Harrison Kinnane Smith
Emmelines | 660 5th Ave (MTA Station Mezzanine)
Through March 21
Emmelines occupies a former newsstand in the Fifth Avenue & 53rd Street MTA station, one of the retail spaces on the mezzanine level, along with a Dunkin’ and a barbershop. Easy to miss (straphangers race by without a second glance), it’s tucked against the wall just before a short flight of steps leading down into a tiled tunnel that spits you out on the doorstep of the Museum of Modern Art—or, actually, in a maze of scaffolding across the street and about a block east. Regardless, Emmelines’s proximity to the hallowed institution is striking and defining enough so that when I first heard about the new gallery from a friend (it opened last year, in September), I was told it was “in the subway station under MoMA.”
Even better, the bunkerlike venue is beneath the cursed building formerly known as 666 Fifth Avenue. That’s the property, you might remember, that a young Jared Kushner bought for a record-setting $1.8 billion in 2007 and scrambled to unload in 2018 before the ruinous mortgage came due—by which time the skyscraper was appraised at around half what he paid. A story of billionaire-class venality and a real estate deal—that is, a bailout with national security implications—it’s the surprising, invisible backbone of Harrison Kinnane Smith’s site-specific, administratively complicated, conceptually recursive exhibition “Tracings and Arrangements.”
The artist has made good use of both the gallery’s gritty allure—its mysterious, almost unmarked presence in the subterranean commercial strip—and its capacity to display wares. He’s filled the floor-to-ceiling glass shopfront with a view of two MoMA-caliber works by Louise Lawler, on consignment from Sprüth Magers. Like enlarged coloring book pages, the black-and-white compositions, traced from her earlier photographs and applied as decals to a custom-built white wall, are inscrutable, drained of detail. Pristine beneath fluorescent lights, the images have a bright, cartoony graphic power that makes a startling kind of sense alongside the grimy, glowing ad spaces of the MTA labyrinth.
One of Lawler’s works here, Bulbs (traced), 2005/06/19, features the string lights of a Felix Gonzalez-Torres sculpture, uninstalled, laid out on a moving blanket. The other, (Bunny) Sculpture and Painting (traced), 1999/2019, shows a gleaming Koons rabbit and a geometric abstraction by painter Peter Halley, which Lawler photographed together in the Whitney Museum’s critically maligned 1999 exhibition “The American Century.” The artist—whose subjects are famously the artworks of others, often captured in moments that tell something of their roles in the realms of commerce, collecting, or décor—has made the production of recycled, recombinant versions of her own artwork (enlarged, traced, or distorted new versions) a mainstay of her practice. Often offered as unlimited editions with customizable dimensions, Lawler’s pictures glide efficiently through the systems she means to make transparent, traveling like contrast dye through the connecting branches of private, corporate, nonprofit, and (for lack of a better word) alternative contexts.
Here, we find them below ground and under the radar, their materialist mission boosted and intriguingly rerouted by Kinnane Smith’s framing. The younger artist (at 28, he is Lawler’s junior by 50 years) presents the pair of tracings as his opening move in a chain of gestures that extends her concerns. His title “Tracing and Arrangements” echoes that of her first, 1982 show at Metro Pictures, “Arrangements of Pictures,” for which she offered (alongside a group of her own cropped images of historical works in museums) a selection of works by her peers (Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, among others) at a 10 percent markup: her consultant’s fee. Emmelines’s director, artist William Wiebe, tells me that he will, if Lawler’s work sells, split the gallery commission with Kinnane Smith; in this case, the “arrangement” with the consignor is art. And the artist is—as Lawler was—a middleman.
Then, there is Kinnane Smith’s more obvious salute to her methods. He has traced Lawler’s tracings. The act, a reenactment of her re-mediating procedure, seems intended to shore up or test the viability of a vintage, Pictures Generation critical ethos via the techniques of appropriation at its core. Intimately scaled and executed without flair or inflection, the framed inkjet prints (produced in editions of two) hang on the gray slatted siding of a perpendicular wall. With his titles for the pair, Lawler, Arranged at Brookfield Properties, NYC (Photographer Unknown) I & II, 2026, Kinnane Smith hints at what this is all about: why Lawler, why these particular works of hers, why here.
I had to press for further information and explanation to understand, though. Lawler’s Bulbs (traced) and (Bunny) Sculpture and Painting (traced) are in the art collection of Brookfield Properties, the company that develops and operates the real estate investments of Brookfield Asset Management (a subsidiary of Brookfield Corporation), which holds a 99-year lease on the 39-story tower above Emmelines. While Jared Kushner served as a senior White House adviser in 2018, the skyscraper’s rent—more than a billion dollars—was paid upfront by the Qatari-backed firm, allowing Kushner Companies to avoid default. Brookfield’s 2021 renovation wiped the mark of the beast (at least officially) from the building, whose address is now 660.
Kinnane Smith provides, as photocopies, two different purchase and sale agreements for his work (each used for one of the two prints in his editions), both mirroring moments in 666’s storied financial and ownership history. One sample document includes a “hope certificate” (which, in essence, mimics the Artist’s Reserved Rights Sale and Transfer Agreement, enabling artists to profit from secondary market sales). It hearkens back to a part of a contract drawn up in 2011 meant “to prevent the Kushner Companies from defaulting on their January 2007 acquisition by reducing the senior debt owed until such time as the property generated sufficient income.” (No, I don’t totally understand how this works myself.)
The other, a “sale-leaseback and purchase agreement,” makes reference to a pre-Kushner, 1955 arrangement, which, here, means that a buyer will immediately relinquish their Lawler, Arranged at Brookfield Properties print to Emmelines (who is the seller as well as the lessee). The owner would stand to profit from a sale but never be in physical possession of the work—optimal terms for a “collector” whose interest is purely speculative.
It’s possible to get a little lost in the weeds poring over the two agreements, the riddlelike press release, and the “checklist” that maps a kind of distributed authorship through a provenance of image appropriations, and still appreciate Kinnane Smith’s engagement with the legal and financial instruments of real estate transactions and “asset management” in the context of his show’s cool conceptual mise en abyme, his Lawlering of Lawler, his shrinking of her rendering of the mirrored Koons bunny, etc. into compositions smaller than a dollar bill. (I’m told he copied the works from Brookfield’s online index of their art collection, though the links that turn up in my search results are broken.)
Ultimately, the large-scale tracings in the emptied newsstand remain the riveting main event, even as they become the dramatic backdrop for quieter maneuvers. Admirably, endearingly, Kinnane Smith recruits the sphinxian presence (as well as the prestige) of Lawler’s pictures not to one-up them, not to stage a gotcha moment regarding their relationship to Brookfield—to global capital, geopolitics, catastrophic conflicts of interest)—but to align himself with her self-implicating practice as well as, more broadly, the provisional aesthetics, cagey affect, and historical priorities of institutional critique.
What a relief it is really, to write this week about something site-specific, political in the nature of its inquiry rather than in its expressed position. Certainly the Whitney has had enough of this stuff, you might conclude, as you descend the Allison and Warren Kanders Stairway after touring this year’s pleasant biennial, which has leaned into its new irrelevance, free from the practitioners of reflexive commentary who once lent the exhibition its edge, the artists who can, luckily I guess, be relied upon to decline the invitation now.
And what a reprieve from disgust, in this twilight of institutions, is Emmelines. There’s a kind of implicit critique, a general symbolic remonstrance, just in its location: literally and figuratively underground, so close and yet a world away from MoMA and its ineluctable association with the sex trafficking of minors—at least in the public imagination—via the spreading, setting stain of board member Leon Black’s detailed presence in the Epstein Files. I hope he’s gone before they open Duchamp. But, if not, Emmelines—given its short but impressive exhibition history—will no doubt offer a conceptually rigorous palate cleanser with its next show. When you enter the subway station off 53rd Street, pay attention, and you’ll find the scrappy enterprise before the turnstile, next to an OMNY vending machine. No need to pay a fare.
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