Berlin-based artist Simon Fujiwara created this gender-reversing picture as part of a meandering investigation into a now-lost photo of his globe trotting, show-girl mother in the arms of a stranger on a beach in Beirut. With very little information to go on, Fujiwara goes on, casting actors to reconstruct the old photo while musing on family history. (At Chelsea’s Andrea Rosen Gallery through Aug 9th).
Detail from Simon Fujiwara’s exhibition ‘Studio Pieta (King Kong Komplex),’ at Andrea Rosen Gallery, July 2013.
‘You get to have your cake and eat it, too,’ explains experimental film and video artist Leslie Thornton in respect to her three-channel video, ‘Luna.’ Digital effects morph her subject, Coney Island’s historic Parachute Jump, into vibrant, kaleidoscopic forms that evoke different 20th century time periods, prompting us to question what it is that conjures the mood of a particular era. (At Chelsea’s Winkleman Gallery through June 22nd).
Leslie Thornton, Luna, three-channel HD video, 12 minutes, 2013.
Contrary to its title, there’s nothing particularly subversive about ‘Spies in the House of Art,’ the Metropolitan Museum’s enticingly titled exhibition of its contemporary photography collection, which opened yesterday. Photos, films and videos take museum display and visitor responses as subject matter, but the mood of the best pieces is more fond criticism than biting institutional critique. Still, by bringing the myriad ways we navigate the museum experience to our conscious mind, the show counteracts purely passive viewing pleasure.
A standout is Francesca Woodman’s 1980 ‘Blueprint for a Temple.’ Completed a year before her untimely death and marking a major shift from her small scale photos, this 15 foot high photo collage of a Greek temple supported by her friends dressed as caryatids and printed on blue architectural blueprint paper playfully remakes ancient culture while forces a connection between past and present that resonates with the Met’s newly crafted Moroccan court.
The show’s second major highlight, Rosalind Nashashibi’s and Lucy Skaer’s 16mm film ‘Flash in the Metropolitan Museum’ from 2006 was shot at night with a flash strobe as the artists moved through the museum, momentarily illuminating Greek ceramics one minute, African or Medieval European sculpture the next. Unclear images, seen for a moment in varying scales and unflattering angles turn usual museum display on its head while creating an alluringly mysterious anthropological study that is equal parts ‘Blair Witch Project’ and ‘Mixed Up File of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler.’
Less familiar work comes across as amusing and fresh, like Laura Larson’s photograph of a display in the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia which delights in pointing out the tasteless clash of style in a Regency settee, a wallpapered landscape and patterned marble floor. Sophie Calle’s text and image of a gender-ambiguous blind person describing the ‘terrific ass’ of a sculpture in Paris’ Rodin museum invites reflection on our own ideas about beauty.
By comparison, a photo of a shelf of stored artworks by Louise Lawler, an image of a painting by Tim Davis with his flash blotting out the subject’s face and a video by Lutz Bacher following a young adolescent through the Picasso Museum in Paris look at art stored, reproduced or visited in unexpected if not particularly compelling ways. In a sense, the Met itself undermines the less nuanced work in the show – the stunning artwork and displays encountered on the way to the 2nd floor photo galleries are a tough act to follow.
Tris Vonna-Michell, installation view at Metro Pictures, 2011.
In his New York gallery debut, British artist Tris Vonna-Michell explores the stories of little-known historical figures (an East German border guard, a forgotten concrete poet) in a group of distinct but linked installations that collect, sift and reconfigure information to create intriguing, and charmingly quixotic, alternative histories. Despite deliberately low-tech, low-key visuals—slide shows of bleak urban scenes, displays of texts on tables and shelves—the artist’s soundtrack of urgently delivered word streams provides an irresistible hook.
In the darkened front gallery, a voice speaks pressingly about magnetic tapes, tanks and Russians, while a projector slowly flashes images of the former no-man’s-land near the Berlin Wall. Texts spell out the story of a young soldier canonized by the East German state for being shot by defectors escaping west in 1962, but the actual details are left untold because, as the piece suggests, truth was subsumed by official legend long ago.
Elsewhere, Vonna-Michell tells of his not entirely successful attempt to track down an obscure French avant-garde poet, Henri Chopin (a former neighbor), and also recalls the 1989 mass demonstrations around Stasi headquarters in Leipzig, as nervous authorities shredded incriminating files inside. Seamlessly segueing from their frantic efforts to destroy records to Kurt Schwitters’s collage technique, Vonna-Michell demonstrates that while none of us may ever completely know the past, it can be engaged, at least, on one’s own terms.
Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 832, October 13-19, 2011.
Patricia Esquivias, "Natures at the Hand." Photograph courtesy of Murray Guy, New York.
Patricia Esquivias’s immediately likable narrator voice is the hook in her major new video,Folklore III, keeping us engaged through dull, repetitive images and the creeping suspicion that there is less to the historical connections she weaves between two lands—Galicia, Spain; and Nueva Galicia, Mexico—than her deadpan delivery suggests. Unsupported by video evidence, the details Esquivias describes—childlike decorations on the houses, a vast unfinished monument—gradually come to seem more fanciful than believable, and thus, wonderfully entertaining.
Old Galicia represents endings—we see scenes of the coastline and hear about the rituals enacted there—while new Galicia presumably offers a fresh start to immigrants. Yet it’s the Old World that hosts a peculiar and inherently hopeful architectural custom, whereby homeowners build successively larger floors onto their buildings, creating edifices shaped like inverted Aztec pyramids. Such optimism in the future contrasts with the stasis of Nueva Galicia, where newcomers never really find their feet, subtly upending the assumption that newer is always better.
The show’s second major piece, Natures at the Hand, (from 2006) reverses tactics by favoring visuals over story, though it continues to forge similarly tenuous historical or thematic connections—comparing topiary in European castles with that in Guadalajara’s front yards, for example. Collaging disparate images together to create new narratives is a common strategy these days (Fischli and Weiss and Fia Backström come to mind), but Esquivias makes the approach her own by delighting in the simple absurdities of life, and evoking a cross-border culture in which the fluidity of facts meets the charms of quirkiness.
Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 768, June 17-23, 2010.
