Tag: photography

Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins

For ‘Art on Paper’ Magazine

Kara Walker ‘Search for ideas supporting the Black Man as a work of Modern Art/Contemporary Painting.  A death without end:  an appreciation of the Creative Spirit of Lynch Mobs’ 2007 Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Co.
Kara Walker ‘Search for ideas supporting the Black Man as a work of Modern Art/Contemporary Painting. A death without end: an appreciation of the Creative Spirit of Lynch Mobs’, 2007, Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Co.
Kara Walker, Bureau of Refugees: Bob Foreman cut at Union Springs, 2007
Kara Walker, Bureau of Refugees: Bob Foreman cut at Union Springs, 2007

By the time Kara Walker’s first full scale American museum survey arrived at the Whitney Museum from the Walker Art Center last fall, a wave of press coverage, including feature articles in the New Yorker and Art in America, made it the must-see show of the season. But it was the fifty-two-panel, handwritten text in Walker’s simultaneous downtown gallery show that deserved the attention.  Flanked by smaller works in her signature cut-paper style illustrating atrocities committed against freedmen after the Civil War, the enormous text installation, with an equally expansive title (Search for ideas supporting the Black man as a work of modern art/contemporary painting; a death without end, an an appreciation of the creative spirit of lynch mobs), stood out for its sheer unornamented rawness—no illustrations, just scribbled handwriting—and its scathing references to U.S. military action in the Middle East.

Since the mid-nineties, Walker’s silhouettes, paintings, videos, and projections have consistently conjured imagery of the Old South in abject yet clearly readable scenes of violence and sexual subjugation. When she used text, it was written in what could plausibly be the artist’s own perspective or that of an alter ego. Her more recent text-based work (since 2002) adopts a range of voices—anthropologist, slave, contemporary middle class African-American.

Search for Ideas is an even more cacophonous brew of observations and perspectives. Here, Walker explores the potential analogy between racist attitudes in America and those perpetuated by Americans overseas in texts that refer to Saddam Hussein as a “porch monkey” or Arabs as  “sand niggers.”  Under the rubric of aggressor and complicit victim, the text details rapes and torture, proffers that black soldiers are willing Klansmen and asks, in the face of global jihad, “how can colored folks get on the winning side w/o giving up their hard-won right to jeans that fit…” Because the fifty-four parts are hung cheek-to-jowl and there is no obvious sequencing, it is unclear whether one is supposed to read them left-to-right, or top-to-bottom.

Likewise, the show’s small cut-paper works and large-scale collages on panels lack clear storylines, such as ReConstruction (2007), a decorative mélange of floating silhouetted heads over a background of post-9/11 New York Times ads offering condolences.

From Richard Serra’s 2005 poster recreating a scene from Abu Ghraib to Jenny Holzer’s presentation of declassified documents pertaining to military bungles in Iraq, among many other examples, Walker is not alone in using her artistic platform to protest U.S. foreign policy. Yet Search for Ideas seems uniquely geared to offend and disturb by its graphic descriptions of violation, its willingness to lay blame all around, and its success at tapping another well of middle-class guilt, this time over atrocities committed in the name of the American public. A schizophrenic toggle between individuals and nations, and between first and third person, makes for a confusing and overwhelmingly despairing indictment. However, as a grating tour de force of ugly truth, the piece is powerfully effective and makes a loud riposte to one text’s assertion that “Knowledge comes in the form of whispers of those in the know.”

News and Commentary: The More Things Change

For ‘Art on Paper’ Magazine

Aleksandra Mir, ‘Newsroom 1986-2000’, courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery
Aleksandra Mir, ‘Newsroom 1986-2000’, courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery

Visitors were in for a surprise at Mary Boone Gallery recently, when the normally frosty atmosphere was melted by the folksy artwork of artist Aleksandra Mir and her team of assistants. Music blared from a boom box, while collectors rubbed shoulders with young hipsters in what looked like an art studio. In a back office, cordoned off but publicly visible, Mir hand-copied onto huge sheets of paper the front pages from hometown tabloids the Post and the Daily News, dating from 1986 to 2000. When she was done, her drawings were transferred to the main gallery where a Sharpie-wielding team of young artists and students diligently filled in her outlines. All in all, some two-hundred drawings from approximately ten thousand front pages were generated.

Mir claimed that she couldn’t care less about the gallery’s newly congenial or keyed down ambience, saying, “That’s the subject that interests me the least. I’m not interested in institutional critique but in having been a citizen of this town.” Yes, it’s true that the project broadcast a fond nostalgia for the city that the Polish born, Sweden-raised artist recently left after a fifteen-year stay. In some the headlines emphasized the entertainment value of the New York tabloids: a ‘Burger Murder’ poisoning was treated with as much import as a ‘Milk War’ waged on grocery prices. In another group, the headlines were linked by money— ‘Killed for a Quarter’ and a $1.5 billion coke bust—highlighting one of the city’s fondest obsessions. Here was a city perpetually enchanted by the same recurring stories; the drawings seemed geared to prove the cliché, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Yet, the high-polish context begged otherwise, revealing instead just how much the art world had changed. The exodus of galleries from SoHo to Chelsea began during the period Mir examined and, in the opinion of many, precipitated a new fashion in art for work made on a scale and volume calculated to fill newly pristine and vast galleries, as well as an unprecedented alignment of real estate and art. By working in the gallery, Mir aimed to emphasize the fact that she never maintained a studio in New York, working instead without the need for one. But the effect was somewhat different, unintentionally acknowledging a situation whereby artists can no longer afford the city’s rents. Mir became the emblematic displaced artist of today, shunned not to the sidelines as in times past, but to center stage, a peripatetic entertainer in a theater of gold.

Cheryl Yun: ‘Recycling the News’

For Gallery 210 of the University of Missouri, St Louis

Shopping the Cheryl Yun Collection starts out fun but has a big catch. Apart from the fact that its stylish handbags, lingerie and swimwear look as though they belong in a high-end boutique but are meticulously crafted in delicate-looking paper, the subject matter is shocking. When curious ‘shoppers’ inspect the enticing goods more carefully, the kaleidoscopic patterning on each item turns out to be an abstracted image of war, natural disaster or another horrific event, setting up a bait and switch game that delivers not shopping pleasure but a jarring reminder of the coexistence of enjoyment and suffering. By implicating her audience’s desires as consumers and forcing a personal response to international events beyond the control of any individual, Yun’s faux fashion line shatters the status quo of daily life.

From the materials she uses to the themes she explores, constant contradictions force provocative connections where none were first apparent. Purses, underwear and the whole shopping experience itself is a decidedly female domain, but the images that adorn these objects refer to the traditionally male territory of war and politics. Sexy underthings may in themselves symbolize the dynamics of attraction between men and women, but these take the discussion about power relations to a new level. The gap between images of terror and female accessories would seem even harder to bridge, but Yun, who lived in New York at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attack, readily recalls former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s highly publicized suggestion that the best way to recover (and save the local economy from further damage) was to “go shopping.”

At the time, it may have been an exercise in civic duty to hit the stores, but with consumer spending making up the largest part of our GDP, Americans hardly need any extra incentives to shop. Yun’s project, whether replicating high-end clothing or the cheapest plastic shopping sacks, provokes questions about our appetite not just for things but for entertainment. “We consume imagery like we consume objects,” Yun explains. “Sitting down with the newspaper and a cup of coffee is a pleasure that many people, including me, enjoy, but actually involves reading about horrible things happening around the world.” Yun’s garments are not only intimate but force their imaginary owners to literally wear images of far away events next their skin suggesting false familiarity; like Yinka Shonibare’s Victorian costumes fashioned from traditional African fabrics, they reveal the ignorance at the core of cultural imperialism.

Yun is the first to admit her own role as consumer. Afterall, each bag or garment begins with a news photo from the New York Times or an Internet news source that caught her eye for its drama, compositional qualities or captivating story. To create a ‘fabric,’ she scans, manipulates and prints the image, carefully piecing multiple copies together into a seamless pattern. Early bags unambiguously reproduced disturbing news photos; the more recent series are less confrontational, dabbling in the potential beauty of particular forms, multiplied and mirrored with an abstract effect. But disguising the source image and adorning each item with delicate details, like smocking or tiny bows, makes it all the more chilling when a diving figure on a swimsuit materializes as a toppling statue of Saddam Hussein or it becomes clear that a lace pattern originated in an image of an explosion.

The title of each piece (always derived from the source newspaper’s image caption) helps give the game away by leading viewers to try to make out the original image and ensuring that provocation, though it may have grown less obvious, stays at the heart of Yun’s project. At its conception, CY Collection took as its vehicle what Yun calls “…the extreme commodity. If you’re going to buy just one thing, it’s going to be a handbag.” Fittingly, when her conceptual enterprise diversified to carry lingerie and swimwear, these items represented two other extremes: of femininity and of ideological martyrdom. Fascinated by stories of female suicide bombers, Yun researched the practicalities of concealing a weapon for attack. The resulting lingerie and swimwear morphs a purely utilitarian device for strapping on explosives with hidden support garments, resulting in a ramped up garment for traditional seduction and destructive power.

Since it was agreed in the 60s that the personal is political, conversation about sexuality and power have been closely linked. A garment like ‘Flyaway Babydoll with Suicide Hipsters I,’ (2005) decorated with pictures of flag bearing U.S. troops recalls the age-old appeal of a man in uniform to the girls back home (or in every port). But its source image – a photo from President Bush’s highly staged 2005 landing on an aircraft carrier –recalls how a celebration of bravado has become an impotent gesture in light of political instability in Iraq. One of Yun’s most striking pieces is also one of her most daring designs: ‘Halter Teddy with Suicide Belt’ (2004/05) features a text in Arabic behind a gunman and his kidnapped victim reproduced to make a beautiful, calligraphic pattern on the garment’s breast and hip area. Literally embodying opposite excesses of Western immodesty and of Islamic fundamentalism, the garment is itself embodies conflicting extremes.

Though contrast is central to Yun’s work, it is never crass. While artists like Thomas Hirschorn have notoriously appropriated unpublished images of the U.S. war in Iraq from the Internet, these displays are calculated purely to shock by their graphic depictions of brutality. Using images from major publications forces Yun to operate within their calculated standards of decorum, a decision that allows her imagery to be more than just alarming. Her work echoes the punch of Barbara Kruger’s cynical assertion, ‘I Shop, Therefore I Am’ or Jenny Holzer’s self-conscious plea to ‘Protect me from what I want.’ But Yun eschews an anonymous production style, instead offering abundant evidence of her own hand, whether it’s in CY Collection’s obviously hand drawn logo or an awkward length of cording on an individual garment. The approach keeps her project personal, giving credence to her claim that she’s exploring conflicts that she herself faces. That keeps us on her side as she brings a critique of consumer culture into the present day climate of anxiety – one in which images of far away disaster could suddenly loom much closer.

Don’t Miss: Chris Ofili

For many New Yorkers, Chris Ofili’s name will bring to mind the brou-ha-ha around his painting of the Virgin Mary supported by two clods of dried elephant dung, exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. Ofili’s choice of materials aimed to beg the question of what kind of art he should make as a Caribbean-British artist, a topic that he revisits in a show of new work at David Zwirner Gallery. A recent move to Trinidad appears to have influenced the subject matter and style of his recent paintings, with languid characters, intense colors and tropical landscapes making references to European masters like Gauguin and Matisse, who ventured abroad in search of the exotic. With several standout paintings and sculptures, Ofili peels back another layer of his complicated identity, making this the ‘don’t miss’ show of the moment.

For more information on Chris Ofili’s ‘Devil’s Pie’ exhibition, visit David Zwirner Gallery.

On the Horizon: Lower East Side

After two long years of itinerant existence, the New Museum of Contemporary Art is poised to open its brand new building at the intersection of Prince and Bowery on December 1st. Though noteworthy galleries have long called the Lower East Side home, the Museum’s move is boosting the neighborhood’s contemporary art cachet in a big way. Uptown galleries Salon 94 and Greenberg Van Doren have opened satellite spaces just around the corner, while galleries including 31 Grand, Envoy, Luxe and others have relocated from other parts of town to be part of the burgeoning scene. Tiny storefront spaces that are the opposite of Chelsea’s pristine white cubes make for an intimate and fresh art viewing experience while suggesting that the LES trend is one to watch.