Don’t Tread on Me:

Fetish Boots, 2011, in Yinka Shonibare’s new show at James Cohan. The boots—in the artist’s signature fabric, the “African” textile whose true roots are in Holland and Indonesia—are among works in various media exploring themes of desire, yearning, love, power and sexual repression. Also, they give new meaning to the term “finish fetish.” 

Photo Stephen White; © The Artist / Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai

Desperately Seeking Susan? 

Just a few more days to catch Anh Duong’s Portrait of Susan Sarandon (2009). She’s hanging around amidst figures ranging from nobles and cardinals to Pinnochio, Jackie Kennedy, and Krusty the Clown in “Portraits/Self-Portraits: From the 16th to the 21st Century,” at Sperone Westwater.  

Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

Giving Gingrich the Finger:

Strange but true: the best art about the current Republican primary was made two decades ago. 

Jack Levine, the irascible painterly leftist, started painting Finger of Newt back in 1993; the title, echoing the incantations of Macbeth’s witches, referred to the then-Speaker of the House. When I visited the artist in his Greenwich Village Studio in 1997, he was still obsessing over the best way to render Gingrich’s hand. “He’ll be out in two years and I won’t be done,” Levine growled.

Levine finally finished the picture in 1998, depicting the politician in a Capitol Hill setting (with a bust of Jefferson in the background and Bob Dole and Timothy McVeigh at his side). His pudgy middle digit lifted in the air, Gingrich is very clearly flipping the bird.

Levine passed away at the age of 95 in 2010—by which time, of course, the painting had become more relevant than ever. It’s for sale at New York’s DC Moore Gallery, along with other works by Levine, a one-time art star whose muckraking paintings became too earnest and insufficiently ironic for our postmodern moment.

Newt Gingrich’s comeback moment seems to be fading away. Could it finally be time for Jack Levine’s?

Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York.

Love at First Bite: 

Untitled (Apples), 2012, made of styrofoam and paint, in Tom Friedman’s mind-bending show opening today at Luhring Augustine. There’s also a trompe l’oeil camera fashioned from wood, a peeing figure made of stainless steel, and a blue space station suspended in the rafters.  Would not want to be the person in charge of protecting the inch-high, kite-flying man from being trampled during the opening.

Courtesy Luhring Augustine.

Snakes in the museum! 

Anyone who saw what happened to Mr. Popper’s penguins in the Guggenheim might be nervous about bringing live animals to an art museum, but that didn’t stop Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In a first for the MFA, if not any art museum, creatures including a horned owl, a broad-winged hawk, a corn snake, a painted turtle, along with ducks, rabbits, and woodchucks, all from the Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary, will be on hand to serve as live models during family art programs. The sessions will be offered February 20–24,  part of the “Cogan Family Foundation Vacation Week Adventures” built around the show “Paper Zoo,” a selection of animal art from 1600 to the present made (inexplicably only) in Europe and North America. Artists include Rembrandt, Picasso, Calder, and of course Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, the patron saint of cat art, whose undated Prowling Cat is shown here.

The presence of live animals in the sacrosanct precincts of art, even the education department, raises a number of questions. Will the critters escape into the galleries? Will they bite the tiny hands that sketch them? And, naturally, Why a duck? Why not a chicken? 

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  Harriet Otis Cruft Fund/Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Out of the Blue and Into the Black: 

Most of the Western modernists who were driven to abstraction, whether Malevich or the Minimalists, arrived there by a compulsion to reduce, distill, and purge form of content.

In abstraction from other traditions, the form is the content, and geometric shapes, as well as colors, have highly coded symbolic and spiritual meanings. That’s the case with the pre-Columbian Andean textiles that inspired Joaquín Torres-Garcia, Joseph Albers, Alfred Jensen, and so many other painters in the last century. 

And it’s also the case with the incredible Tantra paintings by anonymous artists from India on view at Feature Gallery through this weekend. These works, made between 1985 and 2009, were created as meditation tools to stimulate higher states of consciousness. This image, painted in Udaïpur, Rajasthan, in 2003, is known as a linga, an oval form that represents the deity Shiva. 

Though the makers of these paintings conceive them as objects of veneration, not as art, they are aware that people in India and abroad appreciate them for their aesthetic qualities, says Feature director Hudson. Western artists as well have found inspiration in the way that these rigorous forms connect with spiritual practice and a cosmology far beyond the illusion of the picture plane. A concurrent show at the gallery, “Connected,” presents the works of five such artists, who have been influenced by the kind of Tantra paintings in the show. Don’t miss it. 

Courtesy Feature Inc.

Now That’s a Horse of a Different Color:

Diana Thater, The Future Was An Illusion, 1997, an iris print recently acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. In these days of Photoshop, no one wonders how the artist achieved the effect of multicolored horses, maybe a commentary on skin color in humans, or race relations.

But for some of us, the image inevitably evokes a scene in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and pals travel the Emerald City in a carriage led by a color-changing horse. The story goes that since the ASPCA wouldn’t let the filmmakers dye the live animals used in the scene, they applied tinted gelatin powder, which the creatures consistently tried to lick off. 

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles/Gift of Laurence Rickels.

It’s not the bullet it’s the hose:

Karel Teige, Untitled, 1947, collage. From “New Formations: Czech Avant-Garde Art and Modern Glass from the Roy and Mary Cullen Collection,” at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. 

Collection of Roy and Mary Cullen. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Twitter Tips for $4500:

“#Drunk artist isn’t a hashtag, it’s a warning.” That’s but one instruction that artist and professional gadfly William Powhida puts in his 2012 drawing Twitter Notes, rendered in his distinctive obsessive multi-fonted faux-naif style. Also: never post jpegs of dinner.

The work is being offered for $4500 by his gallery, Postmasters, at the VIP art fair, an online showcase, up from February 3 to 8, that lets you peruse offerings from some 130 galleries without leaving your screen. (If you spring for $50 elite access you can chat in real time with the dealers.) 

The idea of a labor-intensive drawing about a social network being sold online to eventually hang on a wall is appealing, but the process would only go full circle if the purchaser tweets as much to Powhida. Whoever buys it, though, will have to decide how far to follow another one of his directives: “Be Abrasive!”

Courtesy Postmasters Gallery, New York, and VIP Art Fair.