Category: Features & Commissions

For Kravets/Wehby Gallery

Two things in Aaron Romine’s paintings jump out at you right away. First, there is the obvious and unusual skill with which they are painted. Then, there is the sex. Perhaps most eyebrow raising is the over 6 foot long ‘Untitled (Esso, Taise and Kerry)’ in which three larger than life women begin a charged romantic encounter.

Two characters from this group appear in another untitled canvas, a party scene in which a topless Esso straddles a coffee table while Taise eyes her with a look that can only be described as wicked. To either side, fully clothed partygoers embrace, talk or stare into space. In both scenes it’s the people, not their surroundings, which draw our attention. Some, like Esso, appear in more than one painting, which makes it tempting to image who they are and how they are involved with the people around them. This is particularly true in paintings of the impassive Natasha, for example, who poses variously with Charlie or Peter in intimate or post-sex scenarios. The impulse is to read the scenes as documentary and suppose that Romine has access to a world of beautiful people living for sensual excess.

In conversation, Romine will freely mention the names of painters he admires from previous centuries, an inclination that tends to invite comparison between his work and theirs. Any search for direct sampling will be disappointed, however, because while Romine has taught himself to paint by looking at old masters, his style is completely contemporary. Flip through any art history survey book and it’s a guarantee that you won’t be able to match styles and poses with Romine’s paintings. What will happen is that Romine’s composition and his foregrounding of physical, emotional and erotic relationships find the right context. All of a sudden, the lesbian trio’s careful arrangement of limbs slots into a tradition as old as daVinci’s scrambling disciples at the last supper and as sensual as Ingres’ Turkish baths. Olivia’s sprawled position on the couch in ‘Je le vaux bien (Olivia and Nicholas)’ relates to odalisques from Titian to Manet. Centuries of history obscure an old master’s original intentions, the identity of his sitters and other details, so that what’s left to do when viewing his paintings is to consider their style or look for clues that explain the given scenarios. Likewise, Romine creates a certain distance between viewers and his subjects by carefully staging his scenes before photographing and then painting them. As we stop, look and ponder, the dynamics between sitters speak for themselves. Time slows down as we become absorbed in the way Charlie plucks at Natasha’s shoe strap, for example, or the way the sunlight delicately illuminates their shoulders. Romine converts models in contemporary dress into timeless characters, stopping us in our tracks as we rediscover the pleasure of looking.

For ‘Art Review’ magazine

Despite the promising premise, few of the artists actually engaged directly with Latin American history or culture. One exception was Fernando Sánchez Castillo, whose installation of eight bronze dogs, hanging by their necks from lampposts in PS1’s courtyard mimicked an act by Peru’s Shining Path terrorists. Nearby, Pilar Albarracín personalized foreignness in her own country by piling a blue Mercedes with the possessions of an imagined family of North African immigrants.

The pervading influence here is not Latin America, but international pop culture. Carles Congost’s overacted soap-opera video starred a teen vampire who worries her parents. Ana Laura Aláez also tapped the world of youthful glamour in ‘Superficiality,’ a music video featuring models in adventurous makeup dancing to electro-pop. By contrast, documentary work that was specific to a given place and time was the strongest element here. Cristina García Rodero’s large, black and white photographs of rituals in Spain and Haiti was an exhibition unto itself. Wide-eyed Haitians in the grip of spiritual ecstasy appeared alongside theatrical Spanish renditions of feast day rituals, comparing ‘exotic’ rites with equally bizarre images from home. In an unusual curatorial twist, two documentary videos focused on the life work of Justo Gallego, a 78 year old man who has been hand-building a cathedral since 1963.

‘The Real Royal Trip’ included painting, sculpture, video and even a web project by Antoni Abad, but despite touching all the bases, didn’t live up to its proposal to map the intersection of Spanish and Latin American art. In order to really explore this territory, more Latin American artists should have been invited to participate; then, PS1 Director Alana Heiss would not have had to write in her catalogue essay that, “…the inclusion of Ernesto Neto ensures that the great South American dream is also represented,” as if a single artist could represent an entire continent.

It’s hard not to imagine that Szeeman, credited with helping to bring contemporary Chinese art to the attention of the Western world in the 48th Venice Biennale, was tapped to create a similar miracle for Spanish art. Instead, the near complete lack of wall texts and catalogue essays which sometimes fail to even mention the artists do a poor job of introducing their work to a New York audience. Like Columbus leaving the new world for the last time, visitors to ‘The Real Royal Trip’ will leave only slightly more enlightened than when they arrived.

For ‘Flash Art’ magazine

“They’ve all gone on to do things in different ways and it doesn’t make sense to think of them as a group anymore. They never were. They just happened to be thrown together, with good reason.” – Vince Aletti, Village Voice photography critic

It was a scramble, but they did it. With only a few weeks to plan, new gallerist Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and artist Gregory Crewdson dashed around New York City on marathon studio visits, quickly assembling work by thirteen artists from six countries for the second show at what was then called Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art. Four years later, ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ has become one of the most talked about photography exhibitions of the past decade. Critics have described it as “instantly historic,” the “it show” of the moment, establishing a movement of “it photography.” As the legend grew, the show became the art exhibition equivalent of Woodstock – everyone claimed to have knowledge of it, even if they hadn’t actually seen it. In fact, it so captured the imagination of the art world that the show became a symbol of a new movement, characterized by blurred boundaries between documentary and fiction photography. All but one of the artists were women, and the exhibition focused on photographs of women or girls, so it wasn’t long before the moniker ‘girl photographer’ started to stick. Most of the artists didn’t exclusively take pictures of young women, but in the ensuing buzz, that fact was often overlooked.

Despite their diverse backgrounds, those who became most closely associated with ‘Another Girl’ were Jenny Gage, Justine Kurland, Dana Hoey, Katy Grannan and Malerie Marder, the five women in the show who had graduated from Yale University, where Gregory Crewdson taught. By March 1999, when the exhibition opened, most had already embarked on promising careers, showing their work in galleries and contributing to news and fashion magazines. Although these factors made the moment ripe for a statement, “…there is no way to plan or strategize a show like that,” said Crewdson. “It’s so much about a moment and timing.” In fact, the timing was so right that artists who were not in the show began to be mentioned in the same context. A year after ‘Another Girl,’ Harper’s Bazaar ran a piece on the five women from Yale and Nikki S. Lee, who had studied at NYU but whose fashion background and self portraits exploring identity linked her to the others. In the same month, Deborah Mesa-Pelly, another Yale grad, who took photographs in elaborately staged domestic settings, had her first New York solo show and was quickly drawn into the fold by critics.

‘Another Girl,’ and the publicity surrounding it, may have been an incredible break for the artists, but it also presented them with problems. Most of the artists who were either in the show or associated with the kind of staged photography it represented were happy for the exposure but frustrated at the way they were assumed to be a group. For example, one of them could not have a show reviewed without mention of the other ‘girl photographers,’ a trend that is only now starting to abate. Their media debut also coincided with a number of splashy articles about various young, contemporary artists in magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair, prompting New York Times critic Roberta Smith to brand the new generation the “B.Y.T’s: Beautiful Young Things.” Others, like photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia concluded that, while interesting, ‘Another Girl’s’, “…impact seemed to have more to do with the fashion of the moment and the necessity to create personalities for the newer and dumber versions of the art press than any confluence of artistic merit.

” Ironically, the subsequent success of each artist validated the attention paid to ‘Another Girl.’ “So many of those people have gone on to do interesting work,” explains Aletti. “If that hadn’t been the case, I think people wouldn’t be referring back to that show.” Since ‘Another Girl’ opened, critics had been acknowledging that the artwork was, to quote Katy Siegal’s Artforum review, “…a disparate collection of technique and intent.” But even years later, the artists found that their work wasn’t being considered entirely on its own merit, at least when exhibiting work in New York. “Showing in Europe gave me a chance to break away…The people reacted to the work on its own, not in relation to the other women’s work,” said Gage in an observation that echoed the other artists’ experience. Above all, the act of producing and showing their work is what continues to persuade art audiences to acknowledge each artist’s individuality. Last spring, Marder and Mesa-Pelly showed new work, and this fall, Kurland, Grannan and Lee all have solo exhibitions that reveal the extent to which they have found their own voices.

Perhaps more than the others, Kurland was associated with the ‘girl photographer’ phenomenon because, unlike Hoey and Grannan, for example, she actually did intensely focus on girl subjects who she photographed in landscapes. However, by her second New York solo show in Fall 2002 at Gorney Bravin & Lee, she began to focus on adult subjects in two new bodies of work set on communes and gardens across the United States. Most recently, Kurland presented ‘The Golden Dawn’ an exhibition of work completed in 2003 that opened in September at Emily Tsingou Gallery in London. Vast American landscapes dominate, almost swallowing up the often tiny male and female nudes that clamber over boulders or nearly disappear behind mossy trees. Here, nature isn’t so much a spiritual retreat as a setting for interacting with the divine, whether it’s a desert scene in which men, women, and children gather in a circle, or a quiet stream next to which a woman lies on her back as patterns are painted on her skin. In the past, Kurland has expressed interest in utopian ideals, and there is a strong sense here of mixed pre and post-lapsarian boundaries. Some characters, like a wide-eyed blond and her female companion move through the forest with a cautious innocence too young for their years, whereas in ‘The Fall,’ a nude man and woman descend a hill together, his posture recalling Adam’s in Masaccio’s ‘Expulsion from Eden.’

The landscape also figures in a new way in one of two series of photographs by Katy Grannan on show through the beginning of October at Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery and at Salon 94 in New York. Around the time of ‘Another Girl,’ Grannan was making portraits of men and women in their suburban and rural homes, having met them through newspaper ads, referrals and direct contact. In the latest color series, ‘Sugar Camp Road,’ Grannan captures her subjects outdoors, in locations that have personal meaning for them. The title of the show, though it sounds innocuous, refers to the location for one of the last pictures made in the series and to the site of a brutal murder. Despite the setting, the sitters are the true focus of the pictures, even when they interact with nature. In an image titled, ‘Meghan, Saw Kill River, Annendale, NY’ a young woman lies in a shallow stream; goosebumps and beads of water are visible on her pale, almost bloated-looking body. Another scene shows an overweight young woman clasping her naked breasts while kneeling with her back to us in a pool of muddy water. Even without knowing that these are special spots for the models, it’s a mystery who they are or why they present themselves as they do. This lends them an exoticism that is compounded by the imperfections (and sometimes the oddities) of their bodies.

At Salon 94, Grannan showed ‘Morning Call’ a series of smaller black and white portraits made indoors. Opposed to the photographs taken outside, the sitters for the indoor pictures compete with riotous natural patterns on the wallpaper and furniture for the viewer’s attention. In one extreme and completely charming image, an adolescent boy and his little brother, wearing a combination of stripes and plaids, stand proudly before a wall papered with a bold, flying bird pattern. Grannan’s imaginative approach to portraiture plays with identity and location to fascinating effect.

By contrast, Mesa-Pelly obscures identity through location. In ‘Tilt’ a series of seven photographs shown last May at Sandroni Rey Gallery in L.A., the artist almost abandoned the human figure to concentrate on the strange happenings in her domestic interiors. Mesa-Pelly first received widespread attention for her photos of elaborate sets in which young women had just discovered a passage into another world. In ‘Tilt’ the theme of discovery is still strong, but this time, it’s the viewers who uncover the unexpected. The photographs are taken as if whoever is behind the camera has just rounded the corner and pulled up short at the sight of something strange. The effect is less spooky than magical but sometimes borders on the cheesy.

The best example of this is ‘Matterhorn,’ in which the camera peers into a bedroom through a half open door. On a pillowless bed sits a papermache mountain, a little white plastic tree and several Styrofoam spheres. The resulting image looks like a hybrid, low-budget attempt at staged landscape photography and is reminiscent of a few earlier photographs in which Mesa-Pelly deliberately exposed her ‘natural’ materials as man-made. It’s as if she is taking on ‘fakeness’ itself as her subject matter and forcing viewers to think about how easily they are led into the fantasies she concocts in other photographs. Two such examples are ‘Balustrade,’ in which seductively gloved hands pull a red rope over a wooden banister, and ‘Garland’ in which we peer up a narrow staircase through dozens of white paper or plastic chains.

In her past work, Nikki S. Lee took on the role of actor in dramas of her own devising. Dressing the part of a skateboarder, elderly woman, or stripper, she asked friends to snap photos of her as she adopted the look and mannerisms of her chosen demographic group. In a body of work that will be shown in November at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks and Projects in New York, Lee has come closer to producing staged images by working closely with a photographer to predetermine the composition of her work. She is still the central character in the resulting images, but there is no longer an urge to scan the photo to ‘spot Nikki,’ because each image has been cropped to eliminate all but a trace of her companions. In most cases, the shots appear to be candid. Lee is looking away from the camera, absorbed in whatever is going on just outside the frame. In one garden scene, we see a man’s arm held protectively around Lee’s shoulder, and elsewhere Lee beams a smile upward toward a man at the side of a swimming pool. A flushed and happy Lee holds a baby in her arms as she sits up in a hospital room. Elsewhere, she sits in a car’s passenger seat with a broken arm as a man’s hand roughly grasps her breast. These scenarios reveal that Lee is still interest in role-play and identity, but she now challenges viewers to figure out where she is and what she’s doing.

Four years after what Crewdson calls, “…the show that people love to hate and hate to love,” the artists involved are prospering. Plans for an expanded, traveling version of ‘Another Girl’ were dropped soon after they were formulated, but since then, the artists have been invited to participate in group exhibitions which situated their work amongst male and non-Yale artists alike. Dana Hoey, who is working on a radically new body of work, has particularly benefited from imaginative efforts of curators who have recontextualized her work in group exhibitions. At Britain’s National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, curator Patrick Henry included work from Jenny Gage’s ‘Helen’ series in his exhibition ‘Fabula’ which, as he put it, “…moved on from the familiar ambiguities of staged photography to something more searching and sophisticated – something that sought urgently to re-engage with the real.” Gage, who often works in partnership with her photographer husband Tom Betterton, is releasing a book titled ‘Hotel Andromeda’ this month published by Artspace Books and accompanied by a text by writer Heidi Julavitz. In the course of a career, four years isn’t much, but it’s been enough for each artist to mark out her own territory and for us to realize that we’ll be watching them for a long time to come.

For ‘Flash Art’ magazine

Last summer, Lee was sponsored by the Bronx Museum to create work now on show at “One Planet Under a Groove”, an exhibition examining the connections between art and Hip Hop. Her trademark way of working is to radically transform her physical appearance in order to look like a member of various communities, including punks, skaters, senior citizens, and yuppies. She researches each group extensively and learns the skills necessary to fit in, in one case getting sponsorship to cover a gym membership to tone her body, and at another time, spending weeks in Riverside Park learning to skateboard. In the Hip Hop project, Lee closely imitated styles of dress, makeup and hair popular in the Hip Hop community and spent hours in a tanning salon to darken her skin. In the resulting photographs, Lee works the dance floor, pouts at the camera and just hangs out with a crowd that includes music producers and graffiti artists.

Although she studied and practiced commercial photography for the better part of a decade, Lee adopts a hands off approach to the camera. Instead, she asks friends and onlookers to take snapshots of her as she hangs out with her crowd. In the same way that she relinquishes control of the camera, she embarks on her performance projects uncertain of the outcome. In last year’s Exotic Dancers project, in which Lee applied for and got a job as a topless dancer in a nightclub in suburban Connecticut, she worked in platform shoes, garters and not much else. Before this, she created the Lesbian project, in which she is seen sharing intimate kisses with an accommodating blond. In both projects, Lee left her comfort zones far behind, taking risks that give her work strength as performance art.

On a superficial level, Nikki Lee seems to be acting out the American immigrant experience – trying on different aspects of the new culture to see what she’ll take or leave. The fact that she emigrated to the U.S. from Korea only seven years ago makes it all the more surprising that she has been able to master the details of so many subcultures in so short a time. But her forays into individual and group identity are even more profound considering Korea’s conflicts over national identity in the last century. A divided country, recovery from the attempted annihilation of the Korean culture and language by Japanese colonialists, and rapid urbanization and industrialization have put ‘traditional’ Korean folk culture in sharp contrast to modern city life. Anti-American sentiment at home, particularly with regard to U.S. military forces in Korea, makes the position of a Korean immigrant in the U.S. all the more meaningful.

Although fractured identity is fundamental in Lee’s photographs, Leslie Tonkonow points out that, “…One thing people misunderstand about Nikki’s work is that even though it touches on issues of multiculturalism, cultural identity and cultural politics in the United States, this is not really her issue…She is approaching these series very much as someone who is Asian and who has an Asian perspective on the individual in the group…” Lee has made it clear that she is focusing on the way in which any individual will define him or her self in relation to a group while contrasting the pursuit of individual identity in the West with the Asian orientation towards group identity. In an interview earlier this year, she told ICA Boston assistant curator Gilbert Vicario, “…In my work, I take pictures with a group and with other people of the group. So I describe like-people and their cultures, and then it goes back to my identity: I describe myself.”

Lee foregrounds the question of her identity by making artwork which resists a story line. Usually, her pictures look like she is just ‘hanging out’ on a normal day with her normal friends. Often compared to Cindy Sherman or Nan Goldin, Lee denies that either artist has substantially influenced her. She tells Vicario that her work is, “…not about Nan Goldin’s work, you know, going from bathroom to bedroom. Go to your house and look at your snapshot album. You don’t have pictures of sex scenes. Most people only have snapshots when they go traveling.”

Her extreme travels into foreign cultural and racial territory have produced images of subtle incongruity. In gesture, makeup and clothing she plays her parts perfectly, but her Asian features give her away every time, resulting in an initially confused reading. With an ‘anything is possible in New York’ attitude, it is feasible that a young, Asian-American woman might be a swinger, yuppie, lesbian or punk. But it is when she steps across racial barriers that questions of identity and not just subcultures come to the fore, and she creates her strongest work.

Because there is little suggestion of narrative in her photos of group life, the work has the feel of documentary. However, Lee subverts the expectation that the ‘reality’ of each group will be faithfully captured by the camera by the simple fact of her presence in each shot. Like the current trend for ‘reality’ programming on TV, the audience knows that the situations are heavily manipulated and the actions of the characters are influenced by their setting. Lee engages the demand for manipulated reality with work that revels in the contradictions of the global culture. By suggesting that Western viewers consider themselves as part of communities, not total free agents, the artist proposes an alternative way of conceptualizing life and community. She also offers an antidote to the isolation of modern, urban culture.

for Centro de Arte de Salamanca, Spain.

“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 AsiaPacific’ Magazine

While there is a slight bias towards male, Chinese artists, the nearly thirty featured artists are a diverse group that includes those living and working in their native countries as well as ex-pats from different generations. Young, international artists like the ubiquitous Mariko Mori and Michael Joo, whose sculpture was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial appear alongside artists like Xu Bing, Zhang Huan and Gu Wenda. All of the above continue to receive significant attention in the US and provide some anchors to aid the New York audience in understanding this ambitious and intense exhibition.

Translated Acts does not propose to be a ‘who’s who’ of performance artists in Asia, nor is it a historical survey. Instead, the assembled group of work has similarities and differences that inspire reflection on the multitude of conceptual tactics employed by East Asian artists over the past decade. In her catalogue essay, Yu Yeon Kim warns her audience against interpreting the artwork solely in relation to the Western, modernist paradigm. To this end, she briefly outlines the tumultuous political and economic events of the last 50 years in each of the countries represented. She also develops an argument that Asian artists are likely to be influenced by Buddhist or Taoist ideology, which opposed to the hierarchies implicit in Western thought, accepts a more fluid concept of structure. Considering that at least a third of the artists in this exhibition live or were born in the West and taking into account the popularity of Eastern philosophies in the West in the past 50 years, this dichotomy may be less useful than Kim suggests. However, on a less philosophical level, many of the featured artists do acknowledge the importance of their faith in their work. Further, an approach which privileges the spiritual is an interesting counterpoint to the recent observations that China’s lack of “godly morality” has resulted in the use by some artists of the living or dead human body with little regard to its sanctity.

In keeping with Kim’s assertion that video and photography have become inseparable elements of performance art, the exhibition is stronger on performative photography and installation than actual performance. The promising but poorly organized opening events featured appearances by Chiharu Shiota, who slept in one of the many cot-like beds featured in her installation, Wang Jian Wei, who presented a red carpet resting on a bed of glass, which was methodically crushed by the visitors, as well as other performances by Ja-Young Ku and Chun-Chi Lin. A past performance by Chun-Chi Lin is presented on video, and documentation of Tehching Hsieh’s year long projects occupy one room. Hsieh’s performances, which double as feats of endurance, are meaningful in a Western performance tradition, but it is in the context of this exhibition alongside fellow Taiwanese that his radical experiments make fuller sense.

Fellow Taiwanese artist Chieh-Jen Chen’s recent large-scale photographs are the most disturbing pieces in the show, and likely contributed strongly to the Museum’s decision to restrict access for children. Suggesting the invasion of a devastating epidemic, or the impact of a tyrannical regime, the photographs feature scores of prostrate human bodies, covered with sores and invaded by metal clamps, harnesses and tubing. Also unnerving is Yuan Goang-Ming’s “The Reason for Insomnia”, an interactive sculpture in the form of a bed. When the bedposts are touched, different projections of blood, fire and feeling hands appear on the sheets.

Unclothed bodies result in the most striking imagery of Translated Acts. Collages and videos from Ma Liuming’s nude photo sessions with the public, during which he places his own unprotected body at the disposal of his audience, show the artist in a sometimes meditative, sometimes indifferent state. A public dynamic was also central in Zhang Huan’s ‘My America’, seen in Spring 2000 at Deitch Projects in Soho. This video, created from documentation of a performance in which a large group of Western volunteers shed their clothing and followed Zhang’s directions, is a portrait of the artist as he navigates a place for himself in his new country.

Other fruitful juxtapositions surface in the show’s installation. Gong Xin Wang’s ‘The Face’, his own laughing and eventually disappearing head, is positioned opposite Young Kyun Lim’s serene portraits of Korean youth. In another room, photos from Qui Zhijie’s ongoing Tattoo series, in which the artist continues a pattern from the wall behind him onto his own naked torso, appear next to documentation of the now legendary performance, ‘Cultural Animal,’ by Xu Bing, in which a mannequin and live pig were stamped in nonsensical Chinese and English script. Next to these two pieces is a video document of Gu Wenda’s ritual performances in which he writes calligraphy with an enormous brush. This combination of three uses of calligraphy by three Chinese artists who privilege the body is a mini-exhibition in itself.

Yu Yeon Kim’s triple concerns of ‘…cultural identity, historical legacy and inner expression…” cut across national borders in Asia, and apply to artists living at home and abroad. They also offer a way for Western viewers, unfamiliar with the unique and turbulent histories of East Asia over the past half-century, to engage the artwork. Kim has successfully brought together a mixed body of work that comments on the specific cultural backgrounds of the artists and the political situations in which they find themselves. She also addresses the need to develop an understanding of work that has been produced on the other side of the planet and outside of Western frameworks of thought, in an era of globalized culture. ‘Translated Acts’ challenges Western viewers to look beyond the easily digested and much imported anime inspired artwork seen so often in the US recently, and to instead grapple with East Asian art through the truly universal subject – the human body.

For ‘NYArts’ magazine

New York based curator Lauri Firstenberg was a member of the curatorial team for ‘The Short Century’, and a curatorial assistant for ‘Documenta’, but she isn’t giving away any secrets. “I am excited to see what the artists’ projects are going to look like and how they manifest themselves after four or five years of discussion and labor,” she said. “I worked on ‘Documenta’ before a major staff was hired in Kassel and prior to the concrete infrastructure being set into place. Our research was broad, encompassing all aspects of the exhibition process, and the activity was centered in the New York office at that time.”

Although the hype for Documenta is building, and ‘The Short Century’ has finally arrived in New York, Firstenberg completed these projects almost a year ago. She is still in her late 20s, and had the golden opportunity to work with Enwezor right out of graduate school. According to Firstenberg, she was most impressed by “…what Okwui Enwezor refers to as ‘transparent process’ – that the discourse around the making of an exhibit is as acute as the exhibition proper. The extra-Documenta platforms perform a deterritorialization of the exhibition – distributing its influence over a wide field of venues and media.” What is perhaps most apparent in her current New York shows is the influence her of academic background. Firstenberg explains, “I see the creation of inter-discplinary programming and coordination with other institutions as ideal. What I bring with me, having been subject to collaborative teams of academics, curators, critics, architects, designers is an incredible mode of alliances as a critical model.” In 1998, Firstenberg finished her PhD coursework in Harvard’s art history department and moved to New York. Her short stint as assistant to former Whitney Museum curator Thelma Golden ended abruptly with Golden’s departure from the museum, but Enwezor’s offer to work together on ‘The Short Century’ came shortly after Golden’s boxes were packed. This led to Firstenberg’s involvement with Documenta. When the time came for the Documenta office to shift from New York to Kassel, Firstenberg decided to stay in New York. A few months later, she became the Curator at Artist’s Space where she has now mounted two well received shows.

Although it has only recently arrived in New York, ‘The Short Century’ first opened at the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich in February 2001 and is not intended as a precursor to this summer’s happenings in Germany. In fact, the project was originally conceived of as a book and is accompanied by a hefty catalogue chronicling 50 years of African film, theater, literature, music, art and architecture. Firstenberg explains that her academic background in photography structured her place on the curatorial team, saying “A lot of my responsibility stemmed from my own interest in the photo archives and dealing with the contemporary photography, but everything was done really collectively.” In light of her extensive archival research, her catalogue essay profiling the photographers Seydou Keita, Samuel Fosso, Santu Mofokeng and Zwelethu Mthethwa examines how photographic practice in Africa has impacted both colonial and post-colonial formation of identity.

Unlike many curators with an interest in African art, Firstenberg did not grow up in Africa, and in fact didn’t travel there until she made two graduate school research trips to Johannesburg. During her undergraduate years, she happened to spend a semester working at an African art gallery in L.A., and her interest grew from that point on. By the summer of ‘93, she turned down an internship at MOMA to spend the summer working at the Museum of African Art. When she went on to Harvard for her MA, Firstenberg took Nigerian artist Iké Udé’s photographic work as the subject of her thesis, which led to both a monograph and a touring exhibition that eventually appeared as part of a trio of African shows at Harvard University’s galleries last October.

In August, she arrived at Artists Space, the non-profit gallery for unaffiliated artists, with plans already in progress for her first exhibition, ‘Urban Pornography.’ Featuring the work of sixteen photographers, her inaugural show focused on architecture in urban, suburban, and rural spaces. From Alex Slade’s image of the decrepit skyscraper housing Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture to doreen morrissey’s minimal roadside rest-stops in the wide open space of the American West, the exhibition laid bare the built forms which might in everyday life be seen as unremarkable. Peter Zellner, Firstenberg’s architect fiancée worked with her on the project, and the two have plans to keep working on ‘Urban Pornography’ in the form of the book.

Firstenberg may have moved to a new institution and taken up her twin fascinations with photography and architecture, but she hasn’t abandoned her academic and curatorial background. In fact, the curator’s second show at Artists Space ‘Context and Conceptualism’ took a 1996 article by Okwui Enwezor on artist Kendell Geers as its starting point. Enwezor questions how an artist’s context (national origin) determines his or her entry into the discourse of the global art world. In response, Firstenberg presented a captivating installation of South African postage stamps by Siemon Allen, an intelligent video by Coco Fusco in which Spanish speakers from around the world discuss their exclusion from or inclusion in Catalan society and Melissa Gould’s installation relating her to grandfather’s deportation to Auschwitz.

For thirty years, the aim of Artists Space has been to exhibit work by “unaffiliated contemporary artists working in the visual arts.” With her international background, Firstenberg is taking this remit global. From late March to early May, she has invited architect Didier Faustino, who lives in Paris and Lisbon, and London artist John Timberlake to show work in the gallery’s project rooms. In terms of working with international artists, Firstenberg explains, “It is most interesting to work with artists whose work is critical, poses interesting questions, and will translate well to New York audiences. I think that the nature of my job is to look beyond Chelsea and try to travel as much as possible. As both an academic and curator, it’s about as much research as possible.”

New York artists don’t need to feel left out, however. In an independent curatorial project with Lombard Fried Fine Arts in Chelsea, Firstenberg is showing work by seven artists who live and work in New York. During the month of April, ‘Retrofit’ will showcase art that works in tandem with architecture, design and technology to ‘refit’ existing concepts and adapt them for new situations. Lombard Fried director Michael Lieberman explained the adaptability of the theme by saying that the gallery, curator and artists envisioned a show that “…created a dialogue between their work but didn’t impose too much of a heavy-handed curatorial vision or structure on their work. I think it makes sense to have a show that has… a theme and unifying idea but also lets the work breathe and stand up on its own.”

Lauri Firstenberg may have stepped out of the Documenta limelight, but she is by no means receding into the shadows. With her program of exhibitions at Artists Space, continuing independent shows, the ‘Urban Pornography’ book project, and the numerous articles she writes about the artists with whom she works, she is making the most of her location in New York and her role at Artists Space. In her commitment to research, Firstenberg regularly plows through the hundreds of slides sent in to her by emerging artists. In fact, it is from these slides that Firstenberg is charting new territory for herself by developing ‘Painting as Paradox’ a group show of painting scheduled for the winter at Artists Space. Firstenberg admits that the prospect of exhibiting painting, with her background in photography is daunting. But what could have been more daunting than working on the world’s biggest exhibition in Summer ’02?

For ‘NYArts’ magazine

So how is a young curator able to find her own voice in a small museum with two big personalities? Smiling out from the pages of The New York Times ‘Sunday Styles’ photographs last month, Kim didn’t seem to be having much of a problem. The newspaper photos featured the opening of the Museum’s winter exhibitions, the crowning jewel of which is ‘Africaine’, a show of work by four female artists from Africa curated by Kim. At the tender age of 30, she has navigated the competitive world of young curators, to snag a job in one of New York’s most exciting museums, as well as planning independent shows at Artists Space, Gale Gates, and other venues.

‘Africaine’ is the feminine form of ‘African’ in French, and while only one of the featured artists is actually from a country formerly colonized by the French, the title evokes a post-colonial discourse appropriate to the artwork. Kim laughed when I asked about the show’s title, reflecting on someone’s suggestion that ‘Africaine’ might be a new kind of designer drug. Turning serious, Kim explained, “I prefer not to give shows titles that directly locate demographics, race and identity, like ‘Four African Women’, or ‘Nine Korean or Asian-American Artists.’ I like to put the work and the concept of the exhibition before the rest.”

All four artists in ‘Africaine’ grapple with the female form, creating collages or photographs that question how the bodies of African women have been viewed. Twenty-four framed collages of individual women by Wangechi Mutu recall Hannah Hoch’s sexually charged, mixed race collages from the 1920s, while Fatimah Tuggar presents domestic scenes and mixed race couples. Tracey Rose, from South Africa, offers four large photographs featuring herself in the varying roles from porn star Ciccolina to ‘Venus Baartman’ crouching nude in the bush, near the spot where the oldest human remains have been found. Fellow South African Candice Breitz’s images of semi-nude women in tribal dress from 1996 are taken from postcards and transformed by covering the women’s skin with white-out.

Like many people who have a point to make, Kim has a catchphrase. Whether she is referring to Tracey Rose’s provocative photos or the violence of Breitz whiting out black bodies, Kim values ‘pushing the envelope.’ She applies the same phrase to the artists of ‘Purloined,’ the show which opened the ’01-’02 season at Artists Space. All of the participating artists dealt with thievery as a practice or a theme and, as Kim explained, focused on “…challenging the conventions in a community, culture or society.

” Starting with Sophie Calle’s exploits as a nosy chambermaid, the show moved on to look at Polaroids by Lilah Freedland, taken while breaking into the houses and apartments of strangers, and stolen and tagged items presented by Lisa Levy. Other artists, like Nikki Lee and Nancy Hwang, investigated what it means to assume another’s identity. “One of the things that was special about the show for me…” said Artists Space director, Barbara Hunt, “…was Nancy Hwang’s performance where she undertook manicures…You entered through… semi-transparent curtains and sat at table with a sandblasted glass screen, so you couldn’t see the person performing the manicure. She talks about the way in which people really did confess to her and were telling her their secrets five minutes into the manicure.”

As Kim starts to lessen the focus on independent curating and concentrates on her role at the Studio Museum, no doubt she’ll develop her talent for pulling together artists from a variety of backgrounds into tightly themed shows. She is equally interested in artists from the East and West coasts, and says that in her exhibitions, “…most of the time, more than half of the artists are women, more than half are artists of color, but it’s never really mentioned. It’s more about artists working in a certain vein or addressing a pertinent process or idea…” Referring to ‘Africaine’, curator and critic Franklin Sirmans said, “Christine Kim’s approach of mixing up the very local and the global in that show is trademark for her energy in looking everywhere and being able to make the meaningful connections among artists that a lot of people just don’t see.”

Combining the local and global is very Christine Kim. For her next show, tentatively titled ‘Black Belt: Third Arena,’ the curator is planning to explore the conjunction of African-American and Asian-American culture through Kung Fu culture. She points to the popularity of martial arts and eastern spirituality in the African-American communities and is mapping how this has had a significant impact on art by many African-American artists. She is careful to say, “I don’t want to create a narrative that connects Blacks and Asians. But for a generation of people of color strongly influenced by popular culture and urban culture of the seventies and eighties, there was an emergence of another possibility beyond the dichotomies of Black and White from the decade that preceded. There was a transcendent space that mapped spirituality, rebellion, entertainment…and a realization that there were other ‘Americans/Non-Americans’ who perhaps didn’t have exactly the same kind of struggles but experienced social and national alienation whether in the workplace, academic sphere, Hollywood, in sports, or who knows.”

Over the past two years, in addition to working on her own shows, Kim’s assistance to Thelma Golden has provided her with new working strategies. Like others in the field, she uses the word mentor to describe her older colleague, saying “I thought I knew what a mentor was until I met her…It’s not about instruction, it’s about example and about energy.” Kim even admits that her choice of wall color for ‘Africaine’, chartreuse not an earthy ‘African’ color, owes something to Golden.

Far from languishing in the wake of her colleagues, Kim is locating herself as a curator, a second-generation, Korean woman working in Harlem, and a West coaster educated and living on the East Coast. Late one afternoon in February, Kim and I were the last ones left in the museum galleries, when suddenly the lights were turned out. Unfazed, Kim continued talking for another 20 minutes in the dark, enthusing about her ideas for shows and plans as a curator. If the energy of her personality continues to translate onto the walls of her shows, the stars will continue to shine in Harlem.

For ‘NYArts’ Magazine

“I think it’s generational,” she explained. “When I was at university…I was trying to find literature on curatorial practice, and there was not a lot in the early 90s…I was quite curious about this idea of curatorial practice being as much a practice as artistic practice.” One of Chiu’s early exhibitions, ‘Anthology: Six Perspectives on Curatorship’ positioned six curators for a period of a week each in the gallery space. By curating an exhibition of both curatorial practice and artwork, Chiu aimed to drag usually hidden organizational processes under the gallery floodlights. Since then, whether she is focusing on Australian, Asian or multi-ethnic artists, there is an underlying sensitivity to who has put the show together and why.

Chiu came on board at the Asia Society and Museum in September, a few months before the organization reopened in its renovated space. She has inherited the Museum’s ambitious commitment to contemporary art, evidenced most recently by the long-term installations commissioned from a number of internationally known Asian contemporary artists. On the opening day, Chiu led a panel discussion, during which Heri Dono from Indonesia introduced his flying cocoons, Vong Phaophanit explained how living in France and now England for much of his adult life influenced his neon and beeswax sculpture, and Indian artist Nilma Sheikh discussed her long scrolls, which hang from the third floor down to the lobby on the open staircase. Rounding out the new commissions is work by Yong Soon Min from South Korea, Navin Rwanchaikul from Thailand, Shahzia Sikander of Pakistan and New York, Sarah Sze from Boston and Xu Bing and Xu Guodong, both from China.

The new curator will finally come into her own with two shows planned for September. First, the Asia Society will host ‘The Native Born: Objects and Images from Ramingining, Arnhemland,’ a traveling exhibition of Aboriginal art curated by Djon Mundine, a world expert on Aboriginal art. Fusing the traditional and contemporary is the m.o. at the Asia Society, and at the same time as the Aboriginal art show, Chiu will curate her own show of porcelain busts by Chinese artist Ah Xian. Ah, one of the many Chinese artists who moved to Sydney after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, recently won Australia’s National Sculpture Prize, and although his work has been exhibited widely in Asia, this will be his first show in New York. Working with master potters and painters in the Jingdezhen, China, Ah uses the uniquely Western art form of the portrait bust and makes a number of Eastern adaptations. The sculptures are made of porcelain, depict Asian likenesses, and are painted in traditional Chinese designs.

Like Ah Xian, Chiu works at the intersection of cultures. And like the Asia Society’s combination of artists from eight different countries in its recent commissions, she will have to juggle the personal and national concerns of artists from around the world. Born in Australia to a Chinese father and Australian mother, Chiu has first hand experience of living simultaneously in two cultures, an experience with relevance for her professional life. Before leaving Sydney for New York, she was the founding director of the Asia-Australia Arts Centre, a non-profit art exhibition space established to support the work of Asian contemporary and Asian-Australian artists. “We had an interesting curatorial premise to provide these artists with a working environment that wasn’t exclusively Asian,” Chiu explained. “We wanted to create a broader context and perspective of Asian art and culture that wasn’t exclusive or ghettoizing.”

With a strong background in Asian-Australian art, and the Asian and Australian art scene, why did Chiu choose to give it all up and move to New York? “The idea of curating significant exhibitions of contemporary Asian art was a real lure for me,” said Chiu. “Australia for the last decade really focused itself on the Asia Pacific region and becoming part of that, so there are lots of really significant things that have been done but which aren’t known elsewhere. So there is the idea of engaging with a broader audience.” And if traveling to the other side of the world to start a new job doesn’t keep her busy enough, Chiu is also finishing a PhD on contemporary Chinese artists. The focus is on the diasporic communities in Sydney, New York and Paris, particularly how the artists’ work has been affected by the change in context.

It seems fitting that Chiu would eventually be employed by the US institution that presented the influential 1994 show ‘Asia/America,’ of work by ex-pat Asian artists living in the US. And one of the most significant shows of contemporary Asian art to date in the US, ‘Inside Out’, was also organized by the Asia Society along with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This second exhibition of work by Chinese artists took place in 1998-99, after a decade of major shows of Asian art in Europe. At first slow to catch on to the rising interest in contemporary Asian art, the US audience has since embraced several major Chinese and Asian artists. However, Chiu sees an element of following the fashion in this. “When it settles down ultimately, there are probably only three or four artists who get remembered. They are the ones who are still on an international circuit or who have representation from major galleries, like Xu Bing, Zhang Xiaogang and Zhang Huan…And they have in many ways a higher profile than a lot of the Asian-American artists.”

Back in Australia, in her work at the Arts Centre and in many independent exhibitions, Chiu championed the work of Asian-Australian artists. Time will tell if this ends up translating into an interest in Asian-American artists. Coincidently, before she left for New York, Chiu was developing an exhibition that would include some comparative views of artists from Asian origins in both the U.S. and Australia. But whatever the future holds for contemporary art shows at the Asia Society and Museum, it looks promising. The new commissions, the hosting and organizing of landmark exhibitions, and the creation of Chiu’s position are signs that the commitment to putting contemporary Asian art on the map in New York has grown stronger. With her considerable experience and drive, Chiu seems up for the job.

For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine

In the thirteen years since Simmons had his first solo show, he has moved from producing racially charged drawings, sculpture and installations to creating enigmatic wall drawings on a huge scale, accompanied by drawings on paper, linen and chalkboards. Simmons came of age in the late 80s and early 90s when multiculturalism was the art world buzzword and his child-sized Klu Klux Klan outfits, for example, were in keeping with the times. But by the mid-‘90s, his work experienced a shift that was emphasized in the artist’s first large-scale museum exhibition curated by Thelma Golden of The Studio Museum in Harlem (SMH). The catalogued show began in 2001 in Chicago, stopped at Santa Fe and ended this month at the SMH. Nearly thirty drawings, sculptures, photographs and videos from the past seven years were included, along with a major new sculpture (‘Here, Piggy, Piggy’) and a large site-specific wall drawing.

When his early drawings of popular cartoons that stereotyped African-Americans were first exhibited in Europe, Simmons soon discovered that much of his audience considered the work part of a uniquely American situation. Partly in response to this reaction, Simmons gradually changed the subject matter and style of his work in an attempt to address more universal issues. He explains that, “I wanted to open up the dialogue so it wasn’t as isolated to the African American experience. [I included] images of sites that we all interact with or come into contact with so that [in terms of] access to the work and the issues around the work, each person could import their own experience.”* Meanwhile, back in New York, Simmons’ other projects were also being perceived as specific to his experiences as a young African-American. Writing for the New York Times, critic Holland Cotter wrote that Simmons “…brings the language of black hip-hop into an art world that still doesn’t know what to do with it.” Reviewing the same show for Artforum, Jan Avgikos turned Cotter’s observation around to propose that the artist “…emphasizes the ‘outsider’ position of the institution in relation to Pop art…”

Faced with being pigeonholed as an artist whose work related only to a particular time and place, Simmons altered his style around the mid-90s. That change was the starting point of the museum survey. With the exception of ‘Flute Player,’ a drawing from 1995 in which a cartoon figure with a bone on his or her head plays the flute, the focus of the exhibition was entirely on work with no obvious racial or political content. There were drawings of staircases leading into the unknown, of city apartment buildings and shacks in the countryside, of roller coasters, pine trees and stars, but not a stereotyped cartoon drawing, pointed white hood or noose to be seen. Did Golden and Simmons team up to rewrite his history, editing out the artwork which links him to the multicultural art discourse which disappeared from view in the mid-90s?

‘Lost Ones,’ a site-specific drawing executed on an entire 40-foot long wall of the largest gallery helps answer this question. Near the center of a vast, slate colored background, two enigmatic bell-like shapes hang at angles to each other. Each has been partially erased by hand, and the clearly visible finger marks moving out towards the far wall create the impression that they are moving quickly towards each other. In fact, the shapes are bird cages, and the ‘Lost Ones’ the two birds that have flown away. The cages hint at confinement, emancipation and finally the violent crash of the mechanisms that held the birds captive. They also refer back to an installation from 1990, ‘Pollywanna’ in which Simmons placed a live, caged parrot in front of a drawing of two crows from the Dumbo cartoon. Observing the bird led the artist to experiment with an erasure technique. He explains that “…as you looked at the bird, it almost left trails in the wake of the movement of the wings…you see ghost images of the wings moving.” These chains of association run through all of Simmons work and are what link the bobbleheads to the birdcages.

In their own ways, ‘Lost Ones’ and ‘Here, Piggy, Piggy’ deal with power relations and the loss of self-governance. ‘Lost Ones’ does so allegorically, while ‘Piggy’ references violence from a popular film seen and remembered by a generation. At the beginning of the movie, the four adventurers make contact with two families living in extreme poverty and badly affected by inbreeding. These scenes set up a conflict between the city men and their country counterparts, between civilized and wildness, a dichotomy that is often premised by racial difference. In this case, both parties are white, but Simmons points out that “…the fears and stereotypes are all right there and inherent within the film. It’s about the fear of others.” The artist’s interest in the cultural ‘other’ led him to make work that investigates the culture of the southern U.S. As well as being the site of hundreds of years of racial violence, Simmons says of the South, “I think there is a lot of hidden imagery, language and culture that effects us day to day that is literally ghosted.” All of the artist’s erasure drawings summon a ghostly presence that hints at hidden histories. In fact, this accounts for the color of ‘Piggy’ which has been painted all white to, “…almost disappear. They mirror the spirit of the drawings in that way; you’re dealing with something that is recognizable to a point. Like the way your memory works, the edges are sanded down…”

Simmons’ erasure is neither a consequence of a particular working method, nor an aesthetic device. Instead, it has political overtones that are reinforced by the fact that no humans ever appear in the drawings. Some of the best pieces in the exhibition are from a 1996 series of roller coaster drawings titled ‘Ghoster.’ Sections of the coaster’s support structure are rendered as jagged beams, ending in spikes that communicate a menace beyond the scariness of the ride. As in ‘Piggy,’ the thrill seekers are in for more than they bargained, as they lose control in the presence of the, in this case supernatural, ‘other.’ In a major project from 2001, Simmons created a ‘haunted house’ by transforming the walls of an abandoned house in rural New Mexico. The dilapidated structure was not restored, nor were plans made to preserve the wall drawings. The partially erased drawings, their stories obscured by the form they take, mirror a ghost’s fleeting presence as they disappear over time.

Simmons also awakens his audience to the existence of the cultural ‘other’ by making erasure drawings of text that relates to the particular series on which he is working. In a series about drinking, Southern terms like ‘Moonshine’ or ‘Ruckus Juice’ appear in paintings with the same names. Drawings of wishing wells and stars are accompanied by different versions of the words ‘I wish,’ and his current series involves slang and words that refer to pot smoking. By abstracting terms that won’t be found in the dictionary, Simmons focuses attention on the way language is adapted by individuals and communities. The way the words are blurred mimics the way that meaning is obscured for someone from outside the community. For instance, if a viewer isn’t familiar with the reference in Simmons’ painting to Lauryn Hill’s song ‘Lost Ones,’ a shade of meaning is hidden. Simmons compares his work with a DJ’s sampling saying, “There will be references that will be picked up and then there are others that won’t be. That’s OK. When I put two images together and recontextualize them, they become something new anyway.” Simmons is careful to say that, “The viewer might question the fact that they’re on the outside, but they won’t feel like an outsider.” But unless the term ‘ruckus juice’ happens to be in the viewer’s common usage, he or she necessarily assumes the role of ‘outsider.’ Whereas Holland Cotter and Jan Avgikos pointed out in 1993 that the work positions the art world and the art institution on the ‘outside’ of art that references African-American culture, the text drawings, which reference slang terms from a variety of communities, unseat the viewer from an authoritative position.

Ironically, we spend much of our lives wishing to be what, who or where we are not. The precursor to ‘Piggy,’ and the artist’s first all white sculpture were replicas of the stills used to illegally manufacture liquor. Coincidently, the protagonists of ‘Deliverance’ first assume that they have aroused their opponents’ anger by stumbling on a whiskey still. In fact, stills symbolize the supposed lawlessness of deeply rural areas, beyond the arm of the law’s reach. At any rate, Simmons’ focus is the potential of these stills to meet the demand for cheap liquor and plenty of it. In an interview in 2001 with Franklin Sirmans (printed in the exhibition catalogue), Simmons explains that these sculptures are “…about a desire to be somewhere else.” In this respect, they relate to a series of drawings of stars, wishing wells and text drawings of the word ‘wish.’ Wishfulness and drunkenness are ways to escape or take a break from reality, to step into another life. In this respect, both also address what it is to imagine, in a sense, being ‘other.’ Like the birds in ‘Lost Ones,’ who have received or taken their freedom, viewers are left with a choice to fear or embrace their desires.

The four outsiders in ‘Deliverance’ ventured into unknown territory and suffered the consequences. The rules to which they were accustomed no longer applied, and they received no mercy at the hands of their armed captors who Simmons preserves in fiberglass. The Ghoster series also alerts viewers to powers beyond their control, because the appearance of the supernatural subverts even the laws of nature. Finally, by isolating words particular to a culture or geographic region, Simmons hints at the way in which otherness is embedded in the English language. The combined effect of this body of work is to reawaken viewers to the complexity of cross-cultural relations by destabilizing their own positions. Viewers will find themselves on one side or the other (or neither) of the distinction between North and South, and no single viewer will be familiar with all of the jargon that inspired the text drawings. Simmons work forces viewers to see themselves rooted in a particular experience, one of many.

*Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from a conversation with the artist on November 19, 2002.

For ‘NYArts’ Magazine

We sat down in his gracious employer’s back gallery, and before I could ask my first question, Hunt started to talk. He has plenty to say about ‘the art world’ and was eager to give me his opinion on the state of art writing. “Art writers are notoriously bad because it is a good way to start out. Because the pay is so low, art magazines don’t have the luxury of turning people away.” Thanks, Dave, nice to meet you, too.

So why does Hunt write and curate? “I started doing it because I just didn’t want to go to shows and have no connection. I am not an artist. I am not a dealer. So, and the curatorial aspect sprung out of the same thing. I was in Italy and I [thought]…I’m in this country. These people are being so nice to me. I might as well do something with it. So I curated a show of Italian video artists at…Gallery 16…when I went back to San Francisco.”

This exhibition led to others when he moved to New York in 1999. Over the past two years, Hunt has put together two shows in New York art galleries and written dozens of texts on the artists that interest him. He says that he aims to “…work with as many different galleries as possible…to maintain as many relationships as possible.”

“Dusk”, an exhibition which took place at the I-20 gallery last Fall, took its name from a time of day often associated with natural beauty and an element of intrigue. Hunt chose 20 works by different emerging artists whose work resists the romantic and ‘gothic.’ In a catalogue essay written in the form of an internal office memo from the marketing department of a company whose products are artists, Hunt elaborates on the heavily marketed concept of dusk (think photography magazines, think romantic couples) as beautiful and subverts it, pointing out that “any moment of the day can be beautiful.” At the same time, he tackles elements of what he sees as gothic subculture.

He explained to me that, “Dusk is about this anti-gothic sensibility….I just think that the whole gothic subculture is just so anachronistic….We’re coming back to the 80s. Before that we came back to the 70s. But gothic exists no matter what. It never goes away. There are always gothic clubs in every city. There are always people who…[have] pancake makeup on….And one of the elements of the art world is black.” Despite the vast difference between the ever-acceptable black clothing worn by art world denizens (Hunt himself was wearing at least two shades of black when we spoke), and the black leather and crushed velvet worn by goths, Hunt makes a mental connection between two distinctive styles of dress, and combines them under the rubric of impending darkness.

His next show, seen last summer at Caren Golden Fine Art, joined together no fewer themes under the title “Superimposition”. Given free reign in the gallery by Caren Golden, Hunt put together a tightly packed exhibition that included the work of another 21 emerging artists. For many, ‘superimposition’ referred to the process of constructing an image in layers, an organizing principle described by artforum.com reviewer Martha Schwendener’s as, “…impossibly, almost irrationally nebulous…” On the other hand, New York Times critic Holland Cotter turned the ambiguity into a positive point in his review, saying that, “One comes away reminded afresh of how much of interest there is to choose from these days and thinking how smart so many of Mr Hunt’s choices are.”

Speaking in outline form, Hunt set the scene for the exhibition: “The show was like an anti monochrome show. You noticed that there were no big fields. It was all over gestural mark making. You had to be working to the edge. Jim Lambie’s eye thing – tons and tons of eyes. Super, super imposition. Marsha Cottrell. Those computer drawings. All those lines. Thousands of little marks. That’s the type of stuff I am into. Supercomplexity.”

Complexity is what Hunt thrives on and the combination of unlikely themes in a single show has become his trademark. Last month, he opened his latest exhibition at MullerDeChiara, a new contemporary gallery in Berlin, co-directed by Laurie DeChiara of DeChiaraStewart in New York. The gallery’s inaugural exhibition is Hunt’s “Wattage and Friendship.” The inspiration for the show began with an article in The New Yorker magazine profiling an electricity resale company that encouraged its employees to sell electricity to friends and family. Hunt played on the idea that, “…the more power you have the more connectivity, the more friends you have. But really, the more alienated you are, the more you stay at home, the more acquaintances you have.”

Also in October, Hunt was asked to curate “Video Windows”, a selection of three video artists which changes monthly, at Stefan Stux Gallery. Taking the title, “Respirator”, the gallery will showcase work by Lila Friedland, Yorgo Alexopoulos and Jonathan Calm. More projects are on the horizon, including “Ursa Major” and “Druid: Wood as Superconductor”, two exhibitions slated to appear in New York galleries this season. My suggestion that Ursa Major, being a constellation of stars, might produce some art stars failed to win a smile. Instead, Hunt quickly related the constellation of the big bear to the bear market. “It’s about the market crash and more specifically the tech market crash – the NASDAQ. But it has two elements. One is the market crash and the other is this idea of day trading and people talking about the market as if it is a rational mechanism when really, it is just a kind of mystical, unpredicted mechanism. So there is artwork dealing with mystics, and psychics and cults…” “Druid…” also involves the mystical. It will include artists whose work in some way uses or references wood, a low tech natural object which cannot be improved by technology.

Hunt chooses a range of young artists, some better known than others. Matt Bakkom, for one, appears in every show. How can Hunt find relevance in Bakkom’s work for every show? “I just like the guy’s ideas. I mean, all of his ideas are good. Sometimes it’s like that. Some people are one trick ponies. This guy, he has the whole stable.”

Hunt’s own sense of disbelief that he has been able to achieve so much in such a short time and without a ‘proper’ art background kept coming up in our conversation. He reminded me several times that he is self-taught when it comes to art (his BA was in English) and has been living in the city only a little more than two years. Maybe it is his self-perceived outsider status that gives him a unique curatorial perspective. His ambition doesn’t hurt either.

To add to the success that Hunt has had in promoting exhibition ideas to gallerists, he has been well received by critics. Part of his appeal as a curator lies in his ability to showcase so many young artists while tying their work into his sometimes abstract themes. Both “Dusk” and “Superimposition” were shows that could have easily washed over the heads of gallery visitors who look at art like they shop for groceries – speeding down the aisles ticking off shows they’ve ‘picked up’. But for those with a little more time on their hands, Hunt’s work leaves much to be discovered.

In both his curatorial and writing styles, Hunt expresses his thoughts by making a steady stream of pop cultural references. Written in rapid fire, stream of consciousness prose, his catalogue essays and critical writing can be difficult to untangle. Caren Golden read a passage to me from one particularly dizzying catalogue essay on the artist, John Kalymnios. She concluded enthusiastically that, “this is an introduction to a catalogue of someone’s artwork that takes us to Kubrick, Spielberg, Rodney Brooks, Star Troopers, Robot Wars, Star Wars and Beckett in the first paragraph….He is coming from a fresh point of view. He doesn’t have to use the grad school lingo….I found it so high energy and fresh.”

Caren Golden isn’t the only one who thinks Hunt has hit upon a new way of curating. When asked by The Art Newspaper recently to name the best recent show in New York, Whitney Museum contemporary art curator Laurence Rinder picked “Dusk”, saying that, “I saw works by a number of artists whose work I hadn’t known of before and thought that David explored the theme in a fresh, unexpected way.” By putting together exhibitions crowded with the latest talent, Hunt reminds viewers of the role that galleries should play as laboratories for developing new ideas in art and in contemporary culture. History may be written by the slower moving museums, but it is in galleries that experimentation can take place. It might not be easy to encounter 20-something works by different artists in an average sized gallery space or digest a stream of cultural references in a catalogue essay, but there is enjoyment in the challenge.

Toward the end of our talk, Hunt cast some light on his technique for choosing the artists for his shows, saying, “I’m really into novelty…If it’s interesting right now and it’s not interesting next week, well…I don’t really have a problem with it. If it gets people excited for that amount of time then that’s a cool thing. I’d rather see that than…” Like he did many times during our talk, he trailed off before changing tack. Our interview ended in much the same way when, in midsentence (his, not mine), I turned around to find him gone. He had raced out of the gallery to intercept an artist, and so I left him doing what he seems to do best – following hard on the heels of the new and novel.