For ‘Flash Art’ magazine Nan Goldin, Simon and Jessica, faces lit from behind, Paris 2000, Cibachrome, 76 x 100cm, Courtesy Matthew Marks
“Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me,” moaned Bjork as 245 slides of loving and lounging couples flashed by. Titled ‘Heartbeat,’ this slide show included many of the images displayed in the gallery and was the centerpoint of Nan Goldin’s fifth solo exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery. The music, based on a Greek Orthodox mass, sung in Bjork’s raw voice, seemed like a cry from the heart, as natural and passionate as the lovemaking of Goldin’s friends.
As she ages, Goldin’s subjects remain young. Simon and Jessica, a sugary sweet young couple, who look and often pose like models, are the subject of a steamy shower scene. Clem and Jens star in a huge, nine panel sex scene. But couples with kids take over the show, with children often joining in post-coital cuddling. Goldin remains focused on documenting her adopted ‘family’ but in the year of her fiftieth birthday, she seems intent on reexamining the traditional, if somewhat updated, family unit.
for Centro de Arte de Salamanca, Spain. Torben Giehler, 'Circling Overland, 2002, Acrylic on Canvas, 244 x 305cm
“Experiencing nature was not enough, so we sought to understand it. Understanding nature was not enough, so we seek to control it. Controlling nature was not enough so we seek to enhance it. Enhancing nature was not enough, so we seek to reproduce it. Reproducing nature is not enough, so we seek to replace it. These are all human pursuits, but it’s only through digitization that we are able, now, to take them to their ultimate conclusion.”
Richard DeGrandpre
“Simply put, the inhabited grid has become the irreducible sign of the world we live in today.”
Dan Cameron
Below his seat, the ground begins to tremble. A roar fills his ears and suddenly, he is pinned to his seat as the aircraft gains momentum and lifts into the air. Cruising at altitude, the plane tilts to the right and left, making minor course adjustments as tiny earth whizzes by in a blur below. Torben Giehler’s landscapes are a view from the cockpit. High above the ground, civilization turns into a patchwork of color featuring an occasional boxy piece of architecture or globe-topped communications tower. In the distance, mountain ranges come into view, their craggy peaks still too far away to awe us with their scale. Each painting is a challenge to the gravity that keeps us tethered to earth and the limitations of our physical bodies. Like flight simulation computer games, they fulfill a simultaneous fantasy of escape from and dominance over the landscape. But their effect is physical, and viewers are propelled forward into Giehler’s brave new world.
It’s unclear how high above the planet we are in these paintings, but one thing is certain – there are no ant-like people or tiny farmhouses visible at this altitude. In ‘Circling Overland’ (2002), the plane flies over a landscape dominated by a white grid and swoops down to the left so that the horizon nearly disappears into a wedge at the top of the canvas. The painting shares a title with a song by the Belgian electro-music band Front 242, which describes a midnight surveillance flight over Western Europe. The year is 2029 and intelligent robots do the bidding of their military commanders by monitoring the activities of humans below them. Two paintings with a similar composition, ‘Bad redandblue’ (2002), and ‘Night Train’ (2002), feature layers of blue and purple sky hovering over an ominous, blood red horizon. Suddenly, we’re in the future, we’re being watched, and we don’t know what’s coming next.
Not all of these flights are night missions, however. One of Giehler’s trademarks is his use of bright colors that neutralize the darker edge of the digitally enhanced world he depicts. ‘Ziplock’ (2002), for example, is a spaghetti junction of thick, overlapping lines in orange, green and white. As if Barnett Newman’s famous ‘zips’ have gathered for a party, the grid has loosened up and lines overlap at random. ‘Push’ (2003) is a crazy quilt of distorted rectangles each pulling down toward the bottom left of the canvas. Although it has spatial distortions similar to Giehler’s aerial views, there is no horizon and the sunny yellows, peppy oranges and pinks, and mellow blues and greens are the subject of the painting. The pattern resembles the patchwork of colors that underlies the white grid in ‘Circling Overland,’ suggesting that this painting is a partial view of the larger piece. ‘Ziplock,’ may look like a busy junction, but it also resembles fibers under a microscope, magnified to reveal the component parts of a larger structure. If ‘Circling’ is an aerial overview from a surveillance flight, ‘Ziplock’ and ‘Push’ are the data gathered, snapshots taken by a zoom lens.
Whether the perspective is micro or macro, Giehler’s pixilated aesthetic is familiar to anyone who has used a CAD program, played a combat video game, seen flight simulation or watched a manga cartoon character fly through a futuristic city. Computer mediated reality and virtual reality, less common in painting, permeates daily life. The ubiquitous grids that lie over the surface of the earth in the paintings are a visible manifestation of the ever-expanding web of human communication accessible through the Internet, e-mail, cell phones, satellite beams and TV signals. So while Giehler might, through Front 242’s lyrics, envision a futuristic race of free thinking machines serving man as they cruise the airspace, his paintings are resolutely set in the present. Hidden communications networks are made visible, but these webs exist now and deny his work the designation ‘futuristic.’
During the last century, artists were no strangers to scientific progress, sometimes adapting the latest findings in their artwork. The Impressionists’ daubs of paint and the Cubists’ fractured picture planes occurred in tandem with scientific advances in understanding the structure of reality. But while the Futurists, for example, were in awe of the material world, others like Kandinsky and Mondrian investigated a way to communicate the unseen, spiritual structures that they felt dominated life. By elaborating these hidden relationships in line and color, Mondrian set a precedent for artists like Giehler, who depict the invisible, wireless world. Mondrian’s unfinished, final painting, ‘Victory Boogie Woogie,’ (1944) is a tribute to his intoxication by the energy of wartime New York, and his continuing meditation on the meaning embedded in his grids. Giehler quotes Mondrian in his own ‘Boogie Woogie’ (1999) and a similar piece titled ‘Yeah, Yeah, Yeah’ (2002). Each is a painting within a painting – a close-up on the surface of a gridded canvas. Like Mondian’s, Giehler’s lines resemble a circuit board, broken up by squares of color that give the composition the energy of a dance step and the speed of a microprocessor.
Circuit boards, microprocessors and the Internet may be the innovations of the present day, but they’re also the platform for tomorrow’s advanced technology. Giehler references both present and future in every image. With one foot in fact and one foot in science fiction, the artist reminds us that the difference between reality and virtual reality is sometimes one of perspective. By painting specific places, like ‘Lhotse’ (2002) and ‘K2-North Spur’ (2002), Giehler counters the anonymity of his other landscapes. Titled or not, the mountain paintings suggest real places, whether they are laid over with a patchwork of light and shade, as in ‘Untitled’ (2002) or bask in the setting sun, as in ‘Untitled (Brown)’ (2002). Side by side on the wall, mountains and vast planes push and pull the viewer between the present and the future, the real and the virtual. But what is specific to the mountain pictures and particularly the Himalayas, are their identity as a final frontier for adventurers who pit their strength and wits against Nature. They symbolize the last remaining real life challenge to human dominance of the planet.
As our communities become increasingly virtual, when we can shop, pay bills and do our banking on line and then take a break to converse in chat rooms or e-mail a friend, convenience increases alongside impersonality. The premise for Giehler’s paintings, visions from the air, posits the lone individual against the masses below. The pilot whose viewpoint we share has broken free from his fellows and speeds through the atmosphere alone, a free agent. Below him, the grid remains in force, but unable to extend its grip to his freewheeling ship. Inevitably, the pilot must sooner or later return to his rightful place and whatever mediated version of reality he inhabits. As he descends back into the colorful architecture of the ‘Downtown’ series (2001), he resumes his participation in the dream that is progress, still a citizen of a cyberspace that is, “…a conscious reflection of the deepest desires, aspirations, experiential yearning and spiritual Angst of Western man.”
For ‘Art on Paper’ Magazine Michael Ashkin, Untitled (NJ Meadowland Project) Gelatin silver prints (dimensions of grid variable; detail # 6, 4 x 10 in.). 2000-01. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery
Michael Ashkin might agree with the New Jersey Tourist Board’s claim that the state is, “America the Beautiful, only smaller,” but his idea of beauty is found in the desolate landscape around chemical plants, truck yards and industrial compounds. Last year, he tramped through the undergrowth and slipped under fences to create a monumental photographic series based on the Meadowlands. Developed for efficient production rather than human enjoyment, these active work environments are so perfectly ugly that they challenge the notion of a ‘beautiful’ outdoor environment. Exploring the gritty side of the industrial aesthetic, Ashkin also traveled to the old mining town of Butte, Montana and locations in and around Palm Springs, California, producing eight photographic series for his third solo show at Andrea Rosen Gallery.
‘Meadowlands,’ is a group of 133 black and white photographs that was commissioned by Documenta XI. Presented in a compact grid, the photos formed one large composite that simulated the experience of seeing the Meadowlands as a series of glances from the Turnpike. Most photographs documented traces of a still active human presence: a memorial on a chain-link fence, a graffiti covered wall and a careful arrangement of truck storage containers along a canal. By contrast, the Butte series was a vision of advanced industrial decline. Shot on a hill near an abandoned pit mine, Ashkin’s subjects include a rusting basketball backboard, cracked building foundations and a lonesome bench next to an empty, six lane highway. Occasional disused mines appear in this series, but the focus is on the dilapidated housing and barren landscape of a dying neighborhood. Several shots were taken in or near the artist’s car, suggesting that he, too, would soon make his getaway.
In “Notes Toward Desolation,” a text recording Ashkin’s thoughts on post-industrial landscape, the artist characterizes Butte, the Meadowlands and Palm Springs as places where “…the frenzy of consumption has exhausted itself….” As a consequence, property owners make little effort to conform to landscaping ideals, ironically making these places attractive to the artist for what he calls their, “absence of false beauty.” The Meadowlands photographs document two worlds: one populated by truck drivers and gas station attendants by day, and one in which vandals and joyriders leave evidence of their activities under cover of night. Unlike Butte, which is desolate day or night, the Meadowlands series challenges viewers to see these landscapes not as industrial wastelands, but as sites free from rules imposed by urban planners and the arm of the law.
For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine Sanford Biggers, They Wants to Join You, 2002, Mixed Media on Steel, Double-sided
‘New Wave,’ a group show curated by Franklin Sirmans, inaugurated Kravets/Wehby’s new gallery space last December. Still located on the same block of 21st Street in Chelsea, the formerly closet-like space has given way to a gallery big enough to accommodate large paintings by emerging artist Kehinde Wiley and expansive work on paper by William Cordova. Five other young artists with an urban sensibility rounded off what seemed like a mini-spin off of Sirman’s popular ‘One Planet Under a Groove’ exhibition at the Bronx Museum last year. Paying homage to an influential exhibition at PS1 in 1981, the show presented artwork indebted to hip hop music and culture with a focus on portraits. Iona Brown’s painting on a Japanese screen of a half Asian, half African woman with Louis Vuitton logos stamped across her skin complimented Kehinde Wiley’s painting of young man nearly swallowed up by his over inflated puffer jacket. Jeff Sonhouse painted two sharply dressed men whose faces, clothing and hair were created out of burnt matchsticks. Sanford Biggers altered an old army recruitment sign, one of the first to feature an African-American man, to read as a statement of inclusion and exclusion, while pieces by William Cordova and Luis Gispert speak to a fascination with boomboxes and turntables, the instruments of DJ culture. Set to the beat of a sound installation by DL Language/Josh Taylor, the exhibition smartly mixed admiration of and critique of hip hop culture.
For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine Jay Davis, It's time to leave, 2002. Acrylic on canvas, 137 x 183cm
Photons blast into a menacing blob, a rock monster stalks his terrain, and two otherworldly demigods, only their faces visible, square off in a bloody battle. Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic in six new paintings with Davis’ signature blend of hard edge abstraction and sci-fi menace. Davis’ abstract patterns are so dynamic that they lend themselves to a narrative, aided by the painting’s suggestive titles and the recognizable, figurative elements.
In ‘I Think It’s Time to Leave,’ a goofy looking figure of a goat’s head with blindfolded, gem shaped eyes and a flame coming out from under his chin seems to blast off from a ground composed of various geometric patterns. Splatterings of blood red paint dot the patterns, suggesting violence even if it’s not obvious what might have happened. This painting, with its clear differentiation between ground and sky, is one of the few that connects these paintings to Davis’ early work. ‘Who’s Asking Questions,’ on the other hand, enters a whole new dimension of space, with a mirrored ‘v’ shape dividing the canvas between top and bottom. A mask-like face dominates each sphere. Above, an indistinct, oval shaped face, outlined in wavy blue and red lines and framed by what looks like bloody gashes, peers down at a second visage, this one with distinct features composed of clear lines.
It’s unclear why these Janus faces are locked in confrontation, but this feeling of conflict comes across in nearly all of the new work. It’s a fight that seems to extend to the composition of the paintings themselves. As if from the tightly controlled blocks of seemingly random patterning, the creatures have managed to wrench themselves free, allowing abstraction and representation to go to war against each other. Under the spidery trace of a psychedelic, tie-died snowflake pattern that appears in some variation at least once in every painting, Davis expands to a cosmic stage where the fundamental oppositions of painting can battle it out alongside other masters of the universe.
