Artist Andy Coolquitt patches together an entire universe out of found material that's accumulated at his house in Texas. Whether hanging on the wall or suspended low in the middle of the space, the lamps included in this group show are but a small quotation from his entropic artistic project. Constructed from found pieces of metal, these functional sculptures illuminate themselves more than the space in which they reside. In a second room, viewers encounter sculptures by Frank Haines and works on paper by William J. O’Brien. Whereas Coolquitt flirts with a plumber’s formalism, Haines is on the trail of a geometric ordering principle, one that at times verges on the mystical. A hexagonal installation in the cellar, placed in front of a wall lit with colored light, reminds one of a witch’s cave; upstairs, an agglomeration of thirteen photographs in shaped frames features at its center the image of a painted eye. O’Brien’s abstract and figurative drawings exhibit a deeply intuitive visual language of human faces and gestures, and they evoke the work of Jonathan Meese. Each of these three American artists samples everyday themes and forms to create his own personal cosmos.––Sabine Vogel

Loaded with esoteric symbolism, objects of ritual and occult references, Frank Haines' work spans many different disciplines, most easily captured under the catch-all term performance artist. Shown here, predominantly, are photographs which are the result and record of one of his most recent performances, and which were one of the standout exhibits at this year's Frieze art fair. Haines is a prolific creator, a man whose life seems consumed and driven by the urge to channel his vast knowledge of the arcane, pagan and ceremonial into one form of art of another. These photographs, sickly in their acid colours and leaping out at the viewer, show bizarre objects and constructions, all of which make up parts of Haines' bizarre world. Think Joseph Beuys via Kenneth Anger with a punk sensibility and a splash of SUN O))) and you're getting close. - Field of Vision

On Saturday night, it seemed as though filmmaker Kenneth Anger had, like Zeus, sprouted an Athena in the form of American artist Frank Haines. Haines's celebration of the summer solstice, Blood Transfusion for a Ghost, was a big, bright aesthetic mess, met with ritual noise and pagan glee. Organized in collaboration with Kate McNamara and MoMA's Poprally series, the night featured performances by curator Mark Beasley (who is at the helm of Creative Time's soon-to-open group show This World & Nearer Ones, held on Governors Island), filmmaker Rose Kallal, poet Cedar Sigo, and the band Miracle of Birth (which one attendee described as "intellectualized heavy metal"). 


The showstopper of the event, however, was Haines's own trio, Blanko and Noiry, which features legendary electronic music innovator (and septuagenarian) Chris Kachulis. The band has played at several art events in the past, including Pati Hertling's Evas Arche und der Feminist, and their performances are nothing if not riveting. Amidst a set often composed completely in black and white (there are stalactites, stalagmites, and a smattering of black candles), the trio take occult ritual, electronic dissonance, and art history for a joyride. Saturday's performance included the emptying what appeared to be dinosaur eggs filled with paint onto an all-white-clad Haines, who has said that the performances are in part homage to the films made by the Vienna Actionists.



Kachulis's vaudevillian ghost attire and vaguely creepy crooning of Doo Wop hits, including "Under My Skin," was the icing on the Anger cake, so to speak. Not to mention, a very good complement to the survey of Anger films that remains on view at the museum until September 14th. In Anger's work, magic is both the ritual and the rabbit: deeply held belief systems are met with an acknowledgement of -- and affinity for -- the kitschy iconography magic conjures in Western thought. His forays into the teachings of Aleister Crowley were made hand-in-hand with explorations of sexuality and camp aesthetics (Scorpio Rising is as much a swirling homoerotic fantasia as it is a paganistic attempt to imbue inanimate motorbikes with humanistic sexual prowess). The great gift of Anger's work has always been the myriad conceptual inroads it makes for other artists: one finds another nascent devotee in art photographer David Benjamin Sherry, who curated the group show currently on view at Bellwether gallery and often cites Anger as an influence. Like Anger, Haines' work (the artist has a solo show of sculpture and paintings on view at Lisa Cooley Gallery until July 3rd.) is also deeply ingrained with religious inquiries. And, as is most firmly evident with his performances, Hainess' art feels at once joyous and profane. Explorations into hermetic realms are always met, in the end with a big, bright, glow-in-the-dark smile.––Aimee Walleston

Haines ranges across mediums—and levels of consciousness—in his first solo show in New York. The gallery’s three walls have been painted black, white, and gray in what may be a nod to the early-twentieth-century exhibition designs of Hilla Rebay, a co-founder of the Guggenheim Museum, or, perhaps, to the era’s fascination with Freud’s theory of the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious mind. A pair of pyramids, one black and one white, mirror each another; crepuscular paintings of esoteric symbols vacillate between the surrealist and the vaguely spiritualist (early Miro, the vibrational drawings of Emma Kunz, and Lee Mullican’s countercultural abstractions all come to mind). A soundtrack recorded by Haines on a Prophet 600, the synthesizer favored by slasher-film composers, heightens the sepulchral air.

Rosalind Krauss dubbed the grid “what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.” In his recent exhibition, “Form is the Graveyard of Consciousness,” at Lisa Cooley, Frank Haines’ sculptural and drawn grids reflected the messy geometry of the natural world. Blossoming on wood like newborn stalagmites, or dripping with mossy bumps of shellac, they were like reclaimed ruins from a modernist shipwreck. In some works the grid was more literal, a revealed infrastructure cheerfully acknowledging its debt to Sol Lewitt, as in one piece, a painted white X.
   
Along with the grid, triangles dominated the space .The focal point was an inverted triangle made of latticed painted wood that hovered above another resting on the floor. The negative space between their apexes seemed magnetically charged. In another work, an elongated pyramid sat regally atop a wooden shelf. Ambient music composed by Haines during a recent stay in Vienna played throughout the gallery and included moments when three notes formed an aural geometry.

Paintings on paper with dark glossy surfaces were lovely when compositionally full but cryptic when they listed ambiguous symbols. Haines speaks of his work as a conduit for an elusive energy force derived from disciplines that range from alchemy to the occult. When he attempts to depict this too literally, however, the work can suffer. Haines is at his best when he coaxes materials into beguiling forms that transcend a need for explanation.––Tamsen Greene