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Losing Oneself in New York
John Haberin New York City
Alvaro Urbano and Scott Burton
AMSA and a Place for Sound
To live in an ever-changing city is to know loss. It is what makes you a New Yorker—the passing of friends and loved ones, the restaurant where you knew the menu by heart, the bar where all the customers knew you by name, the bookstore that taught you what and how to read. For Alvaro Urbano, it is as if a painting had come to life, only to insist by the very stillness of its actors that he will never see them again.
The show is his "Tableau Vivant" (literally a living painting) at SculptureCenter. Successive "In Practice" projects take the back room, while downstairs the pair known as ASMA listen for the sounds of Minimalism. Urbano pays tribute to a place where people once gathered and to its one-time creator, Scott Burton. Alvaro knows that he cannot bring back either one. 
You can still see benches from Burton in Manhattan, and people really do gather there and take their rest, but you better hurry. A renovation in Battery Park City has already slated them for removal.
Minimalism in spirit
Not that it matters, but a tableau vivant was a nineteenth-century fashion, and it, too, is not coming back any time soon. People put on an act, staging a favorite work of art. No worse, I suppose, than those who use 3D glasses and projections to put you in the middle of a painting, as if The Starry Night were a planetarium—and no better. Urbano's tableau, however, is no mere reproduction. He salvaged whatever he could from the atrium at the former Equitable building in Manhattan, only a block from the Museum of Modern Art. That does not include people.
Back in the 1980s, Scott Burton brought Brutalism to Minimalism, as if nothing could be more hostile to human feeling, but with fine marble and flowers. He had an architect's sensibility as well—a commitment to public spaces. Not all were cherished, and not all survive, but such is the city. This one fell victim to yet another tasteless renovation in 2020. Born in Madrid and based in Berlin, Urbano got there just in time and carted off roughly half. The result steals the show, as Atrium Furnishment.
Presence and absence alike haunt its semblance of a plaza where people once hurried past or stopped for lunch. It is a recreation in spirit, and spirits can be threatening. Urbano breaks up Burton's marble circle, meant to evoke a clock face and the dreaded nine to five. It can now broaden to cover SculptureCenter's main hall. (Converted by Maya Lin, the former trolley repair shop has its own spirit life.) It has the original's beauty, but also its formidable mass, and it no longer welcomes seating.
Visitors are warned not to touch, for their own sake as much as the work's. Leaves that have seemingly fallen are metal, with sharp edges. Their fall colors bring a reminder of death. Much the same colors shine out from light boxes propped here and there on the marble, streaked like a rock face and a geological record. The original's flooring is gone, but a drop ceiling has collected no end of dust, and one lone object bangs against its glass as if trapped within.
Bastien Gachet has his own "object-based dramaturgy," as he calls it, in the side room (since given over to Tony Chrenka). Where you might hope for a bathroom, he sets a bone-dry sink. A keyboard lying on top has nothing to communicate, and a bucket on the floor holds what could be diluted blood. The rest of the installation lacks quite the same shock, but its bare wood furniture is creepy enough. I cannot swear what it has to say, least of all something about "pre-intentional," real, and fake. It seems real enough to me.
Still, he and the more evocative work out front should have anyone asking what has been lost. Gachet also speaks of the imminent, emergent, and durational, and Urbano, too, confronts the passage of time. Burton's trees have become his bare leaves, which can never die because they were never alive. They also create a bridge from the chill of an office building to the fragile warmth of Central Park. He took the form of his leaves from the Ramble, north of the park's lake and south of the Delacorte Theater and Great Lawn, once a popular queer pick-up space. Burton died of AIDS in 1989.
Silent music
The years that gave birth to sound art and text art also brought an uncanny silence. Strange perhaps, but hardly a contradiction. Painting was losing authority, abstract or representational, and something had to take its place—not more stories about saints, sinners, or the artists themselves, but Minimalism. And if industrial materials could invade the gallery, why not something barely seen or heard? Where Minimalism boasted of art as object, subject to gravity, sound art was in the air. Now ASMA and Tony Chrenka bring their own silent music, but the stories and the objects are back as well.
ASMA may sound like a coughing fit, but it is much the familiar mix of ice-cold sculpture and sound. The collective (Matias Armendaris and Hanya Beliá from Mexico) calls the marvelous basement tunnels an "ideal space for music," but the only sound this winter was of water, drip by drip. You had to listen carefully if you were to subject yourself to the water torture. It also dared you to connect three distinct sections and motifs. One comes straight out of Minimalism, light sculpture—not in neon, but in older sources of light. The artists direct them through glass.
What looks like a bulb has a hand-made geometry, and what looks like a lens is just a glass disk. And the lack of focus continues into work that sticks more closely still to Minimalism's industrial sheen. What light there is reflects off relief elements on polished spheres, like disco balls where dancing is prohibited. A third basement tunnel brings anything but dancers at that. Female dolls the size of small children lie on shelves or on the floor, seemingly unable to rise. One has at her feet a furry black creature like a wildly overfed rat.
One last space, for video, may or may not unify the three. It treats the basement as a source of images or abstraction. The dolls themselves aspire to the sexual charge of work by Laurie Simmons, but the point seems to be the music and the silence. Both continue upstairs, in the side gallery that most recently held Gachet, but it is not out to give you the creeps. It takes Minimalism and music seriously. It makes up for a lack of poignancy with a bit of clarity, trickery, and paint.
Chrenka covers the walls at eye level with thin paired verticals, one brown and one white, each with a slight lateral twist. You may take them for twigs. I could swear that I had seen this strategy before, but its familiarity is deceptive. Julianne Swartz, for one, has herself both leaned wood against the wall and created sound art. Chrenka, in turn, has not salvaged branches but rather guitar necks, cutting away the frets. I smell a rat.
The cuts leave only bumps at left and right, which the artist reinforces by painting over them. The paint also helps them adhere to the walls, and it reinforces the silence. The slats broaden at top, like actual guitar necks waiting for someone to tune the strings. You cannot finger these fingerboards, but the white of the walls looks all the more compelling for that. So where is the promised music, and just where is that "ideal space"? Maybe the dolls are too world-weary to listen or to sing.
Alvaro Urbano ran at SculptureCenter through March 24, 2025, ASMA through February 3. Bastien Gachet ran through October 21, 2024, Tony Chrenka through December 22.