Browsing the Chelsea Galleries: Nicole Eisenman, Mamma Andersson, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Richard Serra

Yesterday I visited a number of galleries in Chelsea and had a look at the latest work of Nicole Eisenman, Mamma Andersson, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and Richard Serra. Also a group show curated by Bob Nickas and some old de Kooning sketches.

Nicole Eisenman's work is at the Leo Koenig gallery. The heart of the show is a pair of enormous mural-style canvases displayed side by side. Both are remarkably violent, with hunks of paint in some cases seemingly smashed onto the canvas and innumerable images of violence and futility. The right canvas repeats images of birthing -- spread-legged women birthing odd babies into a rushing river, from which they are fished and hooked by menacing figures on the shore. One of the birthers has just been shot in the forehead by one of the many rifle-armed women who inhabit various parts of the canvas. Even the mountains in the background are involved, one of them taking the shape of these spread-legged women and birthing the river itself. The only moment of what might be calm or dignity is a girl who stands in a swimsuit on the shore of the ocean fed by the awful river, a parent figure standing reassuringly behind her, as one might stand to encourage a kid on his first summer foray into the water.

But in the left canvas, that same sea is revealed in its own violence and futility. Most of the canvas is a ramshackle house on a boat in this violent sea. In the house, surrounded by chaotic heaps of stuff, an artist quietly draws a landscape on a sketchpad, using a quill pen. The left canvas is crowded with signifiers: a traffic sign with an arrow on it, two Café Bustelo cans holding brushes, a Swiss flag imprinted with the phrase "Nuke the Swiss," etc. I suppose this complements the kind of detail on the right canvas, where the images are more natural (birth, sex, killing) or less mediate (some sort of auction, flying Big Mac-style hamburgers).

I can't tell whether the image of the artist in the left canvas is supposed to be a positive statement. He or she (gender is concealed) is engrossed in the drawing, unheedful of the violence beyond the sketchpad. The sketch itself is calm and classical, austere in black and white. Is this the still, calm world that art can find when it turns away from the futile cycle of signifiers and signifieds? Is art like the yogic practice that the Bhagavad Gita says can free people from the futile cycles of action and inaction? Or are we to see the artist in the canvas as an example of the falsifying that goes under the name of art?

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe is 180 degrees different. A fact sheet distributed at the Gray Kapernekas Gallery show quotes him: "Brutality and argument tend to be contemporary signs for the serious." So in reaction his work is about beauty -- harmonious plays of color on square canvases, more pretty than beautiful, and a good deal more likely to end up above someone's sofa.

Richard Serra's works in "Rolled and Forged" at the Gagosian gallery escape from all this palaver about art by being massively themselves, not signifiers and resistant to signification. The largest of them, "Amongst Elevations," comprises 16 enormous plates of weatherproof steel, in 4 different sizes, arranged in 6 very long lines so that one can walk between them or around them. The walking is the experience of the art. Each is rusted and scratched in different ways, so that one experiences them differently as one walks. It is an awesome experience, maybe a little humbling, and definitely worth the visit.

Over in the Paula Cooper Gallery, Mark di Suvero has another exercise in enormous steel work, a 27 foot tall structure made of I-beams enclosing a kind of stylized globe. Like that thing that Picasso gave Chicago, but more aggressive. Walking around and under it is nothing like the experience of walking among Serra's work.

Mamma Andersson has a number of excellent paintings at the David Zwirmer Gallery, under the title Rooms Under the Influence. One of the most delightful aspects of medieval and primitive art is its way of presenting a story in a smooth flow of episodes featuring the same actor. Andersson sometimes approaches this kind of style. In "Leftovers" one woman is in the shower of a small flat while another bends over the sink and yet another stands outside the door and a fourth remains in the rumpled bed. The women are a little different from each other, and yet they seem to mark off the phases of getting-up-and-off in a narrative kind of way. In a similar gambit, "Gone for Good" represents a preternaturally cozy den, with one big easy chair and another smaller one, both angled toward the TV, which has a flower vase on top. Not many books in the bookcase, and just a couple of pictures on the wall. Really down home, except a fire is breaking into the room from the far corner and black smoke fills rushes along the entire ceiling. So you get to see two parts of time: the good, and the gone.

We get a similar effect in "About a Girl," with eight twenty-something women gathered around a coffee table. Most wear similar schoolgirl-like outfits, as if they were all graduates of the same convent school, and most have the exact same unnatural shade of eyes (think baby blue, but more vivid). On one wall, above four of them, are ranged unframed pictures of geishas, and above those an unframed print or magazine page of Disney's Snow White. The girls smoke and drink coffee and look a little worn -- again that way of collocating things to suggest narrative time. They're not Snow White any more, and when were they geishas?

de Kooning's sketches, at Matthew Marks, show how much you can do with line -- in this case, with a lot of line. The sketches are remarkably nervous, movemented, figures emerging from the nervous lines rather than simply being shaped by them.

Utterly puerile is the Nickas show, "An Ongoing Low-Grade Mystery." All the pieces in it, by various artists, are red. That's it. That's why they are in the show. They are red. And why did Nickas do this? Because he did an all-red show 20 years ago, he says, inspired by a Donald Barthelme story about an all-one-color art show. How long will this go on? When Nickas dies, will everyone wear red to the funeral? Will they think they are still just as clever as Barthelme?