Night Bitches

What a great exhibition title: “The Bitch.” It describes so much and says so little. This is a two-person show of Alex Katz, 97, and Matthew Barney, 57. It was put together by Jamian Juliano-Villani, 37, a living-on-the-edge sensation who shows her own hyperrealist paintings at Gagosian and uses the sales to stage exhibitions at her gallery, O’Flaherty’s. With her cohort Billy Grant, Juliano-Villani has operated O’Flaherty’s at two other Lower East Side locations. This one is on Allen Street, a spot that was formerly a bordello, a bar, and a deli. A dead tree trunk dominates the space, a staircase curling around it. It gives the venue a haunted air of dead memories.

Three distinct artistic sensibilities merge into one. Barney’s modus operandi is endless preparation, numerous assistants, and a penchant for the spectacular. (In 1991, he made his way via ice screws along a gallery ceiling, naked but for a climbing belt and other accessories, and climbed down a wall into a basement freezer where he inserted his final screw into his ass — still the best debut solo show I have ever seen.) Here, his Water Cast 10 is part modernist abstraction, part wasps’ nest, and part Chinese scholar’s rock made by a crew of people pouring molten copper into a combination of clay and water. The result is explosive.

Katz emerged in New York in the early 1950s, then the height of Abstract Expressionism. He pushed back against this trend, painting representationally and demurely. His images of people and things are silent screens made with uninflected brushstrokes. I was never much of a fan, but Katz’s bland sublime is forever undead among younger artists. His newest abstractions are rendered in unambiguous neon orange. In one, there is a long, receding highway beneath a leafy canopy road. These are the best paintings Katz has ever made, and it’s moving to think how long it sometimes takes for painting to give up its secrets.

Barney and Katz were represented by Barbara Gladstone, who died this summer. Under a group of directors, Gladstone’s gallery is now trying to extend its lifetime. This idea of pushing back against the limits of life cycles is baked into the audacious DNA of “The Bitch.” Juliano-Villani envisioned a show about “living in fear,” “a gripping tale of unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death.” This sort of raw hubris is welcome in an art world filled with familiar aesthetic conceits and credentialed elitism.

After passing into the darkened downstairs gallery though a sort of cage, viewers are confronted by three monitors suspended over an old bar. Playing on them is Barney’s 45-minute video Drawing Restraint 28, in which we witness Katz, an ancient mariner climbing up and down a portable stairway, making one of his large orange monochromes. He ascends, holds his large brush, steadies himself, and makes a mark. He steps down to consider it. Barney treats Katz as a specter-exemplar, a living gladiator-athlete still at work. The film is a harrowing journey into creativity. We watch someone doing what he has done every day of his life, totally locked in, lost in his own wisdom, motor memory, and instinct. I want to die working, I thought.

Walking through “The Bitch” makes us feel we are inside the body of art. Paced like a dirge or chant, its crushing beauty gives us two very different artists developing their own languages and tools as they labor against restraints of space and mortality. These invisible structures are built into all art, be it the form of a sonnet, the artifice of perspective, the mechanisms of the novel. “The Bitch” tells us that though we may never be the same person who made something in the past, we nevertheless inhabit structures that allow us to create again. This euphoric exhibition whispers that objects have longer memories than people, that everything is on the side of the living.