A few of the images in Luigi Ghirri’s “Kodachrome” series (on view now at the Matthew Marks gallery) are unexpectedly religious. A wooden bench with a soft, curved back sits on a pink and white tiled floor in an old hotel. An arched brick doorway reveals a folded beach chair, its cloth cover bleached by the sun (Marina de Ravenna). The spaces are narrow, worn, and peaceful, like church pews.

Ghirri is very, very good at changing the way that we see. His photos can seem almost too gentle, but they have a way of making you blink.
For one thing, the photos don’t bother with perspective. Instead, they flatten out space, almost like pre-Renaissance painting. Objects either exist in isolation (like the beach chair and the bench) or stand side by side as equals.
Ghirri loves to jam two different scenes together, pulling everything out of its context. In Engelberg tourists stand in front of a gigantic Sprite ad showing snowy mountains and waterfalls and the Sprite logo. The tourists look like they’ve been plunked down in some imaginary Switzerland; they’re helpless and a little bit lost. And of course, the ad isn’t just an ad anymore. It’s real scenery now, taking over the world.
Bologna uses the same technique. A couple sits in a restaurant, heads on their hands, waiting for dinner. But they’re in front of a roaring ocean scene, a mural that fills all the space in the shot. How can they be bored, in front of such an ocean? How can we all let so much of life pass us by? Like Engleberg, Bologna is almost laughably easy on the eyes, but it’s uncomfortably stirring.
Some of Ghirri’s work loses its way and falls into shallow whimsy. Modena is a photograph of two paintings, side by side. One shows bare, wintry trees, and the other is all houses and mountains. The frames touch, but the images never can. It’s clever, it’s interesting, but in the end it doesn’t say much.
Cluny is similarly facile. It’s a picture of a picture: Ghirri has hung a picture of an imposing French medieval cathedral on a monastery wall. The church in the picture is in perfect condition but the wall it’s hanging on is crumbling, ancient. Which is the real image, which is the real truth? Cluny wont tell you, but Ghirri’s better photographs will hint at an answer.
Luigi Ghirri: “Kodachrome” will be on display at the Matthew Marks gallery (526 w 22nd street) through April 20

The New Museum has put together a time capsule: a collection of dozens of works produced in New York in the year 1993. If you were a teenager in 1993, the exhibit “1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” will probably act on you like a heady, pop blast of nostalgia. After all, some of the show’s curators were themselves teenagers in 1993. The show is full of pop music and the kind of lurid imagery that goes straight to your memory banks. The result is a very warm, if perhaps incomplete, dive into the past.
The exhibit opens with a row of TV’s playing snippets of news and entertainment from the time: Rudy Giuliani in an early campaign ad; Whitney Houston belting out a ballad. This sets the tone. In the same room, to make it clear that the show’s focus is on the young, the curators have installed a video by Alex Brag (untitled). The piece is blurry, charming, and predictable: Barbie dolls and young women in little black dresses flail their arms to a background of Nirvana, Ace of Base, and other period music. We know where we are here.

Pepón Osorio,The Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?), 1993 Mixed mediums

Teenage dreamland is realized most beautifully in one large room on the museum’s fourth floor. The floor is covered in a deliciously soft orange rug (Carpet, by Rudolph Stingel). Dusk-blue billboards, each with the silhouette of one bird, take up two walls, and a string of lightbulbs hangs from a rafter in the middle of the room, (both those pieces, untitled, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres). A clip of Kristin Oppenheim singing the Beach Boys’ “Sail on Sailor” plays in an endless loop and completes the wistful mood.
But it’s not all solitary idylls. “1993” goes heavy on death and the grotesque. The AIDS epidemic was at its peak, and the emphasis on loss is inevitable. “1993” includes a well-known, heartbreaking series of Nan Goldin photographs showing a man slowly succumbing to AIDS as his partner stands by, helpless (Gilles and Gotscho). Gregg Bordowitz’s short video (Fast Trip, Long Drop) provides a vivid look at the state of the AIDS activism movement. The grotesque is harder to understand here: Why were so many artists in 1993 turning out coyly sexual life-sized dolls? Charles Ray’s “Family Romance” and Paul McCarthy’s “Cultural Gothic” both point to incest without, really, saying anything about it. Do we need both pieces in this show, especially after Zoe Leonard’s series of anatomical models?
Maybe it’s inevitable that a show of this scope will feel both incomplete and too big. After a while I, at least, found myself wandering through the rooms looking for what I already knew. The show began to repeat. Surely 1993 was about more than dysfunction in Manhattan? A few pieces in the show stand outside of time: Kiki Smith’s nude, powerful Virgin Mary; Lorna Simpson’s simple and somehow shattering Seven Mouths.
A few other pieces at least leave Manhattan. Pepon Osorio’s The Scene of the Crime is a life-size diorama of a South Bronx apartment complete with family pictures and a woman’s body under a bloody cloth. Spanish radio plays ads for detergent and the chairs are draped in Puerto Rican flags. (This Bronx murder is notably the sole mention of a borough of 1.4 million people.) And then there are, of course, Annie Liebowitz’s tragic shots of Sarajevo, including one of Susan Sontag posing amidst the ruins. But why isn’t there more? Did I miss something? Probably. Was the art scene too insular in 1993? Of course. Is there great work out there that still can’t make it on the New Museum’s Bowery? Almost definitely.

“1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” through May 26 at New Museum, 321 Bowery

The New Museum has put together a time capsule: a collection of dozens of works produced in New York in the year 1993. If you were a teenager in 1993, the exhibit “1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” will probably act on you like a heady, pop blast of nostalgia. After all, some of the show’s curators were themselves teenagers in 1993. The show is full of pop music and the kind of lurid imagery that goes straight to your memory banks. The result is a very warm, if perhaps incomplete, dive into the past.

The exhibit opens with a row of TV’s playing snippets of news and entertainment from the time: Rudy Giuliani in an early campaign ad; Whitney Houston belting out a ballad. This sets the tone. In the same room, to make it clear that the show’s focus is on the young, the curators have installed a video by Alex Brag (untitled). The piece is blurry, charming, and predictable: Barbie dolls and young women in little black dresses flail their arms to a background of Nirvana, Ace of Base, and other period music. We know where we are here.

Teenage dreamland is realized most beautifully in one large room on the museum’s fourth floor. The floor is covered in a deliciously soft orange rug (Carpet, by Rudolph Stingel). Dusk-blue billboards, each with the silhouette of one bird, take up two walls, and a string of lightbulbs hangs from a rafter in the middle of the room, (both those pieces, untitled, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres). A clip of Kristin Oppenheim singing the Beach Boys’ “Sail on Sailor” plays in an endless loop and completes the wistful mood.

But it’s not all solitary idylls. “1993″ goes heavy on death and the grotesque. The AIDS epidemic was at its peak, and the emphasis on loss is inevitable. “1993″ includes a well-known, heartbreaking series of Nan Goldin photographs showing a man slowly succumbing to AIDS as his partner stands by, helpless (Gilles and Gotscho). Gregg Bordowitz’s short video (Fast Trip, Long Drop) provides a vivid look at the state of the AIDS activism movement. The grotesque is harder to understand here: Why were so many artists in 1993 turning out coyly sexual life-sized dolls? Charles Ray’s “Family Romance” and Paul McCarthy’s “Cultural Gothic” both point to incest without, really, saying anything about it. Do we need both pieces in this show, especially after Zoe Leonard’s series of anatomical models?

Maybe it’s inevitable that a show of this scope will feel both incomplete and too big. After a while I, at least, found myself wandering through the rooms looking for what I already knew. The show began to repeat. Surely 1993 was about more than dysfunction in Manhattan? A few pieces in the show stand outside of time: Kiki Smith’s nude, powerful Virgin Mary; Lorna Simpson’s simple and somehow shattering Seven Mouths.

A few other pieces at least leave Manhattan. Pepon Osorio’s The Scene of the Crime is a life-size diorama of a South Bronx apartment complete with family pictures and a woman’s body under a bloody cloth. Spanish radio plays ads for detergent and the chairs are draped in Puerto Rican flags. (This Bronx murder is notably the sole mention of a borough of 1.4 million people.) And then there are, of course, Annie Liebowitz’s tragic shots of Sarajevo, including one of Susan Sontag posing amidst the ruins. But why isn’t there more? Did I miss something? Probably. Was the art scene too insular in 1993? Of course. Is there great work out there that still can’t make it on the New Museum’s Bowery? Almost definitely.

“1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” through May 26 at New Museum, 321 Bowery

It’s exciting to walk into the Guggenheim’s new contemporary South Asian exhibit “No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia.” There’s the glitter of silver, the sheen of gold, and the vibrant colors of a wall-to-wall mural: and there’s the promise of a show full of that region’s new artists, fresh to many of our American eyes.

After the first excitement fades you may ask yourself how, exactly, the Guggenheim selected its artists? Who picked the rather vapid spray of volcanic ash that takes up a whole wall in the last room? (Arin Dwihartanto Sunaryo’s Volcanic Ash Series #4). And who decided that the show absolutely needed something, anything to do with the War on Terror and neo-colonialism, and then ticked both those boxes with Norberto Roldan’s F16, which juxtaposes an Afghan bombing with William McKinley’s speech about colonizing the Philippines?

Both pieces are interesting enough; but it’s hard to believe that they represent “some of the most compelling and innovative voices in South and Southeast Asia today.” Which is really all we should have in a show so small, and so geographically ambitious.

Some of the show does, indeed, live up to the hype. Navin Rawanchaikul’s mural, Places of Rebirth, tells the story of the artist’s trip to his ancestral Pakistan along with his Japanese wife and their daughter. The mural has the look of a Bollywood poster, complete with credits for the entire cast; it manages to be playful, political, and highly personal.

Four Pieces of White

, by the husband-and-wife team Wah Nu and Tin Win Aung, is another stand-out. The series shows Aung San, Myanmar’s independence hero and father of Aung San Suu Kyi, in painting and sculpture and grainy video. Whatever the format, Aung San is blurred and distant as any collective memory. You may know everything, or nothing about him; this series will make you think of your own lost heroes.

Vincent Leong’s Keeping Up With the Abdullahs #1 and #2 show two families – one ethnically Chinese, the other ethnically Indian – from Malaysia’s minority groups. Both families are dressed in Islamic clothing, hinting at the pressure to fit in with Malaysia’s Muslim majority. And yet, these photos would work regardless of what the audience knows about Malaysian clothes. The subjects stare out at us, each person a complete individual and yet completely a part of the family group. They’re universal.

The same cannot be said, alas, for Tang Da Wu’s Our Children. How you feel about this piece will probably depend on how much you like reading captions. The work is a large glass table, set with a bottle of milk; below it is a much smaller glass table. The caption helpfully explains that the piece “references a story from traditional teochow opera in which a young boy experiences a humbling moment of enlightenment at the sight of a genuflecting baby goat suckling at its mother.” For some visitors, this will appeal. Others will feel that art should not need to be decoded. Sometimes, a little bit of cleverness goes a long way.

The Rubin Museum is now showing the first American retrospective of Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first female photojournalist, in “Candid: The Lens and Life of Homai.” Vyarawalla started out as an outsider, taking furtive shots of Bombay street life. She ended her career photographing heads of state and dignitaries. Along the way, she may have traded art for access. But the resulting photographs are a gorgeous record of India’s first years of independence (separating from British rule on Aug. 15, 1947).

The pre-independence photos show us an India caught between two worlds. Victoria Terminus is one of the best. The railroad station, a British creation, is all carved stone and gothic archways. Men in white suits stride toward it. But in the foreground, there’s a turbaned man in sandals, working a pushcart. The whole shot is framed by the shadows of another cart. The Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations in Bombay, similarly, show a thick crowd of men holding statues of Ganesh as they march by colonial buildings. A soldier stands on a wood-and-gilt desk to direct traffic. All the faces are a blur.

The faces start coming into focus with national independence. Vyarawalla photographed Gandhi, at prayer meetings and then at his funeral; Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy; and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the first leader of Pakistan. The pictures are just a little bit awkward; Vyarawalla often had to sneak around to get her shot, and it shows. She’s also torn between the crowd and the leadership so that some of these pictures, especially of Gandhi’s funeral, lack a center. But this may be a good thing, since we end up with a broad swath of life in each shot; our eye moves from Gandhi’s son lighting the funeral pyre to a confused child in the crowd, and then back to a European news crew fussing with their own camera.

Once Nehru comes into office (he was prime minister of India from 1947 to 1964), he dominates Vyarawalla’s lens. Some of her photos are pure iconography: Nehru releasing a dove into the sky, for example, looks like a propaganda poster. Luckily, Nehru made a good subject, almost mugging for the camera next to grave visiting heads of state (it’s a special pleasure to see him beside Yugoslavian dictator Tito). Vyarawalla also got shots of the Dalai Lama, Queen Elizabeth and Eleanor Roosevelt, to name a few.

In her later years, the crowds are completely gone from Vyarawalla’s photographs; only the leadership exists. But then, she manages to find the human being inside each dignitary. And she left them for us to see.

Candid: The Lens and Life of Homai Vyarawalla runs through Jan. 14 at the Rubin Museum, 150 West 17th St.

The Chinese invented woodblock printing. And in China, printing very quickly took on religious implications—Buddhism teaches that reproducing sacred texts is a way to receive blessings, so printing became a way to receive blessings while spreading the state religion.

The exhibit starts with a room of seventh-, eighth- and ninth-century prints of the Buddha with short texts. There are a few standouts, like the luxuriously painted “Banner with Bodhisattva.” But after a while, most of the prints start to take on the sameness of dollar bills—they’re spiritual currency.

The show moves on to the Ming period (1368-1644), where prints of leaves and flowers are executed with military precision. The period saw a big growth in literacy and wealth; at the same time, color printing took off. The exhibit includes many examples from the Ten Bamboo Shoots Collection of Calligraphy and Painting, a manual for artists full of lichen-covered stones and vines.

Color printing flourished into the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), whose Manchu rulers gave away prints to their guests to show off their power. The Qing period verges on the garish; loud pinks and greens, overflowing fruit plates and flower baskets all scream money.

The warmest pieces in this show are the so-called popular prints, which ordinary people bought to hang in their homes. Most are “door guardians” from the late 19th century, round-cheeked generals and kitchen gods with open, cartoonish faces. There are a few moving, expressionistic woodcuts from the revolutionary period, too. And the show does include some exciting works from the 1980s and beyond, notably Chen Haiyan’s “Dream,” an evocative swirl of animals on a black cloud, and Wu Jide’s “Fleeting Years.”

But these pieces beg the question: why isn’t The Met giving these artists an exhibit of their own? We would never see contemporary French or Italian artists wedged into a show of this historic scope. Contemporary Chinese artists deserve the same respect we give their Western counterparts.

The Printed Image in China: 
8th-21st Centuries 
Through July 29, The Metropolitan 
Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave., 
212-923-3700, www.metmuseum.org.

I spent a long time looking at “Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian,” a portrait of a couple, one of the first pieces in the exhibit. The subjects are on record as grumbling about Neel’s manners—apparently she hardly said a word to them over the long posing sessions. Still, they almost glow on the canvas. Their skin is blotchy, their bodies are lumpy and their clothes are frumpy, but they look patient and loving and close. Their bodies, side by side, flow into each other. Their wrinkles and tousled hair hint at a private world from which they look out at us.

“Sherry Speeth” is a totally different character. Nervous and taut, he sits on the edge of his chair, bursting with energy. Neel takes the best of him, making a little man in a little chair into a dynamo. Her colors do a lot of the work here; red accents at his ears and hands mark him for action. And, as so often, Neel uses gentle caricature—elongated fingers, sharp knees, oversized glasses—as shorthand to express personality.

“Kevin and Andy,” a father-and-baby portrait, may be one of the oddest pieces in this show. Kevin and Andy look incredibly awkward and unfinished. The baby’s teeth are ludicrous, taking over half his face; his father’s arm, holding him, hangs out over empty space, and the chair they sit in is just a few dark lines on the plain white canvas. But then, these two people are unmistakably happy—and isn’t this what having a baby does, makes the whole world look unfinished and new?

Neel’s still lifes also bristle with personality, especially “Roses.” The flowers’ strong, sinewy stems, their bright simple faces and their tangle of green leaves are all full of life. They sit in a lopsided vase on a messy, misshapen table. Everything in the painting is flat; it’s the awkwardness, the loose lines, that gives it all a little dimension. The same could be said for all the rest of Neel’s paintings.

Alice Neel: Late Portraits and Still Lifes

Through June 23, David Zwirner, 533 W. 19th St., 212-727-2070, davidzwirner.com.

Leonard Freed, "New York City from Inside a Police Auto. Poice check autos for Wanted Man," (1978)

In 1972, the photographer Leonard Freed set out to document the daily lives of New York City police officers. He wanted to humanize the police force, arguing that “if we do not concern ourselves with who the police are—who they really are…we run the real risk of finding that we no longer have public servants who are required to protect the public.” Freed’s work is on view at the Museum of the City of New York in an exhibition titled Police Work: Photographs by Leonard Freed, 1972-1979.
Unfortunately, Freed, in this collection from a period in New York’s most dire and corrupt era, didn’t bother to humanize the New Yorkers who dealt with the police every day. The result is a series of compelling but oddly cartoonish photos of the city in its crime-ridden heyday.
Freed is at his best when he shows us the police on their own territory. I lingered over a series of off-duty cops: a policewoman sits on her motorcycle with her little boy and girl next to her; a policeman dressed in full Civil War regalia stands with his daughters and their dolls. Freed doesn’t give us a location, but both photos look like they were taken in the semi-rural suburbs, at a healthy remove from the crumbling city.
Looking at them is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope into a neat, private little world. Even Freed’s group portrait at a station house has this self-contained look. The officers stare calmly at the camera, giving nothing away. If there is any anger in their hearts or any sorrow, Freed hasn’t captured it. When the cops go out to the streets they are confronted with a dirty, dangerous city. Some of that dirt and danger comes across in the photographs. There are corpses lying in stairwells, men showing off their scars and fields of rubble around abandoned buildings. But Freed ’s photos are primarily portraits of the police, with the city acting as background.
An officer with a fatherly smile points a gun at two suspects whose faces are to the wall. Two young policemen chat while a prostitute, again with her back to the camera, lounges across two chairs. Another photo shows a young policeman in the station house, putting on a bulletproof vest. He looks alert and excited; an eager young hero. The caption reads, “We’re going to pick up a murder suspect.” But what about the suspect he’s apprehending? What does he look like and what does he want to say?
Nobody can do it all, and I wouldn’t blame Freed for neglecting the city’s civilians if it wasn’t for his desperate urge to get cute. There are some goofy photos here, for example of a tall woman kissing a short cop on the cheek (“Isn’t he cute?” the caption reads) and a policewoman playing Duck Duck Goose with children. The Museum of the City of New York, which sometimes looks at New York City through Mickey Mouse glasses, shares some of the blame for choosing to include this kind of schmaltz in such a small show. Still, the exhibit is well worth seeing. Look over the policemen’s heads, past the images that Freed wants to show you, and focus on the city itself.

Police Work: Photographs by Leonard Freed, 1972-1979
Through May 6, Museum of the City of New York, 1220 5th Ave., 212-534-1672, www.mcny.org.

This article first appeared in the March 7 issue of CityArts. For more from New York’s Review of Culture, visit www.cityartsnyc.com.

The title of The Metropolitan Museum’s new Chinese painting exhibit, Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965), is misleading. The painter in question did live through the establishment of the Chinese Republic, the Sino-Japanese wars and the rise of the Communist party, but Fu is far more academic than revolutionary. It is his adaptability and willingness to lose himself in the river of history that makes this show so interesting.

We begin with the young Fu training himself to paint by copying the masters. He inscribes each of his early paintings with an explanation of his influences (“Cheng Sui, active 1605-1691, modeled his landscapes after Dong Yuan, active 930s-960s…I love his simple, vigorous style and imitate it”). Fu was also a professional maker of seals, and the first room of the show includes many of his seals. Like the early paintings, these are well-realized, workmanlike pieces, far more imitative than original.

Fu evidently became more dynamic in middle age. My favorite pieces in the exhibit are a series of rainy, romantic paintings of mountains and remote cottages, done at the end of World War II. “Whispering Rain at Dusk” is a wonderfully broody picture washed in purple-gray; the trees and their leaves look like raindrops. In all the hugeness of nature, the eye goes to a tiny red figure laboring up a path to a house high up in the mountains.

“Myriad Bamboo in Mist and Rain,” similarly, is almost all green mist; trees and rain take over the picture except for some high, far-off mountain peaks and a clean-looking river. Three friends shelter in a cottage, and we can almost hear their crackling fire.

After Mao Zedong took power, Fu found work as a propagandist. We generally expect to look down on propaganda, but in fact, Fu’s Mao-era work is wonderfully fresh. He traveled to the Soviet Union with a delegation of Chinese artists and painted the parks, cathedrals and airports he saw there.

The trip obviously energized him; suddenly, the landscape is neither an academic study nor a reflection of mood but a real place that must be observed and recorded in detail. The trees and factory windows are charming in their sharp-outlined specificity.

Fu’s homages to Mao are also effective. Soldiers, again closely observed in detailed uniforms, trudge bravely through the snow. A cowherd appears to assure peasants that more prosperous times are coming. A number of paintings are inspired by Mao’s poetry. It is not difficult to see in these late works the same capable young painter who so dutifully copied the works of the ancient masters.

Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965)
Through April 15, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave., 212-570-3894, www.metmuseum.org.