Wall Street Journal, NY
Jan 31 2015

A Tribute to a Lowly Beetle, Plus Bringing Myths to Life

Works by Diana Thater, Charles Garabedian and Radical Art From the ‘Red Decade’

By
Peter Plagens
Jan. 30, 2015 4:19 p.m. ET

Diana Thater : Science, Fiction

David Zwirner
533 W. 19th St., (212) 727-2070
Through Feb. 21

Diana Thater (b. 1962) is arguably the best video-installation artist
in Los Angeles; she will enjoy a retrospective at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art later this year. Ms. Thater knows her technical
onions, has a superb theatrical sense of what the exhibiting space has
to offer, and is willing to push the limits of her media.

For this quietly polished show, Ms. Thater, long fascinated by animal
behavior, pays tribute to the lowly dung beetle, an insect that lives
on other beings’ excrement and–here’s the “Believe It or Not!”
moment–navigates at night by the Milky Way. (This ability comes from
its eyes sensing polarized light around celestial bodies.)

The centerpiece of the exhibition, “Science, Fiction” (2014), is a
large white box–seemingly levitating over a yellow glow–whose hidden
gear projects a close-up video of the beetles onto an overhead screen.
In a kind of prologue room, two videos on grids of flat screens,
“Sidereus Nuncius” and “The Starry Messenger” (both 2014), display
what looks to be a spherical sci-fi spacecraft moving silently through
the cosmos. (It is actually the star projector at the Griffith Park
Observatory.) The whole show is lighted in a nighttime blue less like
the dung beetle’s domain than a very exclusive nightclub serving
extremely expensive frosted vodka.

That icy hipness is a problem. There is something missing in
it–namely, an artistic connection between the natural wonder of the
dung beetle and Ms. Thater’s impressive technique. The range of scale,
from an insect to outer space, is daunting, but the show gives us no
particular poetic take on it. What we have here is a gorgeous but
vague entry in a science fair.

The Left Front: Radical Art in the ‘Red Decade,’ 1929–1940

Grey Art Gallery
100 Washington Square East, (212) 998-6780
Through April 4

Just as architecture, with the passage of enough time, becomes part of
our natural surroundings, so do political passions become history. And
when the artistic artifacts of those passions become art history, it
raises the question of whether seeing them as art objects–concisely
imagined, brilliantly composed, beautifully drawn–does an injustice to
their origin.

This exhibition of a hundred or so works of American art by more than
three dozen artists, from the decade between the stock market crash of
1929 and the beginnings of World War II, may not answer that question,
but it gives us a trove of material–drawings, prints, posters and a
few paintings–on which to decide the matter. The mostly
black-and-white art, by the likes of Reginald Marsh, Raphael Soyer,
Mabel Dwight and the underappreciated Louis Lozowick, was created in
the teeth of the Great Depression, when class struggles that make the
“us-versus-the-one-percent” look polite by comparison, union
organizing, and the threat of fascism galvanized and united artists in
a concentrated way that none of our current social issues seem to do
today. Some stunning film clips of huge May Day parades of the time,
right in the Grey Gallery’s neighborhood, reinforce that conclusion.

Then came the Soviet Union’s nonaggression pact with the Nazis, which
disillusioned the left, and shortly after, America’s entry into the
war. They ended the protests, but not the struggles. “The Left Front”
is a rich reminder of that whole story.

Charles Garabedian : Mythical Realities

Betty Cuningham
15 Rivington St., (212) 242-2772
Through Feb. 21

For the past 25 years, Charles Garabedian (b. 1923)–a beloved, slyly
avuncular figure in the Los Angeles art world–has kept figurative
painting honest. He’s done this by drawing badly very well (which
keeps his paintings from being academically show-offy), and by putting
on paint so adroitly that its expressionist whole disguises an
expertise in the particular brushstroke. His color looks
optimistically innocent, but it glows with subtle design.

These large, ebullient acrylic-on-paper paintings derive from
mythologies–Classical Greek, biblical and others–and probably (this is
a guess) from Mr. Garabedian’s Armenian heritage. (His parents fled
the Armenian genocide early in the 20th century, and he and his
siblings lived for a time in an orphanage.)

Mr. Garabedian, an Air Force veteran of World War II, didn’t begin
painting seriously until he was in his 30s. Since then, he’s absorbed
everything from Giotto to Picasso to the painterly ease of his
southern California compatriot, Richard Diebenkorn. Mr. Garabedian has
had, of course, plenty of time to make his own vision based on all
these sources–and, on the evidence of almost every one of his
exhibitions since the 1970s, he has succeeded.

–Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York.