Tribeca: Martin Wong
Through May 30. P·P·O·W, 392 Broadway; 212-647-1044, ppowgallery.com.
Did any artist paint bricks with as much affection as Martin Wong did? It’s doubtful. To Wong, who made much of the art he is known for while living among the derelict red brick tenement buildings of Manhattan’s Lower East Side of the late 1970s and ’80s, bricks were both humble and magisterial, as sumptuous as marble was to Bernini and as endlessly pliable.
The bulk of the work on view here went unseen in Wong’s lifetime (he died in 1999): Plywood cutouts depict a flotilla of brick Popeyes painted with phallic craniums and scrotal chins, a slight restraint on an earlier painting of a more traditional version, save for a comically prodigious penis. Six are free-standing and arrayed into a shooting arcade, their pumping arms motorized for the first time, bobbing like a ship at sea.
Bricks are usually the backdrop to Wong’s high-low aesthetic obsessions: American comics and Asian religious art, tattoo subculture and gay desire. He painted muscled inmates and lip-locked firemen and Tibetan dharmapalas that are set against cellblocks and smoldering apartment buildings.
Here he finally united all of his preoccupations, treating brick as both skin and body art of a syndicated cartoon sailor, an icon of Americana and the most fetishized of all servicemen, mobilized into his own eroticized Terracotta Army. For Wong, the brick was a formalist wink that’s even flatter than Jasper Johns’s American flags and doubly as impenetrable. More than 25 years after Wong’s death, we’re still trying to get in.