Matthew Higgs
‘Look Now, Pay Later’

Murray Guy
453 West 17th Street, Chelsea
Through Feb. 26

     In his New York solo debut, the English artist and curator Matthew Higgs shows art-about-art that continues a tradition of visual linguistic punning at least as old as Conceptual Art. This makes familiarity a problem, although there are mitigating factors. A videotape in which the camera is trained on a book titled “Video Art” could not have been made in the medium’s early years because there wasn’t a book on the subject.
     The same goes for his version of installation art, which takes metaphor literally: the title page of Lucy Lippard’s 1976 collection of essays, “From the Center” is framed and hung dead center on an empty wall. Other readymades include title pages that announce “Just Looking,” “Sold,” “Museum Piece,” “Picture This” and “This Is Not a Pipe.”
     “Parallel Lines” consists of two framed title pages each printed with the word “line.” There are also color photographs of book covers, the best being “Art for cash,” published in the 1920’s, its title stitched in primly devout Aesthetic movement lettering, Sophormorically obvious is a coffee-table monograph of the German art Günther Uecker nailed to the wall, replicating the nailed relief reproduced on the book’s cover.
     An exception to the prevailing market-savvy one-liners is a piece in which the art invited Verne Dawson, Francis Alÿs and Paul Bloodgood to each make a work based on a passing description of a painting in Ross MacDonald’s 1961 detective novel “The Wych-erly Woman.” This work ignites a certain tussle between word and image, mind and eye that transcends just looking and laughing briefly.
ROBERTA SMITH