Mike Kelley: Day is Done
Gagosian Gallery, 555 W. 24th St.

It’s rare to walk into a Chelsea gallery and feel truly disoriented. But Mike Kelley, the Los Angeles-based installation and performance artist, has succeeded in transforming the whitewashed space of the Gagosian into a raucous, troubling, and paradigm-shifting place. Day is Done is a video musical and installation based on the oddly pagan holidays and performances that take place in American high schools. Working from yearbook pictures of “extra-curricular activities,” such as Halloween parades and those terrible musicals we’d all like to forget, Kelley generated videos, photographs, and sculptural objects. Video fragments of singing witches, angels, and fascists play simultaneously on multiple screens throughout a maze of theatrical props and architectural elements. The overload of symbols and the disarming combination of narrative film, architecture, and quaint sculpture create an unnerving experience. Because of the visceral intensity and the wild juxtaposition of forms, this project is more radical and provocative than Kelley’s earlier pieces that feed on the weird tropes of American culture.

The (S) Files / The Selected Files
El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue

The fourth of El Museo del Barrio’s biennial exhibitions of contemporary Latino/Latin artists, this edition is a smorgasbord of approaches to cultural identity. Involving 40 artists from the New York area and beyond, this show samples almost every contemporary art medium, from iPod sound art to beeswax sculptures to graphic novels. Most of the pieces are ambitious, well crafted, and clever — Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz’s cartoon wall drawings, Nicola López’s sprawling woodblock prints on mylar, and Carlos Aponte’s embroidered symbols of gender roles are especially noteworthy. Issues of cultural identity are present as muted undertones, only articulated clearly in the wall labels. In a video projection that flickers between footage of flying out of Mexico City and landing there, Graciala Fuentes obliquely references her Mexican identity. Works such as these confirm that a new era of identity art has arrived, one that focuses on quiet, personal explorations rather than confrontational statements.

If you, too, were disappointed with Chelsea’s blockbuster shows this month, here are some dark horses on 24th Street.

The Art of Chess
Luhring Augustine, 531 W. 24th St.

Chess turns out to be the secret theme of this November. The Noguchi Museum opened The Imagery of Chess Revisited, a recreation of Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst’s kooky 1944 show, the Projectile Gallery displayed Glenn Kaino’s chess set of ammo boxes, and Luhring Augustine unveiled commissioned chess sets in The Art of Chess. The Luhring Augustine show is a special treat because the artists — including Damien Hirst, Paul McCarthy, Yayoi Kusama, Maurizio Cattelan, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Rachel Whiteread and Tom Friedman — are especially cheeky in their designs. As one might expect, the Chapman brothers flout all decency in a set where angry, sexualized white kids face off against black kids. Damien Hirst returns to sculpture with a sleek mirrored chess table and opposing silver and glass chemical bottles. Tom Friedman populates his set with miniature reproductions of his early works, and Yayoi Kasama, elegant to the end, presents a giant, patent-leather pumpkin that splits to reveal miniature blown-glass squash, which are also chess pieces that are not to be missed.

John Wesley
Fredericks Freiser Gallery, 504 W. 22nd St.

John Wesley’s paintings are baffling in the most delicious way. In Dream of Frogs, a naked woman reposes, hovering over three grinning, manic-looking frogs. In Camel, a camel-man wearing an undershirt makes advances on a pleased camelette. The style is almost pop art — heavy black lines outline flat pastel forms — but the content is too surreal, too enigmatic to easily fall within that category. A contemporary of Warhol and Lichtenstein, Wesley appropriated cartoon and advertising imagery in the 1960s with the best of them, but he also threw his personal fantasies into the mix. His work hasn’t changed significantly since then, but it never appears staid — his narratives are interminably opaque and his sexual innuendoes are timeless. Seeing his work for the first time, one might think he was a daring young painter who had rejected the current taste for baroque, exploding, phantasmagoria in favor of succinct comedy.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: History of History
Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street

Not your typical retrospective, this eclectic exhibition was curated by Sugimoto and intermingles his photographs with his private collection of artifacts. Beginning with 500 million year-old fossils, Sugimoto’s collection spans the development of life on earth. With elegant, quietly playful displays of antique art objects and Sugimoto’s contemporary works, the show explores the role of art in capturing the transience of time. This loose theme connects not only vastly different objects, but also the works in his oeuvre that previously seemed disconnected — the abstract seascapes, photos of dioramas in natural history museums, and portraits of wax museum figures. Instead of appearing wry and ironic, Sugimoto’s images of museum displays read as sincere elements of his lifelong philosophizing. A few startling pieces combine his photography and antiquity, such as Time’s Arrow, for which Sugimoto embedded one of his seascapes in an ancient Buddhist reliquary. The piece unites two elegant beauties, but also violates the standard treatment of ancient objects. By mish-mashing eras, cultures, and materials, Sugimoto asserts his unconventional approach to understanding the eternal questions of life.

Stephen Shore: American Surfaces
P.S. 1, 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City

Stephen Shore, one of the pioneers of color photography, spent the 1970s roaming across America. For his American Surfaces series, he took thousands of snapshots documenting living rooms with Astroturf, restaurant salads with orange dressing, girls he bedded, and the contents of his toilet. P.S. 1 has mounted over 300 of these 5 x 7 photographs in an impressive array, and together they offer a wry mockery of American life. Shore transgressed the mores of his time with his inclinations toward the abject, and, more importantly, he spurned the conventions of his art. His use of flash, his off-kilter compositions and his awkward camera angles established a whole new aesthetic for photography. One mundane image of a staircase in a house looks like a throwaway, but by keeping it, Shore proved that even a casual snapshot can have an exquisite composition.