venice Biennale, and their major 2007 Tate Museum retrospective ended at the Brooklyn Museum.

As an example of the duo's view of a divided Britain, Mr. Proesch pointed to "Astro Star," an 8-by-14-foot symmetrical work showing two veiled women circumventing a headless figure in skin-tight jeans. The artists' ghostlike faces and a local café menu, advertising such British fares as steak pie, surround them.

The artists have divided each picture into panels—a look Westerners might associate with stained glass windows, they say. The duo used only five colors: onyx, white, tan, yellow and red.

In "Puttees," a shrouded woman carries two shopping bags down a blood-red street. Beside her, Gilbert & George, distorted to resemble skeletons, raise their palms in supplicating pleas.

Artists Gilbert and George outside their studio in East London last month Jason Alden for The Wall Street Journal

Both artists say the series expands on earlier work that cast a critical look at ideologies like white supremacy and Christian fundamentalism. "What's wrong with a godless religion built around having impeccable manners?" said Mr. Proesch, straightening his tie portraying frogs leaping atop green silk.

For 45 years, Gilbert & George have worn self-designed tweed suits. What began as a marketing aid is now part of an ethos that sees maintaining fastidious standards as a way to show spiritual respect for fellow humans, they say.

Gilbert & George express sympathy for the 2010 French ban on the burqa, the all-body shroud worn by certain Muslim women—a decision that caused much debate in Britain. "Is [the burqa] a wonderful expression of the tolerant society we live in, or are there dangers to it?" asked Mr. Passmore.

"We haven't shown something as political as these works before," says Thaddaeus Ropac, 54, who opened his gallery in Paris in 1990. "The French will embrace it. I just wonder how the members of these [Islam-practicing] ethnic groups will feel." So far he has heard of no protests.

Gilbert & George's White Cube and Ropac works are priced between $91,000 and $829,000.

The artists have always courted criticism with once-controversial themes such as homoeroticism or bodily fluids. The two touched on other topics as they gained fame, but English critics still referred to them as "fruits in suits" when they addressed nonsexual topics, they say. "It didn't matter what the subject was, it was 'gay art' and that wasn't acceptable," said Mr. Proesch.

In time the sexualized themes that brought them publicity have become accepted and even copied. That, the artists say, galvanized them to explore new subject matter: fundamentalism and what Mr. Passmore calls youthful "hooliganism."

The artists remain a tough sell in the U.S., say curators and dealers. They enjoy a cult following among some private American collectors—nearly all of whom own several works and have adequate space for their large-scale pictures, says their New York dealer, Rachel Lehmann. She recently closed a show in Manhattan of historical Gilbert & George videos. They weren't for sale; the exhibition was part of her long-term plan to glean more academic attention for the duo.

Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman, known among curators for his niche artistic predilections, organized the only U.S. touring show of Gilbert & George's work in 1984 and 1985, as director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. "All that male frontal nudity... We had to do a lot of convincing to get museums to take the show" and secure the necessary corporate sponsors, he said.

For Gilbert & George's American devotees, salvation may lie in the South. Curator Bonnie Clearwater is planning a late-2015 Fort Lauderdale, Fla., exhibition to coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach, a mecca for collectors coveting controversy. Ms. Clearwater employed the same strategy last year to promote British artist Tracey Emin. The show was a hit, and Ms. Emin's prices have been climbing since.

Write to Mary M. Lane at mary.lane@wsj.com

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Hitchhiker on an Electronic Road" @nytimes HOLLAND COTTER

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Hitchhiker on an Electronic Road" @nytimes HOLLAND COTTER

   
 

If you want someone to praise or blame for the relentlessly wired, chatty, information-soaked 21st-century world we inhabit, the artist Nam June Paik is an apt candidate. Credited as the founder of video art in the 1960s, he turned television into an interactive vehicle for radical theater. He invented the phrase “electronic superhighway” and imagined beta versions of smartphones, Google Glass, distant learning, YouTube, Instagram and the Internet itself.

The effort to situate this artist, who died in 2006, as a pioneer of the digital present seems to be the main impetus behind “Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot” at Asia Society, a large and good-looking show — designed by Clayton Vogel, it fills all of the museum’s galleries — that otherwise doesn’t seem to have any particular reason for being.

A lot of what’s in it is textbook stuff, and a few less familiar late pieces — paint-slathered portable televisions — aren’t so hot. The catalog offers no new research. Its most substantial entries are a reprinted 2007 essay by the art historian David Joselit and reproductions of Paik manuscripts from an archive donated by his nephew Ken Hakuta to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, which did its own full-scale Paik survey in 2012-13.

Still, the show is worthy of notice, because Paik is, as is quite evident here, a prescient thinker as well as a born entertainer. And its very presence at Asia Society raises at least one relatively unexplored question: How American was he? Although he based the better part of his long career in New York, he always seemed to be geographically unfixed and culturally unaligned, an existential floater who made some of his most interesting art from pixels and sound waves bounced off satellites circling in space.

Paik (pronounced pake) was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1932, the youngest son of a wealthy businessman. In advance of the Korean War, the family moved to Hong Kong in 1949 and Japan a year later. At Tokyo University, Paik studied art and music, writing an undergraduate thesis on Arnold Schoenberg. In 1956, he pursued further musical studies in Germany where, in a kind of conversion experience, he met the visiting composer John Cage.

Cage, with his punctilious zaniness and absorption in Zen Buddhism, was a crucial, liberating influence. Paik, also a Buddhist, ran with the influence and elaborated on it. In addition to composing music, he began experimenting with sculpture, performance and what were at the time still front-edge electronic media: television, personal videotape recorders, primitive home computers. And he combined them with a sensationalist flair pitched to a popular audience.

Returning to Japan in 1964, he funneled this geekish theatricality into creating his first life-size, remote-controlled robot in collaboration with an electronics engineer, Shuya Abe. Named Robot K-456 — the reference is to a Mozart piano concerto — and now on loan from a German collection, it’s the first thing we see in the show, and it’s quite a sight. A futuristic antique, its mechanics now look fragile in the extreme, but its oddness and wit are intact.

Originally fitted with female breasts and male genitalia (the penis was removed when the robot was shipped to a censorship-prone New York City the same year), K-456 was designed to be sociable, political and a little gross. Rolling down a city sidewalk, it waved, bowed, broadcast a tape of President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural speech, and periodically defecated white beans. Like much of Paik’s work, it was both conceptually sophisticated and kid stuff, the way Ryan Trecartin’s comic-apocalyptic YouTube productions are now.

It was also a prototype for more polished things to come. In the 1980s, Paik built a family of robots — father, mother, baby — from stacked-up vintage television monitors. Looking as monumental and boxy as armored samurai, the figures didn’t move, but were internally animated by video montages playing on their many screens with images of war planes, Korean porcelains, African crowds and abstract shapes flashing by too fast to be taken in at a glance but constantly repeated, like online news.

Paik made a variety of such video sculptures. Some took a swipe at a knee-jerk celebration of technological “progress.” The interactive 1968 “TV Chair” has no more elevated function than to video-surveil a given sitter’s derrière. At the same time, Paik fully understood that technology was here to stay, commanding and inexorable, and he wanted to use art to soften its effects, reduce its might, tease it, tweak it, make it enlightenment friendly. One way he maintained this perspective was by working with like-minded human collaborators, mostly artists, with the most important being Charlotte Moorman.

Moorman was born in Little Rock, Ark., in 1933. She studied musical composition at Centenary College in Shreveport, La., but also trained as an instrumentalist and in 1957 moved to New York to study the cello at Juilliard. Although she played the standard repertoire and did a stint with Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra, she was attracted to experimental music and gained a reputation for playing the unplayable, including some of Cage’s more intensely micromanaged scores. With her full figure, cascading dark hair and pale skin, she was a charismatic visual presence onstage. Paik met her in New York in 1964, and they bonded instantly.

Both thrived on controversy. Paik was eager to give vanguard music, so spiky and taxing, the sensuous aura he felt was necessary to attract a general audience. He looked to Moorman to provide that, and she did. For a piece called “Cello Sonata No. 1 for Adults Only” she played Bach while doing a striptease. She performed Paik’s composition “Opera Sextronique” in the nude, as called for by the score, and earned news headlines — far more valuable than reviews — when she was arrested on a charge of public indecency.

In part because she was a woman, and one who at least ostensibly exploited traditional models of femininity, her role in late-20th-century American vanguard culture has been undervalued, though not by Paik. After her death from breast cancer in 1991, he created a memorial tribute to her at the 1993 Venice Biennale, with articles of her clothing floating like spirits on high. That installation is replicated in the Asia Society show, organized by Michelle Yun, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art. And a new book, “Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman” by Joan Rothfuss, due in mid-October from the MIT Press, gives a full and evenhanded account of her accomplishments.

The book provides exactly the kind of fresh, re-evaluative information the catalog lacks, but even without it, the show lets us see Paik in a somewhat new light, not as an Asian artist, exactly, but not as a Western artist either, or even as an artist generically “global.” Specific references to Asia recur in his work: A robot brandishes a book of verse by the great Tang dynasty poet Li Po (A.D. 701-762); a statue of a meditating Buddha contemplates its own image on a video screen. The paint-smeared late televisions, mere souvenirs of a long career, suggest the brash, hand-altered, recycling spirit of technological culture in Beijing and Mumbai today.

And then there’s the installation “Three Camera Participation/Participation TV” (1969/2001) in a gallery of its own. Consisting of three cameras, a video monitor and a projector, the piece barely exists until someone enters and activates it. Only when you walk in front of the cameras does an image appear: your own, as three hazy colored silhouettes — red, green and blue — on the monitor and as a kind of barely embodied aura on the gallery wall. Step out of camera range, and the image is gone. In much of his art, Paik used technology, busy and brash, to create the equivalent of the wake-up slap of Zen master. Very occasionally, as here, he uses it to say something about nothing — about words, and information, and connectivity going away — and that takes mastery, too.