Sue Williams at David Zwirner

Sue Williams's current exhibition at David Zwirner, called "Project for the New American Century," was one of the most thought provoking shows I've seen in a long time. The show's main content consists of several very large oil and acrylic paintings that, from across the room, look like mundane ab-ex works.. Upon closer examination, the paintings depict a lacy web of guts, gore, and entrails.

Although the imagery depicted is visceral and shocking, the paintings themselves are more fun and playful than they are disgusting. Part of their playfulness comes from the lowbrow-inspired color and linework. The paintings have only a few colors each, and although they were done in oil and acrylic, they look like they were silkscreened or otherwise printed onto the canvases. There aren't any visible brushstrokes or areas of impasto or anything to suggest a connection to "traditional" painting. Although they use the scale of masterpiece paintings, they look like they would be more comfortable in the pages of a Robert Crumb comic or painted on the side of a motorcycle. Comic books, particularly underground comics, are known for their depictions of violence (like Fritz the Cat being murdered with an icepick), and these paintings take that stereotype and blow it up to be wall-sized.

While looking at the paintings, I began to deconstruct their possible meanings. One of my first thoughts involved ancient divination rites in which priests would gut an animal and tell the future from the patterns in the entrails. What if, in the tradition of Francis Bacon, these paintings were a memento mori telling the viewer that he or she is simply made out of meat?

On the way out of the gallery, I took copies of everything on the reception desk and stuffed them in my messenger bag. One of the papers I took was a document explaining, down to the most minute reference, the artist's intended meaning of each piece in the show. Apparently the artist wanted to critique the Bush Administration's foreign policy, but the paintings didn't make that view explicit enough, so the gallery printed up a little cheat sheet.

I liked the paintings before I found out what they were about. The whole idea of printing up a sheet explaining what the paintings are about is awfully patronizing to the gallery-goer. I like looking at art and coming up with my own critical interpretations -- that's why I write these reviews. The revelation of the artist's "intentions" has poisoned my ability to view the work from my own perspective. The paintings were great on their own, but the artist stepped in and ruined everything for me.

"Heavy Light" at the International Center of Photography

Kenji Yanobe's "Blue Cinema in the Woods" is the first piece you encounter upon entering -- since part of it is video with audio, you can hear it from the lobby and the bookstore. The piece consists of a small building (the aforementioned cinema) that rests on the back of a metal elephant. Standing on a barrel next to the elephant is Torayan, a ventriloquist's dummy wearing a radiation suit with a Geiger counter. Inside the cinema is a video that parodies children's television shows. The video, which also plays on a monitor beside the sculpture, follows the artist's father and his dummy Torayan as they search for a mythical elephant in Thailand. The narrative evolves into a pastiche of nuclear paranoia, including a "duck and cover" cartoon starring Torayan, and ultimately the childlike utopia of the Blue Cinema is revealed to be a specially constructed bomb shelter for the viewers.

Yanobe's piece treats one of the darkest subjects imaginable with a childlike innocence that makes the apocalyptic themes seem all the more creepy. The dummy, Torayan, is also unsettling in that it has the features of both a child and an old man.

Another artist who forces the viewer to examine his or her expectations is Yukio Nakagawa. Most of his photographs look gory, meaty, and biological. "Fountain" looks like the result of a Jello mold filled with with congealed blood. "Destiny" appears to be a ceramic shoe filled with entrails. "Spinabifida" has the appearance of a leathery, decomposed animal phallus. It turns out that Nakagawa's main artistic practice is Ikebana, the art of flower arranging and one of the most traditional Japanese arts. Nakagawa's photographs do not immediately suggest any connection to Ikebana -- rather, they appear to be most connected to gory shock-art and a far cry from flower arranging. It's hard to believe, but "Fountain" is actually tulip petals rather than blood and gore. None of his photographs bear any resemblance to traditional Ikebana. In fact, some of them don't resemble flowers at all. "The Island of Death" is supposed to consist of 20,000 red tulips, but the photograph appears to be an island of ash in a sea of smoldering embers.