By Arlene McKanic
“Am I in the mood for this?” I wondered as I entered the doors of the museum to find a deliberately placed mess of what looked like half-melted glass in a corner. For not even the integrity of the walls and floors are spared the creative impulses of some of the 160 artists featured; the eye soon expects to see artwork absolutely everywhere.In one gallery, a corner of the wall has actually been carved into what looks like ocean waves – the effect is actually pretty, but in one of the hallways Valerie Hegarty has installed a birch whose trunk has actually burst through the green painted wall like some alien killer tree and whose leaves are scattered violently over the floor.Yet for every installation that leaves one bewildered there's a work that glows with exuberance, joy, playfulness, meaning and real talent. On the first floor there's Kirsten Hassenfeld's “Sweet Nothing,” a wedding cake made entirely of pure white paper and lit from within. It's one of the most exquisitely beautiful objects I've ever seen, full of frou-frou and paper chains; tiny, delicate feathers, flowers, escutcheons, scrollwork and pastilles. Even some wall abusing work is thought provoking, like Wangechi Mutu's “Once Upon a Time There Lived a People who Loved to Kill, But Even More They Relished Watching One Another Die …” Some of the works have long titles like this. Mutu's work can make one's skin crawl, and in this installation one wall is pockmarked with machine gun holes stained blood red. Among the scars are moths with human legs whose antenna stick out creepily from the plaster. In front of the wall is a little bench near a dispensing bottle hung from the ceiling that seems to have some noxious stuff in it. In another room near Garth Weiser's insanely hot pink painting “Untitled” is a heap of pink stuff on the floor. It looks like it was once a cloth mannequin in pink tulle with a cloth microphone, and it turns out to be Christian Holstad's “Restricted My Statement Out of Fear (Dematerial Girl).” Ryan Johnson has two large, amusing and finely done paper works: “Brainstorm” and “Ramblin' Man.” In the first a man's head explodes into a storm of wire and bits of colored paper; he's so precisely rendered that he has paper stubble on his cheeks and chin. I don't know whether his paper fingers are supposed to be trembling, but they are. In “Ramblin' Man” the same chap — or his brother – is captured in the act of walking, leaving echoes of himself behind, like Du Champ's “Nude Descending a Staircase.” The further an “echo self” is from the real man, the fainter and less distinct he is. Amy Cutler presents with her exquisite and humorous “Viragos,” “Dinner Party,” and “Rations,” all gouache on paper. The first shows a line of four ladies balancing bird cages and bird houses on long poles, and not only on long poles, but on the ends of their extraordinarily tall, stiffened hair. In the next, elegant 18th century ladies behave badly at a dinner party, knocking over utensils, stomping all over the table and trying to brain each other with chairs, all the while wearing beautiful ball gowns. The last shows three rather schlubby modern women standing around. Two of them are attached by a Pinocchio nose, the other has had her nose sawn off and has turned away from the others. She looks a bit crestfallen.Kent Henricksen has plastered an entire wall with his “Sheep Toile II,” a bright pink wallpaper with a recurring motif of a shepherd boy and his charge. Upon the wallpaper are hung needle work pictures with elaborate golden frames showing Rococo style lovers in period costume and weird, Ku Klux Klan/executioners' masks.Sometimes you have to give a nod of appreciation to an artist just because of the sheer work involved in making something. Michelle Segre's huge, upside down shittake mushroom, called, of course, “Mushroom” is made of beeswax, papier mache, foam, metal and paint and seems about ten feet tall. The detailing is perfect, from the mottled stem to the creamy gills, but an upside down shittake mushroom? Why? Does the artist have a thing for shittake mushrooms? Nearby is Kurt Lightner's “Untitled,” a huge acrylic and collage on mylar that looks at first glance like a fairy kingdom with mushrooms and bits of moss and grass, but it's not really, and the more you look at it the stranger and more disturbing it is. On the other hand, Yuken Teruya takes up another wall with “Notice Forest.” These are tiny trees made out of the stuff of the gift bags they've been tucked into; the bags are mounted on shelves. The work is very sweet and delicate – especially the pink tree from the pink gift bag.The first floor hallway has Deborah Grant's “March 8, 1945,” a huge collage of all manner of American icon, some of them not restricted to March 8, 1945; there's Lisa Simpson, Courtney Love and Coretta Scott King in her widow's weeds, among others. In the lobby is Cheyney Thompson's “Parfum 11 (February 2003)” which is a nearly life-sized reproduction of a newspaper kiosk. Everything has been reproduced in detail from magazine covers (were they all from February 2003?), to the bottles of Snapple and soda in the fridge, to the fringe of Lotto signs along the kiosk's roof. Like Segre's mushroom, you're impressed by the labor it took to make this, but you wonder why.Video installations are everywhere, even in the elevator. In one nook is “It Had No Feelings,” by Aida Ruilova. This video features two women confessing to something or other. Their hands and faces are spotlit, and the cutting between scenes is so fast that it makes you a little nauseous. There are even installations in the stairways by artists like Gardar Eide Einarsson, David Ellis, Kate Gilmore, Bozidar Brazda and Ernesto Caivano. You might want to take more than one day to check the exhibition out thoroughly. Nina Bachhuber has a series of inks and collages on paper in another gallery. Some of the collage and ink works are a bit squicky, as they look like the headless and mutilated torsos of fat, multi-breasted women done in blood. The ink drawings are equally unsettling, full of hairy protuberances like humans morphing into alien genitalia. But the room is dominated by the luridly colored “Presentation” by Dana Schutz. This painting shows a group of spectators watching the burial or disinterment of an icon/mummy/god. Some of the faces of the crowd match the face of the mummy in their cadaverousness. A couple of people poke at the half-living thing, whose legs and arms are broken. It looks like it's in pain.In a gallery on the second floor Anna Conway shows her mastery as a painter in her works “A Pound of Cure” and “3:45 p.m. October 17th, 41 degrees 46 minutes, North, 10 degrees 31 minutes West.” The paintings are absolutely enigmatic and absolutely captivating; they're works you can spend the day trying to puzzle out. In the first painting, a broody work of muted, overcast light, four kids in blue T-shirts lie at the edge of a shallow pool whose still, black water reflects the tall pine trees around it. Their faces are half way in the water, as if they're listening for something – or half-drowned. A typhoon fence encloses the pool. Beyond the fence sits an official-looking white pick up truck in a huge grassless field. Beyond the field looms a pine forest. In the next painting, a storm-tossed tugboat is dwarfed by huge, grotesque balloons fashioned after the heads of beasts wearing baseball helmets. One of them has been punctured by a team that's come up to it in a raft, and as it deflates its colors seem to bleed into the raging, murky green water. So convincing is this painting that you can't help asking, “When did this happen?” (See the title, I guess).On the other side of the room is Rina Banerjee's “Tropical Fatigue in the Seven Wanderments: You Are Not Like Me,” a sculpture made up of open suitcases, feather fans, banana leaves, crystal beads and the skeleton of a large umbrella. The third floor holds, among other works, Steve Mumford's ink and watercolor depictions of Iraqi Freedom from his Baghdad Journal. The works convey the heat, boredom, stupidity, tragedy and sudden, unexpected eruptions of violence of this latest war. They're well done, especially when you consider that some of them were drawn on the fly – at one point the artist and the soldiers he accompanied came under fire – but they made me mad, anyway.Of course, there are works in and around PS 1's desolate gravel courtyard, including Matthew Day Jackson's “Phoenix (Turkey Vulture, Peace Eagle),” which shows a mostly wooden turkey vulture atop a totem pole of skulls, and Anna Craycroft's “Lo! The Fiery Whirlpool!” of plasma cut steel, brick and concrete. Here a beautiful, rusted tower thrusts up from the earth. A rubble of brick and concrete mark its emergence, and there's a glow through the tower's lacy fenestrations. There are also sculptures in the concrete walled “rooms” that edge the courtyard. In a room filled with what seems like the sand left over from the ill-conceived beach party the museum threw a few years back, is Lars Fisk's “Deere Ball,” a metallic roundness whose green, yellow and black paint make it look like a satellite made by John Deere, and Sarah Braman's “Surrender Incomplete,” a bunch of nylon tents trying to be a geodesic dome; it's so flimsy, maybe on purpose, that a stiff wind can tip it. Finally, in the forecourt, there's Brazda's black Jaguar XJ6 full of old books and bales of hay.”Greater New York 2005″ will be up through Sept. 26. If you see nothing else be sure to see “Sweet Nothing” in Room S 109. PS 1 is at 22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Avenue.
