St. Louis Art Capsules

Newly Reviewed
Marcel Duchamp: Chess Master This thorough and engaging re-examination of the father of conceptual art's sudden choice to resign from making art to become a full-time chess player sees Duchamp's ostensible career change as yet another brilliant creative maneuver. Duchamp, who was responsible for some of the most formidable innovations in twentieth-century art — most resonant, the idea that choice-making itself is an artistic act — found chess to be not only a universal language but the ultimate distillation of his fundamental interests: winning, losing and fastidious strategy. The exhibition presents ephemera and art related to the artist's late years as a chess champion, chess writer, chess correspondent and chess aesthetician (even the chessboard and pieces held particular interest for Duchamp and his like-minded contemporaries), the sum of which is an elegant argument for the game's expansive and allegorical merits, as well as the boundless intellectual agility of the ever-clever master himself. Through August 16 at the Saint Louis University Museum of Art, 3663 Lindell Boulevard; 314-977-2666 or www.sluma.slu.edu. Hours: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Wed.-Sun.

Craig Norton: Shot and Killed Reviewed in this issue.

Ongoing
Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space An explicit treatment of film as art, this survey of two decades' worth of the Belgian documentarian's work distills the medium to two essential parts: narration and gaze. Projected and screened in truncated swatches in a dark warren of loosely partitioned spaces, Akerman's work appears as a menagerie of endless highways, anonymous passersby and the overlapping cadences of the cigarette-ravaged voiceover of the filmmaker herself. Because two of her films explore canonically familiar American subjects — the culture of the Deep South and the Mexican immigrant experience — the issue of otherness, or how someone else's perspective can transform the well known, becomes saliently relevant. How much, actually, is different when seeing the familiar through another's eyes? Complementing Akerman's work is British artist Carey Young's Speech Acts, a series of pieces capitalizing on the creative potential of call centers, telephone operators and that disembodied voice at the end of a long line that calmly leads you through the nebulous airspace of critical questions and their ostensibly revelatory answers. It's an attractive form that suggests perhaps all of us have a need for the ritual of bureaucratic help — as a kind of general panacea, with nothing actually resulting from its use. Through August 2 at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 3750 Washington Boulevard; 314-535-4660 or www.contemporarystl.org. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sat., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sun.

Diary of Consequence This modest show of drawings, prints and manipulated books by St. Louis-based abstract painter Gary Passanise presents a backlog of personal ephemera reflecting certain diaristic urges and sketchbook dreams. In the works on paper, line drawings of skeletal structural frameworks reappear — on studio-abused scrap paper, in formal screen-print series — and alternately suggest something delicately private and publicly monumental. In the collaged and repurposed book-based works, a similar tension exists: An old journal is literally nailed shut, while a small sheaf of torn-out vintage text (from a book entitled Life Among the Lowly) is hand-bound with needle and thread. From nails, chains and shards of glass to the small wavering marks of the hand, it's a show of broad-stroke romantic tropes at odds with their antidotes: earnestness, economy and restraint. Through June 6 at Snowflake/City Stock, 3156 Cherokee Street; www.snowflakecitystock.com. Hours: 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Sat.

Ideal (Dis-) Placements: Old Masters at the Pulitzer This exhibition of canonical canvases of slain martyrs, pious virgins and other grand dilemmas borrowed from two encyclopedic museums and replaced in naturally lit contemporary galleries is a reaffirmation of the human scale. The minimalism of Tadao Ando's building design is diffused by ornate, gilt-framed compositions that date from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, the two historical extremes meeting precisely at the fragile effects of daylight on the predominantly figural pieces. Contemplative and reverent, the show fulfills its premise so well that it seems capable of providing a discretely intimate experience for each and every viewer. Through October 3 at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, 3716 Washington Boulevard; 314-754-1850 or www.pulitzerarts.org. Hours: noon-5 p.m. Wed., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat.

Joel Meyerowitz, Vintage/Modern: Color Work 1976-2008 The fields of Tuscany, Cape Cod's seaside and the Gateway Arch appear, here, as you'd expect — postcard picturesque — in this survey of landscape photographs by Brooklyn native Meyerowitz. An ad exec who never returned to the office after leaving one day to photograph life on New York streets, Meyerowitz has a cool, professional eye for casual instances of writ-large profundity. Light, air, water — the fundamental elements — are his ultimate subjects, captured in the form of young redheads' bright swimsuits, the hazy aftermath of luxuriant outdoor lunches and the blue hue of swimming pools. Maybe it's the photographs' matte printing or a darker edge underlying the photographer's temperament (Meyerowitz also has the distinction of having been the only independent photographer admitted to the World Trade Center site immediately following 9/11 to document the damage), but the pieces manage to swerve just shy of excessive, stock sublimity. Rather, they seem to observe grandeur as if through a kitchen window — albeit one in a fabulously located place. Through May 30 at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, 3540 Washington Boulevard; 314-361-7600 or www.greenbergvandoren.com. Hours: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mon.-Fri. and by appointment.