One detached, one accusatory, doll-like and dark, masculine and feminine at the same time, these have to be among the stranger mermaids out there. Conceived of by Aurie Ramirez, an artist working at Oakland’s Creative Growth Art Center, a studio program for mentally, physically and developmentally disabled adult artists, these girlish ladies stick in the mind for their sheer weirdness. (‘Creative Growth’ is at Rachel Uffner Gallery through August 10th.)
They’re not exactly light summer fare, but Alex Van Gelder’s photos of gravestone, mausoleum and family tomb portraits are a visually stunning showcase of the effects of aging on pictures. Cracked and deteriorated, images like this untitled portrait are no longer about solemn memorials; now they demonstrate the aesthetic effects of disintegration, as if the hand of time wielded Photoshop for its own pleasure. (On view at Cheim & Read through Sept 8th.)
Christian Marclay’s 24 hour video installation ‘The Clock’ – praised as one of the standout artworks of the past decade – opened today at Lincoln Center as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Composed of thousands of film clips featuring timepieces, and synched with real time, it entertains while making viewers eerily aware of the time they’re spending watching it. Arrive early – lines snaked down the block to view it in Feb ’11, so check out the Festival’s twitter ‘line update.’ Watch a few minutes of ‘The Clock’ here. (Runs through Aug 1st).
Adolescent awkwardness has been Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra’s stock in trade, starting in the early 90s with photos of gangly youngsters on the beach and continuing through series focusing on young mothers, bullfighters, dancers and more. The surprise delivered by her retrospective, which opens June 29th at the Guggenheim Museum, is the marked shift in her subjects’ confidence level from the 90s to the present day; her career now memorializes a time before reality TV and social media primed kids for their moment in front of the camera.
The show opens with young bathers from South Carolina to Croatia posed on the beach and brilliantly lit to highlight pimples, pores and, most notably, bodies still in formation, often in ill-fitting or unflattering swimsuits. Nearly nude, the teens have nowhere to hide, and the tension is palpable, whether the subject is a pretty blonde in an orange bikini or her less manicured Belgian counterpart, whose robotic stance – hands to her sides, palms flat on her thighs – suggests she’s itching to get away.
Other subjects kept returning to Dijkstra, notably ‘Almerisa,’ who we meet as a six year old Bosnia refuge in a portrait taken at a Dutch asylum center. Two years later, her blank stare has changed to a smile, later to a knowing expression, and in her teen years to a challenging look. She gains confidence, fills out and by the time she’s twenty has her own baby. As amazing as Almerisa’s physical transformation happened to be (her morphing style choices make it hard to tell she’s the same girl sometimes) distilling her life into an image every year or so denies the complexities and variation of her experience. Watching Almerisa grow up is frustrating as we’re left to guess at what or who influenced her shifting appearance, how she assimilated or challenged her new Dutch environment.
In her pictures of Almerisa, or the Israeli twins Chen and Efrat, whose faces and characters undergo a remarkable change from tame tweens to club vixens and finally to softer featured young ladies in white tank tops, the teen age years look like a scary time without giving a great deal of insight into how the difficulties were navigated. From our after-the-face perspective, Dijkstra’s subjects are survivors. Somehow, sass and sullenness eventually departed, leaving young women who look more in control of their identities and self-presentation.
Dijkstra’s more contemporary subjects seem to have missed out on this phase, however. ‘The Buzz Club,’ A video from ’96-97 shot in a Liverpool club shows young people swaying or dancing with restraint to a beat. A little over a decade later, a second video titled ‘The Krazyhouse’ and also shot in Liverpool features five confident teens who could be in trails for ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ so confident and practiced are their moves.
In contrast to earlier work, in which impending transitions created drama (bullfighters range from gormless to wise, Olivier, the model-handsome French legionnaire developed from a sad-looking, vulnerable boy to a hardened man) or individuals like the bathers symbolized a moment of change, it’s become harder to see past the teens’ practiced exteriors. Though they’re more self-possessed, Dijkstra’s recent subjects can still elicit sympathy and concern via the daring cut of a dress or greasy-haired headbanging. But they, like a group of students thoughtfully considering Picasso paintings in one of Dijkstra’s more recent videos, have evolved into having, or at least appearing to have, more of their own agency, an upbeat final impression conveyed in the show’s final galleries.
The big draw of Mark Dion’s exhibition at the members-only, Upper East Side Explorers Club is, unsurprisingly, the club itself. But Dion seems to have anticipated the distractions posed by the club’s exclusivity and the exotic appeal of its artifact displays from around the world by offering an installation of all-white sculptures that literally contrasts its colorful surroundings.
With his history of creating museum-like displays that question how we categorize information and pursue scientific enquiry, Dion seems like the perfect artist for the Clark Art Institute’s commission to commemorate the 100th anniversary of a publication by Singer Sewing Machine heir Robert Sterling Clark (whose brother’s old residence now houses the club) documenting his 1908 specimen-gathering expedition to northern China.
Dion responded by crafting a catalogue of items representing those taken on the Clark expedition, including barrels and boxes of supplies, tools arranged carefully on a long table, a Chinese rock squirrel scaled up to eight times its normal size, a wild boar and a cooking fire. Sculpted in white celluclay (and white furry material for the squirrel), each item stands out as particularly unnatural amid the ‘Trophy Room’s’ hunting lodge décor.
The barrels recall Gary Simmons’ white backwoods liquor brewing stills, both of which take objects out of context to question the context itself, while the huge squirrel is hard to take seriously, looking like a giant stuffed animal from the polar regions. Removed from their native locations and uses, Dion’s whited-out objects are made unavoidably strange, and they resist absorption into a narrative of daring discovery.
