Polke

The large show of works by the late artist Sigmar Polke now filling the Atrium and the large spacious galleries that the Moma usually uses to show off its latest mediocre acquisitions seems to me to be a show worthy of the attention paid and the spaces used. Polke is pretty much a stranger to me, so I was looking forward to seeing this show, and by and large I wasn't disappointed. I especially liked his imaginative use of materials and how well he used his large canvases, these are the best pieces and no doubt these works done on fabrics and other odd surfaces were a big influence on some well placed and over saturated artists of the 80's. His work with photographs and smaller collages are pleasant enough but really didn't do the trick for me and I couldn't concentrate on his films and videos that were placed on monitors here and there. The exhibition guide that you pick up is 32pgs and as usual I hate these fucking things in which you have to match the tiny diagrams with the numbered captions, small descriptive labels would have worked fine instead of me having to try to decipher this poorly conceived and designed road map. I took a look also at the Jasper Johns "No Regrets" show which put me to sleep and I was standing up and walking. This guy hasn't done anything worth looking at in probably 40 or more years and the only reason he has this space is well because hey he's Jasper Johns. He might be the most overrated artist of the 20th century, notice I said might be, but his reputation to me is really based on a few maps and flags he did in the 1950's. These latest works are dull and D.O.A. I also took a quick second look at Robert Heinecken: Object Matter which I liked better the second time but I still think his stuff is pretty juvenile, minor and mostly silly, but the guy sure could handle an X-acto knife and I liked that he pretty much worked only in black and white with the exception of those altered magazines that cover a whole wall with their bright colors. Think Mad Men and advertising of the early 60's with some mild porn thrown in. Yesterday I caught the final day of the Onnasch Collection that took up the huge Hauser & Wirth space with a museum quality exhibition of mostly works from the 60's by some big time major male artists, and one woman, but I did like a lot of the work, a room of Kienholz, and some terrific small Tuttle's early Dine's and Oldernburgs, and not a Jasper Johns to be found. Also good was the Howardena Pindell show of unstretched paintings from 1974-1980 which are obsessive with punched dots and overloaded with paint and other unusual "things." I also quickly walked in and out of the David Zwimer galleries which had some dark rooms that I wasn't going to go into and Petzel which has some big charcoal drawings by Robert Longo that didn't interest me at all. The other gallery that I made it to was Michael Rosenfeld which is a gallery that I like for the "historical" shows they put on. This month there is a beautiful show of twentieth Century African American artists, and finally if you are near FIT this week check out the soon to close "Elegance In An Age of Crisis: Fashions of the 1930's" if only to see the display cases full of Fred Astaire's shoes.