Eddie Martinez continues to mine art history in increasingly abstract paintings now on view in Chelsea at Mitchell-Innes and Nash. Tapping into diverse sources of inspiration – from Basquiat’s jittery line to de Kooning’s boldly outlined bodily forms – Martinez creates strangely familiar paintings to ponder. (Through March 5th).
Francesca Woodman changes from girl to woman within seconds in the first two pictures displayed in her retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim: first we meet a fresh-faced kid wearing a billowy flower-patterned tunic and her signature Mary Janes, making a motion as if she’s holding a clapper board and about to shout ‘action.’ Next, we see her nude lower body coming from a cupboard, the tilting camera catching her as if in a fugitive act. Taken in her freshman year at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975-6, the precocious Woodman already explores the signature themes of her short career – non-narrative scenarios in which her young, perfect body interacts with the crumbling architecture of a Providence house or an old warehouse-like space in Rome (during her Junior year abroad).
Whether she’s lying curled up on old floorboards under a heavy wooden door propped precariously against the wall or straddling an old fireplace mantle leaning against the wall, Woodman attempts impossible hiding acts that ironically expose her to both prying eyes and the danger of falling props (in later pictures, we see a snake slithering across her outstretched arm and threat arrives again in the form of a wasp on her neck).
Her interaction with the space of the dilapidated room she’s in (in one, a view out the window shows a presentable house next door) resonates with Gordon Matta Clark’s radical interventions in abandoned or otherwise neglected spaces. But Woodman’s nude or partly clothed body (looking very unlikely to have ripped a door from its hinges or detached a mantel) forces unlikely connections with domestic space rather than destroying it. In one image, she covers herself modestly at breast and pubic area with two jagged sections of ripped wallpaper that cover her face and create a flattening of space that merges her body with the wall.
Using her body and physical surroundings as materials, Woodman aligns with late 70s conceptual art and body art contexts in the show’s most surprising images, such as one alarmingly masochistic image showing her at close range with clothespins attached to her nipples and abdomen. Whether this is a larger comment on womens’ bodies or sexual behavior, references to sexuality are rare, despite her frequent nudity. So much so, in fact, that when a’79-‘80 image cropped to exclude her head shows her clutching three sizeable zucchini, the allusion is so out of place that it’s more funny than it might be in another context. Later, she poses in a jeweled belt or dons multiple garter belts like an overdecorated Bellocq model, but the photos feature her curves more as formal compositions than critiques or self-exploration.
In three pictures, Woodmans lets a man into her mostly solitary, female world. All titled, ‘Charlie the Model’ they feature a heavyset man clothed, crouching nude while peering in a mirror, and smiling through a circular glass while a nude Woodman moves in a blur behind him. Perhaps because of his size or his smiles, he dominates, which put viewers in mind of his personality rather than Woodman’s retiring character and emphasizes how her more characteristic images don’t really aim to explore identity. The closest to narrative or role-play she comes is in an early photo series (exhibited in an easy-to-overlook passageway between galleries) titled, ‘Portrait of a Reputation,’ a five-image artist book from 1976 in which Woodman poses with hand over her heart, with or without clothing and with the outline of her hand eventually degenerating into two handprints suggesting an assault.
It’s a Woodman moment in New York now, with a show of the artist’s late work at Marian Goodman Gallery and the monumental ‘Blueprint for a Temple’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s contemporary photo galleries. Woodman appeared to be in a transitional stage when she took her own life in 1981 at the age of 22, making larger images and experimenting with blueprinting processes and collaged images. In ‘Zig Zag’ from 1980, she creates a zigging and zagging line by linking photos of bent arms, v-shaped dress backs, scissoring legs, and more expanding her subject matter to include other people while still exploring the body and pursing formal relationships in her art. Cruelly, seeing so much of her work whets the appetite for more, but true to the Guggenheim’s purpose, offers opportunity to reconsider the context for photography in late 70s America.
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.
For Gallery 210 of the University of Missouri, St Louis
Shopping the Cheryl Yun Collection starts out fun but has a big catch. Apart from the fact that its stylish handbags, lingerie and swimwear look as though they belong in a high-end boutique but are meticulously crafted in delicate-looking paper, the subject matter is shocking. When curious ‘shoppers’ inspect the enticing goods more carefully, the kaleidoscopic patterning on each item turns out to be an abstracted image of war, natural disaster or another horrific event, setting up a bait and switch game that delivers not shopping pleasure but a jarring reminder of the coexistence of enjoyment and suffering. By implicating her audience’s desires as consumers and forcing a personal response to international events beyond the control of any individual, Yun’s faux fashion line shatters the status quo of daily life.
From the materials she uses to the themes she explores, constant contradictions force provocative connections where none were first apparent. Purses, underwear and the whole shopping experience itself is a decidedly female domain, but the images that adorn these objects refer to the traditionally male territory of war and politics. Sexy underthings may in themselves symbolize the dynamics of attraction between men and women, but these take the discussion about power relations to a new level. The gap between images of terror and female accessories would seem even harder to bridge, but Yun, who lived in New York at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attack, readily recalls former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s highly publicized suggestion that the best way to recover (and save the local economy from further damage) was to “go shopping.”
At the time, it may have been an exercise in civic duty to hit the stores, but with consumer spending making up the largest part of our GDP, Americans hardly need any extra incentives to shop. Yun’s project, whether replicating high-end clothing or the cheapest plastic shopping sacks, provokes questions about our appetite not just for things but for entertainment. “We consume imagery like we consume objects,” Yun explains. “Sitting down with the newspaper and a cup of coffee is a pleasure that many people, including me, enjoy, but actually involves reading about horrible things happening around the world.” Yun’s garments are not only intimate but force their imaginary owners to literally wear images of far away events next their skin suggesting false familiarity; like Yinka Shonibare’s Victorian costumes fashioned from traditional African fabrics, they reveal the ignorance at the core of cultural imperialism.
Yun is the first to admit her own role as consumer. Afterall, each bag or garment begins with a news photo from the New York Times or an Internet news source that caught her eye for its drama, compositional qualities or captivating story. To create a ‘fabric,’ she scans, manipulates and prints the image, carefully piecing multiple copies together into a seamless pattern. Early bags unambiguously reproduced disturbing news photos; the more recent series are less confrontational, dabbling in the potential beauty of particular forms, multiplied and mirrored with an abstract effect. But disguising the source image and adorning each item with delicate details, like smocking or tiny bows, makes it all the more chilling when a diving figure on a swimsuit materializes as a toppling statue of Saddam Hussein or it becomes clear that a lace pattern originated in an image of an explosion.
The title of each piece (always derived from the source newspaper’s image caption) helps give the game away by leading viewers to try to make out the original image and ensuring that provocation, though it may have grown less obvious, stays at the heart of Yun’s project. At its conception, CY Collection took as its vehicle what Yun calls “…the extreme commodity. If you’re going to buy just one thing, it’s going to be a handbag.” Fittingly, when her conceptual enterprise diversified to carry lingerie and swimwear, these items represented two other extremes: of femininity and of ideological martyrdom. Fascinated by stories of female suicide bombers, Yun researched the practicalities of concealing a weapon for attack. The resulting lingerie and swimwear morphs a purely utilitarian device for strapping on explosives with hidden support garments, resulting in a ramped up garment for traditional seduction and destructive power.
Since it was agreed in the 60s that the personal is political, conversation about sexuality and power have been closely linked. A garment like ‘Flyaway Babydoll with Suicide Hipsters I,’ (2005) decorated with pictures of flag bearing U.S. troops recalls the age-old appeal of a man in uniform to the girls back home (or in every port). But its source image – a photo from President Bush’s highly staged 2005 landing on an aircraft carrier –recalls how a celebration of bravado has become an impotent gesture in light of political instability in Iraq. One of Yun’s most striking pieces is also one of her most daring designs: ‘Halter Teddy with Suicide Belt’ (2004/05) features a text in Arabic behind a gunman and his kidnapped victim reproduced to make a beautiful, calligraphic pattern on the garment’s breast and hip area. Literally embodying opposite excesses of Western immodesty and of Islamic fundamentalism, the garment is itself embodies conflicting extremes.
Though contrast is central to Yun’s work, it is never crass. While artists like Thomas Hirschorn have notoriously appropriated unpublished images of the U.S. war in Iraq from the Internet, these displays are calculated purely to shock by their graphic depictions of brutality. Using images from major publications forces Yun to operate within their calculated standards of decorum, a decision that allows her imagery to be more than just alarming. Her work echoes the punch of Barbara Kruger’s cynical assertion, ‘I Shop, Therefore I Am’ or Jenny Holzer’s self-conscious plea to ‘Protect me from what I want.’ But Yun eschews an anonymous production style, instead offering abundant evidence of her own hand, whether it’s in CY Collection’s obviously hand drawn logo or an awkward length of cording on an individual garment. The approach keeps her project personal, giving credence to her claim that she’s exploring conflicts that she herself faces. That keeps us on her side as she brings a critique of consumer culture into the present day climate of anxiety – one in which images of far away disaster could suddenly loom much closer.
For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine
“I think Jesus would be horrified at what’s going on,” Huma Bhabha quipped in front of J.C., her rendition of a shell-shocked son of God fashioned from scavenged wood and Styrofoam with clay accents. Standing in Salon 94’s guestroom last fall, where the harrowing bust starkly contrasted subtle furnishings, Bhabha contextualized it as a response to the Iraq War. Not only does the gritty piece embody the artist’s ability to push religious and political hot buttons, it showcases her skill in crafting grotesque portrait sculptures of larger-than-life characters.
Though Bhabha’s appropriation of Christ’s identity for her own ends cleverly critiques the proclivities of U.S. politicians, the distressed-looking figure’s real impact is its Janus faced identity. From one side, a blackened face made from ripped Styrofoam suggests an injured victim while on the reverse, a second visage appears wearing a rusty metal grill recalling a soldier’s makeshift armor.
Ambiguity defines the hunched form of another sculpture – an untitled, black clad figure apparently bent in prayer from which a tail of rubble extends. To Bhabha’s chagrin, the press interpreted the piece as a comment on Muslim women when it appeared in the blockbuster young art show ‘U.S.A. Today’ at London’s Royal Academy last fall. The artist sees the piece as sexless; clad in a body bag, not burkha, it’s intended as a disintegrating “monument to the hundreds of thousands of dead” in the Middle East.
Though Bhabha sees her artistic role as partly political (to “bear witness if nothing else,”) she is equally committed to forging a provocative formal vocabulary. To this end, she mines familiar figures from art history in fantastical portraits like Man of No Importance (a Cyclops whose head is his body), and Waiting for a Friend, (a female fertility figure bleeding from the waist), recasting her characters with newly uncertain identities.
Sleeper, a standing male figure with a stiff posture reminiscent of a Greek kouros and an economic construction suggesting an African artifact, looks at once like a battered but noble antique sculpture and a creepy contemporary character with oddly delicate features. His pronounced derriere is a comic detail observed only from the back and side, above which is a vividly blue framework – like shelving or an empty shadowbox – that turns the man vaguely mechnical.
Photographs often fail to do justice to Bhabha’s multifaceted sculptures, which yield different impressions when viewed from the front, back or side and reward close inspection of their intricate details. Early last year, the formal refinement of the sculptures in Bhabha’s second New York solo show at ATM Gallery moved veteran New York Times critic Roberta Smith to declare them, “close to perfect.” With their ambitious subject matter, from Christ to kouros, and endless suggestiveness, they continue to move even closer.