Editor's Note

The quintessentially American Pop Art of Roy Lichtenstein is the subject of a major museum survey reviewed in this issue. While Lichtenstein: A Retrospective continues to run at Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art has opened Claes Oldenburg: The Street and the Store. This is the Lichtenstein we know and the Oldenburg we don't. Despite the variety of Lichtenstein's dots, what was fresh in the 1960s can appear gimmicky to contemporary eyes. MoMA's more focused exhibition, concentrating on Oldenburg's earliest work, delivers some surprises. Images and artifacts from his 1959 installation The Street appear today as relics of a Pop—at the intersection of performance—that was anything but easy. The artist as ragpicker was also a role incarnated by Oldenburg in actions staged in The Street, anticipating the unscripted antics of the comedian Andy Kaufman. These attempts to assail the boundaries between art and life were the subject of a recent exhibition, On Creating Reality, by Andy Kaufman, at New York's Maccarone Gallery. Imagined as an environmental archive, the exhibition assembled pieces and personas as unclassifiable as Kaufman himself.

As part of its Artist's Choice series, the Museum of Modern Art invited Trisha Donnelly to curate a selection of works from its collections. Artist-curated exhibitions of this sort have become common practice. More unusual is the case of the collector who "transcends" the role of the curator. The new Barnes Foundation, now housed in a modern museum building in downtown Philadelphia, is one such collection. But is the whole really greater than the sum of its parts? The task of the curator—like that of the editor—remains at its best an invisible art.

Ariel Plotek

Lichtenstein: A Retrospective
Chicago | London

Catalogue by James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff.

Chicago: Art institute of Chicago, 2012.

The power and glamour of America that dominated art in the second half of the twentieth century finds its distillation in the art of Roy Lichtenstein. This retrospective of his work, including paintings, sculpture and drawings, which started in Chicago, and is currently on display at Tate Modern, might provoke the question as to how his reputation has fared in a different age, where the power has been diminished and the glamour tarnished. In Britain the response to the show has been positive, but to the work itself mixed. Murmurings that Lichtenstein simply repeated his one innovation--the use of comic-book imagery and in particular the Benday dot--are frequently heard. His formulaic, superficial imagery descended into a hollow parody with the late nudes, made in response to market nostalgia for his earlier works. The dots, so this argument runs, went only so far.

Dots were to Lichtenstein what white flecks were to John Constable—the animating, vitalizing element of the picture surface; an indispensable part of a painting's visual appeal. Throughout his career Lichtenstein was faced with the challenge of reinventing the dot, a challenge that he generally met—with a few exceptions—and on this count his critics are wrong. The key transformation in the crucial few years after 1961 was the enlargement of the dot, making it a stronger pictorial element. In Look Mickey! (the painting that launched Lichtenstein on his Pop path in 1961), for example, the dots are tiny hand-painted marks creating tonal areas—much as they appeared in comic-book sources. As he swiftly developed his comic-book format, transforming panels from War and Romance titles, and including large areas of text, the dots at first remained small and tentative—in Masterpiece, 1962, for example, they still appear to be painted unevenly by hand. But Lichtenstein soon abandoned the hand-done approach, and used a stencil, made by drilling holes in a sheet of metal—at first home-made, then graduating to an industrially produced perforated sheet. M-Maybe, of 1965, shows a comic-book blonde rendered with dots that, were they any larger, would look like the measles—as it is they are perfectly judged and impart exactly that vital visual fizz that came to define the irreducible 'look' of his paintings. No longer tone, the dots are now texture, with an independent presence (alongside John Constable, British critics might be inclined to compare Lichtenstein to Aubrey Beardsley, whose sense of contrasting textures and deployment of dots, for example in his illustrations to Pope's The Rape of the Lock, at least from the point of view of design, are undoubtedly proto-Pop).

Lichtenstein was fully conscious of this fine calibration. A black-and-white painting from 1963 shows a magnifying glass hovering over a field of dots: those around the edge are smaller 1961 dots, such as in the painting Washing Machine from that year, but within the circle are all-new, bigger and better, 1963 dots. The dynamic, and often optically dissonant effect of the dots is a result of their diagonal staggering—rather, for example, than being placed in a grid format. Never quite fitting the square format of the canvas, Lichtenstein dots are always therefore in maximum conflict with the otherwise static, classical restraint of his compositions—they are the wild element.

Style is ultimately a matter of visibility, and it was Lichtenstein's aim to create a kind of pure, direct visibility. The thrilling display of War and Romance comic book paintings at the centre of the Tate display demonstrates how completely he came to inhabit his direct pop style; how decisively he elevated his source material into the clearer atmosphere of high art. Comparisons of works from year to year show clearly this evolution: the Romance painting Masterpiece, from 1962, has a more reticent, tonal surface, using a smaller dot pattern, by contrast with the 1964 War painting As I opened Fire, which uses a larger dot and an incredibly subtle and complex combination of three basic colors (red, yellow and blue) to create a range of tone and effects. Curiously, although the obvious precedent for this optical mixing of color carried by dots might seem to be the pointillism of Seurat, the truth is that the two artists could not be further apart in their aims. Lichtenstein is far from a colorist, and is concerned with a hardening of the surface into a material fact rather than a dissolution into pure color and light. Their popular source material might be suggested as a further point of comparison, but the worlds of Jules Chéret and Tony Abruzzo (the Romance comic book artist a number of whose images Lichtenstein used) seem unbridgeably alien to one another.

It is to this end interesting that Lichtenstein never made a work based on a painting by Seurat, despite the importance of past art—mostly the modern masters—for his work. His pop parody of Picasso's Femme d'Alger, from 1963, shows how early he began reflecting on the history of art. In his parodies of Monet and Mondrian, on show at Tate nearby, one gets the feeling of an affectionate, but ultimately dismissive attention to the Western European tradition—as if when such images arrived in America they were all, in a similar way, sacred grist for the profane mill.

Yet it is at this point—at least in the Tate display—that the whole endeavor seems to falter a little, and the power of the dot attenuates. When in 1974 Lichtenstein attempts a parody of a Cubist still life without using a single dot, replacing them with a buzzing wood-effect pattern, the effect is weak and unimpressive. Why? Something essential is missing, an erotic charm, without which the image simply grows cold. Here we would far rather spend time with the original. The same problem besets the 1980 painting Landscape with Figures and Rainbow, where dots are replaced with boring diagonal stripes, or in the Laocoön, where the stripes are supplemented with a kind of bowtie pattern that is also used in the more successful parody of early Mondrian abstraction, Plus and Minus VI, 1988. These works show in very simple terms how the dot pattern had become such a powerful, and potentially suffocating technique in Lichtenstein's work.

Yet these paintings are only failures by comparison. That Lichtenstein was able to, and indeed already had, reinvented the matrix of his dots, is signaled by the large painting Reflections on 'Interior with Girl Drawing,' of 1990, a complex image showing Picasso's 1935 painting, in the collection of MoMA, reflected in a mirror. Lichtenstein was particularly attracted towards the dissonance and harshness of Picasso's color, a type of militant romanticism that became increasingly important in his oeuvre. The mirror in Lichtenstein's version, it should be said, is just as important as the parody of Picasso—and it was in the motif of the mirror that Lichtenstein had found a way of taking his dots to the next level.

A thrilling room of mirror paintings at Tate show how in these works Lichtenstein effectively dematerialized the dot, completing the transformation from tone, to texture, to light. The decisive move was to vary the size of the dots, providing a sense both of depth and movement. The beveled glass edge and surface sheen of the mirrors are indicated by tightly packed bands of graduated dots creating a sense of light glancing across a surface. The layout of the exhibition at Tate implies (although not overtly) that the mirrors come as a solution to the problems of the non-dot paintings of the mid to late 1970s, but the solution came, as it were, before the problem—the first (and perhaps best) mirror painting using the graded-dot method, Mirror no.1 (48" Diameter), was made at the surprisingly early date of 1970.

As artists grow old they invariably return to the origins of their art: for Lichtenstein, this meant a return to the romance comic girls, who reappear in more monumental form in the 'late nudes' made during the last four years of his life. Here are the same youthful models that appeared in his comic-book paintings just over three decades previously, now freed from their narrative confines, no longer dependent on the gallantry of Brad or Jeff. Roy however, remains faithful; what is most remarkable about these late paintings, made in a different age, is the utter absence of cynicism, the pure affection for the subjects—the girls—that they witness. Lichtenstein's identification with an earlier twentieth century tradition of the Grand Nu, Picasso and Matisse in particular, may not be directly evident from the paintings themselves, but is never far below the surface. The complexity of their construction, the sudden foregrounding of subject matter and scenario, and the unabashed eroticism of works make these classic 'late works,' sophisticated, yet fresh; the product of a final, heroic, renewal.

The late nudes also show the degree to which Lichtenstein stuck within the traditional boundaries of genre. He remained in essence an easel painter, in the European mould (even if in his case it was a specially-constructed rotating easel). This adherence to genre was accompanied by a sense of decorum and restraint that emerges in this exhibition as the key guiding factor—the sensibility that kept the dots in check. Lichtenstein's final landscapes, not parodying, but offering a window onto Chinese landscape painting, are the final unfolding of this masterly restraint. Landscape with Boat (1996), for example, comprises a sloping band of graded dots on a blue background, a tiny boat in the lower left corner, just emerging into the scene, giving scale and meaning to the abstract field. There is not a trace here of Lichtenstein's Pop art origins, and perhaps only a portion of the charm of his early years, yet for all this the dots have survived. Where the mirror paintings elevated the dot to a symbol of reflected light, here the dot dissolves into pure atmosphere, disappearing over the edge of the canvas.

John-Paul Stonard

On Creating Reality, by Andy Kaufman
New York

On Creating Reality, by Andy Kaufman, on display in the warehouse space of the Maccarone Gallery from January 12 to February 23, 2013, was a curious affair: a portrait of a notorious and unclassifiable figure who simultaneously operated as a comedian, performance artist, actor, and provocateur. The exhibition presented a selection of archival material relating to Kaufman's personal and professional life, including both ephemera and artifacts such as letters, photographs, scripts, props and costumes. Complementing the visual archive was a rotating cast of Kaufman's colleagues, family, and friends, one of whom was present each day in the gallery to speak with visiting patrons. In conjunction with the exhibition, Participant Inc. (an alternative exhibition space on East Houston Street) held a two-day video series Andy Kaufman's 99cent tour, and MoMA PS1 hosted a Sunday Session devoted to exploring Kaufman's work and his place in the expanded field of contemporary comedy and performance art. Framing the project as an impossible portrait, the exhibition functioned as an environmental archive of voices and documents, each element addressing a particular aspect of Kaufman's life, work, and the identities he constructed and performed. As an environmental archive, the show cleverly built on the work of Kaufman himself, continuing in the participatory tradition of his practice, and expanding the field beyond his death.

The show was the brainchild of New York artist-curator John Berger. Wanting to engage the viewer, Berger cleverly installed the relics of Kaufman's many endeavors within a series of seventeen waist-high, semi-opaque square cases. The design, when glimpsed from afar, appeared as a homogenous series of boxes—much like an archival storage facility. Each box, however, was overlaid by a Plexiglas top, compelling viewers to peer through the openings and engage with the vestiges of Kaufman's varied identities and projects. While one vitrine displayed material documenting Kaufman's extravagantly coiffed Elvis impersonations, another exhibited the traces of his early forays into television: Uncle Andy's Funhouse.

Other vitrines served as containers for the remnants of his most iconic ventures. The material within these cases cleverly balanced Kaufman's creations and the audiences' reactions. In the middle of the exhibition was a box containing the t-shirt and championship belt uniform of Kaufman's "Intergender Wrestling Champion of the World." Accompanying the costume were magazine articles, photographs, and stacks of letters documenting the extreme public reactions to the persona. The responses ranged from vociferously worded hate mail to poignantly aggressive and comical wrestling challenges: "When you done gone and said what you did about women, I plum got insane. You got no right to say us women hain't no brains to wrestle you. It don't take no brains to wrestle shit to floor! And keeping it thar ain't nothang".

At the back of the exhibition were a series of cases displaying the relics of Kaufman's alter-ego, Tony Clifton—the incompetent and offensive lounge entertainer from hell. A sweat-stained tuxedo jacket, shoes, cufflinks, fake sideburns, and even false teeth and neck fat were enshrined along with photographs documenting the belligerent entertainer's public intrusions and scuffles with studio security. Complementing and confounding the nature of the relics is the continued appearance of Tony Clifton, even today. Clifton's semi-lucid acts still garner stage time—recently performing sold out shows in Los Angeles, as well as headlining at the after party for the opening of the Maccarone Gallery's exhibition, and a show-stopping cameo appearance at PS1's premier of Tony Clifton: The Movie. These manifestations have perpetuated the half-serious myth that Kaufman's untimely death in 1984 at age thirty-five from cancer was actually his most elaborate stunt.

Adding to the environmental archive of the exhibition was the roster of characters rotating through the gallery space. Seated at a circular table in the center of the exhibition, and more conspicuous than the documents, were individuals who knew Kaufman personally and professionally. Among the alternating (and unannounced) cast of guests were artist Laurie Simmons, family members Michael Kaufman and Carol Kaufman-Kerman, and the infamous, multifaceted sidekicks: Bob Zmuda and Little Wendy (Wendy Polland). Each guest spoke about one or more of Kaufman's personas. Zmuda, Kaufman's partner in crime, collaborator, and part-time Tony Clifton impersonator, regaled listeners with stories of late night meetings and an infamous conversation between Andy Kaufman and Andy Warhol on the topic of Howdy Doody. Little Wendy, who frequently played Kaufman's ingénue little sister, recounted Kaufman's relationship with meditation, their collaborative street improvisations, and the bizarre and fascinating exchanges that would occur between unwitting pedestrians subjected to Kaufman's madman-in-rags persona.

The participatory nature of the exhibition was in keeping with its subject, as well as the contemporary discourse on relational aesthetics and parafiction. Kaufman's performances were an experiment in both. They engendered a comedy of discomfort, pushing audiences to the edge without explanation or justification. Viewer engagement (and enragement) was the result of violating the implied social contract between performer and audience. Enthusiastic participants and angry audience members were challenged to wrestle, treated to milk and cookies, and subjected to a reading of the entirety of The Great Gatsby by Kaufman's character "British Man." During these events, individuals collaborated within the reality of the created environment. Berger cleverly built on Kaufman's direct and participatory practice by organizing the exhibition as an interactive event. The show avoided mediating didactics and labels, and thus forced viewers to confront Kaufman's life and work in a fairly raw and headfirst manner. The involvement of Kaufman's friends, family, and creative partners both complemented the artifacts on display and the participatory nature of the exhibition, expanding the 'reality' Kaufman created.

The exhibition as archive also played in the space between fact and fiction. Kaufman, perhaps the ultimate Hollywood prankster, consistently left spectators asking: "Is this for real?" He conned audiences and the police, and staged an elaborate feud with pro-wrestler Jerry Lawler. Fittingly, the archival nature of On Creating Reality, by Andy Kaufman perpetuated the fluctuating and uncertain nature of the realities Kaufman created. The objects that comprised the exhibition served as documentary evidence of various fictions and constructed realities. Coupled with the unpredictable nature of the special guests, this archival exhibition underscored how information shapes our understanding of reality. In this way, the show captured the essence of Kaufman's artistic practice which continues to this day to defy definition.

Monica Steinberg

The New Barnes Foundation
Philadelphia

Can the Barnes collection itself be considered a work of art, on a par with the objects it comprises? The question is raised by the Barnes' recent relocation—from Merion, Pennsylvania, to Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway—and the controversy that has attended this move. Dr. Albert Barnes, a self-made pharmaceutical magnate, began collecting modern art around 1910. By 1923, when his collection first opened to the public, Barnes had assembled an astonishing array of modern masterpieces, including notable works by Renoir, van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. Dr. Barnes' taste, however, was derided in the philistine Philadelphia press. Barnes never forgave the insult, delivered particularly by rival collector (and Philadelphia Inquirer publisher) Walter Annenberg. Henceforth, the foundation's mission would be twofold: to educate students, and to stick it to the establishment arbiters who had got it so wrong about Barnes' collection.

These goals were explicitly spelled out in the terms of the trust: the collection would remain intact, in a purpose-built Beaux-Arts mansion, and arranged in evolving didactic groupings that Barnes termed "ensembles." Access to the collection would be severely restricted. Barnes notoriously boasted about denying entry to impertinent collectors and critics. His preferred students belonged to the working classes, not the high-minded elite. This proletarian public, like the workers in Barnes' pharmaceutical factory, were not only invited to view the boss' collection but to receive instruction in his "method of seeing." Barnes, in short, was a most enlightened capitalist. He was also a bold and eclectic buyer of art—more acquisitive, perhaps, than discerning. By the time of his death in a car accident in 1951, Barnes' collection included 183 Renoirs, 67 Cézannes, 59 Matisses, 91 African art objects, and 417 pieces of miscellaneous metalwork. In his will, Barnes left control of the foundation's board to Lincoln University, a historically black institution in East Philadelphia. Like the stipulations in the trust, and Barnes' stewardship of the collection, this decision attests to two abiding concerns. First, Barnes' progressive social politics, especially regarding education; second, his absolute determination to prevent enemy interests—not just Walter Annenberg, but the Philadelphia Museum of Art—from wresting control of his collection. The terms of Barnes' will would also have a major unforeseen consequence: effectively freezing the displays in the foundation's galleries as they appeared at the time of his death. In this respect, the Barnes Foundation is not unique. Since 1924, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has had to contend with an equally restrictive trust. Neither institution can lend, and both are enjoined to preserve their collections in context as total works of art. "Founders, choosers," would seem be the rule. At least, up to a point.

The current custodians of Barnes' collection have plainly broken his rules. With the consent of the courts, the foundation has been adroitly hijacked by the same powers and interests that Barnes devoted himself to despising. Since May of 2012, the building in Merion has stood empty, the collection and all of its furnishing having been transferred to a purpose-built pavilion designed by Billie Tsien and Tod Williams. As a museum, this building includes modern facilities that the mansion designed by Paul Cret in 1922 lacked (an auditorium, a café to complement its gift shop, and an immense reception hall adjacent to the galleries). Then again, Barnes never intended for his collection to be visited like a museum. The Barnes was conceived by its founder as a school. It is these "classrooms" that have been painstakingly recreated in galleries identical to those arranged (the word hung seems too slight) by Barnes during his lifetime. The doctor's ensembles, including sculpture, furniture, metalwork, tapestries, and assorted bric-a-brac, remain unaltered. As period rooms, these full-scale reproductions are as scrupulously faithful as possible (modern illuminated exit signs are discreetly relegated to the baseboards). This dutiful imitation may seem an ironic—some might say sardonic—form of homage. Given the controversy that surrounded the collection's transfer to its new home, these doppelganger interiors could be viewed as a meaningful concession to the critics who opposed the move and fought to preserve Barnes's vision intact. But will those who protested in the streets and in the press really be grateful for the gesture? Rather, the preservation of Barnes's ensembles, right down to the colored candles that obscure some of the lower-hanging paintings (blue in the case of a 1903 Picasso), suggests that these have been judged an integral part of the Barnes experience, as idiosyncratic as the collection's founder.

Among those who advised Dr. Barnes was the Parisian dealer Paul Guillaume. In addition to his influence as a champion of European modernism, Guillaume was a connoisseur and collector of African sculpture, a passion which he imparted to Barnes. Correspondence on this subject, including Guillaume's instructional sketches of the African continent, were included in an inaugural exhibition, Ensemble: Albert C. Barnes and the experiment in education, in the new building's temporary exhibition space. (This tribute has now closed, and Barnes's portrait by Giorgio de Chirico has made way for sculptures by Ellsworth Kelly.)

Likes Barnes, Guillaume gave great thought to the arrangement and display of the works he acquired, juxtaposing European paintings and African sculptures. What remained of Guillaume's collection after the death of his widow passed to the French state, and is now on view in specially designed basement galleries at the musée de l'Orangerie. For those seeking a sense of how the work in Guillaume's collection was presented during the dealer's lifetime, a miniature diorama has been constructed. Viewed through a vitrine is a scale model of Guillaume's office, complete with furniture, parquet, and tiny replicas of his favorite paintings and sculptures. The effect at the Orangerie is quaint, where a few period photographs might have sufficed.

Photographs of the founder's evolving ensembles were featured in the new Barnes' inaugural exhibition. As a sequence, these records recall the documentary pictures of works in progress in Matisse's studio; photographs that formed one part of the recent exhibition Matisse: In Search of True Painting. Albert Barnes, alas, is no Henri Matisse. Both men compose decorative arrangements. Barnes' ensembles, however, are composed of found objects displayed according to rigid criteria. First and foremost, his ensembles are dictated by symmetry. A pair of Cézanne bathers, for instance, bookend a large and undistinguished Renoir. (Barnes, apparently, felt that one could never have too many Renoirs. Others may disagree.) What is the reason for this grouping? Those trained in the "Barnes method of seeing" will explain that through the improbable pairing of disparate materials (a Modigliani, say, and a washstand) the student is awakened to art's endless possibilities. Cannot one superb stand-alone Cézanne suggest similar possibilities, without being treated like an inkblot in a Rorschach test? One regrets, also, Barnes' horror vacui. Perhaps when a collector feels compelled to hang paintings by Cézanne as mere pendants, he has more Cézannes than he in fact knows what to do with.

To be sure, these ensembles are a significant part of Barnes' legacy. Unmaking them in the course of the move would have been further evidence of a brazen disregard for donor intent. But what about artists' intent? Is it not to be regretted that Seurat's Poseuses perches, as before, at a height that precludes close examination, while Cézanne's Card Players (for reasons best known to Dr. Barnes) hangs uncomfortably near the floor?

In their joint writings on African art, Paul Guillaume and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term "assemblage" to describe the bringing together of pre-existing parts to create a whole possessed of a new, and often ritual, power. Barnes' disciples speak in similar terms about the founder's vision, such that the doctor's "method" begins to resemble a twelve-step program for seeing. It too demands that the student submit to a higher-power, what might—in the case of the fetishized ensembles—be called the "magic" of the Barnes. It is a shame for those of us who would be content to experience, unimpeded, the magic of great art.

Ariel Plotek

Artists' Choices
New York

Artists make choices. These choices define their work, and their identity as artists. The manicule, or pointing finger of a disembodied hand, often appeared in Dadaist works by Marcel Duchamp. It is a symbol that entertains a host of meanings. For example, an artist can be someone who points a finger at an object and names it art; hence the birth of the modern readymade. The ordinary, found object can be reborn as art through the choice of the artist, through an act of naming and repurposing.

Several museum shows in New York this season have danced around the idea of the artist's choice, and specifically the artist as archivist, by asking artists to re-imagine museums' archives and collections. One theme this season has been the artist sifting through, reclaiming, and repurposing the oeuvre of another artist. In fact, several solo shows have become platforms for recuperating the archives of influential artists and colleagues who have, for various reasons, had less public acclaim during their careers. It has been a season in New York of seeing new material through new eyes; of being pointed towards new objects and nontraditional histories of art.

The artist's choice is a familiar framework in contemporary museum collection shows. A current iteration is the Museum of Modern Art's ongoing series Artist's Choice. Now in its tenth cycle, the popular series is given new direction by the conceptual artist Trisha Donnelly, who selects unusual and seldom-displayed objects from MoMA's collection. At the Brooklyn Museum, as part of the recent initiative Raw/Cooked, curators have invited emerging local artists to choose pieces from the collection and display them alongside their own works, bringing these "cooked" museum pieces into dialogue with the more "raw" recent work. In both cases, artists become archivists, encouraged to sift through the collections of major museums; in the case of the Brooklyn Museum, to unearth works that may somehow speak directly to their own. At MoMA too, the artist is invited to conceive new pairings and presentations. In each case, the artist's choices extend beyond those that directly shape their work. Choices are made also with an eye to reframing the collection of an institution.

Trisha Donnelly's show, Artist's Choice: Trisha Donnelly (November 9, 2012- July 28, 2013), spans three galleries, with each room operating according to a different organizational paradigm. The joy of being an archivist, and indeed an artist, appears to lie in discovering and navigating new visual worlds. Outside the first gallery is a photograph by Man Ray of a 1933 Surrealist exhibition in Paris showcasing works by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, and André Breton. The photograph reveals a set of art objects offset by free-associative combinations and unbalanced, off-kilter, arrangements: a chair leans to one side, propped-up by a bust of a woman who wears two ears of corn.

This photograph might be considered a lexicon for Donnelly's choices. Dadaist and Surrealist references to the readymade object, the uncommon juxtaposition, and the re-imagined body resound throughout her show. Like the Dadaist manicule, this photograph points the way. Donnelly's exhibition is indeed about opening up the strange world of MoMA's archives, where modern and contemporary canonical treasures reside alongside such surprisingly poignant materials as computer-circuit diagrams from Bell Laboratories and Texas Instruments. Donnelly calls these bright, kaleidoscopic patterns artifacts "of the origin of a universe." As I walked through her show, I imagined them as meta-data maps to long-forgotten and long-obsolete technological systems; keys to mapping a universe, and a metaphor for the way a journey through a system (or archive), creates its own visual index.

In recent months, both the New Museum and The Jewish Museum have mounted exhibitions that showcased artists re-presenting work by others who have influenced them. The Jewish Museum is currently showing work by Los Angeles based artist Sharon Lockhart. The show, titled Sharon Lockhart/Noa Eshkol (November 2, 2012-March 24, 2013), features a multi-channel video installation that Lockhart made in response to her discovery of the choreography work of Noa Eshkol (1924-2007) in Israel. Organized jointly by LACMA and the Israel Museum of Jerusalem, the show was conceived by Lockhart as a two-artist exhibition. Lockhart discovered Eshkol's dance work during a 2008 visit to Israel. Eshkol not only produced a large body of choreography but developed a body-movement system grounded in a study of kinetics and minute body movements. She coded and named each movement of the body so that her dances, shown in archival diaries in this show, resemble a mysterious mathematical language. Lockhart's body of photography and video work, which often shows subjects on the edge of movement, is aptly applied to Eshkol's modern dance. Lockhart's video installation showcases several works choreographed by Eshkol on five large screens installed as life-size tableaux snaking through the gallery. In tune with a soft metronome, the viewer stands and watches as bodies tilt, step, and twirl in precise but fluid movements. Lulled by the rhythm, it was easy to feel pulled into the world that Lockhart builds for her viewer where the gray, concrete floor of the gallery is mirrored in the gray, concrete floor of the dancers' performance space. Lockhart translates Eshkol's body-language through her visual language, inviting us into the choreographer's world as if we stand beside her.

The New Museum presented a retrospective of the feminist artist Rosemarie Trockel. Titled Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos (closed January 20, 2013), the show displayed a range of objects from Trockel's impressive and wide-ranging career. Trockel has worked in many different media including small books, platinum-plated biomorphic sculptures, and surreal installations invoking tableaux-vivant. Interspersed among her works so that one might never know the difference, if not for the wall texts, were objects culled from botanical archives and art objects sourced from the collections of under-recognized artists whom Trockel judged to be, kindred spirits.

The title of the show, A Cosmos, again suggested the idea of system-building, world-building, and world-imagining. What Trockel revealed to us is not only the world of her work, but the interlocking worlds that orbit in her system. Moving her viewer from her contemporary photography installations where a life-sized photo of a teenage girl's back revealed itself, on the reverse, to be just a blank sheet of paper, to anachronisms like an oversized lobster, resulted in the type of Surrealist juxtaposition whose success comes from a dream-logic that relies on metonymic proximity. By bringing these objects into the same gallery space, one began to map the origins and meaning of Trockel's visual language. It is one that revels in provocation as much as the unsteady chair in Man Ray's Surrealist exhibition.

Trockel guides us through her world, much as Lockhart and Donnelly, in their own ways, have pointed us through the archives of artists that have informed theirs, and the collections of institutions that have come to define the landscape of art history. Lockhart and Trockel seem to make a point of drawing from lesser-known artists, revising art-historical legacies. This pairs well with the work performed by Donnelly, who curates a history which—while potentially revisionist—is assembled from the holdings of one of New York's most canonical institutions.

Lara Schweller