The official greeter for this delightful, sprawling show, curated by artist Steve DiBenedetto, was Fabian Marcaccio's construction of a head vomiting flowers (2008-9). It vividly introduced the primary conceit behind the more than 40 works in this show: out of rot springs life; out of old art comes new.
The flowers and decomposition motif pervades Dieter Roth's fascinating collage Schlecht Erkennbares Blumen Still-Leben (Barely Recognizable Flowers Sill Life, 1977/79), which both recalls the artist's garbage assemblages and parodies the old-fashioned still-life tradition. To the life of the Roth were two Warhol "piss paintings," which explicitly link excretion to artistic creation. Meanwhile on the back wall was Malcolm Morley's huge painting The Theory of Catastrophe (2004), featuring a monstrous traffic smashup. With Morley the theme drifted from natural decay to man-made destruction.
The show sounds unbearably solemn, but in fact it was so varied and, at the same time, so conceptually unified that it came together as a fascinating exploration of the creative process, played out in painting, video, assemblage, photography, and sculpture. Hermann Nitsch's large painting dominated by a menacing red blot might have skewed things toward violence, but Markus Lüpertz's Landschaft Schwarz (Black Landscape, 1998) looks back to an almost Gothic juxtaposition of nature and brooding darkness. Vito Acconci's four photographs documenting Seedbed (1972), a performance in which the artist masturbated under a ramp at Sonnabend Gallery, could be viewed as a portrayal of the site of an obscene event that would become a cleansed space where life could begin again.
This was not a summer show of miscellaneous pieces but a meticulously staged demonstration of an idea. The mix of artists—living, dead, young, old—enacted the vitality of the compost heap, of the grave festooned with blooming lilacs.
—Alfred Mac Adam
