AMATEUR ART CRITIC

Upcoming project: Till dust gathers on grass

2012-02-21T18:07:00.003-05:00

My Placebo Affect

2012-01-10T11:54:00.008-05:00

Carston Höller, Experience, The New Museum, Oct 26, 2011 - Jan 22, 2012
Carston Höller, Birds and Mushrooms, Carolina Nitsch Project Room, Oct 7 - Dec 23, 2011

I'm really glad that I didn't wait in line for hours to put down a supposed 1K+ credit card deposit for the "Upside-Down Goggles." I'm glad I didn't get undressed and float in a sub-par sensory deprivation chamber (dubbed Psycho Tank), where I would have been fully aware that that I was in the New Museum, in an overcrowded gallery, in a dank tank, with another line waiting behind me to experience sensory deprivation at its weakest. I'm even glad I didn't pay the hiked admission fee for Carsten Höller's Experience. The show was thoughtlessly sparse and obnoxiously glitzy at the same time. There were flashing lights for flashing lights' sake. If you want to talk about Relational Art, human interaction and perception, let's talk about Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's Phantom Truck, let's talk about Roman Ondak's In Good Feelings in Good Times, let's talk about Jack Strange's Staring into Seeing...hell let's even talk about the Damien Hirst Spot Challenge.

In contrast to the Experience at the museum, Carolina Nitsch Project Room put on a delightful, demure presentation of the artist's work, Birds and Mushrooms , at the end of 2011. On view were two suites of luscious, velvety photogravure etchings of crossbred birds that Höller has studied as an ornithologist. There was also a suite of four-color photogravures of rare and poisonous mushrooms from the Scandinavian region of Europe. The images are printed off register, and viewers were encouraged to use a pair of 3D glasses to get the full effect. One pair for the gallery, no lines. Beautifully printed photogravures, of magnificently odd and normal creatures. In comparison to the show at the New Museum, bigger and brighter is not always better.

Back at the big show —the 100-ft slide, ads all over the subway show— even the lesser pieces in Experience failed to impress. In one of the staircases there is an enormous pile of while pill capsules, accompanied by a generic water cooler. There is a sign that says, something along the lines of, "Please take one. All pills are placebos." My brother remarked to me, "What is interesting about that?" and he then proposed perhaps one the most mysteriously genius ideas that Höller could certainly take a hint from: "Please take one. All pills are placebos. Except for one."

Best of 2011

2011-12-26T18:16:00.000-05:00

I have to say, 2011 wasn't a year where I found much luck in love (with art at least). I flirted with it, went on some blind dates, had some late nights where I kept going to gallery after gallery stumbling through a sea of artists and exhibitions and fairs, taking numbers even though I didn't plan on calling back. However, being the year of the rabbit, I keep feeling like all of this is building up to something incredible, like we've been trying to follow the bushy tail of the art bunny, and once we chase it through the bushes, we'll find ourselves full blown in the year of the dragon, with new exhibitions, movements, and probably some real (and controversial) manifestos. Okay, so enough with the metaphors....Here is my TOP TEN of 2011 (in no particular order):

STORM KING SCULPTURE PARK

A 500-acre sanctuary where sculptures go to live. The park is speckled with hundreds of sculptures, both massive and miniature. Sculptures for sitting, for viewing, for climbing, for feeling. Sculptures that become part of the land, and sculptures that stick out like alien monuments. Viewing art in open air is always more refreshing. Moreover, the rolling hills gave me a sense of giddiness similar to swimming in the ocean for the first time. If I wasn’t already dizzied and in awe of the tremendous works of art that surrounded me in such a beautiful setting, then rolling down the giant hills like a toddler certainly did.

MICHAEL MAHALCHICK PERFORMANCE AT TANDEM BAR

I had the privilege of seeing Michael Mahalchick perform as part of the Movement Research Festival last spring. Along with Mahalchick's understated and hilarious performance, I was delighted by Brian Belott's orchestration of a vocally competitive, intense debate in gibberish (before 2011's Performa of the absurd), as well as the graceful, choreographic expressions of the no doubt beautiful women of the Kate Bush Dance Troupe.

JACK STRANGE AT TONYA BONAKDAR

Deep down, I think most people go see an art exhibition for the reasons of pure entertainment. In Deep Down, Strange's solo-exhibition at Tonya Bonakdar this year, the artist succeeds in making art fun, as well as making fun of his art. At the entrance of the exhibition, a series of American $1 - $100 bills are cut up and collaged into peculiar, funny little characters; a light gesture towards a grand metaphor comparing money with the absurd. The rest of the show was just as quirky with ipod-touch devices looping videos of a computer-animated shark and a dolphin reciting dada-isms, submerged in plastic bags, just like a prize goldfish from the county fair. The sliced heads of a cornucupia of vegetables are sprung into action with cartoon motion lines, and fruit pits are presented as auditory beings, something that no one can actually see or hear. The sound installation, Staring into Seeing, was one of the most immediately disorienting and astonishing works of art I've seen all year. After listening to it, and participating (which is voluntary, as viewer can listen and hear the track, but one must actively choose to participate), I literally left the gallery feeling dizzy, confused, and somehow, enlightened — as well as lightened up.

JACQUES LOUIS VIDAL AT MARC JANCOU

See review from March here!

THE VIEW FROM THE VOLCANO: THE KITCHEN'S SOHO YEARS, 1971-85 AT THE KITCHEN

I came here in the middle of summer on one of those hot, sweaty days where the best idea isn't to go swimming at the beach or a city pool, but to bask in the refreshing AC-pumped galleries of Chelsea. This exhibition provided the opportunity to view rare and important video works and film, as well as video and photographic documentation of groundbreaking performances that took place at the Kitchen in this time period. I was honored to be able to see Elizabeth Streb's Fall Line (1982) and Two Moon July, and multi-artist, multi-disciplinary program originally produced for television in 1986. The last time I was able to sit down and have access to a collection like this was when I interned for EAI!

EDWARD BURTYNSKY, Dryland Farming, AT BRYCE WOLKOWITZ (especially when compared to Andreas Gursky at Gagosian)

I want to own one of these. I have long admired the work of Andreas Gursky (see review from 2007!), but compared with the concurrent show at Gagosian Gallery this fall, Burtynsky wins my vote for the best aerial photography this year. Compared to Gursky's self-titled show, Dryland Farming, takes the politics of environmental issues into account on a more intimate scale, using color, composition, and texture to communicate a more immediate emotion.

PETER NADIN AT GAVIN BROWN'S ENTERPRISE

Forget aesthetics, formal composition, use of materials, concept...Peter Nadin's enchanting exhibition at GBE was my favorite smelling exhibition of the year. Besides the earthy smell fresh carved wood wafting throughout the gallery from the small forest of plinths holding terra cotta sculptures, the final gallery held an enormous shallow pool filled with honey. The robust, yet sweet, smell could easily be unconsciously nauseating if one mistook the thick, black substance for tar or another caustic material. If the smell wasn't enough, fresh honey (from Nadin's actual, working farm, Old Field Farm) was actually available for sale in a pop-up market in the back end of the gallery (where I must add sold some of the most delicious eggs I've ever tasted).

CARLOS CRUZ DIEZ AT AT SIMON BOLIVAR INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

If spending a week in Venezuela wasn't enough of a mind-fuck for a Midwestern girl like me, then getting dropped off at the airport and seeing this was just the cherry on the cake.

FILM: MELANCHOLIA & THE TREE OF LIFE & UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES

Although I certainly made good use of my Netflix this year, marking checks on my "Films to See" list, knocking them down like flies in a cinematic marathon, I still found time to make it to the theater. This year, 2011, was all about the visual. These three films needn't have a plot or script, so long as I could see them. I have often said that my number one criteria in determining a good film is that if you take a screenshot of any frame in the entire film, if it would make a beautiful photograph, then it will make a beautiful film (I'd like to do this with Blood Simple, or Casino). Visual mediations.... Each frame, each second, is deliberate and thought out in these films. Bravo Lars Von Trier, Terrance Mallick, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

STUDIO VISITS
I had the privilege to be invited into many artists' studios this year, for conversation and dialogue on their work, my work, other artists' work, current events, pop culture, and the weather. Nothing is more magical than experiencing an artist's work where it is made, and for an artist to reveal their true intentions of how it should be viewed, why it was made, and what will come from it in the future. I also love to experience the variety of their studios. Some are chaotic with tools everywhere, dry mold and pastes on the wall, paint splattered in every crevice. Others are impeccably organized, spick-and-span, not a paint brush to be found. Some artists use massive power tools, while others use only a laptop. Thank you for inviting me into your world, for your hospitality. I hope for many more in 2012!

MY REGRETS
I am kicking myself for not seeing:
THE CLOCK BY CHRISTIAN MARCLAY AT PAULA COOPER
I dreamed about coming to the gallery at 2am to meditate with this piece. Regrettably, I was actually dreaming.

ROBERT IRWIN AT PACE
Oh Bob (can I call you Bob?), you are my dream artist. Unfortunately, I was too nervous to come over and see you this year.

RYAN TRECARTIN AT PS1
I know I would have had a lot of fun at this show, as I do with all of Trecartin's work. Thankfully, some of my best friends had a psychedelic, spiritual experience with these installations, and I will never hear the end of it.

GREEN GALLERY, MILWAUKEE, WI
For being a Wisconsinite, I can't believe I still haven't made it back to visit one of the most talked about young contemporary art galleries in the US.

Oliver Warden

2011-10-24T10:27:00.000-04:00

A young woman rounds the corner and catches a glimpse of her reflection in a full-length mirrored box. Attracted to this, she stops to make sure her bangs are okay, and notices that the mirror also has a switch, at perfect doorbell height. Curious, she flips the switch, only to immediately jump back, letting out a half scream, half laugh. She might be going crazy, she thinks, but she swears she just saw her reflection change into that of a man’s. Intrigued, she presses the switch a second time, and registers the flashing image of him again. Sure enough, inside the two-way mirror is a man, about 6’, standing at the ready, in a grey suit with a black tie. He has the appearance of James Bond, but the moxy of Elvis Presley vis-à-vis Andy Warhol’s prints. This man also has an identically placed switch on his side of the mirror. While the young woman can turn on the light, revealing the man, he has the power to turn the light off. The young woman giggles, fascinated by her power, yet she still feels the need to touch the switch again, and sees the opportunity to compete; a game ensues. She continuously turns on the light, as fast as she can, trying to reveal the man, to find out who he is, and what he looks like. He is calm and quick to the switch; she is relentless. She giggles more and more, and he remains stone cold 007, intensely staring into her eyes. You can see he is sweating, somewhat annoyed yet maintaining his authority, which fuels this woman’s sadistic tendencies even more. Who will win?

Eventually, she grows tired of hitting the switch so many times, hoping to tire him out, hoping to see him give up. He finally breaks, and the two individuals share a moment of recognition. She backs away, and he turns the light off, deviously waiting in the dark box for the next person to discover the game. The man is Oliver Warden, a Brooklyn-based painter, photographer, performance artist, and videogamer (of all things). The performance, Untitled Box 2.0, is a concept that was originally devised in 1993 (as Untitled Box) while the artist was in school, and realized for the second time nearly 20 years later in November 2010 at Physical Center, a night of performance and installation at Former Convent of Saint Cecilia in Brooklyn, NY. The piece was performed most recently at School Nite, an exhibition in partner with the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas in May 2011, in Manhattan. Untitled Box 2.0 is a piece that speaks directly to the viewer’s most immediate feelings of art viewing: surprise, mystery, and humor. From another point of view, Untitled Box 2.0 is about many things: pop art, masochism, the Internet & social networking and analogous topics like voyeurship and surveillance, as well formal themes such as the artist/viewer interaction.

Firstly, it is inescapable to draw comparisons of Oliver Warden’s performance in Untitled Box with Andy Warhol’s screenprinted paintings of Elvis Presley, posing as his character, Pacer Burton, in The Flaming Star (1960). Both men are positioned in an at-the-ready stance, feet slightly wider than shoulder-width distance, one hand drawn (either with a pistol or to flip the light switch), and sporting a wide-eyed, determined gaze. Warhol, the master of Pop Art, explored pop culture through celebrity iconography and multiplicity in advertising. Warden, on the other hand, is not working within with these themes; rather, the majority of his body of work deals with pop technology, such as gaming, virtual reality, and social networking. Therefore, only formal comparisons can be drawn, however the similarities are undeniable.

Oliver Warden (b. 1971, Cleveland, Ohio) is a multidisciplinary artist, working both in the realms of contemporary art and technology. When online, he goes as his avatar name, ROBOTBIGFOOT. The majority of his body of work is inspired by and culled from his experiences in the virtual world, as he spends about 40 hours a week inside the realms of Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, and various independent titles. It can be said that Warden essentially, and by 21st Century definition, lives in two worlds: online and off. His paintings, ranging in size of 1 ft to 21 ft canvases, are made by a unique process of pouring Galkyd onto canvas laid horizontally in his Bushwick studio. The semi-transparent and glossy layers build over each other in intricate and elaborate geographies, creating an effects-driven and technologically mediated super-world. His cameraless-photography is created on his computer, in virtual spaces. One series that I find especially innovative shows the “edge of world” in the video game Tribes; Warden literally played the game until there were no more challenges or objectives to complete, and after reaching the literal end of the map (where the playable area stops), he took thousands of screen shots. The results are works on paper, presented as pixelated photographs. His performance pieces are the third factor of his work, creating a complete balanced and intentional body. Inspired by his interactive experiences, he built a body of work around notions of privacy, voyeurship and control. Stalking people in Central Park at midnight and “capturing” them on video, living in a school wall for a week and pulling covert ops at night and sitting inside a chair as unknowing sitters sat on his lap, all challenged and occasionally broke the rules of engagement and participation.

How is Untitled Box 2.0 different in 1993 and 2010? How did it change over the years, and why is is relevant that Warden first performed the piece in 1993? The piece was conceived at the cusp of the Internet-era, before terms like social media, tweeting, and skyping was common language. The idea was inspired by a culture that was exploding with hype about interactivity, and increased immediacy in national and international communication. Today, there are countless scholars writing novels and textbooks about extracting a movement or shift in contemporary thinking and philosophies in the Internet age. 20 years ago, we were wondering what possibilities the Internet would bring; today, we are wondering how it is adversely impacting our society, and how far it’s going to go. In the early 90s, most people still had private lives, or rather, one life. Today, in 2011, we have our real lives, and our virutal lives. We have our real address, and our email address; our job history, and our google-search engine history; our real friends and our facebook friends. Most dramatically, in the nineties, most people could only imagine the possibility of meeting strangers in chatrooms, calling a friend via videocam, or being able to meet up with (real) friends, in physical spaces, by ‘checking in’ or ’shouting out’. It was the beginning of a millennial phenomenon to put oneself out into the virtual world, with little concern for privacy or emotional repercussions.

At the beginning, these ideas were novel, intriguing, and we waited with impatience. Today, there is a general feeling of paranoia with applications like foursquare, facebook, or Chatroulette; if you are present in the Internet community (even the most in-active kind of member), you are never alone, and you can never be alone. With Untitled Box 2.0, Warden reduces interactivity to its most essential components: on-off, you-me, inside-outside. The result is something everyone can understand and participate with – a base language, a fundamental duality, a bit code. Like a computer code that is written between the artist and participant, our interaction makes the work have a life, and therefore content, that exists for as long as the two parties work to keep it alive. Essentially, Untitled Box 2.0, is about the Internet and social media at its most fundamental form: we are reaching out to each other, at a distance, but who has the control and how do we know when is the right time to stop?

You can learn a lot about a person by seeing how they interact with Untitled Box 2.0. Even though the viewer can turn on the light in the box whenever they want and how often they want to, Warden acts as the ultimate eye. He can watch people in the room when they can’t see him, he can watch their reactions, and hear what they have to say. He can see the viewer/participator, even when they aren’t even aware that he is inside the box. He can see their reaction, their facial expressions and body language, their insecurites and their character. They make themselves vulnerable to his surveillance (although, as a participant has control of the switch, it is easy to prematurely conclude that one has control over the artist). Often, he loses this power to aggressive participators, sometimes for minutes on end. The result for him is a bombardment of light and noise and burning 500 Watt lamps, which sometime reach a tortuous state. Warden however stays silent; so many viewers forget or fail to acknowledge that he is listening to them. On facebook, there is a questionable and interesting feature called Poke or Poking. It allows you to call someone’s attention by virtually “poking” him or her. In a way, it feels like Warden is humanizing the facebook experience, by making this “poking” function real and physically participatory. The resulting experience creates heightened emotions, both in excitement and awkwardness, embarrassment and empathy.

Oliver Warden will be performing Untitled Box 2.0 twice this week, on Sat, Oct 29 at the Gowanus Studio Space from 9pm – 4am and again on Mon, Oct 31, at The Delancey, from 8pm – 1am. Additionally, his paintings can be seen in two upcoming group exhibitions, at Allegra LaViola, Die Like You Really Mean It, opening on Oct 26, and at Camel Art Space, in Space Over Time, opening Nov 4.

Glutton for Video Art

2011-08-05T10:35:00.000-04:00

Read full post, a review on Glutton for Punishment at Ramis Barquet Gallery HERE on ArtcardsReview.

Interview: ART BLOG ART BLOG

2011-07-13T12:02:00.000-04:00

Joshua Abelow set out to create a personal, visual archive through his blog, ART BLOG ART BLOG, but within a year he was getting up to 900 hits a day from over 125 countries. Less than two years later, the blog has materialized into a physical, artist-run gallery space, ART BLOG ART BLOG, with nine independently curated exhibitions, open through October 29, in a donated space located in Chelsea at 508 West 26th St, Floor 11.

Abelow is a young artist, who after receiving his BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998, decided to move to New York. Before moving, he wrote a letter (yes, by post) to Ross Bleckner, an artist whose work he discovered and admired while in school. About a month after Abelow moved to Bushwick in 1999, Bleckner offered him a job as a studio assistant. For the next seven years Abelow worked for Bleckner before moving on to obtain his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. After a few more stops down the road and all over the world, Abelow ended up back in his hometown outside Baltimore, MD. ART BLOG ART BLOG emerged in early 2010 as an important way for Abelow to build a community over the web and engage with artists in other cities. Now back in New York, Abelow maintains his blog as a diaristic visual journal, with daily posts including other artists’ work, book and album covers, posters, personal work and personal photographs, poems and quips, and more. I had a chance to sit down with Joshua Abelow, as well as the curators of the upcoming exhibition, Can I Get a Witness? to find out more about the project.

Amanda: How did you start the blog? Where do you find your material for the blog?
Joshua Abelow: I never blogged before I started ART BLOG ART BLOG, in fact, to me, blogging seemed like a silly thing to do, even “blog” is a funny word. I guess I never set out to create a “blog” so much as an archive, a means of keeping a visual journal for myself. It’s a way for me to engage and document what is being made around me and to share this information with others.

I find a lot of material simply by sifting through my emails. I am on the mailing lists of a lot of galleries, so I often find out about other artists’ works through the Internet. The material I post is a mix of other artists’ work and my own personal contributions. I take a diaristic approach to posting...I see it as a visual radio show and in that sense it is important for me to update the site regularly. It also gives me something to do when I’m waiting for paint to dry and I don’t feel like sharpening pencils or stretching canvases or whatever.

I find the blog format interesting because of the immediacy. Instant contact with a relatively wide audience is the exact opposite of what it’s like to be alone in the studio all day. I was very surprised when I realized the blog had a following, that other people were actually visiting the site on a regular basis.

Do you read other blogs? Also, I find a lot of art-related blogs to be criticism-based; do you read any art criticism?
I look at a few other blogs like, AH HOLE AH HOLE (published, or rather curated by Tisch Abelow and Dakatoh Savage), which I find to be very humorous and clever. It is more like an art project than a blog – I’d love to see it projected on a big wall every morning when I wake up. I also look at ANABA, KCLOG and HKJBLOG regularly.

As for art criticism, I like to read what my peers’ are writing. I enjoy 16 Miles of String, (Andrew Russeth) because it’s art criticism from a younger point of view and he covers a lot of stuff that bigger publications overlook.

How did “ART BLOG ART BLOG”, the blog, turn into “ART BLOG ART BLOG,” the gallery?
Ross Bleckner invited me to use his studio space to organize some shows for the summer and fall. Rather than make it some sort of ego trip, I decided to make it a group effort and share the opportunity with as many people as possible. I’ve invited several individuals and groups to curate shows in the space. Jon Lutz (Daily Operation), NUDASHANK, and Regina Rex have all presented exhibitions in the space thus far. I picked them because I’m a fan of their work and I wanted to see what they would do with the Chelsea space and I thought other people would want to see as well.

It’s funny and interesting to see a blog go 3D. The exhibition space is a direct extension of the blog, which is why I gave it the same name. There’s a lot of hard work going into this and, of course, it would not be possible without Ross’s generosity (thank you Ross!). It would also not be possible without all of the talented people involved. The spirit of the project is one of generosity: the space was a gift from one artist to another, which is a gift to many other artists. It’s exciting to be exhibiting work by both emerging and established artists, unknowns mixed in with bigger names. In a way, this is reflective of the Internet – a weird flattening device that levels the playing field. This project, both the blog and the gallery, provides me with a chance to examine this moment as we proceed further into the 21st century.

Amanda: In Can I Get a Witness? Who are the artists involved? What sort of work can the viewer expect to see (painting, video, etc)?

Tisch Abelow / Jashin Friedrich / Dakotah Savage: We are exhibiting works by Joshua Abelow, Matt Connolly and Joachim'YoYo' Friedrich. We also have a reading corner featuring artists books by Kevin Gallagher, Lukas Geronimas, The Kingsboro Press, Davida Nemeroff and Eric Veit.

How was the show curated? How did the three of you work together to create a cohesive exhibition?

We started with a long list of potential artists, originally thinking of having a larger group exhibition. As we narrowed down the candidates, we realized we wanted to have a smaller show to highlight specific artists and their work. It became clear that Matt, Josh, and YoYo's work cosmically related. We found it interesting that the artists whose work was the strongest together happened to be 'the men in our life.' The curatorial process came about only in the most natural way. Including the reading corner is a way for us to support other emerging artists we admire and because punk lives.

Like, Josh, I imagine the ART BLOG ART BLOG space as a physical manifestation of the blog. How does Can I Get a Witness? relate to the Internet? Can you draw any comparisons?

Art Blog Art Blog--the blog- is a continuous parade of images of art; it brings the viewer daily, sometimes hourly, updates- a self-creating, ever-evolving context. We don't see Can I Get A Witness? relating to the Internet per se except, perhaps, in an inverse way-- If anything, an exhibition with actual art hung on actual walls is in opposition to the pervasive virtuality of today. There are, however, visual parallels between our show and our blogs, especially AH HOLE AH HOLE, which emphasized repetitive color, shape and text.

Do you read any blogs?

We read ART BLOG ART BLOG, Jashin's Tumblr and AH HOLE AH HOLE, which is co-curated by Dakotah and Tisch.

Can I Get a Witness? curated by Tisch Abelow, Jashin Friedrich, and Dakotah savage, opening on Thursday, July 14, will be the fourth exhibition at ART BLOG ART BLOG. Abelow plans to have five more shows through October 29. Up next for Joshua Abelow is a solo exhibition at Tomorrow Gallery in Toronto, Canada, who will also be publishing the book, “Painter’s Journal," a diaristic journal in six parts about Abelow’s experience as a young artist moving to New York at the turn of the century.

ART BLOG ART BLOG is located at 508 West 26th Street, Fl 11. Hours: Wednesday-Saturday, 12-6pm. More info: www.artblogartblog.com

"I Wonder What They Meant," May 7 at 233 Mott St

2011-04-27T15:47:00.000-04:00

Bad Timing, Good Shows in the LES

2011-03-23T21:49:00.000-04:00

I've had bad timing with viewing some recent exhibitions in the Lower East Side. I want to be able to write about the fantastic shows that I saw in order to encourage others to go and experience the same, however, they all seem to be closing this week!

I was lucky enough to catch Maria Petschnig at On Stellar Rays, which had already been extended through March 19. In the video, De Niña a Mujer, the viewer is invited into the apartment of Viktor, a Russian New-Yorker who produces elaborately-staged (yet with a low production value) softcore porn. The Russian women, who also include Petschnig, appear comfortable and relaxed with the gentle, even silly man as he helps them put on, shall I say unique, costumes. Oddly enough, this is the sort of behind-the-scenes behavior I would expect on the set of a pornography, whether softcore or hardcore. The relationship between Viktor and the woman is desexualize, and almost familial. Although Viktor’s final product is a photograph, which seems cold and distant compared to the more intimate moments between producer and actress/model that Petschnig captures in this video.

At Dodge Gallery, sculptures by Robert de Saint Phalle and pseudo-paintings by Jane Fox Hipple both delighted and intrigued me to learn more about both artists. The gallery press release describes Hipple's work better than I could in that she "works with all of the familiar criteria that denote painting for painting’s sake: oil, egg tempera, rectilinear frames, flat surfaces, wall-hung pieces." It is obvious through these canvases that Hipple is having fun. With shades of soft blues, hazy purples, and juicy pinks, she paints on the frame, outside of the canvas, and on top of objects that she places within them. Saint Phalle’s sculptures are on the other hand, are more structural and obtuse, yet they are not aggressive. In a way, seem to be three-dimensional literary devices, telling a story between their material and form. A glossy, black plane intersects a sleek, modernist bench. Within this plane is a oddly shaped chasm letting light in from one side, only to land upon a slack cloth already mimicking the possible reflection of the spectrum, were the sun to enter at a perfect angle. If that description seems abstract or ambiguous, then I have accurately described the formal aspects of the works on view. More mid-scale sculptural works are on view Blackston Gallery, where Rachel Beach presents a geometric collection of reconstituted, resituated wood sculptures. The strong verticality of the works, made of plywood and old wood beams, suggest statues or human forms.

One exhibition that you'll still have time to see is Alison Knowles, Clear Skies All Week, on view at James Fuentes LLC through April 3. Upon first view of the multimedia works on view (assemblages made of old shoes, pieces of driftwood, handmade paper, and other found materials), I was impressed that this young artist (I thought maybe in their 20s) was able to capture an authentic sense of nostalgia. It almost seemed West Coast, like the type of visual cues that could accompany a Brautigan novel. This is why I never read press releases or CVs before viewing an exhibition -- for that element of surprise! I didn't realize that these were new works by the Fluxus artist who is now in her late seventies. Knowing the age of this artist (rather than the history of her artistic career and her taste for tunafish & buttermilk shakes), rendered the works more gentle, genuine, and charismatic.

Dr. Gnass's Prophecies

2011-03-20T22:11:00.000-04:00

Friedrich Schroder-Sönnenstern: From Barefoot Prophet to Avant-Garde Artist
Michael Werner Gallery
March 16 – April 30, 2011

An exhibition of twenty-eight truly incredible, even mind-boggling, drawings by an obscure outsider artist was hardly what I expected to find in the parquet-floored galleries of the Upper East Side. First of all, I must preface that I abhor the term “outsider art,” but Schroder-Sönnenstern certainly was never in the ‘front line’ of his contemporaries, and after a little research, I came to learn that he was socially obscure and ostracized. This is visible in his drawings on view (all pencil and colored pencil on cardboard), which are strange and fantastical. As Jean Dubuffet would describe Art Brut (or Outsider Art), these drawings were created from “unselfconscious imagery born of pure, uninhibited expression.”

Schroder-Sönnenstern’s imagery is so unique and bizarre that, as the press release illustrates perfectly, they seem to have been born forth from his mind without iconographic precedent. If these drawings had been made today, it may not have been such a shocker, but imagining an adult making these in the 1950s is a marvelous thought indeed. Schroder-Sönnenstern (b. 1892, Lithuania) was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic at a young age, briefly institutionalized and later arrested. In his late 20s, he created a new identity for himself as Professor Dr. Eliot Gnass von Sonnenstern, a holistic healer and fortuneteller who, rather than keeping any profits, supposedly donated to the poor. He spent much time in jail for various violations, yet it wasn’t until 1949 that he began to draw. (I would suggest reading the press release or the catalog to learn about his life in further detail).

A poly-ocular creature rendered from multiple viewpoints breathes a stream of fire towards the edge of the paper in The Mass Demon (1954). Its brightly colored rainbow scales signify that it is a sort of fish rising from water, yet with one human arm it holds a cane, suggesting that it may also reside on solid ground. Nothing is either here nor there in these scenarios. A toothy serpent either devours or makes loves to an exaggeratedly cleft-chinned, duck-footed (literally) woman in The Jealousy Tragedy, (1956). In Vitanovaseturine, (1951/52) a rotund, winged woman defecates into a glass jar already occupied by a cartoonish heart symbol. Upon the objects and in the margins are scrawled words that may be a narrative, commentary, or perhaps prophecies. What did Schroder-Sönnenstern (or Dr. Gnass) mean to communicate with these drawings? Were they images of personal fantasies, or perhaps pedagogical illustrations meant to convey a particular message?

Works that are heavy with text such as Monument of the Dead(1951/52) bring to mind other ‘prophets’ who conveyed their messages through drawing such as Royal Robertson. Although Robertson made his maniacal, biblically prophesiable drawings in Louisiana mainly in the 60s and 70s, there are formal and thematic similarities between their works.

In The Moon-Moralistic Veneration of the Artist's Bones, (1957) the artist looks introspectively at his life after death. On his right side, a dog-fish on wheels offers him poison, and on his left, a woman offers food while a dog, or feline creature, offers money. A primate serves him as his feet, while a serpent with an inner-eye resides below. I do not believe that a conclusion really be drawn from any of these clusters of symbols, and rather that one can appreciate these incredible scenarios as just something that is beyond one’s individual comprehension.

A Triangle

2011-03-18T21:54:00.000-04:00

Jacques Louis Vidal, Games People Play
Marc Jancou Contemporary
Feb 9 – Mar 12, 2011

Hal 9000 always made me feel a little bit uncomfortable, even before he started his plan to kill Dave. I didn't think I would ever want an omniscient voice as a friend, that is, until I met Emily, Sarah, and Nathan.

Emily, Sarah, and Nathan were the three beings who made up the voice in the back room of Marc Jancou gallery for the past month. Or, at least that is how they described themselves to me. Perhaps this voice introduced itself as a computer, or as God, or Dr. Oz, or as a man behind the walls during the course of Jacques Louis Vidal's ongoing performance during the exhibition, "Games People Play."

Upon entering the back gallery, I noticed various so-called props scattered about, as well as piles of torn and printed pieces of paper. I heard a strange, almost computerized voice that I wrote off as a recording – that is, until I realized that another woman in the gallery was holding a conversation with this voice.

“How many are you?” said the voice.

....the woman paused and realized that I was new to the room, and smiled. “We are three,” I said.

“Oh, a triangle,” proclaimed the voice.

This simple comment sparked my interest and I eventually stole the conversation from the woman as her and her companion decided to move onto the next gallery on 24th street. I was able to recognize this voice as the artist’s, but after spending thirty minutes with it, I felt duped; I was geniuinely not sure if I had been talking with Mr. Vidal, or if it had been another person’s voice, or if they whole thing had been a computerized interaction (like the Dolphin Oracle).

The voice was neutral and calm, as he (although it could have been androgynous, I understood it as a “he”) asked me simple questions such as “Where are you?”, “What is the room like?”, “How big is the room?”. “Am I with anybody?”. I responded with concrete, qualitative answers (and sometimes quantitative). Although I tried to ask questions back, this voice was more curious in me, and always found a way to win the upper hand in the dialogue.

“What is it like where you are?”
“It is small and white and has various props sitting around.”
“How big is the room?”
“Hmmm, I’d say, maybe 20 feet by 20 feet.”
“oh....a small room”
“Oh, well, it would be enough to live in.”
“Do you live in the room?”

I forget mostly what we talked about, but I felt a sort of comfort with this voice, almost like I would tell him anything (if he asked). He wasn’t apprehensive about my questions, yet he wasn’t overly descriptive.

“What do you look like?”
“We are there.”
“What do you mean, there are three of you?”
“Yes, we are talking to you together.”
“What are your names?”
“We are Sarah.....Emily....and Nathan”
“Are you physically together?”
“Yes, we are a triangle.”

During this visit, I also exchanged a dialogue with the walls. Notes would literally beg to be grabbed out from the walls (and they shifted in and out of a small slot like ticker tape), with questions and comments. The voice needed me to explain that I was also exchanging notes with the wall, yet he didn’t quite understand, which made the whole experience even more disorienting. I was having so much fun, with at this point, at least 5 people to talk to (Sarah, Emily, Nathan, the Wall, and my friend who came with me to the gallery), I could have stayed all afternoon.

It’s not so much the fact that I was having a fun, social experience, but the fact that this work of art was so engaging, that I became to feel an personal affinity towards it. I wasn’t really having a conversation with a person, but with an intangible object. In a sense, I have always been looking for a piece of art that makes me feel emotionally vulnerable. After I realized that my afternoon was running away from me and that I had to leave the gallery, I felt a little sad. The voice told me that one day, perhaps we would meet again, which comforted me a little. We decided upon a code word, so that if I ever came back, they would know it was me. So wherever you are Sarah, Emily, and Nathan: MANTELOPE!

Interview: Bryan Zanisnik

2011-01-20T11:11:00.000-05:00

An entertaining, animated oral narrator in person, Bryan Zanisnik is also highly talented at telling stories through visually complex works, stacked with symbols, metaphors, and signifiers. In a sort of choose-your-own-adventure visual narrative, the viewer is allowed to piece together the information to create, or re-create, his or her own personal story. Zanisnik photographs complex tableaus constructed from personal and found objects, stages absurdist performances, and shoots videos that follow a New Jersey couple (his parents) through domestic, familiar spaces. His new body of work, Brass Arms Upper Eyelid, is currently on view through February 19, 2011 at Horton Gallery. In conjunction with the exhibition, Zanisnik will present a live performance on Saturday, February 5, from 4-6pm.

Bryan Zanisnik (b. 1979, Union, NJ) lives and works in New York, NY. He received a MFA from Hunter College, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and is currently an artist-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program. He recently performed at Galeria On, Poznan, Poland; PS1/MOMA, New York, NY; and Marginal Utility, Philadelphia, PA. This summer he will perform and participate in an exhibition at the Times Museum in Guangzhou, China.

Amanda Schmitt: In comparison to your last show at Horton Gallery, Dry Bones Can Harm No Man (2009), your new photographs are printed much larger. Did this happen naturally, or was the larger space a factor?

Bryan Zanisnik: The increase in the size of the photographs is simply a natural progression in my work. In my last show at Horton Gallery, I was working with film and a medium format camera. In the current show, I am working with a 25-megapixel digital camera attached to a panoramic head. The panoramic head allows me to create high-resolution composite photographs that consist of numerous individual shots that are then stitched together in post-production. While I use Photoshop and a program called PTGui to assemble the images, none of the actual content is digitally manipulated. For example, 18 Years of American Dreams consists of 80 individual shots stitched together. Using a 100mm lens atop the panoramic head, the telephoto lens naturally compresses the space, creating a photograph that appears dense, chaotic and hyper-real.

Are you influenced by movies, book, and other popular culture references? Are any of your works odes or monuments to specific authors, musicians or celebrities?

The content of my work is influenced by numerous literary and popular culture sources. In recent works, I have referenced everything from James Joyce and Jonathan Safran Foer to Pink Floyd and Neil Young. However, personal memories and histories are more often the starting point for one of my works*.

If masculinity and paternity were themes that ran through Dry Bones Can Harm No Man, could one say that sports and American athleticism are central themes to your current show?

Looking at the subject matter in the new photographs, there are numerous references to sports and sports memorabilia. All of the sports objects used in the photographs are connected to my childhood, and were culled from my parent’s garage in New Jersey. For example, in the triptych Off Season, there are cardboard cutouts and posters of my childhood hero Larry Bird. I remember as a child watching a video clip of Larry Bird mowing his own lawn during the basketball off-season. Looking back on that memory now, there is something extremely idiosyncratic and poetic about a basketball icon mowing his own lawn. Beyond this quirkiness, the memory also feels particularly American.

Can you speak more about your works relationship to American culture, folklore, and history?

I think of my work as the merging of Americana culture with my own personal culture and history. I am very interested in responding site specifically to locales within the United States, and more recently, I have begun to respond site specifically to spaces abroad. This past summer I built an installation at Galeria On in Poznan, Poland as part of the Mediations Biennale. The installation consisted of numerous communist artifacts from the 1970s and 1980s, including postcards, furniture and tchotchkes, to name a few. At the opening I sat completely still inside the installation for two hours, holding a rifle in one hand and a large polish sandwich in the other hand. The rifle referenced American gun culture, but also referred to the gallery’s location, which was inside the former hunting residency of German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II.

One Touch Is Never Enough alludes to obsessive-compulsive tendencies, collecting, and even hoarding. How does this piece fit with the rest of the show?

Since soap dispensers are associated with bacteria and health, there is a natural obsessive compulsive and anxiety-ridden subtext to these objects. At the same time, the backdrop of professional wrestling images creates a free associate and enigmatic narrative within the photograph. For me, at the forefront of this narrative is the tension between the inaccessible boyhood fantasies of wrestling and repetitive bodily activities, like pumping a soap dispenser.

You have worked with your mother and father in many of your videos and performances. Do you feel that they are actors or props in your work, or do you view them as collaborators?

I think of my parents as collaborators, but with a distinct hierarchy in mind. In my performances from the past few years, my parent’s actions were very controlled and choreographed, and often they did not move at all. In two of my most recent performances, I allowed their actions to be more casual and self-determined during the actual performance. This was in contrast to the very controlled and pre-determined actions I was carrying out. This contrast created a sense of ambiguity between what was actually the performance, and what was just my parents living out their lives in front of an audience. One would wonder if my father was being my father, or being a performer playing my father. In a way, he was being both. While I am still interested in creating still, tableau vivant performances in the future, I will further explore this relinquishing of control in my upcoming performance at Horton Gallery on February 5th.

*To learn more about Bryan's personal history, click HERE to view a comic strip timeline of his life by comic artist Eric Winkler.

Interview: José Lerma

2011-01-04T17:43:00.000-05:00

Lush and tactile, the canvases heavy with paint, José Lerma is known for his texturally seductive, semi-abstract paintings that allude to the idea of a formal portrait. Recognized for his abstract, expressively personal paintings, Lerma ventures off the canvas to a conceptual, almost sculptural practice in his latest show, “I am Sorry I am Perry” at Andrea Rosen Gallery. In three parts, the bankers, the curtain, and the keyboards, Lerma references both personal and historical narratives, yet encourages the viewer to create their own.

José Lerma (b. Spain, raised in Puerto Rico) lives and works in New York and Chicago, where he is on faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, he has a solo show at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, NY. “I am sorry I am Perry” is on view through January 22, 2011. Additionally, “A Person of Color/ a mostly orange exhibition”, a group show curated by Lerma, opens at Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI, on January 22, 2011.

AS: Rather than just a showing of new paintings, “I am sorry I am Perry,” seems to me to be a very thoughtful exhibition with clear formal and conceptual intentions. Are you both the artist and the curator?

José Lerma: I had planned this exhibition around 3 elements I had worked with in the past. Curating is a good way of putting it. Even before I started making art, I loved Mardsen Hartley's paintings of Von Freyburg. I like the idea of a collection of objects and stories collapsing on each other and becoming, in effect, a portrait. In that sense, all my shows are a kind of curated self-portrait. However I didn’t want it to feel like discreet parts that were there to be decoded instead I wanted the viewer to arrive at kind of “fourth reading”; I love when clarity devolves into babble and facts become aesthetics. What I mean is that what matters to me is the effect the parts have on each other and not their individual meanings.

AS: Reading the press release for "The Golden Sea" at Andrea Rosen Gallery back in 2006, the focus of your work seems to have shifted: it is no longer as self-referential, and now seems to more so reference other artists and other histories. You also seem to be less focused on your intimate contact with the paint, and more focused on the conceptual-weight of the materials (the 3M curtains, keyboards, etc). How do the works in this show depart from your previous work?

JL: My work has always been either been painting, or works about painting. Initially I was attracted to it because it was a very direct way of exploring personal mythology. I knew early on I wanted to make autobiographical painterly works but I was also attracted to painting because it was the least popular medium among my friends, particularly in Puerto Rico, most of which were at the time emulating artists like Gabriel Orozco, Francis Alys, or just working on new media.

What I really loved early on about painting was its immediacy, and the fact that it was ideal for dealing with certain events from my youth. I could convey the awkwardness of being thirteen by painting an oversize pink polo shirt and a skinny neck. I didn’t need actors, an audience, or even much space. Plus it enabled me to work very fast.

If anything, this feels like a synthesis between my early post-studio work and the paintings of the last 5 years. It feels very natural and complete to have all these bodies of work in a space.

AS: Although you reference specific historical figures, your portraits are often left without a face. Why this anonymity? Are these people specific to you, or possibly meant to be unspecific to everyone?

JL: My previous paintings (paint portraits, 2006-2009) were abstract references to portraiture but without likeness. In this new body of work, I am not interested in psychological portraiture; instead I am more interested in the trappings of power, the visual cues, the posture, the wigs.

I guess there are classic regal and patrician features, certain noses and lips for instance. The figures I choose are not usually well known enough that it would matter if I had included their face. There are other bankers throughout history who are far more recognizable - Salomon Chase, some of the Rothschilds, Medicis, and of course a lot of contemporary money managers - but I wasn’t interested in directly addressing current events.

The only face whose features I have consistently drawn was that of Charles II of Spain. He had the proportions of a caricature due to many generations of inbreeding among his predecessors. He was truly a tragic figure: at once one of the most powerful and one of the weakest men in the world.

AS: Your work is dense with allusion. Did you study a lot of art history? Or history in general?

JL: I mostly read history. I had a good background in social sciences and was also getting my J.D. when I decided to study art. Maybe for that reason I was drawn to a lot social satire from the 18th and 19th century especially James Gillray, Daumier and Hogarth. My earliest series were portraits of historical figures as children. Early on, I spent a very productive summer at the UW-Madison library. That summer I made no art, and spent every day at the library. I built a huge catalogue of contemporary images and strategies, which I proceeded to cannibalize for the next year. Only later did I stop looking over my shoulder and began to steal more from myself, from the things that honestly had interested me in the past.

AS: Tell me about the curtains in this exhibition. How long have you been using this material and where did you find it? What sort of formal or conceptual role does it play within the exhibition?

JL: This is the fourth and largest version of a reflective curtain that I have made so far. The fabric is a reflective material made by 3M, mainly used as a safety precaution at night. On one hand, I like that the curtain, when in the gallery, can almost become a light emitting object. However, I am mostly entertained by how the curtain acts in relation to the keyboard pieces. It flattens as you approach one keyboard or it becomes dull as you approach another.

I think all the elements together give a very subtle cinematic illusion. You can arrive at certain effects and somewhat change the read of a painting by a kind of triangulation between the relative positions of light sources and sounds.

AS: To me, your work is very humorous. Between your MFA exhibition at UW-Madison [in which Lerma power-sanded a hole deep into the wall of the MFA gallery, revealing layers upon layers of past installations and wall-painting from decades of students’ past work] and the "Saddest Chord in the World,"[which consisted of a Yamaha DX7 keyboard leaning vertically against a wall, which had the D, F and A keys held down by means of masking tape, creating a D minor chord, playing throughout the course of the exhibition] it seems to me like you're poking fun at everyone else around you: critics, professors, curators, and other artists. Do you find your own work funny?

JL:Most art is never really that funny to me. Some exceptions are Sean Landers, Scott Reeder, Peter Land, Mike Smith and William Wegman. I guess ideally I would love to make works that are heartbreaking. Instead, in reality, most of my works deal with the tension between the heroic and the pathetic.

I am interested in tragic figures. The ascent to power and then an abrupt plummet are a favorite theme of mine. One of my favorite scenes is from the movie Ridicule by Patrice Leconte where the character played by Bernard Giraudeau is defending the existence of god in front of the king with amazing showmanship, and in an act of hubris goes from the most sublime moment of his life to the lowest in a matter of seconds. How we chose to fuck everything up is always fascinating.

Top 10 Picks: Fall 2010

2010-12-08T18:20:00.000-05:00

1. I wish your wish

Early in the summer, I attached a ribbon around my wrist that I acquired at Rivane Neuenschwander's show, A Day Like Any Other. By October, my shiny ribbon had faded from lime green bracelet to a faded, sorry looking string scattered about my wrist. "I WISH I WAS A FAMOUS BASEBALL PLAYER," it read.

The ribbon came from her installation, "I Wish Your Wish," in which a room on the ground floor of the musuem was full of thousands of ribbons that visitors were invited to take with them. The project is based on a Brazilian tradition in which people tie colored ribbons onto their wrists and keep them until they fall off, at which point their wish is to be granted. However in Neuenschwander's version, we are wearing the wish of someone else in Brazil, ultimately deciding their wish's fate.

I do hope that on this day in October, some young man in Brazil hit a career-launching home run!

2. UNTITLED

Joel Mesler made the move onto the Lower East Side's main drag, Orchard Street, this fall with the opening of his new gallery, UNTITLED. Sure, it's no Sperone Westwater, but Andrew Ong (the designer and architect) held its own without the help of celebritect, Norman Foster. The new gallery space looks like it could be based in London with it's high, lofted ceilings, bright, ambient light, and perfectly unused white cube walls. It's almost hard to believe that a space this big exists on a block with little'ole storefronts, the gallery is a pocket-size illusion, currently holding thirty-six 8x4' paintings by Matthew Chambers, comfortably. I greatly enjoyed the opening exhibiton with gallery artists David Adamo, Heather Cook, Brendan Fowler, Rashind Johnson, and Phil Wagner. In fact, one of my favorite pieces of the year, maybe ever, is David Adamo's Untitled (Duet). Adamo's red and blue M&Ms lost (or hidden) on the concrete floor create a work of art that both perplexes and humors me (two of the most essential reactions a good work of art, in my preference, should evoke).

3. Bruce High Quality Foundation's intervention on the Bruno Bischofberger ad on the back cover of the October 2010 issue of Artforum

Those sneaky little tricksters.....

4. Robert Rauschenberg at Gagosian (Chelsea, 21st St)

As if you weren't already told by numerous art history textbooks, Robert Rauschenberg is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, and by greatest, I guess I mean the greatest at artistic invention and innovation. If a contemporary artist working with digital materials (computer screens, projectors, video, sound, light, etc) is doing what Rauschenberg did with tangible materials (paint, canvas, fabric, found objects, etc), and to the same magnitude, please let me know.

5. The Former Convent of Saint Cecilia

Artists and curators began using the former Convent of of Saint Cecilia in Brooklyn a little over a year ago as an alternative exhibition space. The four-story, now delapadated building has housed dozens of exhibitions this year, and I frequented it a few times this fall to prepare for a show that I was curating there. Walking into the cold, quiet building on a dark October night was an eerie, yet invigorating experience. The building on its own, without or without art, has a mysterious tranquility and lots of character. In it's earlier stages, the 97-year old building served the Catholic parish in the Greenpoint/Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, whereas most recently, it serves young curators who have zealously curating shows that showcase new media, elaborate, internationally-collaborative installations, sound programs, and "phantasmagorical performances" (as one press release describes).

6. Eric Fertman at Susan Inglett

I really can't say why this ended up being one of my favorite exhibitions this fall, but for some reason this show really stuck with me. I only spent a short amount of time at the gallery, but what can I say, I'm a sucker for wood, and the more grain the better (***unabashed pun alert: considering the numerous phalluses in this show, I guess this I really did like wood!). Okay, for my younger readers (do I even have any?) and to my brothers who may be reading this, I apologize. On a more critical note, the natural grain of oak has an incredibly seductive texture, and when rounded and sanded into the shapes of Fertman's desire, the innate patterns become smooth and lucious (perhaps I'm using these adjectives because the brightly colored stains, magenta and lemon yellow, remind me of juicy fruits).

7. Fall Foliage

My favorite season! Really, no words can describe....I might as well just start a life-long project of writing a novel describing how much I love the changing colors of leaves in the fall....

8. Painting Comes Alive! at ArtJail

What is this gallery? Why have I never heard of it and what kind of funding backs it? I forgot how important clean, white walls and clean faciliities can be in securing the success of a show of abstract paintings. The floating walls were solid and pristine enough for the paintings (and some non-paintings, a la Courtney Puckett, Joy Curtis, and Justin Aidan) to really pop off the wall. Additionally, the organizers of the exhibition send out one of the best postcards I've seen in a while: a fold-out image of the album cover of "Frampton Comes Alive!" -- an image from 1976 graffitied and recontextualized for this 2010 painting show.

10. Artfrombehind

I have a guilty art world pleasure: i love looking at blogs that have pictures of openings, after-parties, performances, and dinners that I never went to. Out of them all, I most enjoy looking at Kathy Grayson's blog, www.artfrombehind.net. The website borders a fine line between a personal blog, an art blog, and a professional blog. I like it in the same way I like www.thesuperficial.com and any food porn website, especially www.thisiswhyyourefat.com. Grayson feels no need to hide behind her pristine, white gallery desk and act like a well-behaved gallerist -- she is having a freakin' ball running her newly opened gallery on Greene St, The Hole. She follows no rules, and is clearly very successful at her job as a dealer and curator. Drugs, yes. Sex, yes. Dinner, yes. Dinner on the sidewalk afterwards, why not. She lets her viewers in on every aspect of her life, where Art Rules Everything Around Kathy (AREAT, Ms. Grayson, you should think about getting some AREAT grills).

Board Bitches

2010-11-24T22:26:00.000-05:00

Alan Reid at Lisa Cooley

Working in the woodshop at Parson’s School of Design, Alan Reid draws inspiration, in an ironic way, and finds useful materials, in a work with what you’ve got kind of way, through the discarded scraps of wood left behind from drill presses, routers, and other power tools. In his second show at Lisa Cooley, “With,” Reid uses these bits and pieces and presents them atop seven large canvases, upon which rest seven lethargic, ephemeral females.

The women lounge casually, yet as is made obvious in their facial expressions, they seem irked at the scattered bits of wood scraps and dowels dotting the surface of their domain, their canvas....Not entirely upset, just annoyed. Although the canvas is naturally where Reid’s artistic hand lies, the playful additions of these haphazard scrap materials add another dimension, literally, to the show. On Sao Paulo Turtleneck, the colored wood balls died with polychrome look like juicy plums, sticky lollipops, and red rubber balls. Each ball has a different surface texture, some are matte and some are glossy, some you can see the wood grain and some are illusory smooth surfaces. Just as the three-dimensional objects rest lightly above the canvas’ surface, almost as if magnetized rather than glued on, the artist’s marks of colored pencil and caran d’ache seem so feathery on the surface – so fragile, it might fall off. Even the moles on the womens’ skin, such as in Mintadi, are speckled so delicately it’s as if they appeared organically, magically, rather than applied with the artist’s touch of ink. The silk that clothes the bodies of the woman in Highland is so light and airy that if a breeze came through the open door of the gallery, the woman would likely be left nude!

Lightness as a theme in this exhibition, is especially amplified with the addition of the painted wood attachments. Even though less obvious in The Official, the wood attachments act almost like a grammatical point – a paranthesis or a semicolon adding something to a longer sentence. The single stripe crossing the top-right diagonal is an elegant, quiet trio of ochre, teal, and bare balsa wood. Reid’s technique, both on the canvas and on top of the canvas, is unique and almost shocking in its simplicity.

The Storyteller

2010-10-05T14:52:00.000-04:00

Laurie Anderson, "Delusion"
BAM Next Wave Festival
BAM Harvey Theater, Brooklyn, NY

“I’m gonna play a sound, and I want you to follow it with you mind.”

These words floated softly out of Laurie Anderson’s deep yet wispy, earthy, and harmonious voice. Although she was quoting a teacher from long ago, I held on to very word and anticipated whatever this noise might be....A sparkling * ding * resonated throughout the auditorium of BAM’s Harvey Theater. Within the 3 seconds that this playful, bell-like tone rang, I swear my mind followed it outside of the theater, across the sky, to the moon and back. In fact, every part of Laurie Anderson’s latest performance, “Delusion,” left me in a dream-like, drifting state; I felt accepting towards any small or great adventure my mind might travel during that evening.

Laurie Anderson can be described a performance artist, musician, and comedian, or actress, but perhaps the best word to describe her is a storyteller. Rather than just Laurie, the raven-voiced, wise, mother figure, we have Fenway Bergamont, the lighthearted, deep-voiced male character telling the audience stories, jokes, and moral tales. Anderson's male alter-ego, Bergamont, is created through a voice changer, and his deeper voice ends up sounding distorted and disturbing; his character and tone however is light and playful, and one may or may not feel more sympathetic to his words. Like a dream, Anderson (the performer herself, not the characters) floats in and out of stories, characters, and scenes – almost like chapters in a never-ending book. She/He speaks of archiving digitized music recordings into plants, of giving birth to her own rat terrier, and of Father Pierre, a ‘kind of New York art-world priest for lapsed believers’.

Many elements of her performances seem dated, with plenty of saxophone, fake snow, pink satin, and dramatic blue and red light filters, and at points I felt as if I was watching a well-produced PBS production from 1992. Yet all of these effects are sincere, and if Anderson embraces it, then the audience embraces it. The audience eventually drifts into her rhythm and accepts it. In fact, when the 90-minute performance came to the finale, I felt as though I was being shook awake from a deep sleep.

The State of Being an Object

2010-09-30T22:02:00.000-04:00

Michael Zelehoski, Objecthood
Christina Ray

Although Christina Ray’s self-titled gallery in on Grand Street cannot be more than 12’ x 12’, Michael Zelehoski manages to fit a couple of shelves, some old crates, several construction barricades, used pallets, a table and a chair, as well as a full picnic table inside the tiny SoHo gallery. Zelehoski has disassembled these three-dimensional quotidian objects and has confined each of them into a two-dimensional picture frame, preserving the objects’ original material, yet rendering their original purpose useless.

Although every element of the picnic table is still there (in Picnic Table, 2010) and embedded into the frame, one can no longer use it as a piece of furniture. It has been reduced to a visual element to be placed on a wall, rather than a shared object placed in the grass in a park. Perhaps does Zelehoski render these unwanted, discarded materials (old barricades, pallets, etc) more precious in reducing them to a two-dimensional, artistic element? In the October 2010 issue of Artforum, Giuseppe Penone says “sculpture is volume, and lives in space, while painting is surface, two-dimensionality.” In these terms, Zelehoski has painted all of his subjects without even picking up a paintbrush.

Zelehoski ultimately is delving into a study of “objecthood”, questioning and confronting the existence of each object (a table, a chair, etc) and their intended purposes (to eat, to sit, etc). The artist has subjectively titled each piece as Box, Ladders, Pallet, etc; however, these titles are simply signifiers, and once the original object has been broken down and reassembled in an eventually skewed perspective, do these signifiers still hold?

I believe that fundamentally, Zelehoski has presented the viewer with a good humored body of work, and has created a “clown car” show; a jam-packed exhibition of sculpture/painting in a pocket-sized gallery, leaving no room for empty space, both physically and philosophically.

Top 10 Picks: Summer 2010

2010-08-27T17:14:00.000-04:00

1. Ann Liv Young at 177 Livingston Street

Photo: Christy Pessagno

Sherry gains your confidence and trust, makes you believe that she really might like you, like you really might be the one person in the audience that she feels like being easy on, like she'll really listen to your problems and then ask you for advice on her own problems as Ann Liv Young after the show, and then she'll throw a bag of pee at you.

During this 4 hour long performance, "Sherry tries on Cinderella," at 177 Livingston (also known as Triple Canopy and Light Industry), Sherry gave us advice, brought audience members together both physically and emotionally, sold samples of her own shit, held a fan photo booth, reconciled a couple's sexual frustration, made me sing a TI song with her, gave out free pink lattes to special winners, showed us her dance moves, and topped it all off by throwing tampons at our faces.

Sure, she can give a pretty radical performance and throw out some 'wild moves' that are really just groaner performance art acts (i.e. piss, shit, nudity, obscenities), but what she is really good at is just plain entertainment. I would rather attend a Sherry seminar than attending any live Oprah taping. I didn't see anybody leave the show early; although they were probably just scared of Sherry's verbal persecutions, I think it's because she hosted a great talk show that held my attention every minute.

2. Slummer Nights at CANADA

Once again, CANADA has programmed a fantastic 4-night series of summer events, forcing me to trek down Chyrstie Street and face the roaring stench of Chinatown in the middle of a record-breaking New York heat wave. This year's "Slummer Nights: In Search of the Perfect Haze," brought video screenings, live performances, and even live comedy routines.

3. Furniture at Neue Galerie

My visit to see the Otto Dix (add link) exhibition this summer was the first time I had ever visited the Neue Galerie. I remember the warmth and character of the building, the charm of the cafe, and the small details that make the galleries just as much of a destination visit that the artwork on view. The furniture especially caught my eye, as I have always felt a strong affinity towards the personal, symbolic ideas that chairs and tables carry.

Edouard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill, "Drawing cabinet for Kunstchau Wien" (1908)

This cabinet's drawers are stacked in an ascending, chubby pyramid, almost Aztec in shape (and probably in inspiration). The inlaid mother-of-pearl adds an iridescent elegance and accentuates the cabinet's irregular outlines.

Koloman Moser "Armchair" (1903)

The checkerboard seat woven from cane invites objects to rest on rather than a bottom to sit upon. The strict, cage structure that is traditionally meant to act as arm and back supports actually attracts optical interest rather than warming, physical comfort.

4. Brian O'Connell at PS1

Brian O'Connell
"Structural, Uncontrolled, Hollywood, Political, Auteur, Cosmic, Happy, Sad, and Ordinary" 2010
16mm film projector onto a painted patch of wall

Aside from a unclear title, this piece is one of the most thoughtful, elegant works of art I've ever seen. I would call it jaw-droppingly beautiful if it didn't feel as if to carry the weight of a feather. Towards the gallery wall, a 16mm projector casts a bright light onto a painted rectangle, approximately 2'x3'. Rather than a blinding, white patch on the wall, the light seems to hover between the lines of darkness and lightness. In a way, the light seems to float in a patch just in front of the wall, rather than actually ever hitting the beige patch. However, in physical reality, the darker beige cancels out the bright light, making this patch of wall appear to be the same color and luminosity as the rest of the walls in the galleries illuminated by ambient and daylight. All that is left is a soft glow around the edge of the rectangular patch. "Structural, Uncontrolled..." is romantic, delicate, and has captured my heart.

5. PREHISTORIC Arts and Music Festival Outlaw Gallery

Once again, Weston Ulfig's Outlaw Gallery has made it into my Top 10, because everything he does there (the art, the music, the screenings, the crowd, the vibe, the weather) is just so damn fantastic! During the weekend of August 20-21, Ulfig organized the PREHISTORIC Arts and Music Festival which included an indoor/outdoor art exhibition featuring over 25 artists, an evening of video art and experimental film screenings, the presentation of his artist(designer)-in-residence, Brian Stanziale, and a final night featuring the music and performances of four artists/bands.

Sadly, this was the last event at Outlaw Gallery at the 191 Skillman location, but I hope it continues in a new location with more backyard fun!

6. The Man Who Fell To Earth

Okay, so I finally saw this movie. Now I finally understand why everybody finds Bowie attractive and now I can't stop drinking Beefeater's.

7. Brion Nuda Rosch at DCKT

DCKT, you own my aesthetic heart! I have never been disappointed with a show at DCKT, and this summer they introduced me to the work of Brion Nuda Rosch. The individual works in the exhibition are documentary in the way that they carry the quality of an altered historical artifact. Even though there is a range of collages, photographs. and small sculptures, they seem categorical and itemized. Though the objects are demure and mostly sepia-toned, an overwhelming Turquoise strong-arms its way through the exhibition. I use a capital "T" because this Turquoise is a dominate theme which takes over both the works in the exhibition and even the gallery walls.

8. Rafael Ferrer at Museo del Bario

See previous post.

9. Eric Ginsburg

I've been collecting these palm-size paintings that Eric Ginsburg distributes as promotional materials for his work. How ingenious to give out mini paintings as business cards! I think the paintings of dogs are humble works, yet delightfully unique, and full of artistic zeal. If anybody needs an idea of a gift for me, here's a not-so-subtle hint:
http://www.zazzle.com/dogs_by_eric_ginsburg_tshirt-235778219606518424
or
http://www.zazzle.com/art_by_eric_ginsburg_mousepad-144944725129891806

10. Knight's Move at Sculpture Center

In a way, "Knight's Move," was a lot like PS1's Greater New York show in that the curators seemed to have used the same process: find everything that was good about solo shows in New York over the past 12 months and re-install them with other works in a group exhibition in Queens. All cynicism aside about lazy curating* aside, this show was still great, and brought together a lot of my favorite artists, making it worth a trip out to LIC. Artists of note include Erin Shirreff photographs, Alex Hubbards slow-moving vertical videos, Cassie Raihl's fragile sculptures and Esther Klaus' chunky ones, and Tom Thayer's hidden basement videos.

*I must note that I do not actually believe that the curatorial process of this show was lazy, but I can bet that the majority of the artists in this show live in New York and had shows at galleries in town in the past 9 months. There is already one gigantic exhibition in Queens about the "New York Contemporary," and I think that Knight's Move could have deviated from this a little bit more creatively.

Saturn Devouring Monkey Mop Boy

2010-08-27T15:17:00.000-04:00

Saturn Devouring Monkey Mop Boy
Monkey Mop Boy (Daniel Bainbridge and Erin Jones)

I saw this painting/collage on exhibition at Outlaw Gallery's "PREHISTORIC" Music and Arts Festival last weekend. I immediately recognized the composition as an ode to Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son (1819-23). Rather than a gory depiction of a monstrous Saturn chomping the bones and flesh of a corpse, this collaborative duo's rendition shows a cartoonish Saturn coyly protecting a doll or excitably sucking on a novelty popsicle. Although Goya's version is pained and dramatic, Bainbridge and Jones have produced a comical spin on this epic tragedy.

Take a picture, maybe it’ll last longer!

2010-08-13T17:42:00.000-04:00

Michele Abeles, Leigh Ledare, Eric Shirreff, and Pinar Yolacan at PS1

I feel as though photography is often the low point, or just the overlooked medium, in contemporary group exhibitions, however this is not the case at PS1’s Greater New York exhibition this summer. As someone who is often drawn to video work, installation, or performance (new, new media), I was surprised to find that many of my favorite pieces were photographs.

Michele Abeles’ C-prints are studies into still life photography, even when a body is involved in the strictly formal compositions. Plant, Hand, Paper, Table, Lines, Numbers, a still life of those object described in the title, is supercrisp and has a super high contrast that cuts like a knife. Although this is a photograph of three-dimensional objects, Abeles has opted for a lack in depth of field bringing each object onto the same plane, and in turn, the print carries a strong two-dimensional quality. Man, Shadow, Table, Fan, Rock, is so highly detailed, that the viewer can see every blemish, pimple, stubble, and goose bump on the man’s body. Regarding the body, this is more beautiful than repulsive.

Erin Shirreff’s Teeth is a series of 28 silver gelatin prints displayed in two rows on the wall of the gallery. By association, they appear to be specimens of teeth (human or non-human), however, once you take away your pre-conceived idea of the objects from the title, these smudgy little white objects could also be sample, mystery artifacts that one finds in a lab, but in the end, they really just look like tiny pinches of clay. I love that these photographs are so close up that you can see the artist’s fingerprints, as I can picture her sitting in her studio endlessly shoving the clay around until it reaches her desired, abstract shape.

I was enamored with Pinar Yolacan’s Mother Goddess series of eight C-prints featuring a corpulent woman costumed in various bodysuits of textured fabrics and material. The suits, made of black pleather, stretch denim, nude-colored nylon, or plush velvet, fit the woman tightly around her body and head, leaving the impression of a curvy, silhouette rather than a woman’s body. Her face is eliminated, therefore leaving the idea of femininity, rather than a portrait of a specific person. Her bulbous, reclined silhouette brings to mind the bronze and marble sculptures of Fernando Botero.

Lastly, Leigh Ledare’s provocative photographs of his mother, her lovers, and himself in sexually explicit situations are disturbingly captivating, leaving me more intrigued than disgusted. Mother Tied to Catch 22, is probably one of my favorite photographs ever. I don’t know Tina (his mother), or Catch 22 (the young lover, probably younger than Leigh Ledare himself), yet the playful, intimate comfort between two lovers is captured here in all of its essence. Although Ledare specifically documents his mother (creating an incestuous dialogue that could pose a dilemma with certain viewers’ morals), it is in this photograph that Ledare speaks to all lovers; to both open, sexual promiscuity and to intimate, private relationships.

Artist Under the Influence

2010-07-23T22:01:00.000-04:00

Rafael Ferrer
El Museo del Bario
On view through August 22, 2010

Upon entering the gallery of El Museo del Barrio, we are presented with a timeline of Ferrer’s extensive studies and travels around the world. This is evident in his work, as the artist unabashedly references other artists of the 20th century. This is done purposefully — almost obviously— in some works, and by chance in others. The exhibition is made up of three types of works by Ferrer: those where he is clearly referencing another artist, those where he subconsciously references others, and those that are totally and completely Rafael Ferrer originals.

There are many works in this exhibition that are clearly Ferrer’s studies into other artists’ techniques and styles. The is seen most plainly in works like “Las Muchachos (Les Demoiselles),” 2007 and “El Studio (In the Studio),” 1953, that, although created more than five decades apart, demonstrate Ferrer’s passionate curiosity of Picasso’s cubist technique. Dadaist collages such as “The Mind Owes,” 2008, not only combines juxtaposed imagery similar to those artists of the 1910s and 20s, but Alberto Giacometti’s actually “Walking Man,” figure strides through the midground. “Melancolía (Melancholy),” 1987, is akin to Edward Munch’s “The Scream,” but with more sorrow and less terror.
I am certain that his friends also directly influenced Ferrer. The elongated face, simplified facial features and almond-shaped eyes of “Monica,” 1988, are undeniably derived from Alex Katz’ portraits of the same period (Ferrer was family friends with the Katz’).

I admit that most of the associations that I have made between Rafael Ferrer’s work and that of another artist is subjective, and might even be solely my opinion. For example, the painting, “Untitled (Sueño)”, 1960, surprisingly reminds me of a three-dimensional, Franz West sculpture. Now, West did not even begin his plaster sculptures until the 1980s, so this is most definitely a subjective association by me, and not an intentional interpretation of Ferrer’s. The softly colorful, strongly vertically oriented painting brings West’s work to mind because of the rough, yet playful application of the paint, which somehow renders a rough stone or paper maché texture. The object, or subject, seems to stand up off of the canvas, asserting its false three-dimensionality.

“Area de la noche (Arena at Night),” 1999, presents a strangely familiar composition, which quickly can be recognized and attributed to Francis Bacon’s study of boxing rings and fighters. A limp, dull, and dark figure rests awkwardly in the off-center (not quite the middle) of a large canvas. The colors, dissimilar to “Untitled (Sueño)”, are mute and washed out, much like Bacon’s own palette. Nevertheless, Ferrer’s signature painterly characteristics show through in small bursts of joyful color like a harsh orange and a light pink to outline details in the composition.

Ferrer’s studies into scenes of various campsites and homes in the jungle are wild in color like Fauvist paintings, and this connection cannot be denied. The lounging subjects (canine rather than human) in “Innocencia,” 1987, remind me of Paul Gaugin and his paintings of relaxing, quotidian scenes in Tahiti. Although the scene is calm and serene, the vibrant colors and uncertain brushstrokes set the painting in motion!

Another series of work by Ferrer that is comparable to another artist’s work – but clearly not derived from– are the stitched map pieces. “Culebra,” 1971, and “Cuba,” 1974, bring to mind the embroidered maps of the world by Italian artist, Alighiero e Boetti. In Ferrer’s version, a grid of colored-boxes composes a map of Cuba, although instead of being neatly embroidered, the boxes are drawn in crayon, with a childlike hand. The crayon makes the piece seem like a children’s project hung on the refrigerator, yet the composition and text is sophisticated enough for an artist’s hand. Without considering material or texture, there are many similarities between Ferrer and Boetti’s map series, however, Ferrer made these drawings in the early 1970s, whereas Boetti’s “mappa” series was made at the end of the decade. This brings to mind who was influencing whom!

Ferrer had an unfailing admiration towards other artists, which maintained his enthusiastic curiosity of materials and techniques. In “Abstract,” 1998-9, we see that Ferrer actually makes a painting of another painter working on his canvas; this work is, in a way, an ode to all artists.

I have always been interested in how artists reference other artists, and how it is done well. Pablo Picasso is known to have said something along the lines of, “good artists copy, great artists steal.” I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Ferrer ever stole, but that doesn’t mean he was not a great artist. In Ferrer’s work, referencing (and sometimes straight up copying) is done well, but not consistently tastefully. Nevertheless, I greatly enjoyed the exhibition for Ferrer’s unique style, his use of bright and vibrant colors, and his playfulness towards, and admiration of, his contemporaries.

The Unusual Subjects

2010-06-23T17:27:00.000-04:00

Otto Dix
Neue Galerie
On view through August 30, 2010

The first U.S. exhibition of German painter, Otto Dix, at the Neue Galerie is long overdue, and I after a recent visit, I have discovered a newfound admiration for a painter whom I only thought of as creating “Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden.” This exhibition proves Dix to be an incredibly self-aware artist who dedicated his life to the study of painting, and in turn, the study of the human condition as seen in his many variations on portraiture. The exhibition at the Neue Galerie begins with a small gallery full of his work made during World War I, a body of work that ultimately sets the tone for his entire artistic career.

The series of etchings from the “War/Der Krieg” portfolio bring to mind the lithographic work of Mexican artist, José Clemente Orozco. However, instead of images of impoverished, displaced families during the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th Century, Dix spent years documenting the horrors of World War I in Europe. In these series of etchings and drawings, Dix’s line quality and use of chiaroscuro renders his style strikingly similar to Orozco, even though they were an ocean apart. Even stronger than the similarities between Dix and Orozco are the similarities to Käthe Kollwitz’ various print portfolios. Kollowitz spent the 1910s and 20s documenting how suffering families, women and children, were affected from the war, whereas Dix, as a soldier for the German army, was out on the battlefield. These earlier works, made from 1914-1918 (not printed and published until 1924) are not illustrative to those works that Dix is most known for: portraits of the haute-classe or bourgeoisie of the Weimar period. Rather, these drawings and prints are firsthand reactions to the horrors surrounding the artist during the War. It is important to realize that these scenes are not fantasized images that one might see or dream up from a horror movie or novel, but almost diary-like accounts of a typical day in a soldier’s life in WWI. Especially horrifying are the gruesome portraits (can I even call it that?) of war victims. In the drawing of “Wounded Veteran/Kriegsverietzter”, Dix adds shock value with red watercolor paint to illustrate the horribly disfigured right side of the man’s face. “Skin Graft/Transplantation”, shows the revolting effects of hurried surgery, and “Wounded Man Fleeing (Battle of the Somme 1916)/Fliehender Verwundeter (Sommeschlacht 1916)” shows a man more terrified than terrifying; his fear transforms him into a Gollum-like, monstrous creature.

After the war, Otto Dix moved to Dresden to continue his studies at Hochschule für Bildende Künste, launching a lifetime career in painting. Although he was out of the trenches and off the battlefield, Dix seems to have always carried a feeling of disgust towards humanity, as all subjects in his future paintings retain a disfigured or inhuman quality. Some of his portrait studies of women are as appalling as the men in war. The woman in “Head I – Mrs. D (Head of Woman I)/Kopf 1 – Frau D. (Frauenkopf)”, 1923, smiles sheepishly, but her face is lost in a haze of reddish-pink smudge, making her blue eyes brighter and bigger than normal. The “Half Nude/Halbakt”, 1922, is an ogress of a woman, her face more baboonish than human. The woman in “Rachel I”, 1924, has blue lips, grey skin, and appears corpse-like, and the “Old Woman/Alte Frau”, 1923, is simply just a drawing of a skeleton with wisps of hair. In the following gallery, Even Dix’s later studies of the circus and other realms of the world of entertainment continue to portray corruption, illness, and hysteria.

During the Weimar era, Otto Dix became most well known for his portraits representing the varied types of people during this time period in Germany. It is during these years that Dix’s use of color develops into full force. The sitters’ cheeks are a drunken rosy red, their eyes are popping blue or shining brown, and the backgrounds are washed in deep ocres of a curtain or the soft periwinkle blues of the evening sky. Disturbingly, one thing that remains constant is the pale, white face on almost every portrait.

Dix took his own liberty in deciding how he wanted a person to look. He was certainly deeply affected and troubled by his years serving his country in World War I, as his subjects never really return to human forms. Although Dix accurately captures the roly-poly shape of a man in “Portrait of the Laryngologist Dr. Mayer-Hermann”, 1926, his shoulders are so disproportioned that his body turns into a full spherical shape. It is impossible that the seductress in “Reclining Woman on Leopard Skin (Portrait of Vera Simailowa)”, 1927, had a face so felineness. And “Dr. Heinrich Stadelmann”, 1920, has outrageously large ears, nauseously green skin, and bulbous, protruding pink eyes.

Dix continued his studies far and wide, and was certain and determined from a young age about his place in Germany, and in the world, as an artist. He was constantly challenging himself to create new styles and try new techniques, however it seems as though in his later years he took this curiosity so far and lost his signature style. There are several paintings in the galleries that I would have never believed were done by Otto Dix if they had not been included in this exhibition. For example, “Vanitas (Youth and Old Age)”, 1932, is eerily similar to a John Currin rendition of a buxom youth; the blonde has a godlesslike, beautiful body, yet her smile if forced and absurd. In “Randegg with the Vögeli,” 1936, Dix takes a shot at landscape painting. The pastoral, autumn landscape looks as though it could have come from the Hudson River School, rather than Weimar Germany. The most absurd painting was attempted when Dix decided to explore biblical themes in “Saint Christophorus IV”, 1939. Although he was clearly inspired by DaVinci’s work – as is evident in Dix’s inclusion of jagged, smoky mountains in the background – I can only assume that the artist returned to contemporary subjects shortly after this painting.

Although “Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden,” will probably remain the first portrait I think of when speaking of Otto Dix, I will certainly think of the “War” etchings and drawings as the most important works in Dix’s career, as they were the base upon which the rest of his work was created.

Top 10 picks: May 2010

2010-06-04T15:44:00.001-04:00

MAY TOP 10

1. Metropolis at Film Forum

I love science fiction movies, and I especially love any film about future dystopias. So, I was already expecting to enjoy viewing this film for the first time. The experience was absolutely a highlight of my month, if not of my lifetime journey in cinematic adventures (and viewing it at Film Forum, my favorite venue, didn’t hurt either). The full 2 hour 33 minute screening of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was honestly an assault on the eyes. The crisp contrast of the film, the instensely composed score, and the unnaturally fast-paced action at 25 frames per second, and shockingly wide eyes of the actors was certainly an eyeful to handle for that length of time. Nonetheless, I feel proud to say that I have seen the fullest version of the film to date.

The film seemed so far ahead of its time in so many ways. It’s hard to imagine how they managed to produce the elaborate Art Deco / Gothic sets, and I wonder what happened to them and if they’ve survived after the World War. Additionally, the sultriness of actress Brigitte Helm playing both the love interest, Maria, as well as the fembot, and scandalous acts that take (nipple action!), leave me surprised the film was released in 1927!

2. 2-Channel Video: “Men Die and They’re Not Happy” Orit Ben-Shitrit at Hunter MFA Exhibition

Shitrit’s 2-channel video installation was in a different league than the other 22 artists at the Hunter College MFA exhibition this May. That is not to say that there weren’t other artists making intriguing, thoughtful, challenging, quality work; rather, I mean to say that Shitrit’s “Men Die and They Are Not Happy,” did not seem like a work made straight from an MFA degree-seeking student, but rather the side project of a Hollywood director. It is highly produced with excellent lighting and sound editing, supports a large cast of actors, as well as a large production team. The story seemed clear and determined, including several different plot lines, and an entire made-up, foreign language. The costumes were clean and well-made, and the movements and actions were beautifully choreographed. I am interested in knowing Shitrit’s age and perhaps his professional background. If he ends up been a 25-year-old guy just graduating from school, then I am eager to see what else he comes up with in the next few years.

**Just before posting, I found out that Ben-Shitrit is a woman. The fact that I assumed this was a man is somehow embarrassing and shameful (but the gender difference in contemporary arts is something I’d rather not get into with this post).

3. Video: “The Ascent of Man” Tommy Hartung at Greater New York

At PS1’s Greater New York exhibition, where artists are competing with dozens of other artists for 7 seconds of your (the viewer’s) time, Tommy Hartung won the race for me and my attention span. Granted, I’ve only been to the exhibition once, and I must say it was a rushed visit, the only gallery that caught my eye, and my time, was Hartung’s video installation. The stop-motion animation (which replicates at 1973 BBC documentary about humanity’s ascent), is visually captivating and curiously mischievous.

4. “Another Time Man” Johannes VanDerBeek at Zach Feuer Gallery

Most of the time when a solo-exhibition appears, upon first glance, to be a group-exhibition, it’s not a very good sign. However, I am delighted and amused by Johannes VanDerBeek’s playful ecentricity. The show is like pulling open the different drawers in VanDeerBeek’s chest; instead of finding the sock, pant, neckties, and shirt drawers, the artist is putting it all on view: tin can sculptures, people made of tie-dyed wire, walls of colored napkins and various foiled materials. I may read the exhibition in my own naïve, silly way, but the press release begs to differ.

5. Darren Almond at Matthew Marks Gallery

Please see previous post.

6. Michael Asher at the Whitney Biennial

I’ve always asserted that Michael Asher was an artist who fought against the museum as an institution (but in a buddy-buddy, friendly manner). I chuckle at the humor in the Whitney Museum of American Art fighting back: for Asher’s piece in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, he proposed to keep the museum open 24 hours a day for a two-week period of the exhibition. Due to budget constraints and short staffing, this proposal was cut back to three days, or 72 consecutive hours of museum hours open to the public.

I love Michael Asher for his interventions within the gallery space and within the institution; one must recall his groundbreaking project at Galleria Toselli in Milan (1973) when he sandblasted the gallery walls down to a brown, plaster surface, and his interruption of controlled curatorial decisions at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979 and again in 2005.

Read more about Michael Asher and other sneaky artists here.

7. “She Awoke With a Jerk” at Andrea Rosen Gallery

Paul Houseley alongside Magritte – how sweet!

8. “Foreclosed” Alison Elizabeth Taylor at James Cohan

Plywood is an entirely underestimated material. It can be used for some of the most beautiful textures in woodwork, which Alison Elizabeth Taylor shows off to its fullest extent in “Foreclosed.” She uses the delicate marquetry technique to illustrate scenes of poverty and economic destruction in the rural Nevada, just on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Although the subject matter is oxymoronic with the technique and use of materials, I am most interested in the lush textures and smooth surface of her finished product.

9. Video: Mads Lynnerup “Presentation” at Seven Easy Steps video screening, Horton Gallery

A secret video camera documents the artist’s Danish mother explaining to his very conservative aunt what “Mads does for a living.” No, he’s not trading stocks or teaching science or even selling cars; he’s *gasp* an artist! We see the two woman belly-laughing at the thought that Mads is back in America doing these ‘absurd’ things! Rather than disownment or shame, his mother is proud (although, she still finds his work rather silly). Mads Lynnerup also finds humor in his work; although his aunt might not get it per say, someone’s still laughing!

10. Sean Lennon and Thurston Moore performing “Oh Yoko” at the Standard (Bookforum & DAP Party)

I just never thought I would see this happen.

11. A Dry Opening at Outlaw Gallery

Which event would you rather attend? A) A gallery opening at a hot and stuffy gallery in Chelsea, waiting in line for 20 minutes for a glass of warm white wine after receiving numerous elbows in the ribs and getting your toes crushed by stiletto heels, awkward conversations with someone for whom you interned two weeks before quitting abruptly by email, all the while not seeing a full work of art before finally clawing your way out... OR B) A backyard BBQ in Bed-Stuy with a jovial, almost rowdy, crowd, a cool night breeze as you view dozens of works by local artists mounted on exterior brick walls, wire fences, and trees (lit by the glow of a good-ole illegal Brooklyn bonfire), and also continues onto the walls in the living room of a cute apartment, leaving you plenty of time and opportunities to discuss art, and other oddities, with good people? Did I mention there were brats?

Sometimes Still, Mostly Moving

2010-05-11T00:39:00.000-04:00

Darren Almond, Sometimes Still
Matthew Marks Gallery

Although some might praise photographer and filmmaker Darren Almond for withstanding the test of time during his all-night exposure shoots, the social and political barriers of obtaining rights to document rare footage in foreign countries, and the challenges of producing his works in difficult-to-reach locations, his accomplishments are still somewhat unimpressive compared to the awe-inspiring activities and rituals of his subjects. In Sometimes Still, a six-screen video installation on view at Matthew Marks, Almond’s camera follows a monk through dark mountain trails as he trains to complete the process of Kaihōgyō.

Although Kaihōgyō is a seven-year process where the monk trains to ultimately gain Buddhahood and discover a higher state of consciousness, the camera follows one of these “marathon monks” as he performs a central ritual that involves walking extraordinary distances for hundreds of days at a time. Upon entering the gallery, one must take a few moments to adjust to the overwhelming darkness of the gallery and the contrast of the five large screens. The screens are overlapping each other in such a way that all five are viewed at once, both allowing the viewer to experience the videos fully (as the screens overcome the viewer and seem to wrap around panoramically), and also distracting the viewer (as one cannot possibly watch each screen at the same time since one will always remain in the periphery). The screens are taller than the average viewer, and rest on the ground, further bringing the viewer’s body into the video. This strange effect transports the viewer into the video; one is soon on the mountain trail following the monk on his surreal quest in the moonlight.

Uneasy at first by the darkness and imposing size of the screens, one might build up the courage to venture back behind the main screens to see what else the dark gallery might hold. In the rear, another smaller screen reveals to us a black and white video of a more mature — perhaps enlightened— Buddhist monk tending to a fire in a temple. Do not be surprised if you suddenly feel more at ease in the darkness of the gallery, or perhaps more courageous than the new arrivals who are sheepishly standing near the entrance/exit of the gallery.

Top 10 Picks: April 2010

2010-05-06T15:38:00.000-04:00

I have to admit, I did not get out to seeing very many shows in April. Maybe I was burned out from March, or perhaps I was preparing myself for the massive amount of exhibitions opening in May, but when setting out to create my Top 10 Picks of the Month, most of my favorites strayed towards non-exhibitions like performances, events, and websites. In no particular order:

1. Lost and Found: An Evening with Bern Porter

This gathering brought together both well-versed, cultish fans of Bern Porter's work, and curious newcomers to his words and poetry. I especially enjoyed the looping slideshow of Porter's cunning, clever, and comical works of "word art."

In addition, Kenneth Goldsmith's suit (while reading a Bern Porter poem about the monotony of getting dressed) was spectacular and also worth mention:

I also must make a note to go see the actual exhibition on view at the MOMA Library through July 5, 2010.

2. Jennifer Rubell's melting cheese head sculptures/hors d'oeuvres at the Brooklyn Museum's Brooklyn Ball 2010

I did not have the chance to attend this high-falutin, swanky party at the Brooklyn Art Museum, but I'm sure I would have left satiated, in a happy daze. From what I've seen, this was an artful feast of gluttonous proportions including a pile of potato chips and mayonnaise imitating Jackson Pollack's One: Number 31 (1950), and tables full of whole roasted pigs, rabbits, and other edible animals . What made my mouth water the most was the melting fontina cheese heads over Carr crackers, inspired by one of my favorite artist's (Bruce Nauman) Ten Heads Circle/Up and Down (1990).

3. Spring blooms in New York City

Need I say more?

4. Curtis Mann at the Whitney Biennial

Even though this year's Biennial has a significantly less number of artists than previous years, it was still difficult to pick and choose which work to spend time on and which works to give the old 4-second study. I have to admit, I gave Curtis Mann's After the Dust a quick look from across the room and quickly brushed it off. However, a few minutes later I noticed that my companion for the day was not with me anymore, and I found her in the last room still studying this wall-size collection of images. I am delighted that I decided to give this piece a second glance, and I was soon cooing "oohs" and "ahhs" and "how?"

Upon closer examination, I could not figure out how he could have possibly created this effect in the darkroom, and was mystified by thought that he had! It wasn't until I learned that the photographs had been tampered with bleach that it all began to make since. I was slowly putting together the pieces of an exciting puzzle, learning how the artist came to the final product. It was a bewildering art viewing, "aha," moment -- one that I often didn't identify with while witnessing upon other's faces while I was once a museum gallery attendant.

5. Smokebath

Smokebath is an online exhibition, zine, and fundraiser exhibition curated and organized by Peter Sutherland. The online exhibition (fabulous and addicting) and accompanying catalog (a cute, grayscale zine printed on the most wonderfully soft newsprint) includes works by dozens artists based around the themes of camping, nature, and exploring. It sure makes me pine for summer...In fact, I just bought a tent on amazon.com!

6. Drawings by Jenn Brehm

Jenn Brehm continuously works series of water color drawings where she allows her hands and thoughts to evolve freely. She doesn't allow herself to spend more than a brief amount of time on each drawing, leaving each work seems like a fragile object, and even a fleeting image. I love the gestural marks and linear forms that are suggestive of human bodies, even though the final subject falls short of human.

7. Bruce High Quality Foundation at the Whitney Biennial

For showing me images and youtube clips that I didn’t ask to see, yet somehow I can’t take my eyes away.

8. Painting scene during RED on Broadway

I have to say, the play was "fine." The most enjoyable scene depicts Mark Rothko and his assistant priming a canvas with, yep, you guessed it, a deep red pigment. This is the moment where the play hit its crescendo and grabs the viewer in, almost as if a zoom lens is applied onto the stage. Alfred Molina (Rothko) and Eddie Redmayne (Ken, the assistant) leap into a highly choreographed (in fact, choreographed into a cutesy dance) pas-de-deux, where their bodies intertwine through a synchronized rhythm of aggressive brushstroking and arm-flailing.

9. Wall decorations at Pies'n'thighs

Leave it to me to let food leak its way into this list of Top 10 highlights more than once! The food at the recently re-opened hipster soul-food joint, Pies'n'Thighs is delicious, but the choice of wall decorations and posters inside the restaurant are humorously delightful! I particularly enjoy the poster of a bowl of vibrant oranges, a vintage poster of a woman with Subway-Jared style over-sized pants, and a wonderfully simple, gestural, still-life painting of fruit (pictured above, on the left wall of the restaurant).

10. Marco Anelli’s Flickr Steam

Photographer Marco Anelli has been spending everyday at the MOMA during the run of Marina Abramovic's 3-month performance, "The Artist Is Present." Anelli is documenting the face of each person who goes head-to-head, sitting across the table from Marina Abromavic as she looks into their eyes, all day, everyday, for the entire run of the exhibition. I have to say, Marina isn't looking so good these days...her eyes are raw and red, her skin is waxy, and she looks absolutely exhausted (and this is only Day 22!). What is beautiful about the participants (her opponents and/or partners) is they all appear so fresh-faced, optimistic, and sincerely determined (even this kid looks pretty serious!).

Each photograph is beautiful, and when seen as a set on Flickr, a glance of each person creates a poetic mosaic of Abramovic's experiences with the visitors of the MOMA. Even more interesting is the fact that Anelli lists the day and amount of time that each person spent participating in "The Artist Is Present."

Interview #1: Egan Frantz

2010-04-08T22:39:00.000-04:00

I begin this (hopefully continuing) interview series with a highly intellectual conversation with Egan Frantz, whose first New York solo exhibition is currently on view at Cueto Project. When I first saw this show I was intrigued, baffled, humored, awed, dumbfounded, and especially curious about the artist and his work. I am happy to share the artist's words here.

Egan Frantz, Revision 1: All Quiet on the Western Front
Cueto Project, New York, NY
On view through April 24, 2010

Revision 1: All Quiet on the Western Front. What a heavy exhibition title! It is loaded with various allusions and pre-conceived connotations, yet the “Revision 1” addition leaves everything open and unexplained. Now, to be honest, I have never read the novel nor seen the film adaptation, and my knowledge of this story extends to what Wikipedia and imdb.com have provided me with. Can you please give me, in your words, a brief, objective summary of this novel?

Most people I have spoken with, having read the book/seen the film(s) or not, come to the exhibition knowing there is this war story. In this regard the title carries a kind of automatic weight which I hoped to set against certain lightness. The exhibition is situated on the western front of Manhattan, or, almost, it’s up against the West Side Highway. Before anything, one feels a breeze of speeding vehicles… I find a certain humor in this. As metaphor the title might suggest a certain silence in the history of Western thought, and it is important for me that all this can all happen before opening the door or having never opened the book. Inside, the music sounding from the back room of the gallery is always present, perhaps to the point of being aggressive. If you really want to sink your teeth into the footnotes, the introduction of ‘silence’ came only through the novel’s subsequent translation into English. The original German title, “Im Westen nichts Neues,” makes no mention of silence. There is then this idea of a continuous project, rephrasing or translation in “Revision…” The title points both inward and outward, locating the textual and the ‘non-textual’. Or you can just walk in you know?

I really want to make work that can be read on its own terms at the same time offering itself to some potential, persistent reader. The novel itself is a kind of educational shoe… me and my friends read it growing up… My good friend Luca Dellaverson can recite the preface off the cuff:

"This book is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."
-Erich Maria Remarque (1928)

Would you still like me to summarize the novel?

No, I think I'll stick with my wikipedia summary...or maybe get to reading it one day!

This exhibition is very visual…it requires a lot of effort on the eyes. There is one section that blasts club music, yet, because of the bright lighting and lack of other bodies, doesn’t make me feel like dancing at all. How do you feel this noise may or may not affect the way the viewer interacts with the framed pieces on the wall? For me it was unsettling, and made it difficult to concentrate on what I was looking at. In fact, I felt a little confused. What are these numbers? Why am I not able to discern any recognizable figure within this field? Did the bass from the amp jumble up the printed numbers on the paper so that they are now scattered and crooked? Are these two separate pieces that happen to be in the same room, or is this a cohesive installation?

The work you are referring to is 13 Figures and K.I.T.T.Y. Jam, an installation which I like to think of as playing “call and response” between this amazing Eddie Def electrofunk mashup and my 13 figures. A “jam” is what we used to call an old school hip-hop track, and it also brings to mind fresh-fruit preserves (FRESHHH – remember that sample?) which are, of course, “mashed up.” Language or ‘that which is received’ is the generator here and always in my work. I might also just say I like the way Eddie works with constraint at the same time keeping things totally wild, in outer space. My decision to make 13 works using only the numbers 1-13 comes from a similar impulse.

Within the larger construct of the exhibition the way the audio travels around the space does something very important for me – it’s like seeing through walls – which is to supply a connective tissue between each and every work in the exhibition.

Please tell me more about “MK, PK, LK, LLK, C, M, LC, LM, Y,” a piece that is visually compelling and surprisingly seductive. What printer did you use? What kind of paper is this? I understand that you used CMYK cartridges, correct? What was the exact model? Also, how many cartridges did you have to go through for each piece?

I have an Epson Pro 3800, the smallest version of their large-format printers. It uses the same inks as the big ones but is only 17 inches wide and fits in my little Chinatown studio. The engineers at Epson designed a palette based on CMYK with steps in between. I simply command the printer to print each value, the thing is, the printer mixes nearly all the inks to produce each figure. If it looks like an attempt to deconstruct the inkjet image, it is just that, an attempt. It only feigns its own success as some kind of exercise in purity. They are printed on a paper made by Ilford called Galerie Gold Fibre Silk and I made the entire work without swapping cartridges. If you like the piece formally, props to Epson and Ilford.

I LOVE the piece formally. I am a CMYK-LOVER. Props to Epson and Ilford!
Material is clearly important to you. The description of the medium for each piece on the checklist goes on for several lines. Some artists just opt for “mixed media.” Why is your work not just “mixed media”?

Trained as a photographer in school I was led down a particularly Barthesian path. In Camera Lucida Barthes comes to many things, one of these being that every Photograph is a certain proof, “like the delayed rays of a star.” This might not be the case for inkjet prints, which are produced by something more like a painting machine than any assortment of darkroom (chemical / light) processes, but I’m not lost on this. I use materials as proofs towards a kind of mute speech via their associative qualities or the way these things sound or look in language itself. The materialist lists / titles are tools to get into the work. They also make very clear the impossibility of a complete description. Jared Madere has nice way of putting this, “I don’t say whether or not my window was open when I made the work.”

As in Petroleum Pictures, we are told that the plastic parts come from Canal Plastics Center. What if they had been mail ordered? Would it not be the same piece to you? As for the piece in the center of the room, made with 18% reflective middle gray book cloth, how would the piece change if it was 81% reflective?

I have a nice anecdote to get somewhere close to an answer. The nice girls who work at the gallery were getting really tired of the music which plays rather loudly 10am-6pm, 5 days a week. I wanted to make some sort of gesture to express my gratitude to them, so the next day I went to Canal Rubber (just down the block from Canal Plastics), bought some acoustic foam, that I later cut to the same size as this middle grey stage you were describing, before swapping the former for the latter. The Petroleum Pictures room is situated between the 13 Figures… and their respective desks. Of course, they’re still dealing with music, but surely the acoustic foam is sucking up some sound on its way over! I’m especially fond of this move for the way these two rooms, when taken together, present a kind of aporia -- one projecting and the other sucking.

The Sidesteps series were made by taking a squeegee to freshly printed digital images, however they very much have a “darkroom” quality to them. They remind me of Wolfgang Tillman’s photographic abstractions, made by manipulated photo chemicals directly onto the paper during the development process. How did you come about making this series? What it a happy accident or a calculated, conceptual process?

For me and many others the word ‘conceptual’ is bound up with a specific historical moment, that is, ‘conceptual art,’ and I think it functions best this way, as descriptive of a moment in time. I make use of systems to get myself out the work and avoid making too many arbitrary decisions, but, when making objects, it becomes increasingly clear how pathos continues to creep in. The late Jack Spicer has this character called Lowghost who is often creeping into his books. I like this idea of logos as a kind of gremlin in his work.

Regarding the Sidesteps, there is a lot of information this work (it is an ongoing project) which I could easily go on listing. Lately, I’ve been interested to see how the sequence functions without my voice all over it. The tools are there in the titles, materials, numbers, sizes, etc. As far as process goes these things are very simple. Using a squeegee has nothing to do with some sort of affinity towards the tool and the result it produces. It’s a matter of treating the inkjet print like its gelatin silver predecessor. Treating one object like another – this is key. In the darkroom one would normally squeegee their prints in kind of final gesture before laying them out to dry. I use this same squeegee and do the same thing when a print comes fresh out of the inkjet printer. Naturally, this produces a distinctly different result every time, so as R.H. Quaytman likes to say, “to pierce the ego of their singularity,” I repeat this process 11 times and display each result.

It was the image I used for the first sequence, Sidesteps (source: chaos_and_creation.jpg), that was helpful in determining the system I continue to use. I used a still from a video in which Dali is having an argument with Mondrian about pure ‘painting’ vs ‘corrupted’ painting… I wanted to pull this whole idea to the side. In doing so I ended up making a kind of horizontal move into painting myself.

Let’s talk a little bit about “Untitled…” (the one made out of PMMA). This work can read in many different ways; it is a different piece each time a different person views it. This here is a fact, since the reflection changes with each new body that stands in front of the piece. Now, the viewers can be grouped into two categories: those who look at Untitled… and see through the first layer of PMMA and try to look at the interior of the three-dimensional object (a sculpture), and those who look at the surface of the PMMA, ignoring the side of the box (a quasi-painting). If you had to categorize Untitled…, would it be a painting or a sculpture?

Would it be helpful for you if I categorized it?

No. That wasn't a good question. In fact I should probably delete, but I like the moxy in your response. And no, it wouldn't be helpful. I all for the subjective....To me, the piece is open-ended because it can be a piece about materiality, formal compositions, transparent interchanges, self-reflexivity, etc…the list goes on. Is this piece as open-ended to you as it is to me? Or rather, are you trying to communicate something specific to the audience?

Yes it is definitely open ended, at least more overtly than the others. There was point where I was calling it “a nothing” to my friends but this went into some funky Ray Johnson territory, and I don’t want to step on Ray Johnson.

What are you Mr. Frantz, a photographer a painter? You to seem to fit in between the two. You are not taking images with a camera, or creating them with a brush, but rather a “chooser” and “manipulator” of images. You seem to control how your audience sees an image. As in MK, PK, LK, LLK, C, M, LC, LM, Y, we are looking at pure color, yet that color, or image, could have come from anywhere! The MK could be a microscopic view of someone’s black tuxedo, or a macroscopic view of the night sky. Or perhaps, it is just ink on paper. Or in Remarque, Erich Maria, you present the viewer with a photocopy of a photograph. Would you reject my assumption that you are a curator of images? Are they YOUR photographs, or do they come from somewhere else? Are your manipulated inkjet prints your paintings?

I was recently invited to participate in a book project happening out in LA. Shortly after confirming my participation they sent out of PDF list of participating artists. In that list, it says Egan Frantz – Painter. The function of a curator is so contested these days I’m not sure what you mean when you ask if I consider myself a curator of images. I can tell you that if there is any one object I have a particular affinity towards it is the radio. I would like to be a radio, to transmit that which comes from the outside, and do this very well!

You know, my brother, a nuclear engineer and an avid logophile (lover of words and definitions), loves the fact that I describe myself as a curator. Before looking it up in a dictionary, he didn't know what a "curator" was. And now, to him, I am "an ecclesiastic entrusted with the cure of souls." Basically what I'm trying to say is that although there may be a definition in Webster's, the term is as you said, highly contested and absurd.

To wrap things up, how does Revision 1: All Quiet on the Western Front relate to All Quiet on the Western Front (your first solo exhibition)? Will there be a Revision 2?
I can’t say if there will be a Revision 2 but surely the next exhibition will function that way. I came to Revision 1 for a number of reasons, one being that I had had my undergraduate exhibition at Hampshire College a little less than a year before and still felt that I was sweating out a number of the same problems. A good deal of this show is comprised of things I made in school, which is a nice glance back to this narrative of school boys in Erich Maria Remarque novel. It is my hope that through these exhibitions I’ve built something like a solid stage. If this is true, the next thing I should be able to do is walk all over it.

Right now I’m really excited about the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso. Some of his stories are as short as one sentence as in The Dinosaur, “When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there.” This little structure is endlessly playful. Again, we are dealing with a translation and in this case the “I” is interchangeable with “he” and “she”. I have a pretty intense relationship to sleep (I sleep more than any one I know) and I am still something of a bedroom artist (I share my studio with my bed), so, yes, something along these lines is happening for me…

Again, Revision 1: All Quiet on the Western Front is on view at Cueto Project through April 24. I highly recommend a visit. It is a splendid solo exhibition and I cannot wait to see what Egan has planned next.

What a Rush!

2010-03-16T15:15:00.000-04:00

Virtuoso Illusion: Cross-Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde
LIST Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA
On view through April 4, 2010

In Virtuoso Illusion: Cross-Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde, the LIST Visual Arts Center proves once again to be one of the strongest art institutions on the East Coast, consistently programming superb exhibitions that prove to never be a letdown. Although one criterion, New Media, slightly overshadows another, Cross-Dressing, curator Michael Rush has brought together seventeen artists, ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Kalup Linzy, to produce a sensuously captivating exhibition. It’s no surprise that “New Media” dominates in theme, as Rush is the author of numerous, widely-read textbooks such as Video Art (2004, revised edition, 2007), New Media in Art (2004), and New Media in Late 20th-century Art (2001). Much like his books, Virtuoso Illusion is easy to navigate, yet packed with useful information. Due to the size of the List Center, the layout of the exhibition is borderline overwhelming. However, this overstimulation seems to fit hand in hand with New Media and its tendency to aggressively, and in some cases subtly, invade your senses.

Although the show includes photography, ranging from Pierre Molinier’s pre-Photoshop surrealist collages from the 1950s to Yasumasa Morimura’s stylized appropriation of Manet’s Olympia, it is the video installations that make the visit worth the trip. Not surprisingly, both Ryan Trecartin and Kalup Linzy are included – although not to any disappointment, as they are both prolific (and might I add known to be cross-dressing artists from time to time) artists who would leave a gaping hole in this exhibition were their videos absent.

While some videos are awkwardly cramped into cubicles on small television sets (like a looping reel of Charles Atlas’ work), Rush has allotted an enormous area in the back to Michelle Handelman’s four-screen projection, Dorian (2009). The only completely dark screening area in the galleries, the four large screens (roughly 10’ wide each) seem to float in space as the high-definition, well-produced video projections illuminate their surfaces. The credits on this piece are extensive, as dozens of artists and technicians were involved in the making of this film. Dorian is rich with color and character. The non-linear narrative introduces us to numerous personalities, all lusciously made-up, and as a result, overtly and quietly narcissistic (depending on the character). Here, celebrity is grotesque and the obscure still aren’t beautiful.

The final work in the exhibition is Katarzyna Kozyra’s Summertale (2008), a delightful short film about five dwarfs who provide an unusually inhospitable welcome to a couple of seriously misplaced visitors. The viewer is introduced to a lush, vivid garden paradise near a cozy cottage where numerous dwarf maids are going about their daily chores of watering the flourishing plants, picking apples and other fruits, and hanging fresh laundry in what appears to be the freshest breeze ever. Who knows how long these women have been tending to this house, why they are there, and if they have frequent guests. One day, a large Alice-In-Wonderland-like mushroom appears in a clearing. It towers above their heads and clouds their senses with stink. The ladies look upon it with confusion and amazement. They hesitantly approach the mushroom and start to poke it, acting similar to the apes when the mysterious, black monolith appears in Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey"(1968). The mushroom hisses and steams, burps loudly, and out crawls three unlikely characters: a stately gentleman (who we find later is an Opera singer with no sense of cleanliness), a prissy drag queen donning a skintight dress and a furry, rolling suitcase (who we find later is quite sloppy despite her efforts in appearance), and finally a silly, child-like woman dressed in all white (who is taken in by the dwarfs as a project in innocence). Summertale is ridiculously charming; it could be a set of a Disney movie, however with its sinister undertones, it could easily be a Lady Gaga video. This cautionary tale warns the viewer to always stay on one’s best behavior when visiting a far away land. Kozyra’s film is probably the least-likely to fit with Rush’s overall theme of the show, but it was definitely the most enjoyable video and a pleasant surprise ending to an overall satisfying show.

You Got Schooled by DCKT

2010-03-09T11:14:00.001-05:00

Dennis Christie and Ken Tyburski of DCKT gallery blew everybody out of the water last week at the Armory Show 2010 on Pier 94. First of all, those guys are amazingly productive, even outside of the Armory Booth: a) since the gallery lies a few doors down from the New Museum on the Bowery, they’re open every day of the week (in order to accommodate both the museum crowd, and the crowd that goes to the museum while it’s closed and turned away), b) Ken and Dennis are die hard and always working it behind the desk (I still have never seen an intern), and finally c) they curate a rigorous schedule of exhibitions, most often including a second project in the back of the gallery. Jumping back to the booth, this last week at the Armory, the dynamic duo planned on 4 different exhibitions in 5 days!

The artists on view this week all share one dominating characteristic: seduction. Seduction through color and texture, through mystery, and through the enticement of a woman. The booth is quaint and handsome, somehow the perfect size to house exhibitions by five of the gallery’s artists. On Wednesday, Cordy Ryman threw his last name out the window with his colorful, densely textured, block paintings – so chunky they might be sculptures. One multi-paneled baby blue piece began as a painting on the wall, and smoothly transitioned out onto the floor. Other works rested firmly on the booth’s wall, or stood coolly in the corner. On Thursday, Andrzej Zielinski’s candy-coated fluorescent paintings assaulted the eye with color. The pieces radiated light, and emitted some sort of happy gas, putting a smile on my face.

On Friday, I was able to access an art fair version of DCKT’s most recent show at the gallery, a photographic essay by Zoe Crosher. The viewer (voyeur) is allowed into the private life of Michelle DuBois during the time while she was living around military bases in the Pacific Rim during the 70s and early 80s. We see Du Bois, a prostitute, posing for pictures taken by unknown photographers (her clients). Evidence that DuBois was a playful prostitute, she dresses up as a cavewoman, a cowgirl, secretary, or anything else that could set her off giggling, as she often is seen doing in the photographs. Most notably, she is consistently confident, sexy, and proud of her womaness, rather than the contemporary idea of a prostitute (the kind most often portrayed on crime dramas) as weak and ashamed. In these various bedroom scenarios (although, she is always full dressed), DuBois comes off as coy, rather than scandalous – an innocent girl rather than a provocative temptress.

On the fourth day, Ted O’Sullivan was introduced to the booth. Throughout the installation of over a dozen dark, sexy paintings, the viewer’s eye jumps from genitalic focal point to genitalic focal point. One canvas looks like a murkier version of a Peter Doig butterfly, floating not in real space, but perhaps through a grey, foggy camera lens. If Tim O’Sullivan’s paintings had a smell, it would be musky. On view throughout the five days of the Armory Show was a table by Ryan Humphrey, a chaotic array of wooden wheels placed under a glass tabletop that proudly shouts their brand of extreme sport: skateboards, BMX, and so on. Accompanied by four fluorescent, exotically patterned chairs, Ken and Dennis were able to sell in style.

On top of the quality of the artwork, the gallerists have installed, destalled, and installed without flaw. There was no evidence of hardware, paint splatters, spackling, or nail holes from missed measurements or hurried installation. One could not even see their tools or packing materials lying around. With the fair running nine hours a day, with various events in between, one wonders if Ken or Dennis slept at all last week! I can imagine them frantic and bustling all night long installing the next day’s show and packing up the previous day’s show, yet still presenting themselves as cool and calm – and stylish might I add – during the course of the day. Now the Armory is over, and I can guarantee that they are back at work, tending to Josh Azzarella’s solo photography exhibition and already planning for the next one.

Perfect Circle

2010-03-05T11:15:00.001-05:00

James Nares' video work
Paul Kasmin, Armory 2010

I wouldn't say I was a fan of James Nares' paintings -- something about the fact that I can never tell if I'm looking at a painting or a silkscreen print really bothers/annoys me. It could also be the fact that his gallery, Paul Kasmin, in their press releases, tries to describe him as an 'outsider' artist, making work unlike any of his contemporaries (although, perhaps this is an annoyance felts towards the gallery and not towards the artist). And perhaps it's the fact that I feel as though Nares is betraying Roy Lichtenstein through his sloshy, macro-brushstroke paintings; it's almost as though Lichtenstein should have been 'referencing' (as contemporary artists so often do) Nares' paintings in his benday-dot, "Brushstroke," from 1965. It seems almost in reverse -- as though Nares got to the idea first, and Lichtenstein only had to build upon the idea. Or, maybe Nares is 'referencing' "Brushstroke" in reverse. Maybe I feel jealous, or protective. I mean, Lichtenstein has a legacy, but Nares gets the 21st century fame! Either way, I'll quit my gripin', because this isn't about Nares' paintings, but rather his video works, which absolutely delighted me!

What initially drew me in was the noise of PVC pipes gloriously falling, or being thrown -- in spastic rhythm -- against a wall in an empty concrete room. First of all, I love the sound of PVC pipes: they are like construction's conga drums and my haphazard percussion instrument of choice. They produce a pleasing range of high and low notes, and could easily be used as a sort of woodwind instrument if somebody put in the effort. So, what drew me into the viewing room was the pipes, aptly titled "Pipes"; what made me stay was the promise of another amusing, titillating video, "Giotto's Circle" (1976).

"Giotto's Circe," follows a trend of single male artists documenting their silly -- yet somehow deeply poignant-- studio activities on video. What was different about Nares in this video (as compared to William Wegman's video from the 70s) is the assistant, or friend, who is holding the camera, rather than a fixed tripod (Nares is not flying solo here).

A shirtless young man walks up to a wall in what appears to be a dilapidated warehouse, but is probably the artist's dingy, yet fabulous, studio in Manhattan. His back is tanned, his shoulder-length hair is wispy and sun kissed, and his pants are pulled high in disco style (all in all, a fine looking man!). He is holding a long, thin piece of metal horizontally, probably 7-9 feet in length. With his back turned to the camera, he begins to rock the metal pole up and down in a see-saw motion. As he increases the energy of these pendular motions, the viewer begins to wonder where the circle will come into play. Almost immediately after having this thought, I began to notice a faint outline of a perfect circle come into view. Almost like magic, or par with the excitement of mixing Kool-aid with water, the entire wall in front of the man begins to change. The wall slowly, and somehow suddenly, changes color in a miraculous way. The colors do not actually change, but become more obvious and important to the viewer. The wall is a stunning deep turquoise, made all the more dazzling by the dull beige of the concrete showing through the chipped paint. The scratched lines that the metal pole is creating stands out as a bright white. In addition, a burnt-orange haze hangs around the top of the screen, with a fluorescent green hovering just below (evidence that this was shot of faulty film or processed incorrectly).

This piece is titled, "Giotto's Circle," a clear homage to Florentine painter, Giotto di Bondone, who is best known for his biblical frescos from the early Italian Renaissance. Story has it that Giotte was up for a possible commission for the Pope, and when asked to deliver an example of his best work, dipped a paintbrush in red and composed a perfect circle on the canvas. The Pope was initially confounded and insulted, but shortly thereafter realized the mastery of Giotto's technical skill. Why Nares is paying homage to Giotto's circle is anybody's guess. With an entirely different strategy, Nares approaches this challenge with ingenuity, but I doubt the pope would be as inspired as I am.

Focus back to the male specimen, who at this point stands in as the Etruvian man: handsomely proportioned, fit, clean, creative, and productive, all summed up in the circle which he stands inside of. The idea of an Etruvian man, or rather, the American man? Either way, he's my new video man, at least until my next date with Wegman.

Seeing What the Artist Feels But Cannot See

2010-02-26T10:08:00.000-05:00

Ján Mancuška in "Reel Subjects"
Andrew Kreps

Ján Mancuška’s, “The Other” (2007”, was recently on view at Andrew Kreps gallery in the form of a sculpture. Before being included in the group exhibition, “Reel Subjects,” it previously existed in the form of photography; previous to that it was a painting, and before that, a performance. Finally installed in its butterfly stage, “The Other” is a beautiful example of how a work can come to life over a series of processes, and how a sculpture is rarely just a crafted object or a final result. In fact, the viewer feels almost as if to move back in time while carefully observing the installation: an oversized light box illuminates a series of film strips hung vertically -- and at an angle -- so that the artist’s performative actions taking place from frame to frame play out in slow, slow motion. There is a tremendous difference between watching 24 frames per second (a film), looking at single photographs one at a time (a photography exhibition, book, or catalogue), and the rate at which one views Mancuška’s frames (in my case, approximately 1-3 frames per second).

What we see in the first few frames is a naked man, the artist himself. A woman, his wife, appears and begins to paint his back and his neck. Suddenly he is bending over as she carefully applies paint to his most intimate nether-regions, at -- if out of wedlock or rather romantic intimacy -- would be suspiciously close for a hired artist's assistant. They are both smiling, either because it is humorous, or she is curiously aroused, or both (after all, sex, and the body, is humorous). Her paintbrush moves northward to paint his face, and the whole scenario becomes increasingly silly, as Mancuška begins to look like a clown. This activity is clearly fun for both of them, as seen in the final frames where the artist shows off his hilariously painted body with a wacky smile plastered on his face. Throughout this process, the human canvas and the painter must communicate, because the viewer can deduce that she has painted every part of his body that he cannot see. He might feel the paint, but he cannot see it, which is a performance that is sure to set off fits of giggles between two lovers.

Now I can't help but question, why is this piece presented in its final stage as a sculptural installation? Why is this not a live performance, a series of photographs, or perhaps a timed slide projection? I believe that Mancuška was interested in touching upon as many facets in the act of making art with "The Other," as he could possibly experiment with. Or rather, he just wanted to have as much fun making a piece of art as he could. Painting every part of your body that you cannot see makes the artist blind to his work. Although for me, the hilarity of the situation, and must I add cuteness, distracts from any further reading of this artistic, conceptual, or emotional gesture.

I hate...

2010-02-13T18:13:00.000-05:00

being underwhelmed by artist's solo exhibitions whose work I thought I loved.

I love....

2010-02-13T18:11:00.000-05:00

looking at work by Dan Perjovschi.

Hanging rugs on walls: a lesson through the ages

2010-01-15T10:00:00.000-05:00

Hanging rugs on walls: a lesson through the ages
Bauhaus 1919-1933 | MOMA New York
Sam Moyer, Shape Shifters | Rachel Uffner Gallery

Two exhibitions currently on view in New York are making me want to consider redecorating the walls in my apartment; suddenly wall-hung rugs seem much more attractive than they had before. An extraordinary exhibition on view at the MOMA provides a comprehensive history of the Bauhaus school that could capture a viewer for an entire afternoon. Spanning from its foundation in 1919 until its forced closure by the Nazis in 1933, the highly informational exhibition showcases everything from student exercises to the work of the school’s masters, from textiles to architectural renderings to posters to home design, this exhibition could span (and should have) the entire top floor on the museum. Essentially, the Bauhaus school taught the philosophy that high quality design of everyday objects (such as furniture, appliances, interior architecture, and domestic decoration) could improve one’s life. Therefore, if one owned an aesthetically attractive lamp, chair, rug, or table, one could improve their personal worth. Some of the most intriguing objects in the exhibition are the decorative wall rugs, and I stress the word “decorative” here. These rugs were designed with intricate patterns and bold colors in mind; Bauhaus rugs are meant to be seen and appreciated for their artistic qualities, rather than their practical functions. The rugs on exhibition at MOMA are examples of creative exercises in pattern, texture, and material.

Downtown at the Rachel Uffer Gallery in the Lower East Side, Sam Moyer’s rugs of a different type boldly present themselves on the gallery’s white walls. After purchasing mass-produced IKEA rugs, Moyer has re-designed them by tearing their threads loose to the point of unravel and then smothering them in a thick, black encaustic. Aside from the rug parallel between these two shows, other personal, domestic objects are manipulated, or re-done, by the artist; objects that are decorated, but somehow do not become decorative (well, in the Bauhaus definition of this attribute). Small paperback books with titles like Structuralism, have been assembled together in juxtaposed compositions, painted over or scratched out over the original title or cover design, and finally placed in frames under glass. The unmistakable Bauhaus-style graphic design and typography techniques on these older books are obvious, and are still allowed to peek through.

The Bauhaus school of thought was simple enough so that it allowed mass production of objects with high quality, modern design. Sam Moyer’s concurrent exhibition is both ironic and sardonic. By placing the rugs and books (which have been worked upon by the artist’s hand) in a frame, she is emphasizing their role as decorative artworks. However, by using mass produced, common consumer goods, she is highlighting their role as utilitarian objects. Whether she is aware of it or not, Moyer’s work pays homage to Bauhaus; just as the Bauhaus philosophy was really all about trying to place art in life, Moyer’s work brings life 2010’s early cycle of New York exhibitions.

REPOST: After seeing a few more shows this week, I must bring attention to two other exhibitions currently on view in New York that feature, yep, you guessed it, more wall-hung textile works (I wouldn't necessarily say rugs). At James Cohen Gallery, thirteen artists, who do not work in this medium, have been commissioned to create hand-woven tapestries. When given this challenge to work outside of their normal practice and attempt a foreign technique, the result is an impressive exhibition.
Also of mention is Josh Fraught at Lisa Cooley, just down the street from Rachel Uffner. The haphazard show features loosely -- and some how richly -- crocheted textile pieces hanging on the walls and propped over other structures. These assemblages are heavy in color and texture, and hold a scattered collection of small knick knacks and street souvenirs. One piece alone is made of hemp, spray paint, political pins, laminated poster advertising house cleaning service, denim, sequins and garden trellis. Like the Bauhaus and Sam Moyer, "Demons, Yarns & Tales" at James Cohen and Josh Fraught at Lisa Cooley are incredibly comparable (and worth seeing).

Artist of the World, World of an Artist

2010-01-11T19:13:00.000-05:00

Gabriel Orozco
Museum of Modern Art

By using cities all over the world equally, as places to find and collect both physical and intellectual material, Gabriel Orozco is an ideal example for a global artist. Orozco is continuously thinking about the next project or artistic endeavor, because for him, being an artist is not a career, but a way of living. He is constantly on the prowl for inspiration, which appears to come to him easily – he almost attracts it. I can imagine him walking around gutters all day looking and searching for anything that he can use. Since he is an artist who wants to make objects that are formally appealing, he must find objects, or material, that fit his taste; in a city like New York or Berlin, there is an extraordinary amount of sifting through to be done!

During this process, Orozco certainly uses, but doesn’t abuse, the city. Penske Work Project: Open Door (1998), illustrates how he will often find garbage or discarded materials on the street and then present it, in the same form that it is found, within a gallery space in order to highlight the existing formal qualities of the object. In Dial Tone (1992), he uses New York citizens’ phone numbers, as well as the free phone book, to create an enormous scroll presenting all of this information in his own interpretive form. Aside from the ability to find and use objects of the preferred size, texture, material, etc, he also has quite a photographer’s eye, as seen in various photographs of fleeting moments within a city, any city. Piles of debris stacked to resemble skyscrapers in the background, tracks of wet bicycle tires, warm breath leftover on a piano. In a way, I could compare him to a 21st century Henri Cartier-Bresson, always looking and waiting for the right moment.

Although I said earlier that Orozco is essentially a global artist, operating outside of any one place and in everyplace at the same time, there is something about his work that somehow feels Mexican. After all, isn’t it true that the further one gets from home, the closer they become to their roots? The collection of objects placed upon a large table in Working Tables 2000-2005, seems like historical or anthropological artifacts. This work, along with the photographs on exhibit, seems most appropriate, or effective, to the Orozco retrospective in highlighting the artist’s non-studio practice. Orozco picks things up on the street, or elsewhere, and bends them, cuts them, mixes them, flips them over, and contorts them into new objects that are, to his own taste, aesthetically satisfying. The Working Table holds experimental models for possible future projects. Among the collection of mostly clay creations, one can also find a pizza crust, a mini toy convertible, and many mutant-fabrications from undoubtedly non-clay materials like insulation foam and various plastics. Rather than an archeological dig in Mexico, the table illustrates what one would find if they dug through the artist’s lower Manhattan apartment. The fact that the artist does not maintain a studio practice is also evident in his various drawings on notebook paper, bank notes and bills, and newspaper clippings throughout the gallery.

These small drawings transition into an enormous collection of painting depicting repeated patterns of circles; a strict conceptual experimentation of variations in shapes, size, and color. Although the curator is clear to define Orozco as a sculptor, there are quite a few paintings in this mid-career retrospective. I can only imagine this endeavor to be a personal challenge that the artist felt he had to face. The two largest, Kytes Tree (2005) and Tuttifrutti (2008), somehow fit seamlessly into the rest of the artist’s body of work (by their conceptual qualities – certainly not by their formal or material qualities). There is something on the surface that appears as though Orozco was reluctant to make a painting, possibly even embarrassed, for it is obvious that Orozco is not a painter. Even these works seem conceptual and calculated, a three-dimensional idea forced onto a two-dimensional surface.

Nothing about his sculptures are beautiful in a classic sense, yet Orozco’s artistic practice is all about finding beauty, sometimes by haphazard chance, and sometimes by a conceptual calculation. Although I said earlier that he is interested in the formal qualities of an object, he is not concerned with their overall beauty (in the standard sense of the word), but rather in creating an aesthetically satisfying, intellectually stimulating object. In certain examples, the objects in his apartment are just as inspiring as anything he might find on the street, as is evident in the re-installation of Yogurt Caps. For some time, Orozco had a yogurt lid hanging on the wall in his apartment. He may have placed it there as an arbitrary thought, or perhaps he thought the lid was very beautiful to him at the moment. Whatever the reason for hanging the cap, Orozco eventually fell fond of it, and it eventually became a distinctive wall hanging to him. When deciding to make it part of his first solo exhibition at Marian Goodman, his thought process was simple: if the yogurt lid was interesting to him, perhaps it might be interesting to others. This is a very intriguing approach to making art, and to having control over a gallery space. In a way, there are two groups of artists: those who create art for others’ enjoyment, and those who create art for themselves. Orozco is surely a leading figure for the latter. The reason Orozco is viewed as more of the most important contemporary artists is that he appears to creating art that satisfies the masses as well.

A simple exercise at Gallery-C

2009-10-01T23:39:00.000-04:00

I’m pining for some academic activity...... In college I had a professor that would simple describe works of art that they were looking at: they would break everything down into simple — and often symbolic ¬— terms, and all of a sudden everything was explained and I could easily understood the piece. Let’s try an exercise:

Gallery C
Dan Shaw-Town: Drawings

What am I looking at?

There are two support structures, harnessed by the strength of the wall, holding a piece of single-ply cardboard across the space between them. One support structure is thin, vertical, and holds the cardboard at its bottom. The second structure is tapered, at its thickest in the middle, where it attaches to the wall. It folds over at the halfway point, creating a perpendicular angle to the wall. It is painted in misty blue and pink. The cardboard holds a weathered, semi-glossy sheet of fabric, folded upon itself multiple times. The seductive surface quality of the materials invites touch. The dark, fabric-like material appears to hold a significant weight, as it softly bends the cardboard that is holding it up, on display, in a space between two support structures.

On a neighboring wall, there is yet another assemblage in which two hanging structures support a draped piece of fabric (although this is an exercise in description, I must not falsely advertise the word “fabric,” as this material is an actuality paper that has been heavily drawn-upon with graphite and charcoal). A pair of baby-pink hangers, which are typically used to properly store clothing, rest side-by-side and share in the task of supporting two separate sheets of this mystery fabric. One carries a silver-black sheet of this mystery fabric, and the other carries a diagonally striped — in alternating light and dark tones — piece, same appeared size, weight, and material.

Let’s simplify it a little more.

A pair metal, opposing vertical structures support a vertical sheet of basic packing material. Upon this a folded sheet of a dark, shiny fabric — heavier than it’s support system itself — is modestly on display.

Two identical plastic, cheap household items hang on the wall next to each other, holding two differently patterned tattered fabric-like materials.

Keep going...

One dark, heavy component being held up by a basic, weak component, which is held up by two thin (though not weak) components, all being held up by the gallery wall for the ultimate display of this first component.

This piece is about: Family
Or, Capitalism
?

A twin pair of bright domestic items holding dark, flimsy materials.

This piece is about: Inner Beauty
Or, Consumerism
?

Okay, I give up.

Summer Screenings at CANADA

2009-08-03T13:36:00.000-04:00

The gatherings that took place in a darkened gallery over the last four nights at 55 Chrystie Street were a rare opportunity to devote one’s time to the celebration of video and film art. Summer Screenings at CANADA offered a chance for multiple curators and artists to showcase an extensive sampling of artists working in video and film, a medium that often fights for attention when placed as part of a typical group show. By presenting the works in a theatrical setting, the crowd is able to appreciate each piece in its full length. Some of the programs were classic video screenings, like EE Miller’s TITS and Allen Cordell’s Pulsating Sunglasses, screening videos one right after another with little introduction. Other programs provided a creative twist of fun, like Frankie Martin and Leidy Churchman’s Music Video Awards 2009, complete with prize-winning categories such as “Scariest” and “Sparkliest,” a surrogate Vana White, and homemade trophies.

Certain videos stood out individually, which was not an easy feat after the four full evenings of screenings. Jacob Ciocci and Shana Moulton’s collaborative super-8s on view were distinctively Moulton-style, featuring paintings that one would fine at your aunt’s garage sale and a softly rendered graphite drawing of a cat in a matching neck brace. However, when filmed in super-8, and the Magic Eye patterns and Pure Moods soundtrack are subtracted, Moulton’s perma-lonely character seems somehow more depressed and pathetic; the film takes on a poetic, introspective quality. In [B]LACK, we watch in reverse as the artist, Kenyatta Forbes, applies white face paint and regurgitates (literally, from her mouth) heavily socio-political and/or personal written statements about the being Black. Eric Wareheim’s video for MGMT’s “The Youth,” is one of the most mind-boggling, unbelievable music videos I’ve ever seen. Despite from the video’s advantage of a high-quality production value (thanks to Wareheim’s studio availability from the widely popular Tim & Eric Show), the ridiculous choreography, elaborate costumes, and creepily adult-like child lip-synching to the music put the cherry on top. All I have to say is, “just YouTube it.”

One of the most beautiful (as opposed to in-your-face, extreme, political, comical or revealing – like many of the videos in the programs) works presented was Naomi Uman’s Kalendar. It was one of the longer videos screened during the programs, which was appropriate since the artist manages to brings the audience through 12 months of daily life in Ukraine (and manages to capture the essence of each one). In the Ukraine language, each month has a literal translation: February translates to “fierce,” May is the “greening of grass, October is “the yellowing of trees,” and so on. Uman’s portrayal of each month is under-stated and meditative, yet provides a respite from other, more intense videos from the Summer Screenings, like Torsten Zenas Burns’ Selected Afterlife Characters or any of the selected works by Jimmy Joe Roche.

*I will be curating a video series of my own to be screened this September. Keep it in mind!

2009-07-29T16:33:00.000-04:00

Ronnie Bass, 2012
on view at White Noise, James Cohan Gallery

Although I was feeling no particular stress, after watching Ronnie Bass’s 4-minute video, 2012, I left the gallery feeling as though a huge weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. Perhaps this is because my worries involve everyday troubles like paying rent and putting food on the table, rather than the protagonist’s worries of the impending collision of intergalactic systems or the certainty of whether or not the sun is going to rise tomorrow. Perhaps I should not have felt so comforted by this video, since 2012 is the year that — apparently— the world is going to end (sorry to break the news).

An unseen father reassures his son’s paranoid questions that he calls out into the dark with comforting responses: “Are the systems colliding? Very hard, son / And the fire is rising? Very bright, son / But tell me about the morning? In time, son / Please tell me about the morning! / It’s here, son.” The viewer becomes witness to a tender paternal relationship as the father tries his best to console his son’s insecurities about himself, the world, and the future. The fact that the son in this situation is a full-grown adult (“I’m almost 35 now. It’s not too late, son.”) creates an intense level of poignancy and humility. The majority of the video focuses on the protagonist (the son) while he floats through what appears to be a distant galaxy; in profile, with his gaze lowered, he contemplates what the answers to these questions mean. In another scene, a young man guides another in a seemingly simple task of shaping a pile of soil and eventually setting it on fire. In the end, the son character joins the other two young men as they watch the pile of dirt rise in flames.

Despite the prophecy of the 2012 Doomsday, a hopeful melody, paired with a soft, synth beat, slowly builds up throughout the video, although it never rises to a crescendo. Instead of the world ending, or a new day beginning, the video loops again and the song starts over. Rather than feeling sad for this character as he realizes that the world is going to crash down any minute, one feels as though he might make it through to the next morning only to find that these apocalyptic predictions were false. Between the Bass’s captivating melody, powerful lyrics, and peculiar characters combine to create a haunting video experience.

2009-07-25T15:32:00.000-04:00

TRANCE, CHANCE, DREAMS & THE UNCONSCIOUS

South First

A visit to TRANCE, CHANCE, DREAMS & THE UNCONSCIOUS at South First provides a stimulating sensory experience a world apart from the one provided by Williamsburg on a summer Sunday afternoon. Just a quick escape from the blazing sunshine, pushy flea markets, and post-brunch kids on their way to the Jelly Pool Party, exists a cool and calm recluse in the South First Gallery. Although, calm might not be the right word as this exhibition is quite disorienting.

Jacob Dyrenforth’s embroideries immediately pull the viewer in, tempting them to run their fingers along the rich patterns of colorful threads tautly stitched throughout the canvas. In Brother Cedric, the artist renders a portrait of an unidentified bearded man in the style reminiscent of a Chuck Close spit bite aquatint, although the fluorescent pink and orange in the background distracts from –but does not hinder the effect of– the subtle shifts in tonality of the graphite. The thick cords of thread create simple geometric shapes like circles and triangles, and intersect in such a way that they appear to create a pentagram. However, it is simply a organizational habit of the brain to create sense out of intersecting shapes, and upon second glance, one realizes that there are no obtrusive religious or mythical undertones.

Leslie Thornton’s video, Bob Bob, is hypnotizing, and if you’re not careful, you might find yourself watching it for multiple loops. A hazy globe softly bounces in the midst of a kaleidoscopic, ever-shifting foreground. After only a few moments of watching it and then turning away, it may cause a phantom sensation that the viewer is now bouncing rather than the globe on the screen. Jack Early provides a Walkman (I almost forgot how to use one of these!) to listen to CDs of songs and stories that he has recorded for some auditory stimulation. Rather than just hearing a pleasant song or eloquent narrative, the artist tickles the visitor's funny bone in some of his more humorous accounts of past personal situations and events. By recording these snippets and constricting the accessibility of the stories to one person at a time, Early separates himself from what could pass as stand-up comedy. The experience is almost like sharing an intimate coffee with the artist rather than sitting in the crowd at a nightclub.

Fabienne Lasserre’s wall sculpture brings to mind figures in art history (tactilely and visually it reminds me of a hybrid between Lee Bontecou and Franz West), and also brings to mind multitudes of unpleasant sensory suggestions (it sure does not bring to mind anything that one would want to smell or taste if they could). The object protruding from the wall looks like the underside of a bear’s belly, or like gooey, melty, cotton candy, or kind of like a burnt scalp oozing with pus. If that is too much for you to handle, Ariel Dill’s paintings provide a few refreshingly simple exercise in color to top the exhibition off with a sweet note.

What does this ink remind you of (not a Rorschach test)

2009-07-08T23:49:00.000-04:00

Fights and Fireworks

2009-07-07T14:50:00.000-04:00

Cyprien Gaillard, Desniansky Raion
The Generational at New Museum

It’s not often that I like a work of art before I see it, and this seems like it would be much less common with a video. Even more uncommon was the fact that I had never seen anything by this artist before. Perhaps I had high expectations, or perhaps I just read a lot of convincing reviews by some talented writers, but I knew I was going to love anything by French artist, Cyprien Gaillard as soon as I saw it.

The video currently on view at the New Museum, Desniansky Raion, is absolutely hypnotizing. This is perhaps because everybody loves seeing a fight and for some reason, we can’t tear our eyes away from watching the imminent destruction of another’s face, because psychedelic light shows are designed to stimulate our brains, or perhaps because the feeling of floating over a city leaves us with a dream-like sensation. Gaillard carries the viewer through these situations in a segmented video work that seems to run backward from what one would usually expect; rather than picking up pace or plot, the video seems to calm down, almost decrescendo.

The first of three stages of the video begins with the eruption of a violent street fight between two semi-organized street gangs outside of a suburban housing project. The anticipation of a fight is palpable as the two groups rally together. As if a fuse explodes, the two proletarian armies charge at each other and the exchange of blows to the head and the lashing of steel-toe boots begins-- and continues at an exhausting pace. The battle between the two gangs is entropic: the actual physical fight between the groups, although organized through their preparatory ‘warrior’ march and corresponding colors (red and blue), is muddled and amateur, and almost seems recreational (a good number of each gang are simply watching or cheering their fellow members on). Suddenly, the brawl disbands as quickly as it escalated. As soon as the defeated troupe flees the triumphant, the scene abruptly cuts to the static view of a desolate high-rise housing complex at night.

The building is in Meaux, France, but it could easily be in Eastern Europe or Russia, where the video began (St.Petersburg) and eventually comes to an end (Desniansky Raion, outside of Kiev). In sync with a hypnotizing musical soundtrack, the viewer watches a bonafide twentieth century lightshow on the side of the building, slightly reminiscent of the laser show that was presented in my junior high’s gymnasium. During the light show, the viewer can see the silhouette of a soccer field lit up below. This alludes to the youth--and often male-- violence that erupts between fans at football matches. Although the viewer is watching something completely different from the opening stage of the video, they are kept with this subtle reminder. After ten or fifteen minutes or so of watching the hypnotizing light show on the side of this immense apartment complex, my jaw literally dropped when the building, much to my surprise, imploded. Unlike the first scene – where the impending fight is inevitable—there are no clues that would cause the viewer to anticipate the sudden collapse of the building. Although the fight during the first stage is a chaotic mess, during the second stage of the video, the implosion of the housing complex is much more organized, down to every last detail. I’m sure there were city permits achieved, marketing campaigns, an excited crowd watching on picnic blankets, firefighters on sight, etc. The concrete structure seemed to resist, and fall to the ground much more slowly than one would expect gravity to allow. Although the light show seems as if it is building up to something, the implosion does not exactly carry the effect of a finale. This further adds to the impression that the direction of the video -- although becoming more grandiose in destruction – is somehow slowing down.

The final chapter brings the viewer high above the housing district of Desniansky Raion, after which the video composition is named. Filmed from a helicopter, the city below looks cold and gray, which almost always symbolizes despair and desolation. The camera work is lazy, and leaves the viewer with a sleepy, dazed impression towards the images before them. All of the shots in this video are taken from a safe distance. The person filming need not worry of receiving a blow to the head during the street brawl, inhaling harmful smog or being buried in rubble during the high-rise’s demolition, and need not worry about finding themselves in a decayed and desolated urban district such as the projects of Kiev. In fact, throughout the three stages of the video, the viewer is withdrawn further and further away from the going-ons of these failed urban projects. As witnesses (thank god we aren’t participants) we feel secure watching the young men beat each other to a pulp, staring at an entire complex of what were once families’ homes fall to the ground, and gazing upon the structure dystopian municipal system. Gaillard’s work here is mesmerizing – both the fireworks and the fight scenes. This is perhaps because the viewer has no need to flinch or flee, but rather become lost in a series of unlikely beautiful sceneries and situation.

Strawberry-Bananart Smoothie

2009-07-02T00:24:00.000-04:00

Hernan Bas at Lehmann Maupin
The Dance of the Machine Gun & other forms of unpopular expression

I suspect it’s a condition of being a part of the Millennial Generation, but I am more excited about exhibitions relating to new media rather than an exhibition of paintings. With that said, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that I didn’t quite enjoy a exhibition of paintings that can only be described as a 21st century combination of 19th century illustrative narratives, Expressionism, and Romanticism, and 19th century illustrative narratives.

On the contrary, although Hernan Bas’ series of paintings carry hints of the previously mentioned styles, his work carries a distinct contemporary flavor, as if there is no doubt that they were made in this decade. In fact, they are suspiciously comparable to the recent paintings of another successful contemporary artist, German painter Neo Rauch. Rauch --while working with fantastical imagery and impossibly juxtaposed scenery-- manages to harmonize painterly graphics with incomprehensible narratives into a coherent image. However Bas, while seemingly working on a similar track, manages to spin together a sloppy mix of Rauch with Monet, concocting a blend of what might resemble a strawberry-banana smoothie thrown at the canvas. Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh, but Bas does get a little Impressionism-happy on certain areas of the canvas. The choice of colors becomes too haphazard and the directionless brushstrokes and painterly marks become forced. These areas, particularly on The bagpiper in exile (or, the sad wind) remind me of a painting that I did during my last year of college after watching “My Kid Could Paint That.” A friend and I set to work; first on half a bottle of gin and second on a giant canvas that we laid across my living room floor. We were hoping the liquor would force our natural artistic instincts to revert back to 4-year-old cognizance, and hopefully we too would produce a masterpiece. It looked great at the end of the night, but we sobered up the next day and saw a mess of paint on the canvas (and the floor), and we realized that even we couldn’t do as well as that talented Marla. What I learned was that inhibition with the paintbrush (or fingers) does not always create a masterpiece. Painters must (but not always!) place colors with intent, especially if it’s going to throw off the rest of the painting.

Aside from the overall comparable quality to Neo Rauch, I have to mention the uncanny resemblance of the men illustrated in Bas’ paintings compared to Elizabeth Peyton’s renditions of Liam! I don’t feel as if I’m looking at original work, but rather a combination of other artists’ styles and signatures. Bas’ paintings just aren’t ‘doing it’ for me (pardon the colloquial text, but it just fits right). The majority of works in this show seem like mistakes that the artist attempted to fix, but just hasn’t found the right solution yet.

Looks like that Ernie Warhol again

2009-06-20T23:44:00.000-04:00

(I stumbled across this, which I wrote a few months ago while working my previous job as a gallery attendant....I find it extra humorous now that I don't work there anymore)

I think I've been working at a public art museum for entirely too long now.

It's been almost 3 years of sitting in overly air-conditioned galleries for 7 hours a day, doing nothing but reading until my neck cramps up, obsessively finding and rubbing off scuff marks on the floor while bored, or staring out the window and watching all of the happy, free people walk around on State Street. Thank God I recently brought the Games page from the State Journal into play; lately, I've been able to pass the first two hours of my shift relatively quickly by starting with the Daily Crossword (which I rarely finish), moving onto the Jumble, then solving the mystery that is Cryptoquote (which may I add, I have not failed at in the last month or so), and finally saving Sodoku for last (though I have usually lost my zeal for any more newspaper games at that point).

I recently realized that my time here is ripe and ready to leave after training several new, fresh, eager faces to the facility. They ask me what they need to know to work here and I end up giving them all the best advice on how to pass the time in a gallery, a far from sensory experience. I have all the tips in the book, the best ones coming from the first few months that I worked here: I was not informed that we were in fact allowed to have reading materials in the gallery with us (what a fool!). I learned to pass the time by seeing exactly how many paces complete one loop of the smallest gallery, and its percentage compared to the largest gallery. Another entertaining on-your-feet activity was to slowly grapevine step across the gallery, while keeping your feet as parallel as possible. Or perhaps scripting "Henry Street Gallery" on the attendance pad in the most intricate font (this was sure to eat up at least 25 minutes). I knew the exact order of the paintings in the gallery, and could recite it with my eyes closed. I knew every label of every work of art, right down to its collection catalog call number. It got to the point where I could exactly pinpoint when 10 or 20 minutes had passed. Chapstick would be applied at exact intervals, so that I could reward my dry lips with moisture each time a half an hour had passed. These were the glory days. The days of innocence from wordsearch puzzles and art history notes. I'm surprised I haven't started buffing my nails or taking my afternoon tea right in the middle of the gallery.

I used to be so eager for every question from a visitor, whether it be "What is your opinion on new media in contemporary art as opposed to traditional methods" or "where is the nearest bathroom?" Now, if a visitor even walks over to my lowly post in the corner of the gallery (and also the furthest from any air duct, in order to conserve body heat), I will expell a heavy sigh, slowly fold my New York Times back to the cover, and slowly raise my eyes to say "What could you possibly be interupting my comatose news state in order to ask me a pointless question?" What has happened to me? Has literature ruined my excitement for this job? Should I go clean again and return to passing the hours by counting how many people grab the handle but then change their minds and never open the door to enter the gallery per hour?

I haven't gone completley numb, because I still catch the ridiculous quotes that I hear throughout the day here. Things like, "Young lady, are you the artist?" (anytime we have an exhibition by a woman artist). "Yes, I have nothing better to do than to sit and monitor my artwork in this museum halfway across the country from where my studio is for the next few months." Or "Miss, can you point me to the Meat & Munster exhibit?" (a German man who just didn't even attempt to say "Myths & Monsters," but rather was just hungry). Or the man who really enjoyed the Ernie Warhol exhibition.

I know what my breaking point will be. The next time I hear "I don't understand it," or "I could do that," I'm just going to break. Sure, you could have drawn those squares, but you didn't do it, did you? No, Sol LeWitt probably did.

Action, Reaction, Interaction, Satisfaction

2009-01-12T20:57:00.000-05:00

Act/React
Milwaukee Museum of Art

Founded on our inherent narcissistic nature, people love to see themselves, whether through a mirror, a photograph, or in this special case, through an extraordinary exhibition at the Milwaukee Museum of Art. Every kid learns to love museums through interactive science and discovery exhibits at non-art museums, and in turn, develops a negative connotation to art museums as places where you can’t touch, speak, or move anything, and therefore, not have any fun. Going to an art museum where you had to keep your hands behind your back and use an indoor voice was a drag! But oh, the science museum, the fantastic place where you could jump on, climb through, pick up, dig under, feel inside, and more. As we grow older, art museums became fantastic places where many discoveries could be made as well, but this taste developed later on, and even still, it did not happen for everyone. The Milwaukee Art Museum and curator George Fifield succeeded in combining these two institutions into an explosive exhibition, Act/React: Interactive Art. The artists represented in this show present the best kind of art for a museum: art that actually needs, and encourages, the viewers in order to be activated and to serve its function.
The exhibition opened with what turned out to be my favorite works. Scott Snibbe uses infrared and motion detection technology to track the movements of viewers, or should I say, actors. A great deal of silliness surrounded Snibbe’s Deep Walls, a wall projection that casts the shadows of visitors’ movement onto the wall in a grid pattern. Each person’s movement in front of the sensory camera is recorded and then repeated in a loop within one square of a grid. The projection continuously shows the last sixteen people to walk in front of it, or dance, or jump. I reacted to this piece the same way that everyone else did: I saw the projection and first tried to decipher what I was looking at. I soon figured out that I could be part of the projection too! I hesitantly walked in front of the light, creating a shadow, feebly waved my arm, and then stepped back. Shortly after, I found my shadow being re-played in a little square on the wall. How satisfying! There I was, up on the big screen for everyone to see! My own shadow was on exhibit in an art museum! We, the visitors, like this idea. The best part about another one of Snibbe’s works, Boundary Functions, is the fact that more than one person is needed to walk on the platform for it to even start to track their movement by creating boundary lines between the bodies. The exhibition was off to a great start. No need to press a button or click a mouse, all I had to do was move through the exhibition space and things around me began to change.

Daniel Rozin managed to create both one of the most fascinating works of the exhibition, and one of the most beautiful. Peg Mirror is made up of six hundred and fifty wooden pegs cut at an angle and mounted on the wall in a circular form. The angles on the ends of the pegs create shadows whose gradient values become darker or lighter when the pegs turn. In the middle of the circle is a tiny motion sensor that instructs the pegs to turn when something walks in front of it. There, the pegs become a sort of living mirror, reacting to anything that stands in front of it. Most impressive is that fact that these pegs don’t just recreate the outline of what is in front of the sensor, but they turn at just the right angle so that small changes of the shadows on one’s face are recreated. The pegs act quickly and in unison, giving the so-called mirror a life of its own.
Upon entering a darkened room, one can find discover the beauty of Rozin's Snow Mirror, but only if everyone in the room cooperates. During my first few attempts, other visitors were moving around too much, confused by the darkness, couldn’t activate the sensor correctly, or too impatient to see what was going to happen if they would just stay still. After a few attempts, I was able to join several other like-minded museumgoers standing still in the room, staring at the silk curtain onto which their eerie images were projected. A storm of snow-like pixels falls through space, and slowly accumulates on the viewer’s virtual image on the screen, filling their body up into a solid, but still abstract, form. Standing there with two others, we looked sad, desperate, and cold on the projection. The image resting upon the silk curtain looked almost like a Käthe Kollwitz woodcut, with us as shrouded pheasants waiting in a storm. When the person to my left decided to turn around and leave, the pixels that had been holding her shape fluttered up into the virtual space, and the ghostly image of her walking into the distance left a stirring impression.

The exhibition ended with one of the most interactive pieces, one that was able to accommodate and react to dozens of visitors at once. Camille Utterback created what looked like giant, moving digital paintings projected onto the gallery walls. With a futuristic twist, it is not Utterback’s movements that create the painting, but rather the viewer’s physical movement that change the virtual canvas, simply by walking across the motion-sensor light box shining on the floor. Each one of her three pieces react differently to the movements around it, creating unique painterly motifs. The earliest version, External Measures, looks like ever-changing graffiti. The bright colors contrast against the dark background, and each movement sends sparks of color all over the virtual canvas. Untitled 5 is more somber, and seems to resemble a Cy Twombly painting with its scribbled lines and subtle marks that respond to each body that crosses its path. Untitled 6 is the most dramatic piece, and also provides the most satisfying interaction. The viewer sees the mark that represents their body on the screen morph in constant bloom. A small shift in weight, nod of the head, or heavy breath can cause rich, flower-like forms to explode in bold colors. There was hardly any need to move within Untitled 6, as it seemed to detect the viewer’s weight as they stood there patiently, happily watching their virtual self grow into full bloom. I observed as visitors stayed on this platform for long periods of time, mesmerized at the view. In fact, one woman had to drag her child across the floor to get him to leave. This motion made a stunning, fluttering pattern across the screen.
Within this exhibition space, I couldn’t help but chuckle at the numerous adults who looked absolutely ridiculous running around, clapping, jumping, snapping, and hooting at each installation trying to activate it or figure out what it does. Although I have to admit, I was felt like a little kid again, and was doing the same things. Initially, I felt embarrassed jumping around and waving my arms without a companion to experience the exhibition with, but I was comforted by the other solo exhibition-goers around me looking just as ridiculous. Every single part of Act/React was as interactive as it could be, even down to the exhibition brochures that you had to search for and collect throughout the space to complete the information, like a scavenger hunt.

Complementing this feature exhibition (and continuing in its legacy now that the show has closed) is Sensory Overload, showing in the museum’s contemporary galleries, thankfully through next September. This exhibition, like Act/React appeals to all audiences, however I can only guess at its great popularity with college-aged kids who are looking for some extra stimulation. Erwin Redl’s Matrix XV is a LED installation with blue fiber optic lights that hang from thin strands throughout a dark room in a grid pattern. The installation in simple, but the experience is overwhelming, even disorienting. Josiah McElheny’s Mirrored and Reflected Infinity is another one of his infinite reflection mirrored works that do not cease to blow my mind. Another work that requires physical movement by the viewer is Howard Jones’ Sonic II, an unanticipated instrument that produces high and low-toned thuds as one’s shadows cross the sensors. In the ultimate compilation of the interactive and the disorienting is Stanley Landsman’s Walk-In Infinity Chamber. This infinity chamber, once very popular in the ‘60s, is quite the experience; you need to wait in line, take off your shoes and wear disposable socks, and check your bags in order to enter. After all of this build-up, one enters the chamber and all of a sudden the ground drops away from them and they are floating in outer space. After viewing these exhibitions, it was hard to discern whether I was an art museum, and science discovery zone, or in another dimension.

Artist Intervention Within the Institution

2008-12-28T18:26:00.000-05:00

This is not a review of an exhibition, but rather an essay on, well, the title should explain that:

A brief review of art history will demonstrate that when patrons have commissioned works of art, the artist has —for the most part— provided what is asked of them. Until the 17th \ century, the patron, such as a religious group or a wealthy noble, had a large role in commissioning works of art. A service contract would be devised with the patron’s wishes in mind, and the artist would have been expected to strictly adhere to this approved agreement. The art was a product of the contract (Kleiner & Mamiya, 2006). A traditional example of this process would be a church’s hire of an artist to paint a biblical narrative scene, or to cast a bronze statue of a royal figure during the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. A more modern example of this concept would be a museum’s invitation of an abstract-expressionist painter for an exhibition. The artist would have been expected to create a collection of paintings, and they would be hung on the wall in a logical manner, orchestrated by a curator or the gallery administration. Today, an institution hiring an artist for an exhibition can be a game of Russian roulette – they can’t be completely sure what they’re going to get and will often be forced to concede to the artist’s creative or social expression.
It is a postmodern trend for artists to radically intervene with, or manipulate, the gallery space . In taking control of the regular functions, operations, attributes, and/or physical appearance of the gallery, the artist is taking a role of superiority above the gallery/museum’s management. In exercising their authority—or rather, artistic freedom— the artist becomes more prominent than the patron, or the institution. This intervention is an example of a modernist shift in patronage towards the artist’s influence. The patron no longer has as large of a role in the decision-making process or development the ideas for a feature exhibition. This transition began at the end of the 19th century when groups of artists like the Impressionists resisted salon-style exhibitions that had been controlled by state-run Academies. Artists began to reject the stringent nature of juried salon shows, and began to show their work in alternative platforms. They rejected the Academy and the rules. They wrote manifestos, explored new ideas, and even rejected the notion that art had to be made by the artist, had to be on a canvas, or had to be representative of something tangible. Later in the 20th century, museums and galleries on the large scale caught up again with the artists and began to accommodate and support their formerly alternative artistic endeavors.
As Andy Warhol once remarked, art is anything the artist can get away with, and in the past few decades, artists seem to be getting away with a lot in contemporary galleries and museums. Recent examples of artists’ interventions within these spaces include physical alterations of the site, mediation of the institution’s mechanical and administrative operations, and dramatic distortion of the viewer’s perception. We will first look at instances in which the artist substantially alters the physical space of the gallery, including works by Michael Asher, Doris Salcedo, and Olafur Eliasson. Secondly, we will look at works by artists who manipulate the administration responsible for an exhibition or the curator, such as Cai Guo-Qiang, Michael Asher, and Tino Sehgal. Lastly, we will examine instances in which the artist physically changes no part of the gallery, but distorts the viewer’s perception, which will include works by Tino Sehgal and Chris Burden. Throughout the examination of these works, it is important to keep in mind questions pertaining to the exhibition space, to the role of the artist within that space, and the major shifts between pre and post-1960s artistic and institutional practices within the exhibition space. Although many of the following artists’ works deal with institutional critique, I would like to focus on the actual change that takes place within the social, cultural, and educational space of an arts institution. I do not want to focus on the fact that some of theses artists take control over the normal the behaviors of the viewer, administration or building, but rather the fact that these subjects allow these artistic actions to take place, modifying the institution, physical space, or visual/mental perception in some form.
Conceptual artist Michael Asher’s work is exemplary of an artist’s intervention within the gallery space. For the past four decades he has been modifying the gallery by either adding or eliminating architectural elements, changing the way a viewer perceives the gallery itself, and even changing the way the administration sees their own workspace. In 1973, Asher sandblasted the walls and ceiling of Galleria Toselli in Milan until every trace of white paint had been washed off the pristine, white-cube gallery walls, leaving nothing but a brown plaster surface (Asher & Buchloh, 1983). By doing this, Asher was able to change the way Galleria Toselli normally exhibits artwork. By making the removal of paint the exhibition itself, Asher limits the gallery’s ability to display and/or sell any pieces. In this exhibition, Asher questions the role that white walls play within a gallery, and investigates how they affect or influence the perception of the artwork placed on them. By subtracting the white surface of the walls, Asher was able to heighten one’s awareness of the surface’s usual pristine quality and its integral part in the gallery. On the other hand, he was also able to highlight the awareness of the walls themselves: making the conduit of display, the actual structural support, into the artwork itself.
It must be noted that by working entirely with architectural and conceptual elements, Asher’s work cannot be bought and sold – it is separate from the art market. Any time that an artist makes their work inaccessible to market, they are inherently making a statement against it, criticizing its very foundation. In one monumental instance, Doris Salcedo went as far as to fracture the physical foundation of the museum, at the Tate Modern in London. Shibboleth, sponsored by the groundbreaking (literally) Unilever series in 2007, is an enormous crack stretching across the floor of the museum’s Turbine Hall. Some consider this work to be about racism or colonialism, but Shibboleth could act as a commentary on the shaky foundations of modern art museums, a rift between the public and private sectors of arts commission, or the uncertain distinction between modernist and post-modernist practices. Shibboleth also acts to heighten the viewer’s awareness of the space within a museum, proving that one cannot always rely on a pristine, solid, white cube. The installation gained infamous attention as viewers continued to fall into the crack throughout the exhibition (“More visitors hurt,” 2007). The Tate Modern risked their reputation in accepting this project by Salcedo (they were criticized for their feeble safety measures), but ultimately gained a lot of attention and press for it (and all press is good press). Salcedo’s installation is a perfect example of a modern museum’s assistance in the realization an artist’s idea. The Tate invested their money, time, personnel, and reputation to help fulfill Salcedo’s vision. Like most exhibitions, it was on display for an established amount of time, and then the crack was filled up again. However, the concrete floor of Turbine hall still bears a mark, a scar, of where the deep fissure used to be. Although other artists continue to exhibit their projects for the Unilever series, Salcedo made a lasting mark on the museum, which will not be soon forgotten.
The Tate is certainly accommodating to its chosen artists, as is demonstrated in Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, another work from the Unilever series. Four years earlier than the monumental crevice in the floor, Turbine hall was transformed into a tropic environment with a gigantic simulated sun at one end of the hall (May, 2003). This was no ordinary gallery experience; instead it was practically like a day at the beach. Hundreds of lamps were installed to create the sun, while a humid mist permeated throughout the entire space, creating cloudlike formations and obstructing the view of the hall’s ceiling. Eliasson took care to use mono-frequency lights, making yellow and black the only colors visible within the space, further disorienting the visitor (May, 2003). This installation was a true spectacle, as the artist changed the museum’s main hall into an overwhelming experience that transports the visitor into a different environment.
One can’t help but wonder how the museum decided to realize the works of Salcedo and Eliasson. Did the curators and director really believe in the artists’ philosophy about Shibboleth and The Weather Project, or did they choose it because they knew their audience would enjoy it and that it would gain them a lot of media attention? Was their goal to induce social dialogue (which were the artists’ goals), or to act as entertainer? That same question can be asked of any exhibition. Is the role of the museum to provide educational and social opportunities, or to simply act as a place of entertainment and leisure? Should they support the ideas of their artists or the needs of their audience? In these particular cases, both goals were probably satisfied.

Outside of the typical exhibition space, an artist can also take advantage of how a museum spends its money. With a quick look at Cai Guo-Qiang’s body of work, a curator can assume that the exhibition might involve an explosion at some time or another, but they probably wouldn’t expect him to blow up the project fund. This is exactly what Cai did in 2003 to prepare for the inauguration of the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent, Belgium (Kwon, 2008). This act was a kind of “spit in your face” gesture reflecting Cai’s attitude towards museums at the beginning of the new millennium. He organized a huge fireworks display because he feels that we (by we, I can only assume society) spend too much money on museums and other arts institutions. He even went as far as to create a portrait of the exhibition’s curator, Jan Hoet, out of gunpowder, just to blow it up (www.caiguoqiang.com, 2008). This act for the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst was the ultimate exploitation of a museum. This work is about institutional critique, but moreover, it is about the fact that an exhibition can be so temporary that it doesn’t even last more than one evening. Yet somehow, Cai’s work is more than just an event. The curator made the decision to commission a work by Cai, and in turn, as a symbolic gesture the artist literally burned the money. So much for the idea that conceptual art is cheap! So what makes Cai’s fireworks displays different than any other celebratory display? The museum could have easily set up the same spectacle to mark the inauguration of the space, however, it was Cai who took the museum’s money and created an unorthodox firework display. The money that could have gone to an extended exhibition was instead used by Cai to demonstrate the liberties available to artists, and to draw attention to contemporary arts institutions’ liberal financial practices. Conceptual works were once looked at as an “aesthetic bargain” (Stimson, 1999), but Cai, in satire of these economic practices, proves that an artist’s concept might be more expensive than originally expected.
In some instances, very slight changes are made in order to change the gallery’s significance or to disrupt curatorial influence. Demonstrating so much authority over the administrative practices of a museum so much as to take over the role of the curator can be seen in Michael Asher’s work at the Arts Institute of Chicago. Usually, the gallery space can use their curatorial authority over an artist’s desires when putting together an exhibition, often to the artist’s dislike or disagreement. Asher however, managed to switch the roles of curator and artist by choreographing the presentation and organization of the Institute’s collection.
In 1979, for the 73rd American Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, Michael Asher took a bronze copy of a marble sculpture by Jean-Antoine Houdon, George Washington, from its usual position on the front steps of the museum and placed it inside. The original marble statue was made in 1785-1791, while the bronze copy was cast in 1917 (Moeller & Rorimer, 2006). Asher decided to place the sculpture inside of Gallery 219, which held European painting and sculpture from the 18th century, the same time period from which the original marble sculpture was created. In short, the Institute paid Asher to take an artwork that they already owned from the exterior and relocate it to the interior. Asher did not think that the statue belonged outside on the steps, and he was able to move it to a gallery where it contrasted with its surroundings. By regrouping the statue with other works of Houdon’s contemporaries, Asher was “placing it within the framework of a contemporary exhibition”(Haydon, 1979). He did this in order to highlight the fact that the museum had not yet found an appropriate position for this sculpture within their collection.
26 years later, Asher repeated this gesture for a Focus showcase at the Arts Institute of Chicago in 2005, although he did not entirely reenact the same exhibition. Instead of moving the statue from the exterior steps of the museum, this time he moved it from the lobby of the Mayor’s Office, where it had been on loan since 1984, into Gallery 220 (Moeller & Rorimer, 2006). By moving the bronze statue, Asher elicits a different viewer response depending on its surroundings. As its surroundings change, people’s reactions towards it are altered. When outside it is public and accessible to everyone. When placed in Gallery 220, it turns private, exclusive only to those who have paid admission. Within the museum space, viewers are always indirectly told how to look at a work of art. By the way collections are displayed, the spectator is forced to view it in a certain context, whether a collection of work is grouped by theme, chronology, medium, technique, or shared history.
When the bronze copy of George Washington was outside on the steps, it was available for all to see. When placed inside of the Institute, a paid-admission museum, only few can appreciate it. In a way, Asher is mocking the fact that the Art Institute, along with the city of Chicago, cannot find a suitable place for the statue to remain. However, he caused it to stand out by relocating an American-made 20th century sculpture of an American icon in a room occupied by 18th century European paintings. Placing it in the center of the gallery heightened the viewer’s perception. They could reflect upon it more, perhaps trying to derive the meaning behind it, whether it is random or deliberate. One could walk up to the roughly seven-foot statue that was placed directly on the floor of the gallery instead of atop a pedestal, producing a more personal relationship. In contrast, each painting was held in decorative frames, a French vase protected in a glass case, and an antique English table positioned on a pedestal. Every other piece appeared unattainable and in pristine condition, while the weathered bronze seemed approachable.
In conceptual art, the subject is superior to the object. It is not important whether Asher constructed this statue or not, but what he chose to do with it. In 1979 and in 2005, following in the footsteps of Sol LeWitt and other conceptual artists, “all of the planning and decisions were made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair” (Cotter, 2008). Asher sought not only to find how people would perceive this statue in different environments and how their response would change, but also to challenge the curatorial and administrative practices of the Institute.
Deconstructing the exhibition space or transforming it into an entirely different environment garners immediate attention from the viewer and encourages them to think about the institution in a different way. The contemporary artist relies on the institution’s financial, administrative, and mechanical resources to realize these incredible constructions and installations. Nonetheless, some modifications do not have to be physical in order to interrupt normal functions. In 2003 at the Tate Modern, Tino Sehgal was able to control even the gallery attendants at the museum. In This Is New, Sehgal instructed the attendants to stand up and recite headlines from the daily newspaper (Herbet, 2008). Many visitors were shocked by this unexpected behavior from a gallery attendant, someone who normally stands in their corner and minimally interacts, even avoids interaction, with the museum visitors. This sudden announcement of the daily news shocks one’s normal perception of how one should behave in a gallery. In this work, if a visitor responded to the gallery attendant, they were then instructed to declare out loud, “This Is New, Tino Sehgal, 2003.” Within this piece, Sehgal is able to have the museum staff directly participate, even activate, his work. Without the gallery space, and especially the public operations staff, his work would not exist.

This brings us to the last artistic practice involving intervention within the gallery space: the artist’s manipulation of the viewer. This concept is not novel; in fact, the artist’s attempt to deceive the viewer can be seen in centuries’ worth of trompe l’oeil paintings. The deception is purely visual as the artist attempts to trick the viewer’s eye into thinking they are looking at something tangible or three-dimensional, rather than a flat surface. Recently, artists have been investigating ways to dupe or trick the viewer by stimulating other senses or emotions, involving the viewer in a specific work of art when they might not even realize it. Slovakian artist Roman Ondak’s work often intervenes with how visitors interact with and within the gallery space (and by intervene, I mean deceive). In Good Feelings in Good Times, Ondak hires actors to form a queue on the outside of a museum or exhibition entrance (www.gbagency.fr, 2008). Museum and/or gallery patrons often do not know how to react to this piece, most likely because they are not aware that it is a work of art. However, it certainly causes the visitors to act in a different manner; they will join the queue because they think it is the line to enter the museum or exhibition. If not, they will wonder what the line is for /should they join it /how long will it take? I would not be surprised if a patron were to feel angered after learning that the line they just stood in for the past twenty minutes was actually staged. They would feel duped, deceived, betrayed by the artist. Is it possible that some viewers could walk away disliking an artist’s work just because they didn’t know it was part of an exhibition? This is a potential problem when the museum is looked at as an educational institution, or a place of preservation that houses tangible artifacts. For those who might view the museum as a venue of entertainment, this work is whimsical and clever. It’s all about finding those who can laugh at themselves, even when the artist is making fun of them. In a contemporary sense, Good Feelings in Good Times is a genuine example of art; as Walter Benjamin asserts, “once an object is looked at by us as a work of art, it absolutely ceases its objective function”(Krauss, 1999). When visiting an art museum or gallery, the viewer expects to engage with works of art. However, in Ondak’s queues, the audience engages in a purely objective form of art (that is, before they realize it is the actual exhibition).
Ondak’s subjects often have no idea that they are participants in his artwork. What would happen if a knowing participant was improperly persuaded—rather than deceived— to participate in a work of art that they might not have necessarily agreed to if they had been fully informed? When Chris Burden shot himself in 1971 at F Space in Santa Ana, California, his audience did not know what to expect (Ward, 2001). Imagine the trauma of seeing your friend about to be shot with a rifle, and not being able to do anything about it. At that moment and time, this performance could not have elicited creative or social enlightenment for the viewer, but rather stress, confusion, and consequently, panic.
The medium used by Ondak and Burden in these pieces is not material. Rather, their medium is the encounter that involves the spectator; it is the proposal of new questions about the way the art is produced, presented, and received by the viewer. These two works encourage the viewer to think about where art is viewed, and to consider the alternative perceptions that one may experience when art is presented in an unexpected manner. When a museum or gallery allows an artist the freedom to do what they want with the space, or with the viewer, it is the artist who ultimately gains control of the entire situation.

However, we must look at this concept from another point of view. Perhaps this trend is not about the artist’s intervention, but the institution’s willingness to accommodate the artist’s wants and needs. This brings into question a fundamental uncertainty of the modern exhibition space: is its true function to show objects of art that already exist, or to introduce new, innovative projects by up-and-coming artists? Are patron’s required to compromise for an artist whom they have chosen to commission work by? Can they deny an artist’s proposal simply because of financial or maintenance concerns? A museum’s goal is to sell admission, while a commercial gallery’s goal is to sell artwork. Therefore, it makes more sense when a museum allows this intervention to take place. It has become clear that the contemporary art museum is no longer a place of conservation, rather an entertainment venue. A place of cultural activity and stimulation rather than cultural preservation or presentation. No longer is a museum’s prosperity found in the quality or quantity of their permanent collection, but in their willingness to program challenging temporary exhibitions by innovative and unique artists. This curatorial practice has become so widespread that it is no longer shocking to the viewer. In fact, one can expect a perception-distorting, opinion-changing, large-scale, physically all-encompassing installation at a museum, and are often disappointed if there is no such spectacle.
The gallery on the other hand has a lot more to lose. They do not sell a spectacle, but rather the art itself. So what advantage does a gallery gain when they allow an artist to say, remove the gallery walls, as did Michael Asher in 1974 at the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles (Asher & Buchloh, 1983)? The gallery is not a space of private art collection, and more recently, it acts as another storefront with luxury goods. It is almost as if the contemporary gallery acts as entertainer as well, luring collectors in with appealing shows by daring artists. Curators are organizing exhibitions that intrigue, amuse, and fool the audience. More people attend museums and browse through galleries today than ever before, and the quantity of these exhibition spaces is rising so rapidly that one may wonder if there is an audience — or even a body of quality work— large enough to fit the bill! There is a high demand for exhibitions, and gallery spaces are attempting to have their shows stand out from the rest of the competition. Museums and galleries are equally organizing exhibitions that will glean press, income, and status. In the end, even when the exhibition space is left with a giant scar, must seek repair for damaged walls, or left with a tired or displeased staff, it is ultimately to the their benefit to commission the artwork. Contemporary institutions are commissioning temporary exhibitions for the same reason that wealthy patrons of the Middle Ages and Renaissance did: for philanthropic or commemorative purposes (Kleiner & Mamiya, 2006).
As I said earlier, I did not want to focus solely on the institutional criticism that inevitably arises through this discussion. I do believe that artists should have the liberty to critique the institution, but in agreement with Andreas Huyssen, this act should be site-specific rather than global (1995). The artist who critiques the institution ironically needs the institution to form this argument in the first place. Secondly, they need the institution to exhibit their works, just as the institution needs the artist in order to fulfill its essential function. A global criticism would eventually halt all artistic functions.
Although several of the mentioned artists focus on this issue, I am more interested in discussing the temporary aspect of all of their works, and how none of them are permanent fixtures within the exhibition space. The conception and realization of each of these works undoubtedly cost the institution a great deal of time and money (some more than others). In today’s global art market, how do these works fit in —or stand out— when everything else placed in a gallery is a commodity? Art has always been bought and sold, but today more than ever, people are investing in it. In works like Cai Guo-Qiang’s explosions, nothing can be sold in the aftermath of the explosion because of, well, obvious reasons! The same principle goes for Asher, Salcedo, Eliasson, Sehgal, and Ondak’s works; the only record that these works existed is in their documentation, rather than in the bill of sale or contract of acquisition. The current rate of growth of the global art industry as well as the escalation in the construction of museums is at its highest, so why are artists making transient works they cannot sell? They are instead pushing the capability and resources of institutions to achieve their artistic goals. This evokes a romantic notion of the artist, as someone who needs to make it to say it, rather than someone who needs to make it to sell it. The institution on the other hand does spend money to produce these incredible temporary exhibitions, and it can be assumed that most of the money goes to the artist. So much for romance!

Reader Be Where?

2008-11-26T22:27:00.000-05:00

Jenny Holzer at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Although the visual splendor in Jenny Holzer’s work is evident, her work cannot be universally understood; it cannot be perceived by everyone the same way, and sometimes the language component of her work is meaningless. To a viewer who does not speak English, her words lose all meaning, and form takes over content. The artist’s intention can be especially skewed on a day like Target Free Family Saturday at PROTECT PROTECT at the MCA Chicago, when the galleries transform into a funhouse of bright lights and color. Children react to these pieces in the exact opposite way that adults react to them. Children see colorful, blinking rainbow shapes; their eyes light up at the sight, and then they lose interest quickly. “What’s next Mom?” Adults on the other hand, survey their surroundings, let their eyes adjust to the dim light, focus on the scrolling words on the LED screens, and lift their fists to their chins in concentration. Even if a child can read, they most likely cannot focus on the words rapidly scrolling across the LED screens, and if they could, then parents would have to try to explain loaded terms like “Pride of Duty,” and “Absolute Submission.” To those who read and comprehend these statements, or “truisms” as Holzer calls them, it is not the form that is important in this exhibition, but the content – or is it?

One notable piece is comprised of a long row of arc-shaped LED screens that dictate US government documents to and from military personal. They are hard to read because a) one only sees a few words of a sentence at a time; b) it scrolls through fairly fast; c) the bright lights are blinking and sometimes written in negative; d) many words that provide critical information within a sentence are “X-ed” out. One can never fully piece the information together. Like communicating over a radio, it is hard to hear/read everything at once – one has to concentrate to decipher the code, slowly reading and piecing together what it dictates. In this work, although the content is extremely important in understanding its role within the exhibition, its visual form is quite appealing as well.

The highlight of the exhibition is a work dedicated to the city where Holzer is holding her exhibition. From a purely visual standpoint, For Chicago is an absolutely breathtaking light installation. Enormous LED lights span across the floor in a parallel row, emitting a golden light through the text displayed. Each screen alternates in pattern while scrolling heart-wrenching statements such as, “I am crying hard,” as well as proverbial phrases like, “A little knowledge goes a long way.” They scroll in reverse to the back wall, creating a magnificent glow against the white surface. Every so often, the screens blink in unison, creating clarity and disillusion at the same time. Holzer creates an utterly stunning environment, especially for a display that —when described in minimal, simple words to someone who had not seen this piece—would seem like the lights at the Stock Exchange: a row of large LED lights of constantly displaying unpredictable information. These two spectacles are two different stories, which might not be as distant as we think.

Throughout the exhibition, I couldn’t help but think what was necessary in the use of LED lights. How does Holzer communicate her views about the war in Iraq any more efficiently through LED lights than with any other medium? Holzer is certainly not the first artist to speak about the war, so when given this opportunity at the MCA, why did she choose this subject matter? Normally, LED lights are used in very public settings as advertisements and instantly updatable announcements; they give information, facts, and statistics. They usually do not express or emote; something that Holzer finds a way to accomplish. The LED lights simultaneously recite personal and universal statements like, “I feel you.” The “I” can be interpreted on any number of levels, as well as the “you”; “I” can be Holzer, the viewer, or the American people. Although many of Holzer’s statements are universal “truisms,” as I mentioned earlier, there is no way her work can be universally understood. The artist’s full intention cannot be fully grasped unless one speaks English, and even after that one must consider physical & intellectual barriers.

So, if we look past the language component, and the war in Iraq topic, we can concentrate on Holzer’s use of LED lights. Why is it relevant to use LED lights for this exhibition? The messages communicated only have a short lifespan. They scroll so fast across the screen and the viewer has only a certain amount of time to read them. This adds a sense of urgency. The viewer must read it as fast as they can, and therefore come to a conclusion about the statement at a quicker pace. Perhaps Holzer feels that she has something new to say about the war, and she must say it now.

Peyton's Public Commemoration of Civic Distinction

2008-10-26T20:00:00.000-04:00

Live Forever
Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum

Throughout the history of art, no subject matter is more attractive to the human eye than portraiture. Like an infant who first realizes that he himself is a living being that others can see, that infant will be fascinated by this image for the rest of their life. Humans are essentially drawn to images of other humans. What is the sentiment that creates this phenomenon? In portraiture, is it some sort of narcissistic pleasure in recognizing that this person on the canvas in front of oneself shares the same corporal attributes? Or perhaps it’s the attraction in comparing oneself to that image, whether they have a bigger nose, more expensive clothing, more wrinkles, a better haircut, etc. Whether in comparison or in contrast with the subject, we, humans, have an obsession with ourselves. An even superior obsession lies in a species above: celebrity.

Although demonstrating no excelling talent in technique, no breakthrough transition into a new impressionistic or expressionistic style, and no exceptional innovation in subject or content, people love Elizabeth Peyton’s work because she consorts with celebrities. In her latest exhibition, Live Forever, at the New Museum, rock stars, artists, and world leaders such as Kurt Cobain, Sid Vicious, Liam Gallagher, Jarvis Cocker, John Lennon, Georgia O’Keefe, Frida Kahlo, Maurizio Cattelan, David Hockney, and Prince Harry line the walls. The gallery is transformed into a modest tabloid. Just as we love to flip through magazines, the viewer can rummage through the portraits in this exhibition relatively quickly, with no less satisfaction. The viewer is led into the private lives of these idols through the relationships, or perceived relationships, that Peyton holds with them.

Among the dozens of paintings, there were several that demanded more attention than others: some due to the subject, and some due to their strategic placement. From a petite canvas under a spotlight, but hung alone in a nook of the exhibition space, John Lydon, better known as Johnny Rotten, stares out into space —rather than at the viewer. The portrait is simple, and the pastel palette gives John a sort of schoolboy innocence. While Peyton transforms John Lydon into a young boy, in other notable paintings, she manages to transform Ludwig II of Bavaria into a modern woman and Georgia O’Keefe into a powerful heroine. Although she could not have known Ludwig II of Bavaria personally, he is certainly a historical figure that she admires, and he is without doubt someone that she would have been friends with if they lived during the same period. Although he receives the bad reputation as “mad King Ludwig” because of his extravagant construction escapades such as Neuschwanstein Castle, Peyton seems to sympathize with the notion that he was just a gay guy forced in the closet who just wanted to be a designer! By placing his portrait in this exhibition, Peyton is saying, “Hey Ludwig, even if you didn’t belong in 19th century Germany, you sure belong here.” Contrasting from Ludwig’s dainty, charming portrait, Peyton pays homage to one of the greatest woman artists of the 20th century in Georgia O’Keefe after Steiglitz, 1918. A portrait from the waist up, O’Keefe appears beautiful, graceful, and the canvas even seems to glow. Peyton uses a thin oil wash, making the painting seem as if it is painted on glass. Although Peyton made this painting, the credit really must go to Steiglitz who originally saw the wonder, beauty, and force from this woman.

The dominant function of portraiture in Roman antiquity was the public commemoration of civic distinction. Conceivably, it can be said that Peyton chose these subjects in order to immortalize their physical image, and everything that goes along with it. Peyton is not choosing to paint the homeless man sleeping on the street, the young student, the neighborhood baker, and other people of modest civic status. She is painting those who have become famous through music, art, inheritance, drug abuse, and untimely death. Her paintings are not mere portraits, but commemorations. While it is the viewer who flocks in fascination towards these canvas superstars, perhaps it is Peyton who holds the obsession with celebrities after all!

Beyond Life Drawing

2008-10-02T01:07:00.000-04:00

Robert Schultz Drawings: 1990-2007
Chazen Museum of Art

It is not the time to renounce figurative drawing as a worthy competitor in the contemporary art world. Robert Schultz’s recent exhibition at the Chazen Museum of Art proves that there is something more that lies past Life Drawing 101. These works demonstrate an intimate study of composition, line, value, form, and above all, technique and skill. Since DuChamp (and certainly not to blame DuChamp), artists have been bold enough to declare that anything —any object or any production— can constitute a museum-worthy work of fine art. Schultz’s drawings are interesting in that, although we all see figurative art being churned out by art students and in pages of artists’ sketchbooks, they somehow grab the viewers’ attention as if to say, “I am just as worthy of your time as those Italian Renaissance or Abstract Expressionist paintings upstairs.” Perhaps it is the abundance of drawings, each rendered with the same amount of detail. Perhaps it is the fact that we, as viewers, identify that Schultz has mastered the technical skill of drawing. In a world of Twomblys, Basquiats, and dare I say Marla Olmstead (of “My Kid Could Paint That” fame), it is refreshing to recognize that a drawer’s talent and aptitude for the medium is still a factor in the contemporary art scene.
A fine example of this draftsmanship can be seen in Facing the Wall, an example of exquisitely beautiful composition. The angles creating by the man’s posture in relation to the curved back of the chairs produces a perfect harmony between ground and figure. This drawing is a study of line and value; there is not need to deeply ponder its meaning, rather a need to reflect on Schultz’s expertise.
Still Life—Denise on Table is, like all of the works, intricately rendered with details of the human body. A woman is crouching on the face of a cloth-covered table with her back turned to the viewer. Her posture brings to mind a Kiki Smith sculpture, except this time seen in two-dimensions and from behind. The body here, unlike Smith, looks incredibly life-life. One can distinguish a faint tan line across her waist, each hair on her body is rendered individually, and the cracks in the soles of her feet make it hard to grasp that this is an illustration made by hand, and not captured through the lens of a camera. Although the rendering is realistic, we know nothing more about Denise from this drawing and we are given no clues into her character. This holds true in Teak Chair, which depicts a woman bending over on an angled chair. The viewer can find clues from her body and recognize that this is Denise as well. Why isn’t Denise mentioned in the title of this drawing? This suggests that maybe there is something more to find out about Denise from Still Life-Denise on Table, while Teak Chair is just a formal study of the woman’s body.

In Teak Chair, as well as others, I can’t help but notice the flawless white paper that Schultz uses to draw on. Amazingly, there is not an eraser mark or smudge to be found. Schultz’s attention to cleanliness is impeccable, and might I add, much appreciated. The paper is finely textured, and the graphite accentuates its surface. These drawings are not only about what is drawn onto the surface, but also about what is left white to create volume, muscle, and fleshiness. It is important to think about the artist’s intimate relationship with paper quality, and how Schultz must have tried and erred with many different paper stock before finding the right match.

Although some of the drawings are figurative studies and some of them are portraits (windows into the character of the subject), others seem to carry symbolic or religious/spiritual undertones. Ian’s Ladder shows a man, secured by a rope, climbing a ladder from a simplified, frontal view. His muscles are tense, and his veins bulge (they are almost hyper-swollen and seem to lay above his skin) from the strenuous challenge of climbing the ladder. Is this man Ian, or is he climbing another’s ladder (that person being Ian)? This ascent brings to mind the biblical account of Jacob’s ladder to heaven. Another image of climbing towards an unseen-something above one’s body can be found in Ascending, depicting a man from the waist down as he cautiously stands on top of a ladder (where there is usually a label warning the user not to do so). The viewer can tell by his hands that he is cautious, as his fingertips are wary of the space around them, ready to grab onto any available crutch if needed. Formally, the illustration in Ascending is light and airy. The contours of his body disappear on his left side, as if drowned out by the light (of course this contour of the body is suggested because humans are not made of lines). Although Schultz’s bodies exist as lines on paper, they seem to be so much more. These two pieces are heavy with meaning: in Ian’s Ladder the climber is ready to ascend, even exhausting his own strength to arrive there (however, he may be less cautious because he is secured by a rope), while in Ascending, the climber is unsure about his position high above ground.
Because people always feel the need to categorize an artist into a specific movement, field, or related group of artists, one must inevitably ask where Robert Schultz, along with other contemporary figurative drawers and illustrators, lay. Rather than grouping him with a craft or a medium, one might look at other similar practices, whether in subject matter or form. It is evident that Schultz works with the human body. There are artists today who work “of the body”; that is to say talking about the human body’s functions, conditions, systems, and relations. Internationally recognized artists working, or who worked, in this practice include and Ana Mendiata, using the body as a tool for creation; Matthew Barney, using the body as a metaphor for systems; Jeanine Antoni, pushing the physical limits of the body; and Andres Serrano, using bodily fluids as medium. No, Robert Schultz does not work “of the body”. Does he fit in with artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, who conduct formal studies of figurative representations? Or perhaps he fits with artists who create private portraits of their subjects, like Alec Soth or David Armstrong. Or, does he simply fit into a field of fine craftsmen and illustrators? In my opinion, he is a mélange of the last three, creating formal studies while revealing the intimate character of the subject, yet still maintaining a high level of draftsmanship.

RAW

2008-09-14T11:46:00.000-04:00

RAW
An evening of performances with Marina Kelly, Christine Olson, Nicole Gruter, and Angela Richardson
The Project Lodge
9/11/08

Last Thursday after an evening at the Project Lodge in Madison, WI, I walked away with a pot of melting wax, a bag of English Breakfast tea, a heavy burden hanging at my hip, and a stomach grumbling for a slice of blueberry pie. Sounds like a haphazard collection, although it did reflect the night’s various performances. RAW was a series of acts that included some hits and misses. The evening started off with Sleeps & Wakes when Marina Kelly’s alarm clock went off at 7:47pm. She proceeded to stretch, strain, curl and roll about in her bed — enacting how I like to feel on a Sunday morning when I don’t have anywhere to be. Her sleepy movements were quite pleasing, however Kelly did have a pressing appointment she needed to be at; but alas, she had overslept.

Soon it was time for a cup of Isthmus Tea with the engaging and hospitable Nicole Gruter. As she articulately shared her story of a tea set she had inherited — as a burden, not a welcome gift — she reminded the viewer of the symbolic inconvenience or obligation of possessions that we carry with us. Her performance was a simple but enthusiastic narration — a narration that one would expect to hear from a Children’s Librarian than an MFA Candidate. The audience —or invitees I should say— gazed intently and followed every sentence of her tale, complete with fictional family members from far off lands and talking chinaware. The moral of her story was to encourage the audience to purge oneself of unwanted items, and of objects that carry undesired symbolism or significance. I suddenly felt the weight of the cheap, aluminum Guardian Angel pin sitting at the bottom of my purse. Yes, I keep this said angel with me; not for religious, but for superstitious reasons, for my aunt put it upon me during my adolescence and told me never to throw it away, because it will “keep me safe”. So far, so good. However, after this particular tea session, I’m thinking of mailing it to a certain Miss Gruter.

During her second performance of the night, Whore-ding and Consumption, we crowded around a virtual campfire while Gruter honestly narrated the scary tale about her obsession with things, and the horror she feels because this stuff has taken over her life. I empathized with this story, as I too am a thrift-shopper, curbside gazer, and gullible 2-for-1 consumer. Whereas Gruter succeeded in lifting the weight of things she didn’t need by leaving a pile of free stuff for the audience that evening, I walked out the door with a used cooking pot and a hunk of paraffin wax.

While Gruter’s teatime and campfire stories were tidy, PG, and a refreshing take on “typical” performance art (I say this because the term “performance art” generally carries a widely shared connotation, often invoking images of tar, feathers, screaming, and static noise, etc.), the evening ended a little messy. As Angela Richardson rolled on the floor and smeared herself with blueberry goo to the tune of ambient noise, I couldn’t help but think, “How does she not know that this has been done before?” If I’m going to watch a spastic, uninhibited, messy, interpretive performance, they should at least be naked. A deep contrast from teatime earlier in the evening, the viewers watched her squirm on the tarp, and abruptly it was over, as the scent of fructose lingered in the air.

Gezeiten, Marée, Tide

2008-03-19T04:42:00.000-04:00

Sacha Waltz
Gezeiten

For three days last week at the brand new Théâtre National de Bretagne—Centre Européen Théâtral et Chorégraphique in Rennes, German choreographer Sacha Waltz definitely broke in, literally, the new stage with a bang. Waltz has been a big name in contemporary dance and experimental theater scene since the late 1990s, and her projects continue grow more and more elaborate, both in arrangement and production quality. Gezeiten, a two-hour composition, leaves the viewer fatigued after viewing evolution, destruction, and rebirth of the sixteen dancers on stage. ‘Gezeiten’ is German for the French word ‘marée’, which means ‘the tide’. The dance evolves from graceful elegance to chaotic turmoil, order to disorder, and back again.

The opening scene progresses slowly, and habituates the spectator into scene, preparing for what is to come. In fact, the dance begins with several pairs of performers walking in-sync, and eventually uniting into a single line. A solitary cello enters at the side of the stage, and with subtle accompaniment of Bach, the sixteen dancers evolve slowly and collectively, eventually forming one graceful, cooperative movement. It is less a dance than it is an organized, or instructed, movement. The performers act individually or in pairs, slowly but continuously altering in number. Their movements are elegant, loving, erotic, and inspiring. As the music fades away, the choreography speeds up, and a pair of two male dancers takes the spotlight. Their bodies work together and react to each other’s rhythm and weight. There is a large element of trust present between the two dancers as they rely on each other’s bodies to be at their premeditated position in order to progress to the next movement. Once all of the 16 androgynous dancers are on stage again, the best words to describe the performance would be a whacked out Old Navy commercial at a ropes course.

The movements speed up, the entrances and exits become more frequent, the sound of feet on the stage grows louder and gains a faster rhythm, until the dance climaxes at a turbulent and total chaos. As the performers rumble about on stage, bumping into each other, falling over, chairs and tables thrown through the air, the turbulent battle between the bodies brings to mind a catastrophic event. The simulated earthquake takes the dancers captive. However, even the chaos here is organized. It’s almost as if Waltz instructed them to “fall here, push her over there, throw this chair but not that pipe.” One critic describes her style in Gezeiten as “chaoto-graphy,” accurately explaining the prearranged, combating catastrophes that take place on stage.

However, like the tide mounting and descending, the pendulum swung from chaos back to order. This is where the performance crosses the line between dance and theater, because a dialogue is present. The group of tries to reconstruct their world after is has been destroyed, as they all take refuge in a broke-down post-war period apartment. There is a noticeable struggle between leadership. Several performers step up to attempt to establish new rules and a new structure, but there is always someone else who rejects or rebels. A dissonance among the survivors arrives, and they begin to self-destruct.

The final catastrophe during the performance didn’t have the feeling of an organized chaos. I doubt that the performers were given any specific instructions of movements at this point, except to attempt to create a state of total delirium. There was even one point where I was scared for not only the safety of the performers, but I feared the safety of the audience. As the performers literally ripped apart the wooden planks of the stage, knocked down walls, and threw sand and bricks, a huge flame erupted against the back wall. The flame grew large rapidly, and the dancers disappeared from the scene. The smell of smoke and burning materials grew stronger, sitting in the back rows I actually felt heat from the flame, and at one moment, I thought that perhaps something had gone wrong and the flame was now out of control. I expected a fire drill at any moment.

Eventually, the fire went out, and the thirty minutes to follow accurately represented what could only be described as a choreographer’s live combination of a Dali painting and a Lynch film. Bizarre, surreal, and oh so utterly interpretive dance-like. The finale actually peaks about two-thirds of the way through, and the rest of the performance gradually fades back into a state of rest, easing the audience back into their seats.

As I watched the movements of the dancers, I couldn’t help but imagine the thought process of the choreographer, and if these movements were the direct translations of her thoughts. Did the dancers live up to her expectations, her vision? Or, is there another process of translation from the choreographer’s words or instructions once it crosses over into the body of the dancer? This query led me to contemplate the many layers of translation that were present here: Sacha Waltz is a German choreographer who organized these sixteen dancers, performers, and actors to physically carry out her instructions. Each body is not the same, and the brain of each dancer’s body does not send signals to the muscles at the same rate. Each body moves differently, and each body is of a varied size, density, grace, strength, or agility. So one can conclude that the premier translation is that between choreographer’s instructions or intentions, and the dancer’s interpretation of the movements. Next, one must take into consideration that this is a German dance troop performing in France. I was told during a meeting with one of the theater’s employees that it is rare that an entire troop leaves to collaborate with another theater in France. Thus, there is a complexity in translation of instructions between the German troop and the French theater company.

More specifically, as an American watching a German performance in France, I wondered if the movements of the dancers had a language, and if so, was it German? It is possible that I could not understand the dance as well, simply because of the fact that I did not speak German, same for the other French spectators. When one goes to see a play that is performed in a common language, there is already an element present that will guarantee some amount of enjoyment or agreement with the performance. However, if one goes to see a play performed in a foreign language, it is easy to become lost and confused, resulting in a disinterest or dislike in the production. Is it possible to misunderstand a dance spectacle if the language of the movement is in conflict with the language of movement that one is accustomed to?

Finally, there is the element of translation between the performance and how the audience receives or interprets it. To many, Gezeiten may seem bizarre, over-the-top, thought provoking, innovative, unbearable, or beautiful—beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. However, being a contemporary dance, a contemporary piece of art, one should realize that contemporary art isn’t always about pleasing the eye, but about stimulating the mind, posing questions, challenging the normal, or presenting an element of surprise, curiosity, or mystery.

Playful Experiments: Roman Signer at Tanya Bonakdar

2007-08-16T10:41:00.000-04:00

Agitation and Repose

I found myself entranced by a video of a toy helicopter playfully teasing a sleeping child, but unable to look away from the television next to it, where a man sat in an empty room rapidly filling up with hay that was being hurled to the ceiling from a small hole in the ground. These videos, part of a series of six by Roman Signer, kindle curiosity in Agitation and Repose, an exhibition at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea.
The exhibition features mostly sculpture and painting touching on the main theme — as the title states — on agitation and then repose. An observation on the constant cycle in the world: disturbances, confrontations, activation, or tension all eventually find their way back to rest or peace. My favorite, and only notable part of the show, can be found in the back space where six average-size televisions each play different short videos, all being only a couple minutes long. Each action playing out on the TV tickled my fancy, and I couldn’t decide which video to pursue and observe the full piece. My eyes flicked back and forth between the monitors, and every time I missed a couple seconds of one video, something had dramatically changed or the video had already started over in another! This went on for a while, and I felt as though they were teasing me. For example, in Hay Fever (the video aforementioned) I could not pinpoint the exact moment where the room transitioned from completely covered in hay to empty again! Or in Dot, where a man appears to be enjoying an afternoon of plein-air painting; however, if I missed a few seconds, I would look back and all of a sudden there was smoke in the air from an explosion and the man was walking away, frustrated, from his easel.
After setting up a systematic plan, I decided to take the time to watch each video from start to finish without glancing at the other sets; in the end, I was able to solve the mysteries of each piece! What appears to be a chaotic shot on a spinning camera is confirmed at the end of Barrel: a camera is secured inside a barrel in a river while currents churn the container around in circles. In Helicopter on Board, a skilled toy-helicopter control pilot successfully navigates his aircraft to land on a wooden board that has just fallen down and resurfaced from a waterfall. Signer’s work is delightfully playful, and is reminiscent of Wegman’s video works from the ‘70s. The viewer may not always know what or why the artist is filming a certain, seemingly banal action, but the result is simple and amusing. It’s like a magic eye puzzle: you need to be patient and observe carefully in order to take in the full picture.

Building Ideas

2007-07-21T10:05:00.000-04:00

The Lath Picture Show
Friedrich Petzel Gallery

Oh, the infinite possibilities of “low” grade materials and how artists love them! The Lath Picture Show, a group exhibition at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in Chelsea, displays a collection of well-known, influential artists who seek the potential of these lesser materials, and how they can use them as building blocks to convey bigger ideas. This is similar to the lath: a thin piece of wood that is anything but the last piece of a project. The lath is put together in multiples, creating a bigger, more solid structure. The gallery is full of what appear to be found objects arranged in a specific manner, or several low-grade materials put together to appear as though they are a readymade. Several artists experiment with the infinite possibilities of wood: Charles Ray looks at a plank of wood and sees a Bench, even though it may not be convenient to rest upon. Although, at the same time, Robert Gober sees a piece of wood and interprets it as simply a piece of Plywood. Cheyney Thompson creates a ghostly impression of a heavily knotted piece of wood that subtly disguises itself upon the white wall of the gallery. In Work No. 387: Plywood, the clever conceptualist Martin Creed stacks a pile of industrial plywood with stamps and markings on their sides 8-feet high, leaving the viewer curious as to what the side of the pile would say if stacked in correct order: “This Way Up -->” or “Kohler & Sons Shipping”? In a rare sculpture by photorealist painter Martin Kippenberger, Who Have We Brought to the Table Today?, the artist asked an opened ended question, “W.Not?” Is it safe to assume that he meant, “Why Not?” or should we leave all “W” options available: will not, while not, who not, when not, William Not, Wendy Not?

Several times this exhibition poses the most humorous question that constantly pops up in contemporary art, “is it real or made to look real?” How do we know if something in a show is a found object, or if the artist cleverly made it to look like a regular Styrofoam cup, newspaper, or piece of wood. For example, if an artist put a “found chair” in a gallery setting, how do we know that he didn’t actually construct it himself, tricking us all by making it look tarnished, or “found”. It always makes me think of that scene in Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), where the curator is angry that the artist took her coffee mug from her office and put it in his show, while he replies by saying that her painstakingly recreated it on his own. She then is amazed by how authentic his fast food wrapper appears; this time replying that is really just is a hamburger wrapper from his lunch. Coming back from that tangent, Jorge Pardo presents a lavishly textured, dark piece of wood that would probably make a very expensive piece of furniture; the marbled surface looks as though it might glow like mother-of-pearl. However, it is simply titled Plywood, and sure enough, has the thinly-layered, rough as though you might get a splinter, plywood quality on its side. Another piece that plays a trick on the viewer is a Fence created by conceptual duo Chris Hanson & Hendrika Sonnenberg. I almost didn’t give light blue & sea foam colored fence a second glance, but I’m glad I did, because it reinforced the concept that as a viewer, I should always remember to look a little closer. To my surprise, what I thought was a sturdy fence was really made out of polystyrene, and could easily be blown over by a small breeze or picked up and moved about. What once carried the connotation of a barricade was now a witty, almost cute, vertical lattice pattern! After viewing a second piece by this pair, a bright magenta colored Bucket of Blood, I realized that they aren’t trying to be deceptive, but simply witty.

The exhibition abruptly ends with a solid brick wall created by Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. A brick, like the lath, is a building block in construction stacked together to make a sturdy structure. It appears to be a sort of impassible barrier; this piece is surprising given that the rest of the exhibition experiments with the potential of these materials. Does this mean that artists have “hit the wall” with their use of low grade materials such as wood, Styrofoam, rubber, found objects, etc? I believe it is anything but —it is no new phenomenon of artists successfully realizing the potential of low-grade materials, and contemporary artists will keep finding new ways to create “treasures” out of “junk” (and not in an arts-n-crafty way).

Dirty Money

2007-07-19T22:30:00.000-04:00

Sikkema Jenkins & Co.Group Exhibition
Vik Muniz- Two Flags

I cannot miss an opportunity to write a brief review of Vik Muniz’s latest work displayed at Sikkema Jenkins in their summer group exhibition. Known for his illusionistic, richly detailed photographs of his chocolate syrup, jelly, pasta sauce, and various condiment illustrations, Muniz’s works are always stimulating to at least one sense or another. His photographs go hand in hand with the likes of Thomas Demand in that they wish the final product (the photograph) to be acknowledged rather than the sculpture, installation or process created before the shutter opens. In his newest work, a diptych C-print titled Two Flags, Muniz has created a lush garden of leafy greens and white flowers that form the pattern of the American Flag. In this first photograph, the artist has portrayed the flag as crisp green and white; it is surely not coincidentally the same color of money. The second photograph is later in the season; it seems colder and all of the plants and flowers are dying, though the evergreen plants remain a deep green. The petals have yellowed and dead leaves and sticks have fallen on top of everything, giving the entire photograph a sickly brown tinge. Not a stranger to commenting on consumer culture and mass production in his work, Muniz strongly criticizes American consumerism and obsession with money in this pair of flags. The message is clear: an abundance of cash may seem all good and fresh in the beginning, but it will eventually corrupt and be corrupted by everything around it. Whether or not you want to get political with this piece and read into it more than is necessary, the artist’s skill in creating a thought provoking and visually stimulating piece of work must be acknowledged. Behind the detail and color in the final C-print is the effort put into planting and growing the garden into a recognizable American flag. It was not a chance photograph; Muniz set out with an idea from the start, and makes his this clichéd message clear in an easy-to-read image.

The Shape of Space

2007-07-11T10:47:00.000-04:00

The Shape of Space at the Guggenheim New York

Early in the 20th century, the Constructivists began to look at the open space around and object, and how they could use sculpture to elevate this often-ignored area to the artistic realm— space as an element of sculpture. They investigated how the space around an object is perceived, and how it could carry more stress than object itself. This investigation continued throughout the century with works that contained holes, such as Lucio Fontana’s slash painting and Lee Bontecou’s recurring dark voids in her wall sculptures. In more contemporary art, artists have looked at the absence of space, or brought attention to the presence of air, such as in Martin Creed’s balloon rooms that represent half of the air in a given space. The Shape of Space this summer at the Guggenheim in New York takes a look at how the perception of space in relation artwork may change, how an installation or sculpture uses or ignores the space around it, and how art is viewed within the space of an art institution and outside of one. What better way heighten one’s perception of space than in the Guggenheim, where walking through the inside of this spiraling museum is an experience in itself. The viewer travels through the exhibition following one long corridor, and is able to hop on and off the path into other side-galleries as they please.

In the lobby, the viewer is greeted by a piece appropriately titled The Shape of Space by Alyson Shotz, where the artist imagines what living in a world with multiple dimensions would look like. Because there is nothing to base our perception upon but three dimensions, this multiple-dimension viewpoint is impossible for the human eye to conceive, but the artist tries to let the viewer use their imaginations and free their strict observation of the world by gazing through the crystalline, plastic waterfall that she painstakingly constructed. Piotr Uklanski’s crowd pleasing Dance Floor, allows the viewer to momentarily view the museum, normally an institutional space, as a night club, as one can’t help but tap their toes to the top 40 hip-hop songs that blast from the temporary color-changing disco floor. Ricci Albenda’s Portal to Another Dimension (Deborah/Positive, Negative) acts as 3D magic eye illusions that seamlessly protrude and cave in directly out of and into the wall of the museum. The more the viewer studies the shapes, the more their perception changes¬. Lucio Fontana emphasizes painting as something on a canvas rather than an illusion into another world in Concetto Spaziale, another example of his “slash” paintings. King of spatial emphasis Carl Andre declares the area on the floor on the museum in a very blunt way by placing squares of copper that directly represent the amount of space of the floor they take up in Fifth Copper Triode. He forces the viewer to realize the direct physical relationship between the area that both the viewer and the copper plates share. Along the same lines of a direct observation of space, John McCracken’s Blue Plank is exactly what it sounds like: a blue plank leaning against the wall in the museum proclaiming, “Hey! By my presence here, taking up space, I am a piece of art too!” The constructivists believed that an object could depict space without having to depict mass. An example of an artist from this Soviet idealistic movement can be seen in Naum Gabo’s Column. The sculpture calls attention the empty space that continues where the object does not.

As the viewer makes their way up the spiraling corridors of the Guggenheim, the higher up they go, the less interesting and less coherent the exhibition becomes. The pieces become less about defining or observing space, and more about what the Guggenheim wants to show off. Near the top, I almost forgot that I was still looking at the same exhibition, because I could not connect the remaining artwork with any coherent theme. I found that the way the several video installations were displayed in the space of the museum was peculiar. One played on a flat-screen against a wall, several just sat in the middle of the floor playing on TV sets, and one had a specially built wooden cubbyhole, built specifically to view the film. Does viewer interaction with the method of display change the way they perceive a film? Certainly. If there is nowhere to sit down and make oneself comfortable, the viewer will often watch for a few seconds and then move on to the next piece. Should all video be created equal? Perhaps some artists want their pieces to be glanced at, and others want their audience to follow through the entire narrative. John Pilson’s 8-channel video installation, A la claire fountaine, has nothing to keep the viewer interested for more than the average 20 seconds, so it is appropriate to have no seating area. However, all of Nathalie Djurberg’s claymations contain a full narrative, and a piece like Dumstrut should demand more attention, and a seating area (although, I must mention that I have no idea why this video is put in The Shape of Space other than the fact that the Guggenheim loves to show off their Djurberg collection).

The installations and sculpture works in this show are obviously the most successful in creating the “shape of space”. However, painting has forever been known an illusionist artistic practice: an attempt at creating a window to another world— the illusion of space. On the contrary, most of the paintings in this show were clearly the artist’s own interpretation of space, rather than an exact rendition, such as in Sarah Morris’s seemingly abstract Mandalay Bay. The Photographic works in this show are mostly straightforward representations of space: Annika Vonthusswolff shows the audience several deserted interior spaces that most avoid finding themselves in the Spoke series, and Carlos Garaicoa depicts the past and present of a historical building in Havana, seen in La Esquina. The exhibition clearly displays artists attempting to either realistically depict a space or trying to break down all awareness of space completely.

The Shape of Space makes visitors aware of the way in which they view art within the space of a museum, and aware of their position in relation to the work they are viewing. All of the works comment on space that is changing, imagined, claustrophobic, free, shared, artificial, or spiritual. Most art takes up, uses, creates, or defines space. Thoughts do not. While walking through this exhibition, I thought about all of the ideas that hover around an artist’s piece, and wondered if somebody could put their ideas in a sealed jar and declare that it too takes up space.

A Brief Tour of Chelsea on the Dog Days of Summer:

2007-07-03T13:03:00.000-04:00

A Summary of Gallery Visits on the last week of June

Chelsea is perhaps one the best ways to spend an afternoon on a sweltering hot day in the middle of summer in New York, that is if you like, and can tolerate, art. It is too hot to stay in the sun for too long, and the art-mall of Chelsea offers in-and-out opportunities for protection from the sun, and the overpowering refreshment of air conditioning. If you get too cold while examining a piece of art, then you just have to step outside, work up a sweat walking the 10 steps to the next gallery, and then it’s time to cool off again. At this point in the summer most spring shows have closed, or most gallery owners have fled up state to their summer homes. This leaves the slim-pickins of exhibitions— but it should also give smaller galleries the chance to get creative with their curatorial skills, or take a chance on new artists. However, on this particular day, I found that most galleries were playing it safe, but with shows that were nonetheless enjoyable.

In “Running the Numbers” at the Von Lintel Gallery, several large-scale digitally manipulated color photographs by Chris Jordan are sure to play a trick with your eyes. Taking a microscopic lens to the macro-scale of American consumerism, Jordan’s visually complex photographic works illustrate astounding statistics on material consumption in the U.S today. Plastic Bottles depicts the astounding two million bottles that are used in the U.S every five minutes, and Handguns shows a pile of 29,569 guns that led to the equal number of gun-related deaths in the U.S in 2004. Many of these works need to be seen from close up, in person in order to reveal their tiny secrets. What looks like a black & white mountain landscape from far away is a true magic eye puzzle: as the viewer moves closer to the photograph, they find it actually consists of thousands of GMC Yukon Denali logos in Denali Denial.

Of the exhibitions featuring paintings, many were obvious imitations, even hybrids, of already well-known painters. If an artist were to make a dead-on combination of Daniel Richter and Peter Doig’s turn of the millennium aesthetic, it can be found at Moti Hasson where painter Miriam Vlaming presents several large scale, brightly colored, ephemerally brushstroked, pine tree dotted scenes in the show, “Good Morning Revival.” At Zieher Smith, Liz Markus takes obvious inspiration from Color Field painters such as Morris Louis in “The More I Revolt, the More I Make Love.” She creates several Rorschach-type images by pouring pigment onto an unprimed canvas. The psychedelic colors help reveal the long-haired, aviator sunglasses donning hippies that show up in several on the works, leaving the blobs less ambiguous.

I am often confused by the choice of galleries to show certain artists, as in Stephen Haller Gallery’s choice to show a solo exhibition of Nobu Fukui’s multi-colored, collage-paintings. “Looking Forward” consists of too many editions of the same polka-dotted mess. On one hand, at least the show is consistent, but on the other hand, why would anybody want to look at more than one of these pieces? Yes, it’s fun to find different comic book heroes hiding behind the many dots of color, but they are nothing more than an I-Spy game. It is an insult that these arts-n-crafty, questionable collages are compared to the likeness of Pollack.

While some shows bored me, others were quite enjoyable, such as the works in “Awakened” by David LaChapelle at the Tony Shafrazi gallery. It shouldn’t be too hard to curate a good show when you have a gallery space as superior as this one, and an artist with a body of work such as LaChapelle. When viewing the works, I always like to imagine the extensive behind-the-scenes effort put into each bizarre, staged scenario. In a work like his 23-foot long photograph, Deluge, a group of all ages, genders and race dramatically pose in the nude while grabbing onto each other or trying to attain something they can’t quite reach. The chaotic, yet somehow organized, arrangement brings to mind Géricault’s impressive composition in The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19). LaChapelle’s photographs are like guilty pleasures— you may feel uncomfortable by the pornographic nature and garish colors, but you can’t help but sneak a peek. Especially amusing are his digitally manipulated found photographs in the “Recollections in America” series. The party scenes of elderly women binge drinking with younger bell-bottom donning men, or parents pouring Kahlua into their apparently wasted toddler, just seem so unreal that they must be staged. However, the photo quality is of a past decade, leaving the viewer baffled as too how these situations ever came to take place.

Love/Hate Relationship

2007-06-28T20:37:00.000-04:00

Marnie Weber: Variations on a Western Song
Fredericks & Freiser

I simultaneously loved and hated Variations on a Western Song, a solo exhibition of new work by Marnie Weber, the notorious founder of the Spirit Girls. A mix of honky-tonk western and nightmare-circus, the fictional narrative the Weber creates is surreal and fantastical, and the group of five look-alike, animal-loving girls are downright creepy. I hated this show because when I walked in and saw blatantly horrible life-size clowns complete mutated rats through their heads, it only reinforced the irritating stereotype that contemporary art could just be the scene props in a horror movie. I loved it because there was something about the white-masked, longhaired Spirit Girls’ charm and naivety that made me smile, even though I tried to hide it. I hated this show because the elaborately developed narrative causes the viewer to find it impossible to understand the artist’s seemingly pretentious thought process in the creation of the work. Each apparently random oddity of a collage or sculpture showed up in another piece in the show. It is nice to have a show where certain elements are deliberate, and each character ties together. This is what I loved the most; the exhibition’s theme was coherent and well-connected, and every element comes together in the culminating piece, Weber’s 16mm Spirit Girls film, “A Western Song.” While the viewer sits on haystacks, this film elaborates on the fantasy world of the Spirit Girls: humans with animal heads and mystical creatures follow these girls through a world of rich colors, droning music, and not-so-ordinary events.

Rudolf Stingel

2007-06-27T21:40:00.000-04:00

This entry was written for Flavorpill NYC, to preview a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, from NYC Issue #368 from nyc.flavorpill.net.

After upholstering Grand Central's Vanderbilt Hall in a blue-rose carpet in 2004, Rudolf Stingel returns for a 20-year retrospective showcasing his conceptual investigation into what constitutes a painting. Using unexpected, construction-grade materials, Stingel presents artworks that fit the formal characteristics of abstract painting, but are more like relief sculptures. His jaggedly carved pink insulation foam pieces proclaim their physical presence without surrendering their elegant design. For another Styrofoam series, Stingel dipped his shoes in acid and walked across the white surface, leaving the impression of his path. As interested in audience participation as he is in his own, Stingel encourages the viewer to scratch into a wall of silver insulation board, giving everyone a chance to leave their mark.

- AS

Feminism for the 21st Century

2007-06-22T01:30:00.000-04:00

Global Feminisms: Brooklyn Museum

Feminist art is a heavily argued topic in countless critiques and conversations around the art community — How do we distinguish between feminist art, art made by women, art about women, and art with a feminine quality. Why is it that most art made by women, with a feminine quality, is labeled feminist? A piece of art made by a man can be feminine (i.e., pink, frilly, sewed, crocheted), but is it possible for a man to create a feminist piece of art? This summer the Brooklyn Museum takes a look at how feminism has become a major trend found it art all around the world, and treats it as a global issue. It occurs in every country around the world, and sometimes it seems to make a stronger impact when a woman lets her voice out visually, rather than manifested through writing. Global Feminisms presents an impressive collection of present & future feminist artwork by women artists born since 1960. The first wave of feminist art (that is, was labeled as an artistic feminist movement) emerged during the 1970s, but this exhibition showcases only work made since 1990 — an investigation into what represents the feminist art theory today. The show is divided into four themes: life cycles, identities, politics, and emotions. "Life Cycles" takes a look at major milestones in a woman’s life: childhood, puberty, sexual development, marriage, birth, nursing, age, and death. Artists question their roles in society as women in the “Identities” section, while others see themselves playing a larger role in the “Politics” section. The “Emotions” section examines fear, love, happiness, pleasure, anger, and other sentiments experienced in the life of a women, as well as a man. The entire show is built around Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, as it recently found its permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum this year.

A major theme in feminist art has involved an attempt to “take the body back” from the male’s gaze. In effect, there are many representations and interpretations of the body, mostly female, in this exhibition. Jenny Seville’s Fulcrum is all about the body: the enormous canvas just barely fits the three mammoth female bodies stacked on top of one another inside its parameters. The artist mastered the pale peaches, mute blues, and deep reds of the bodies with oil paint, and renders the painting with an intense sensation of fleshiness, and of the weight of the bodies piled together. Rather than beautifying the bodies, Seville emphasizes their grotesque nature. The photograph Venus Baartman by Tracey Rose, is a celebration of the female African-American body, emphasizing its strength and beauty rather than objectifying it, like men did with the original Venus Hot’n’Tot in the early 19th century, whose voluptuous curves were viewed as a freak show.

The “Emotions” section of this show consists mostly of video installations; maybe this was the best way to get their message across, but it surprises me that, being artistically creative, more of the show’s participants weren’t able to get an emotional message across visually. Although, most of the artworks, including the paintings, sculpture, and photography from other sections, do emit an emotional resonance. Of note in the “Emotions” section is Love, a video-montage by Tracey Moffatt of joyous, ecstatic, love scenes from various classic romance films that quickly change into scenes showing the other side of love’s emotions: that of anger, jealously, and rage. The words coming out of these timeless characters’ mouths seamlessly transition from “you’re beautiful” to “you whore.” The video bitterly observes the up and downs of the wonderful/terrible emotion of love.

The most interesting sections of this show and also the only sections containing clear feminist — or feminine — work, are “Life Cycles” and “Identities.” “Identities” concentrates on how different women artists in this show view themselves, and their roles within their family, friends, community, and society. There are several photographic pieces where the artist is commenting on the physical appearance of a woman: Cass Bird’s I Look Just Like My Daddy is a simple image an androgynous looking child — it is not clear if it is a photograph of a boy or a girl. Oreet Ashery dresses up in her alter ego of an Orthodox Jewish man, although she exposes her breast in order to reveal that she is a woman, as seen in Self-Portrait of Marcus Fischer I. Latifa Kahch modestly poses in a sexless outfit with an expressionless face in her Pin-Up (Self-Portrait). Julika Rudelius captures an ironic juxtaposition the typical stereotype that women are narcissistic and obsessed with their appearance in her video installation, Tagged. She documents a group of young men trying on their newly bought, designer label clothes while they talk about the brands they like, how much they spent on their designer clothes, and how important their appearance is to them. This piece shows how both men and women worry about their looks, and how physical appearance may affect their identities.

Of the four themes in the show, “Politics” was the smallest and the least interesting —a feeble attempt to round up the number of the sections. All of the works contained a political message, but none of them were clearly feminist, they were not even clearly personal. However, the artists may have seen a reflection of themselves through a bigger, societal picture. One of the walls is covered with what appears to be a simple wallpaper design, but with a closer look, Parastou Forouhar’s Thousand and One Day reveals that the tiny, delicately rendered figures are participating in torturous acts of violence. These acts that took place in Iran illustrate scenes such as Forouhar’s parents’ assassination by the Iranian Secret Service, making this work both deeply personal and political, but not feminist. On another note, Rebecca Belmore’s video/performance, The Named and Unnamed, is an example of why many associate negative or annoyed connotations with performance and/or feminist art. Belmore performs on a street corner in an area of Vancouver where nearly 50 women have been abducted. During an overdramatic, I-am-woman-hear-my-voice performance, the artist proceeds to scream out names that are written all over her arms, while eating thorned roses, with no lack of theatrical pauses for suspense. This piece earns an “over-the-top feminist” stamp, along with Priscilla Monge’s Room for Isolation and Restraint, in which she creates a solitary room insulated from top to bottom in sanitary napkins.

As a whole, these pieces work together to create an exhibition about feminism, but many individual artworks do not immediately jump out as a feminist piece. The exhibition is jam-packed with talented women artists, with a variety of styles, approaches, and media. The show is tolerable, without too many in-your-face feminist pieces. In fact, if anything, this exhibition shows that feminism is not limited to issues exclusively about women. In the future, it may not just be women giving birth and maternally tending to our children: Hiroko Okada imagines pregnant males in Future Plan #2, and Patricia Piccinni realistically depicts a female baboon nursing a human infant in Big Mother. Feminist art today is not as radical, or harsh as it had been originally in the ‘70s; Global Feminisms shows that feminist art no longer requires spreading blood all over your body, burning bras, or imagery that looks suspiciously like female genitalia. It varies upon the artist whether they take a soft-hands or a harsh approach into getting their message out, as is the same with all art.

Linder

2007-06-20T22:18:00.000-04:00

This entry is taken from NYC Issue #367 from nyc.flavorpill.net. This is my first published review/"snippet" at a web-magazine.

A product of the rebellious Manchester rock-music scene of the early '80s, Linder Sterling displays her sexually explicit collages and drawings that question consumer culture and feminine sexuality. In the Pretty Girl series, nude women modestly pose in the privacy of their domestic abodes with binoculars, cameras, and various voyeuristic tools for heads, leaving viewers to contemplate who really possesses the gaze. In her Star series, Linder collages colorfully saturated flowers over the heads of X-rated women. A scratchy video of Linder performing at the Hacienda Club with her post-punk band Ludus catches her in fabulous 1982 fashion. (AS)

Waste of Space

2007-06-12T10:35:00.000-04:00

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center- Summer Program 2007

After trekking out to Long Island City to visit the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, I was thoroughly impressed with the space, and totally disappointed at the art on view. The building, a former school, offers large spaces with creaky-wood floors that work well for large pieces, and smaller, more private rooms for intimate displays. Being the first to arrive for the day, I have to admit it was somewhat frightening walking around in this vast, empty building surrounding by mess-with-your-mind contemporary art. There was an eerie quality about the dark corridors, low ceilings, hidden passageways, and the buzzing of flies coming from who knows where. I’m sure a horror-movie like scenario has happened in this building in the past; it’s too creepy to have a squeaky clean history.

Once I was done exploring the basement of the building, I eventually found that all the flies were coming from Tunga’s Laminated Souls, exhibiting a room with two oversized yellowing-lamps, with a mesh cage containing thousands of flies. The noise of their hard-working wings is amplified, and the insects seem large than life as their shadows are projected all over the walls. The rest of his show, including At the Light of Both Worlds, has this macabre quality to it. I’m so over this life-and-death, straight out of an insect-themed horror movie quality. Especially the flies, Hirst already took care of that task.

Moving on through the galleries, Organizing Chaos, an exhibition featuring video and sound installations by artists such as Robert Smithson and Bruce Nauman, is a collective waste of space. These huge exhibitions spaces are wasted on separate rooms dedicated to one image, one screen, or one sound. Another wasted effort is spent on a show featuring work from 1963-1977 by minimalist (?), abstract expressionist (?), folk-artist (?), Peter Young. This show merits an “oh please, give me a break!” I was thoroughly annoyed with its crafty bead necklaces placed in display cases, minimalist polka dot paintings, and abstract splatter paintings with no coherent color scheme. Sure, the curators succeeding in showing the experimental, artistic range of Young over his years of living in New York and being a nomad with no studio, but something about the show just irked me. I felt as though each minimalist painting, each grid, and each splatter painting that he created was a copy of somebody else’s technique.

Throughout the rest of the space, I didn’t see any show that struck me as unique, special, or worth a solo show in New York, the center of the art world. Molly Larkey’s rainbow colored, childish sculptures appear to be paper-mâché pieces left out to dry from my 1st grade art class. If not, these Believers should be made into fountains to be placed outside the Pompidou in Paris. Prema Murthy’s scribbled, geometric, apparently arbitrary line drawings probably have some sort of order behind them. However, they are nothing original, and I have to tag her show, Fuzzy Logic, as a “seen-it-before”.

As if I wasn’t disappointed enough with the exhibitions on display this summer, I had to come across Jim Shaw’s Donner Party. His idea is obviously loosely based off of Judy Chicago’s feminist shrine, The Dinner Party, and he miserably failed. Shaw should be embarrassed for trying to build off of the idea of previous work that, unlike his disorganized eyesore, was successfully executed. I thought that maybe this was a masculine version of Chicago’s tribute to historically significant women, but it is instead a fantastical tribute to a fictional cult, and seems to have nothing to do with the tragic cannibalistic tale of the pioneering Donner party. This show is too complicated, to weird, and too disjointed. The excessive symbolism is just too much for me to even want to spend the time to understand. Taking up almost the entire 3rd floor, this is another waste of space in a building that has potential to display great artwork, if only the curators can get their act together.

Metalhead

2007-06-07T22:49:00.000-04:00

Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years
The Museum of Modern Art

For his a survey of forty years of sculpture making, Richard Serra goes big at the MoMA this summer. With a combination of small and large scale, and early and new pieces, Serra’s impossibly balanced sculpture demands attention from museum visitors: three whole floors of it. Serra’s early, smaller works from 1966-86 occupy the sixth floor exhibition space, two steel large scale works lay claim to the sculpture garden, and three new pieces created for this exhibition dominate the second floor of the MoMA. Maybe it’s the intimidating steel medium, or the huge magnitude of the sculpture, or probably the questionable, but surely balanced angles from which they stand: but as I walk through the exhibition, I can help but cringe in anticipation for the loud, crashing bang of a heavy chunk of steel falling over.

Even though the steel has a cold, unwelcoming manner, his large-scale pieces invite viewer participation. Like a Barnett Newman painting, the new works seem to engulf or overcome the viewer with their size and dizzying contours, and they are large enough to overwhelm all peripherals. I cannot stress enough the remarkable measure that the MoMA, and the curator of this exhibition Lynne Cooke, must have taken to install this show. This show is truly a curatorial spectacle. Planning, manufacturing the solid steel pieces, assembly, and installation of these massive structures must have been as difficult as pushing an elephant through a mouse hole. The installation process for the 2006 pieces Sequence, Band, and Torqued Torus Inversion must have been extremely expensive, complicated, but also well organized and successful. As impressive as the works are themselves, the curatorial and installation process of this show is a notable feat itself.

Photograph as Idea

2007-06-07T20:53:00.000-04:00

CONCEPTUAL PHOTOGRAPHY 1964-1989
Zwirner & Wirth

Conceptual artists explore the idea that lay behind creating a work of art, rather than producing a visually pleasing outcome. The newest exhibition at the Zwirner & Wirth gallery proves that even this critical, philosophical approach creates art that is fun to look at and entertaining to discover the artist’s complicated, or almost humorous straightforward approach. This exhibition featuring alternative photographic techniques such as photo-emulsion processes and screen prints is playful, and sure to leave you stifling back a chuckle in the gallery while imagining the artists thought process. Whether it is Nauman experimenting with the different shapes his mouth can make, Acconci narrating exactly what the photography shows, or Ray pinning himself up against a wall with a Serra-like prop piece, the works’ narratives are almost always absolutely absurd, but ambiguous in their attempt at revealing or perhaps concealing underlying truths or philosophies.

Conceptual artists are playful and mischievous: only these minds can create minimalist artwork derived from complex thought processes, or detailed executions with banal ideas lying behind the image. King of Conceptual Art, Sol Lewitt, shows an example of the former in Brick Wall. The two images seem too simple to really be the same image, leaving the viewer to carefully examine the details to find something to set the two apart. An example of the latter characteristic can be seen in Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, a “duh”, almost sarcastic, photograph by Dennis Oppenheim.

A highlight of the show is the combination of both staged, theatrical scenes, and documented photographs of conceptual performances or happenings. There are dollhouse-like scenarios of tiny people gallery openings, carpet shops made of deli meat, and itty-bitty matchbox car collisions. On the other hand, there is also real photographic documentation of performances from Fluxus, Actionist, and Conceptual movements from artists such as Carolee Schneeman, Gilbert & George, and Bruce Nauman.

Mass Photography

2007-06-06T22:47:00.000-04:00

Andreas Gursky
Matthew Marks Gallery

For the artist’s fifth time showing at the Matthew Marks gallery since 1997, photographer Andreas Gursky presents twelve large-scale color photographs that, in usual-Gursky manner, succeed in wowing the viewer with their awe-inspiring qualities. In his visually complex, cleverly executed photographs, Gursky comments on the mass population of the world, drawing attention to the enormous magnitude of industry, urban sprawl, mass media, mass culture, and technology in the modern age. For this new series, he traveled across Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East to capture subjects ranging from ancient and modern marvels of the world, Formula One racing, and a mass sporting events.

Gursky’s work often emphasizes the repetition and seriality of supermarkets, super malls, and super-attractions: the world affected by mass-production, consumer culture, and the outcomes of touristic production and construction. The James Bond Island series is a change of pace from his usual scenes of skyscrapers, stock markets, or crowded supermarket aisles. It is an unexpected surprise to see a Gursky series depicting a beautiful, serene landscape of a chain of volcanic islands located off the coast of Thailand. However, upon closer inspection, the viewer is able to make out tiny vacation homes on the shores of these islands, and several boats meandering through the calm waters, spoiling the “serene landscape” altogether.

An obvious strong point in his work is in the impressive, complex organization of large crowds for his subjects, of the same magnitude of mass gatherings conducted by American photographer, Spencer Tunick (except in Gursky’s case, they are fully clothed). Besides this striking characteristic, perhaps the most impressive part of his work is the all-over detail of his large-scale color photographs, and the impossible angles from which he shoots. In Pyongyang I and IV, depicting a huge gymnastics event in Korea called the “Mass Games”, it is hard to tell if the nearly 10,000 gymnasts and children are posing exclusively for Gursky’s camera, or if he just happened to capture an already-existing performance with perfect light and composition. If so, then this German photographer is one lucky shutterbug! The dizzying angle from which he captured Bahrain I, a Formula One racing track in the middle of a desert, causes the viewer loses all perspective. From where are we viewing this? From a tower or a helicopter? From land or from above? Is this digitally manipulated, or is this a no frills photograph? To add to this visual confusion, there are no noticeable shadows, even though it is clearly a very sunny desert day. This is an example of how Gursky’s works necessitates further inspection for details, and often a second glance. In forces the viewer to ponder “is this real or not? Does this place and time really exist?”

Although ten-foot tall large-scale photographs characterize this exhibition, along with most of Gursky’s work, I can’t help but wonder how these works would work on a smaller scale. Would the impact be different? Would they be more or less dramatic? Would they carry an entirely different message? That is for the viewer to decide.

Showing for the fifth time at this gallery, Gursky is obviously a very accomplished and talented photographer, whose work always generates respect and admiration from the viewer. I have always imagined a whole production team behind the scenes of his work to help with the organization of subjects, lighting, and very often, somebody who has access to a helicopter or plane. However he does it, there must be a lot more involved than just a simple click of the shutter-button.

SubRosa

2007-06-03T10:43:00.000-04:00

Cornelia Renz: SubRosa
Goff & Rosenthal

Sub Rosa is a Latin term meaning confidentiality, and is also the title of the latest Cornelia Renz show at the Goff & Rosenthal Gallery NY. These multi-layered, transparent hybrid drawings & paintings shown certainly contain no notion of secrecy, and they rather are on view and unrestricted. Following the contemporary trend of fantasy scenes of pre-pubescent children boldly frolicking through Arcadian scenery, Renz illustrates the highly-provocative, highly-sexualized life of young, ayrian children when left alone in the a world of delicate lines and blossoming flowers.

Look a Little Closer: An Evening at Yvon Lambert NY

2007-05-31T22:59:00.000-04:00

Thursday, May 31 was the opening night for Yvon Lambert New York's newest exhibitions, showing both large scale painting by Puerto Rican artist Melvin Martinez and illusionistic sculpture by Okinawa-born Kaz Oshiro. The two exhibitions are oddly paired in the same gallery, and seem to have nothing to do with each other except for the fact that they both contain hidden elements, once you look a little bit closer.

I have to admit, I came for the Oshiro pieces, and I was not immediately impressed by Martinez’s display of paintings, Fresh Paint. These 8 large-scale paintings combine hideous mixtures of oil & acrylic paint, confetti, glitter, and other toys taken out from any young girl’s dress up collection. At first, they just look like a colored rubber ball from the 25-cent bubble machine ate too many gumballs and vomited glitter beads. However, being a young girl once myself, I was attracted to the pretty colors and shiny objects. Upon further inspections of the canvases, I began to find little toys hidden within the ridiculously thick layers of paint (which, fitting with the title, will probably stay wet for many years): necklaces, marbles, plastics flowers, and toy butterflies. It creates a playful game of Eye Spy, and the viewer is able to discover all sorts of objects hidden in the thick swirls of paint. Before moving on to the next room, I stood back to observe the largest canvas, and obvious focal point titled, “The Enchanted Garden.” With it’s flowery palette, ephemeral brushstroke qualities, and massive horizontal canvas, I was able to walk away from this exhibition satisfied in the fact that a contemporary artist could reproduce “Water Lilies” by Monet, while keeping their own artistic voice (even if it did look like Pretty Pretty Princess Puke).

On an entirely different note, and just around the wall, was Oshiro’s latest installment. At first the viewer may wonder if they are encountering another one of those so-called found-objects pieces they’ve heard so much about in the contemporary art scene. However, after taking a closer look and reading a few labels, the viewer will discover that the unmistakable microwave sitting on the floor is actually an illusion. Using materials such as canvas, wood, paint, and bondo, the artist painstakingly copies the original object, and recreates uncanny reproductions of quotidian objects at exact scale. Rather than pictoral illusionism, popular in centuries of painting, Oshiro is able to present a sculptural illusionism. I came to the show with full knowledge of his trickery, but was still impressed and almost didn’t believe that I wasn’t actually ogling over a real Fender amp.

Even though the wine is gone after the opening reception, the crowds are gone too, and the art is still there. The two artists shown together create an anomalous relationship between the two shows, but they can both stand on their own. Fresh Paint is very in-your-face with its Lisa Frank trapper-keeper colors, but is enjoyable in the paintings' hidden treasures. Oshiro’s work is simple, but not straightforward. It requires the viewer’s keen eye, and his recreations would be hard to distinguish from the real object were it not for their hollow, artist’s-secret-revealing backsides.