There are found objects, but are there found photographs?  Some of Mark Cohen’s photographs on display now at Bruce Silverstein seem like just that, the sorts of shots you find on your camera, interspersed between the real ones, if you carry it around in your purse for too long.  They are obscured, ambiguous views, uncomfortably close, of you’re not really sure what.  I think it must be very difficult for a professional photographer to capture images like this, that seem to be drained of all formal conventions, and of any discernible subject.

There are photos here of corners, cracks in the sidewalk, paper bags, and lines of ants.  Some have people in them, severely cropped, so that we recognize only a kneecap or a hand, and don’t get a sense of them as characters.  The images are highly-calibrated accidents, like Gary Winogrand’s.  But, unlike Winogrand’s, they’re myopic; they don’t open themselves to expose a small real-world drama.  And while they’re assiduously crafted and printed they’re rough; they don’t settle easily into abstraction, like Edward Weston’s.  They have a strong pull.  Each print, about twenty inches wide, holds your attention the way a larger painting would.  The photos call you into their fractured, unpretty worlds.

The Gagosian Gallery on West 24th Street is a great space to begin with.  Like many Chelsea galleries, which are converted warehouses and garages, it’s a broad, clean space.  But the Gagosian is twice the size of neighboring galleries and, when properly choreographed, a fantastic backdrop for contemporary art.  I saw Damien Hirst’s first New York show there, dazzled by the formaldehyde tanks holding a shark and (in transverse slices) a cow.  And I saw Richard Serra’s 2003 show there, thunderstruck by the grandeur of the immense, curved steel forms.

The current exhibit of painter Rudolf Stingel’s work is a similar kind of knock-out.  Not the art, mind you, but the exhibit.  Stingel’s paintings, all super-sized, aren’t memorable but they have richly textures surfaces.  The large entrance gallery, which features three portraits on three separate walls, is boldly unnerving.  The largest gallery, which contains seven gold color-field canvases, has a lyrical, romantic feeling.  And passing through the narrow back gallery lined with silver carpet paintings feels like a giddy, Pop Art daydream.  Say what you will about their curatorial efforts; the people over at the Gagosian know how to put on a show.

John Chamberlain’s work has always struck me as gimmicky.  He became famous in the 1960’s for making sculptures out of old car bodies, sculptures which seemed, at the time, perfectly in sync with movements in found art, process art and pop art.  As years passed his work has come to feel decidedly minor.

But at a survey exhibit at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea his pieces seem, in their assured composition and assertive figural presence, almost classical.  There aren’t any of the iconic crumpled-balls-of-fenders here.  Instead there are large, freestanding sculptures, which have a bearish spirit.  There are smaller objects resting on pedestals, like heads.  And there are assemblies hung off the walls, which look like flayed skins.  In the immense, bright gallery, the sculptures feel more substantial, and more vital, than they ever have.

Architects are fascinated with the sculpture and furniture of Donald Judd, so the title alone of his show at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea (Works in Granite, Cor-ten, Plywood, and Enamel on Aluminum) should make them palpitate. Architects appreciate the vernacular materials and rigorous form-making of Judd’s work, and the way the objects flirt with architectural language without really being architecture, so that they seem strangely attenuated physically and syntactically.  

But when seeing Judd’s work in person, two aspects lost in the adoration quickly become apparent.  First, the works are immaculately crafted.  The plywood Judd uses is the finest grade, sanded super smooth, and joined in ways that the most experienced carpenter would admire.  The steel plates he uses are finished with a delicacy that Richard Serra could not even imagine.  Second, the works are strangely (and disappointingly, I think) non-architectural.  Most are too small to enter and too large to pick up, hovering in the nether-region between furniture and building.  They’re loaded with spatial suggestion but ultimately sculptures.