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Undone and Art's March Downtown

Heather Rowe constructs her own atrium screen of ordinary wood beams and mirrors. She intends its open spaces and tilted surfaces to fragment the space, but it has the grid and polish of designer shelving units. The best part comes in imagining the actual cash machine behind it as part of the show. Doing the undoing

Tony Matelli’s sculpture creates a more striking illusion. The painted metal looks like weeds and clings to the floor, mostly along the walls. In the process, he leaves the small gallery all but empty, as if nature and art could finally take a shared course once others have gone. Here, too, however, art keeps a comforting distance, in part because the curators lock it behind glass doors.

They also undermine Eileen Quinlan’s large photograph, Smoke and Mirrors, by hanging it high on a long atrium wall. Her photographs of actual mirrors accumulate reflections and geometries the longer one looked. They did so at least twice in just the last year, both in her Lower East Side solo outing and in a summer group show, “Strange Magic.” Here the actual reflection of the light fixtures overwhelms her polished performance. They also leave one wondering how the work fits into the show—and just who is doing the undoing.

I could relish a show called “Undone” just as a museum is coming undone. I could appreciate fresh thoughts on completion and unraveling, just as art is evolving from Robert Smithson to something even more entropic. I thrilled in much the same way to “The Reconstruction,” a show of works in progress when Exit Art moved to its new building. I have much the same thrill and perplexity at the architectural violence of Gordon Matta-Clark—or those trashing the gallery today.

Maybe, too, art could stand something less confrontational than Matta-Clark’s idealistic generation or the overhyped present. Yet both Minimalism and installation art depend on a give and take with the viewer. At times, so could the Whitney at Altria. The combination of a tall atrium, shared by lunch traffic, and a small gallery has often allowed that give and take—as with “Burgeoning Geometries” and Sue de Beer. Maybe things can start to become undone in earnest once the Whitney migrates downtown for good.

That still leaves the big questions unanswered. A cycle of doing and undoing might itself serve as a metaphor for the free market. Can art become undone in productive ways when big institutions are building on its remains? Is there anywhere left for the money machine to go—and anywhere left for art?

With the Whitney, it comes soon enough to the end of the High Line, and with McCarthy it reaches almost to Soho. Meanwhile the New Museum of Contemporary Art opened its new architecture right on schedule. Its first show, “Unmonumental,” could even offer a sequel to the latest at Altria. Yet will all these bow to high finance? Have they already? Consider an arts neighborhood that succumbed to success before galleries could ever flourish.

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