BWW Reviews: Exhibitions of the Week with Mel Bochner, Paul Graham, and Garry Winogrand

September is upon is, which means that the "Closed for Installation" signs are out in full force. But instead of whiling away the next couple weeks before all those big October openings--Matisse at MoMA, Picasso at the Met, the German avant-garde at the Guggenheim--immerse yourself in these soon-to-leave, should-not-miss showcases:

Mel Bochner: Strong Language at the Jewish Museum (Until September 21)

Conceptual artists can age beautifully, and word-crazed conceptualist Mel Bochner is no exception. With his rise to notice in the late 1960s--a rise propelled by hermetic "word portraits" of fellow artists, and sustained with trippy montages of English and German text--Bochner positioned himself as a superbly wonky art theorist. He wrote art criticism; he wrote on walls, then passed it off as art; he wrote out quotes from Proust and Wittgenstein and Marcel Duchamp, then photographed these jottings, then passed the photos off as art. Now, in his 70s, he creates candy-colored canvases of synonyms and big blue paintings full of nothing but the syllables "Blah Blah Blah" and (you guessed it) passes all this off as art. He has an undoubted sense of humor, but he also has a sense of formal grace that a few isolated paintings or a modest installation probably wouldn't convey. Fortunately, Jewish Museum curator Norman Kleeblatt has gathered over 70 of Bochner's paintings, a body of work spans his entire career and that reveals Bochner as an estimable colorist and stylist.

Though the entries in Mel Bochner: Strong Language are judiciously paired off and spaced out, these canvases also radiate a sort of glib, mock-angry humor. The newer works, which list similarly defined and similarly dismissive bits of speech, are the closest we'll ever have to a passive-aggressive version of Sesame Street. (...Today's episode is brought to you by the phrase "SHUT UP!") Yet there is an abundance of control and contrast in all this. Sometimes, Bochner's letters pop--lemon yellow on bubblegum pink, prune purple on sky blue--but sometimes letter and ground are almost the same hue. This tactic creates puzzling, intriguing gaps in otherwise overloaded compositions; one of the best newer paintings on display, the washed-out pastel Obscene, is simply this fade effect writ large.

There are other formal surprises, too: the veering pencil letters of the early works, the Magic Eye disorientation of the English-and-German paintings, the substantial, nightlike blues of the Blah Blah Blah canvases. With each year that passes, I find myself caring about conceptualism's theoretical pretensions a little less and admiring the whole movement's command of shape, tone, and expression a lot more. Sol LeWitt's white lattices and Dan Flavin's light tubes have always seemed aesthetically wise to me. As never before, I can now say the same of Bochner's washes of words.

Paul Graham: Does Yellow Run Forever? at Pace Gallery (Until October 4)

I'm not sure whether to describe Paul Graham's Does Yellow Run Forever? as a photography showcase or as a work of installation art, or to forget labels entirely; I was almost set on "photography installation" until I picked up the catalog and realized how uncannily it, too, seems an element of the exhibition. (How else do you explain its velveteen cover, tiny proportions, purposely misaligned visuals, and complete absence of explanatory text?) Although this latest offering from Pace Gallery can seem like a flippant affair, it is actually a sign of just how far photography has developed. Much like MoMA's indispensable Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness, Graham's display is a pretty good indication that photography has finally come into its own as a totalizing art experience--catalog and all.

Does Yellow Run Forever? consists of a few different kinds of linked images. Rainbows curving across cloudy skies, a woman of African descent (Graham's real-life partner) sleeping in unadorned rooms, and head-on shots of pawnshops that buy and trade gold are the three big items that Graham has picked out. All of these are blown up to sizeable proportions, and some of the frames are positioned low, their bottom edges touching the very floor. The colors are luscious in all cases, but those pawnshops especially lure the eyes--yellow may or may not run forever, but Graham knows that gold, even pawnshop gold, can make you stop and stare.

Garry Winogrand at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Until September 21)

For a certain kind of photographer, morality is a bore. This is certainly the case with Garry Winogrand, who photographed America during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s--morally fraught decades, all of them--but didn't have the kind of strong moral agenda that other black-and-white photographers have embraced. Maybe he just didn't have the time for one. He photographed relentlessly, and left behind roughly a quarter of a million undeveloped images at the time of his death. So yes, there is a fast paced and vaguely irresponsible feeling to Winogrand's work, though there is also a magnetic spontaneity and uncertainty that Walker Evans and Robert Frank--more respected, more moralistic, and much more stagey black-and-white photographers than Winogrand--never really pull off.

The current Winogrand retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum is has been billed as "the first retrospective in 25 years"--here or anywhere, presumably. Making up for this lost time, curators Leo Rubinfien and Sarah Greenough have brought in over 175 images, including developed versions of photographs that Winogrand never shepherded through the darkroom. America according to Winogrand is both an endlessly vast place and an unsettlingly small one: animals in cages, melancholy streets and lots, and disaffected leisure seekers were a few of the subjects Winogrand found, photographed, and left unapologetically behind. He's chilly and ornate and drawn to wreckage of all kinds, every kind, the sort of man you'd get if you put Wallace Stevens behind a camera. Winogrand is hard to love, but I know that I will miss Garry Winogrand the moment it's gone.

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