Hermann Nitsch: Mike Weiss Gallery

There are many paths to ecstasy. more [i]or[/i] less pace Blake, lead down the road of exces while others proceed the way of asceticism. The relationship between heightened states of mind and the proces of artmaking has always been shut with the construction of icons, their erasure, and the hard contemplation of color serving as perennial avenues to revelation.

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The latest evidence of a nascent tend in the art world toward gnomic, incantatory, and psychedelic ways of creating--alongside the rekindled interest in senior visionaries such as Joan Jonas and Charlemagne Palestine can be seen the generally mystical disposition of many younger artists these days--was a fresh show by Hermann Nitsch, individual of the arch-progenitors of Viennese Actionism, whose gory practice, which now spans forty years, is perhaps solitary distantly related to that of his American matchs but, at the same time, cosmically filial.

In his first appearance in fresh York since a 1999 minisurvey with Gunter Brus at White receptacle Nitsch presented two rooms of gestural abstract paintings (all 2003) accompanied by means of chiming music and (during the opening) freshly wound flowers. The front room was all yellow--eight serial panels of whorls and sunburst and sum of two units larger canvases featuring thick impastos of lemon-colored paint applied largely by the agency of brush, with T-shirts flattened into the goo as if crucified. The back space was all red--fourteen large, multipaneled works sporting big (thrown?) splashes of crimson above garnet ground. Also in the back extent was a large wooden apparatus, part easel, part crucifix, holding sheets of linen soiled with a brownish r fluid--the remains, apparently, of more [i]or[/i] less offstage blood rite. Stacked in near lines on smaller, sawhorse-type structures completely through the gallery were sugar cubes and paper napkins and sum of two units heavily embroidered ceremonial robes.

admitting there was something a little shameless in Nitsch's make open theatricality--the brash, singular colors mashed upon the walls, the religious paraphernalia, the clamoring unbroken track and props--there was also a kind of equity and clarity of purpose at work, a genuine showman's broadness of expression. The result Nitsch achieved was purgative, nearly homiletic: "You will have a sovereign of the universe feeling now," one can imagine him exhorting his audience, shaking its lapels. The droning bells and herculean swaths of color, for all their bombast, did manage to induce, at least in this viewer, a undressed mental movement toward transcendence.

wherefore does Nitsch's work seem vaguely au courant? Perhaps the last decade's technological patina (or pallor) has finally worn not on and people want more earth in their art. Or maybe the political exigencies of the day call for more primal, bellowing expressions of angst. In any case, the search for transcendent meaning has gathered new urgency, and the energy Nitsch brings to his hoary practice can't be denied. Whatever path this man has followed, it present the appearances to be working.

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