"Eat the Document"

Alan Shields, Ajax

Photograph: Courtesy Larissa Goldston Gallery

Most Bob Dylan fans have heard of his 1966 tour documentary Eat the Document, but few have actually seen it. By dramatizing some of its scenes, Todd Haynes’s recent anti-biopic I’m Not There renewed interest in Dylan’s flick, giving some hope that it may soon be released on DVD. Until then, we can settle for another “Eat the Document,” a group show of four artists that, like Haynes’s film, toes a precarious line between looking archival and new.

Also like I’m Not There, the works in this show negotiate elements of process and performance. Last spring, in “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975” at the National Academy Museum, Alan Shields’s multihued dome-shaped canvases set on the floor engaged space through a physical playfulness. His work here, Ajax (1972–73), is an equally interesting massive circular structure hanging from the ceiling, composed of strips of painted canvas, glass beads and threads. Several works by young artists A.K. Burns and Eileen Quinlan also push at abstraction and illusion in extreme ways, making nice bedfellows with Shields’s work. Quinlan’s “Smoke and Mirrors” series (2005–2007) is made up of atmospheric photographs of saturated light, pieces of broken glass and scratched negatives and, you guessed it, smoke and mirrors

In the second gallery, a group of photographs by Jimmy De Sana is a welcome treat, even if they seem to stray slightly from the show’s theme. De Sana’s perverse and colorful images, all dated 1980, influenced other photographers who turned their cameras on themselves to create dramatic and abject scenes, including Cindy Sherman. Smartly eschewing a nostalgic tone, “Eat the Document” surveys several overlooked and emerging practices, while offering a refreshing, if not wide-eyed, take on experimentation.

—Lauren O’Neill Butler