Obama-mania has swept the art world this fall with myriad auctions and other fundraising events. At David Zwirner Gallery, you can do more than buy art or hobnob with politically like-minded art lovers. you can take home a piece of history from ‘The Voting Booth Project,’ an exhibition of artwork made from actual voting booths used in the 2000 election in Florida. If the memory of the faulty booths makes you a little queasy, at least the lineup of participating artists promises to sex up the symbols of disenfranchisement by including the campy, carnivalesque assume astro vivid focus, Mickalene Thomas, liberal user of rhinestones in her images, and Fred Tomaselli of drugs-as-collage-materials fame.
The Rema Hort Mann Foundation presents The Voting Booth Project at David Zwirner Gallery, 525 West 19th Street, Oct 14 – 25 and at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 540 West 26th Street, November 7-8.
October is the perfect month for gallery visits, when the season is back in full swing and great weather makes it irresistible to get out and see what’s new. Among the best shows is Doug Aitken’s latest solo at both locations of 303 Gallery, where the mesmerizing video ‘Migration,’ stars American migratory animals confined in rooms at a series of down-at-the-heel motels. A bison knocking down chairs, a deer sipping from the pool and beaver in the bathtub suggest that animals can survive our encroachment – but can we? Speaking of animal nature, Cecily Brown is back with more paintings exploring her signature subject matter – sex. The act is discernable in a few canvases but most are abstract, allowing viewers to make their own conclusions about where her writhing brushstrokes take us. Ernesto Neto’s social spaces are decidedly more public. For his sixth solo show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, a cave resembling a giant caterpillar takes up residence on the ground floor while upstairs, architectural maquettes allow visitors even more intimacy with the artist’s ideas for the space around us.
After he moved to Shanghai from New York in 2005, Chinese art star Zhang Huan hired a huge staff to man a factory-like studio; the enormous installations that fill PaceWildenstein’s two downtown galleries give ample evidence of the scale of his industry since. But the new work lacks Zhang’s signature risk-taking, making it feel safe, easy to consume—and fashionably “Chinese.”
The show’s centerpiece, a nearly 60-foot-long “painting,” is as interesting for the technique used to create it (carefully spread ash from burnt temple offerings) as for what it depicts: an ambitious Mao-era canal project with potential correlations to ambitious contemporary undertakings such as China’s massive Three Gorges Dam. Zhang’s recycling is also conceptually engaging—using highly symbolic spent materials to create something new, which, in turn, refers to the past. But in light of the artist’s past performance-art pieces, for which he coated himself in fish, oil and honey in a public latrine, or donned a “muscle” suit made of raw meat, the ash paintings lack any sense of transgression.
Likewise, a series of “Memory Doors”—intricate carvings made over historical photos adhered to ancient wooden doors—are beautifully crafted, but their subject matter (peddlers overloaded with wares, farmers loading a truck) is more illustrative of China’s shifting economy than particularly illuminating in an art sense. Ironically, the show’s most ambiguous piece—a pregnant giant, covered by animal hides and slumped as if heavily burdened—might symbolize China’s imperiled natural world, but it could also stand in for the unfortunate taming of one of China’s most provocative artists.
Delia Brown paints subjects we love to hate. In the past, she’s depicted herself and her friends in a manner blatantly intended to arouse jealousy—flaunting their youth, sexiness and supposed wealth. Her latest series still unfolds amid the trappings of (borrowed) luxury, but adds cute kids as props in saccharine portraits of the artist and other women (none of whom have children, according to the gallery statement) playing happy mom. As tidy and controlled as her earlier scenes were louche, Brown’s vision of motherhood is as irritatingly unrealistic as it is incisive in exposing unattainable ideals.
Brown has claimed Mary Cassatt as an influence, but even Cassatt occasionally pictured a feeding or diaper change, labors that Brown ignores. Instead, cooperative children are seen lounging with carefully preened moms on cozy beds or couches in immaculate homes; it’s unclear whether the little darlings are “precious” for being themselves or for serving as must-have possessions.
Brown may have intended some sort of meditation on class and parenting, but the absence of affection between mothers and kids, and the sterility of their settings, are more evocative in revealing how hard it is to step into someone else’s reality. What starts out as another provocation turns into a confession of self-doubt, a 180-degree turnaround from the cockiness of her earlier work. Poignant and decidedly less frivolous, these latest panels signal that Brown is perhaps moving in a more personally risky—but meaningful—direction.
For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine, April 2008 '88', Marc Swanson, 2008, courtesy of Bellwether Gallery
Previously known for sculptures of sequined deer and other strange fauna, Marc Swanson seems to be hunting different trophies in his current show. Although a pile of sparkly black antlers greets visitors, a nearby wall-mounted case – a sort of reliquary containing a grungy football jersey and a swath of glam fabric – indicates that the artist is shifting his aim from animals to humans.
Also new is the incorporation of geometric patterns or diagrams – related, apparently, to personality testing and psychiatric evaluation – into several of the pieces, most chillingly Love is All Around (2007), a video created with Neil Gust. In it, we see a shirtless young man with DEVOTION tattooed across his chest posing against a tinseled backdrop in a red-lit room. A network of lines running over and behind him suggests that not only is his body being subjected to some creepy kind of analysis, but his mind is too. In the back gallery, viewers find themselves similarly dissected, thanks to two sculptural installations incorporating mirrors behind radiating webs of string and wood.
Even more disconcerting is another vitrine in which grimy t-shirts are covered in latex to form a giant hide pierced with thin gold chains. The piece recalls an earlier Swanson effort created out of T-shirts, a sort of boat sail evoking sweaty erotic camaraderie. But here, the resemblance to flayed skin, and the dark undercurrent of the other works in the dimly lit gallery sends a far more sinister message.
For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine Andre Butzer, Untitled, 2007, Courtesy of Metro Pictures Gallery On a recent weekday, the traffic at Andre Butzer’s first New York solo show flowed in and quickly back out as skeptical visitors encountered the young German painter’s garish, Expressionist renderings of cartoony characters. Butzer’s brightly colored, monumental canvases are an amusing finger in the eye of prevailing taste – the ‘lessness’ exemplified in the Whitney Biennial – but their role as harbinger of a sea-change in art world fashion is greater than their value as art.
In the first gallery, four huge portraits of Euro-American pop-culture hybrids sport Mickey Mouse gloves and faces resembling cartoons, SS death heads and Munch’s screamer, though none are particularly amusing or menacing. Phallic projections in place of arms recall Caroll Dunham’s grotesque, penis-nosed characters but without the mystery, while the figures suggest the kitschy colors of Kenny Scharf but not his surreal creativity.
Among his own generation of painters, Butzer evinces stylistic similarities to Jonathan Meese’s colorful impasto canvases and Bjarne Melgaard’s messily rendered quasi-humans. But while their free manner with paint is accompanied by developed, albeit personal storylines; Butzer’s deadpan, recurring characters dangle the potential for narrative in front of their audience without really delivering.
The worst culprit is ‘Viele Tote in Heimatland: Fanta, Sprite, H-Milch, Mickey and Donald!’ a nearly thirty foot long canvas arranged with spectral heads surrounded by thin layers of splashed and slapped on paint. Despite the title’s suggestion of a German-American cultural mash-up, Butzer’s ambition to cover that much yardage trumps his ability to come up with appropriately tour de force subject matter, making for a disappointingly flashy debut without much substance.
For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine Tamy Ben-Tor, Still from ‘Normal’, 2006, Courtesy of Zach Feuer Gallery People are idiots. That is the takeaway from Tamy Ben-Tor’s second New York solo show, which offers four new videos that fearlessly skewer the racism and misunderstanding between not only Jews and gentiles, but among humans as a whole. Using characters too foolish to be believed (including obnoxious art-world denizens), Ben-Tor shifts targets between the ugliness directed at entire groups, and the relatively harmless shortcomings of her peers.
Despite the title of the main piece, Gewald (translatable as ‘violence’), Ben-Tor skirts direct confrontation, or provocation for its own sake. Her characters are laughable enough to be dismissed along with our own culpability in prejudice. Yet stunningly acute insights slipped into fleeting scenes or absurd utterances – a Hasidic woman denying that anyone would ever want to hurt Jews; a ditzy Fraulein still ‘duped’ by Hitler – allow Ben-Tor to lay bare our capacity for ignorance without getting on a soapbox.
If these characters created by Ben-Tor (who just recently performed her live work Judensau, at the Kitchen) are fantastical, her portraits of a frustrated curator, an artist laughing all the way to the bank and an arrogant art critic are also strangely off kilter. Contrary to the supposed careerism of today, a frazzled curator can’t get artists to return her e-mails, while an aggravated critic who “doesn’t even like art, let alone love it” is hilarious but probably not too representative of her ilk. Will Ben-Tor’s jumbled characters actually prompt self-examination? That will be the test of how deep our idiocy runs.
For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine, April 2008 Wasabi Without Tears, Katy Moran, 2007 After tantalizing appearances in group shows, Katy Moran’s first New York solo affirms the young British painter’s talent for evocative abstraction. The paintings are rife with apparent contradictions: they’re small in scale yet best viewed from a distance, misty veils of white shroud the subject matter, and titles may mislead more than enlighten. Moran’s approach occasionally feels like a self-conscious gambit, but it keeps viewers guessing long enough to come to provocative conclusions.
Most canvases display the artist’s brushy, layered style and earthy, cool color palette, yet the mood of each comes as a fresh surprise. ‘Lucas’ (2007) is an ethereal cascade of blue and white that could be a waterfall, hazy beach or snowstorm. Alarming splashes of blood red dot a dark oval form that might be a boat or an open grave in ‘Volestere’ (2007). Light paint daubed over dark in the show’s most dramatic piece suggest a battlefield at night, though the title, ‘Wasabi Without Tears’ (2007) turns the painting into a funny take on high-brow, culinary machismo.
Other canvases distill the essence of different moments in the art historical canon: A cow’s head emerges from a patchwork of Futurist volumes; elsewhere a DeKooning-esque crone is rendered in dark Cubist colors while in a third painting, a rough sailboat shape in a light-toned setting recalls a Dutch harborscape. Occasionally, Moran’s jumble of forms fails to materialize into anything meaningful and her grungy color schemes can be garish. This is rare. Instead, the new work convincingly stakes Moran’s painterly territory: historically astute with a dash of humor, making nods to Karen Kilimnik’s romanticism and Cecily Brown’s jittery fluidity while possessing an energy all its own.
For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine, April 2008 Los Carpinteros, La Montana Rusa, 2008, Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery After seventeen years of exhibiting, including a memorable installation at PS1 in 2001, it’s surprising this is only the Cuban collaborative’s second New York gallery show. New Yorkers have missed out if these five new sculptures plus a suite of watercolors, which blend subtle politics, surreal domestic furniture and architectural models, are anything to go by.
Los Carpinteros’ typical sculpture is minimal, large and makes obvious references that put it at risk of seeming simplistic were it not for underlying Cuban references that add a rewarding complexity. The show’s centerpiece, ‘La Montana Rusa,’ (2008) a long, undulating bed resembling a roller coaster, brings to mind the hair-raising and uncontrollable aspects of dreams. But read its ‘socialist’ pink color as political metaphor and it becomes a timely reminder of Cuba’s present uncertain leadership.
The show’s other sculptures are portals into mysterious, dream-like worlds: A replica swimming pool with increasingly deeper chambers arranged like the layout of a house recalls the still, eerie mood of James Casebere’s photos of flooded architectural models. Three large bookshelves resemble Crate and Barrel fare but have wavy distortions that make them appear as if they were underwater or a hallucination.
Eleven watercolor drawings include buildings in the form of meat cleavers and a basketball court whose backboard arches like the trajectory of a ball. More bizarrely imaginative for not being practical enough to realize as objects, they continue Los Carpinteros’ contrast between menace and amusement, adding another edge to their provocative body of work.
Mark Handforth, Installation view, 2008, courtesy of GBE (Gavin Brown's Enterprise)
Mark Handforth’s latest solo show offers work that is both chic and out of fashion. Bold new sculptures in his usual cheeky minimalist style are a big contrast to the ephemeral and intuitive artwork being championed in the major survey shows at the New Museum and Whitney right now. Yet his best pieces combine monumentality with humor and whimsy to exert a sophisticated, mysterious charm.
Hugging the gallery building outside, an impossibly long-necked lamppost bent into a star shape extends its top around its base like a seductively crossed leg. Inside, a similarly exploded sense of scale turns a long piece of rusty pipe, bent into a heart and dotted with colorful burning candles, into a towering declaration of love. Whether the source is freshly mass-produced or just junk metal, Handforth’s amusingly capricious sculptures suggest evidence of a powerful unseen hand, a kind of giant Gabriel Orozco cum Boo Radley.
But when the readability of Handforth’s sculptures is too easy, as with the three pieces in the back gallery, it becomes clear why so many younger artists are rebelling against this sort of aesthetic. A star with two broken tips dominates the room, and also appears on an announcement card for the show in which it is ironically depicted as standing in for Mammon, Lucifer’s demonic follower in Paradise Lost. The piece’s lasting impression, however, like that of two snake-like coils of ropes and a light installation depicting a tumbleweed, is signature Handforth: made to please the eye and titillate with a knowing yet shallow allusions.
For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine Manfred Pernice, Installation view, courtesy Anton Kern Gallery
Given the impenetrable nature of Manfred Pernice’s work, you wouldn’t confuse him for an introspective soul. Despite its title, his latest show does little to change his trademark reluctance to communicate clear meaning. Instead, a mysterious centerpiece sculpture—emblazoned with unexplained dates, dotted with everyday objects and accompanied by giveaway pamphlets stamped DIARY#8212;tentatively suggests that experience is subject to many interpretations.
A few zones of fluorescent green and deep red on the central installation are among Pernice’s few concessions to aesthetic appeal. But for those willing to grasp for associations, a honeycombed-patterned platform suggests an after-hours cafeteria, while empty plinths evoke museum or trade-show displays. If those same pedestals could also be imagined as buildings in a model urban landscape, then a kid’s ball could be a stadium, while a tiny floral tile might be seen as a garden. Who’s to say?
Certainly not Pernice, whose “diaries” mix dates, texts and underwhelming photos of blurred or mundane scenes. One unremarkable photo of a man carrying a bag is captioned EXPRESS YOURSELF, while another image shows the artist with a glazed look in his eyes. Both touch on the challenges of being original, but beg the question of why Pernice can’t provide his audience a few more clues to understanding his work.
As if anticipating such criticism, a sculpture in the back gallery consists of nothing but empty boxes (for cookies, cigarettes, etc.), dated to create a chronicle of the artist’s activities. While appearing to go in a direction diametrically opposed to the rest of the show, it still maintains the same line that artistic identity is ultimately elusive.
Mai-Thu Perret, “An Evening of the Book and Other Stories”
Mai-Thu Perret’s first solo exhibition in New York aims to mine past avant-garde movements for newly provocative images and ideas, but provides little of either. What you do get are lots of arcane references underscoring the video, sculpture and diagrams. Take for instance, the show’s centerpiece video of young female dancers in utilitarian garb which, according to Perret, is inspired by artist Varvara Stephanova’s set designs for Vitalii Zhemchuzhnyi’s 1924 agitprop theater piece ‘An Evening of the Book.’ You wonder whether knowing any of this is worth the piece’s slim rewards.
The front gallery offers an oddball assortment of artworks, including a ball of neon tubing looks like a wadded up (rejected?) version of props the Geneva-based Perret has previously shown, a carpet with a Rorschach pattern and large wall diagrams of dance steps. But nothing quite sums up the pointlessness of this show better than the eight gigantic, cardboard commas – which tellingly resemble quotation marks – that line a wall leading to Perret’s take on Zhemchuzhnyi’s homage to revolutionary literature.
The same commas, along with a huge blank-paged book, appear in the video as part of a set, around which the aforementioned cadre of young women performs synchronized movements that see-saw between energy and lethargy. Apparently unable to sustain the stamina to convert past ideology to present-day meaning, the characters convey the disappointing message that such attempts are better in theory than practice.
Will this be the year that the Whitney Biennial makes critics happy? The United States’ most important contribution to today’s international circuit of biennials and triennials (and one of the oldest by far) is usually guaranteed to provoke debate about which artists were and weren’t invited to participate. The focus in 2006 was international while previous editions of the show stressed artists from regions outside New York, but this year’s show appears likely to please the New York/LA axis. Chockablock with artists familiar to gallery crowds in both cities, the list of 81 participating artists and collectives includes conceptual art pioneers Louise Lawler and John Baldessari, and representatives from the subsequent generations they influenced, including Fia Backstrom and Carol Bove. Amongst the other strains of contemporary art showcased by the Biennial will be a focus on cross-discipline work, including a series of performances staged March 3 – 23 at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Ave at 67th Street. Save the dates!
For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine Dan Perjovschi, installation view, courtesy Lombard-Freid Projects
Even if Dan Perjovschi’s doodle-like, politically charged wall drawings seemed a little out of place in MoMA’s pristine atrium last year, the incongruity created a certain frisson. His first New York solo show is just as arresting, despite being relegated to a much smaller space. Using white chalk on gray walls, the artist turns the gallery into a giant blackboard on which he has scrawled lively if uneven critiques on issues ranging from the environment to Iraq.
Perjovschi’s nervous line, and his tendency to overlap bold and faint images by erasing as he goes along, give his work an energetic, experimental feel. On the downside, drawings of a naked derriere surrounded by puckered lips and of a puppeteer making anonymous figures dance, amount to little more than generic symbols. Perjovschi’s spontaneous approach often misfires, as in his unnuanced drawing of a giant trash can scrawled with .
Most of the time, however, Perjovschi’s economy of means yields more trenchant results. A sun labeled rich on one side and poor on the other emanates more rays on the “poor” side—a concise commentary on the inequity of global warming’s impact. The clarity, punch and provocation of such pieces suggests that they’d be just as at home outside as in a gallery—which would be just as well, given Chelsea’s recent profusion of mindless street art.
Video art may be notorious for not selling as well as other media, but several Chelsea galleries are having a moment with the medium this month. Miami-based Luis Gispert delivers the weirdest show in a dual appearance at Zach Feuer Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery with an enormous projection featuring the gruesome exploits of a libidinous butcher. At the opposite extreme, Israeli artist Guy Ben-Ner’s videos at Postmasters Gallery starring the artist and his two super-cute children thankfully manage to be more amusing than saccharine. Those looking for intellectual challenge can check out ‘the royal game’ embodied by Diana Thater’s chess matches at David Zwirner, or for ‘the beautiful game,’ visit Greene Naftali Gallery and see German filmmaker Harun Farocki’s twelve screen compilation of footage and analysis of the 2006 World Cup. And no video tour through Chelsea would be complete without stopping at Iran-born video art legend Shirin Neshat’s latest videos and photos at Barbara Gladstone Gallery.
“If Ms Walker retired today she would leave behind one of the most trenchant and historically erudite bodies of art produced by any American in the last 15 years, only a portion of which is in the Whitney show,” wrote New York Times critic Holland Cotter of Kara Walker’s powerful survey show at the Whitney Museum. Pilloried by some prominent African American artists in the late 90s for trafficking in negative black imagery, Walker’s signature installations of black-paper silhouettes on white walls, drawings, projections and texts mine America’s past and present race relations in all their ugly complexity. For viewers unafraid to confront controversial issues head on, this is the show not to miss. (On through Feb 3rd).
For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine Diana Thater, 'Horus', Courtesy David Zwirner Gallery
Diana Thater has spent the last year learning all she can about chess and falconry, but don’t expect her latest video installations to provide much edification on either topic. Thater doesn’t seem interested in educating her audience about these ancient pastimes, leaving the viewer frustrated as well as tantalized.
Unlike the participants in a dog show, raptors don’t take too kindly to competition, so the set-up of the exhibition’s most engaging video, Horus, is immediately puzzling. As Thater’s camera swoops overhead on a crane, falconers of different ages and sexes sit with their birds in an atmospheric ampitheatre as if waiting to go on. Nobody goes anywhere, however, which only makes you wonder what all the medieval-looking hoods, straps and other equipment used to calm the birds say about the piece’s apparent subject – the relationship between falcon and handler.
Likewise, Thater promises stories without really telling any in a series of individually titled video reenactments of legendary chess matches. In Gary Kasparov vs Deep Junior, for example, we see the legendary Russian grand master pitted against a computer, a contest which certainly offers fertile symbolic possibilities. But absent the gallery’s explanatory handout, it looks just like the other videos in this group, all of which show similar scenes of hands moving pieces on a board. Even so, Thater’s work, beautiful as it is, inspires at least an appreciation for her subjects (her players move their fingers with the poise of dancers). It may entice you to find out more.
Jan-Feb 2008. Sculpture that tries very hard not to look too good. Tobias Buche's deliberately low-grade sculpture conjures a curious portrait of his inner world. Take Merrily Kerr's video tour of this work at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in Chelsea.
Kara Walker ‘Search for ideas supporting the Black Man as a work of Modern Art/Contemporary Painting. A death without end: an appreciation of the Creative Spirit of Lynch Mobs’, 2007, Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Co.Kara Walker, Bureau of Refugees: Bob Foreman cut at Union Springs, 2007
By the time Kara Walker’s first full scale American museum survey arrived at the Whitney Museum from the Walker Art Center last fall, a wave of press coverage, including feature articles in the New Yorker and Art in America, made it the must-see show of the season. But it was the fifty-two-panel, handwritten text in Walker’s simultaneous downtown gallery show that deserved the attention. Flanked by smaller works in her signature cut-paper style illustrating atrocities committed against freedmen after the Civil War, the enormous text installation, with an equally expansive title (Search for ideas supporting the Black man as a work of modern art/contemporary painting; a death without end, an an appreciation of the creative spirit of lynch mobs), stood out for its sheer unornamented rawness—no illustrations, just scribbled handwriting—and its scathing references to U.S. military action in the Middle East.
Since the mid-nineties, Walker’s silhouettes, paintings, videos, and projections have consistently conjured imagery of the Old South in abject yet clearly readable scenes of violence and sexual subjugation. When she used text, it was written in what could plausibly be the artist’s own perspective or that of an alter ego. Her more recent text-based work (since 2002) adopts a range of voices—anthropologist, slave, contemporary middle class African-American.
Search for Ideas is an even more cacophonous brew of observations and perspectives. Here, Walker explores the potential analogy between racist attitudes in America and those perpetuated by Americans overseas in texts that refer to Saddam Hussein as a “porch monkey” or Arabs as “sand niggers.” Under the rubric of aggressor and complicit victim, the text details rapes and torture, proffers that black soldiers are willing Klansmen and asks, in the face of global jihad, “how can colored folks get on the winning side w/o giving up their hard-won right to jeans that fit…” Because the fifty-four parts are hung cheek-to-jowl and there is no obvious sequencing, it is unclear whether one is supposed to read them left-to-right, or top-to-bottom.
Likewise, the show’s small cut-paper works and large-scale collages on panels lack clear storylines, such as ReConstruction (2007), a decorative mélange of floating silhouetted heads over a background of post-9/11 New York Times ads offering condolences.
From Richard Serra’s 2005 poster recreating a scene from Abu Ghraib to Jenny Holzer’s presentation of declassified documents pertaining to military bungles in Iraq, among many other examples, Walker is not alone in using her artistic platform to protest U.S. foreign policy. Yet Search for Ideas seems uniquely geared to offend and disturb by its graphic descriptions of violation, its willingness to lay blame all around, and its success at tapping another well of middle-class guilt, this time over atrocities committed in the name of the American public. A schizophrenic toggle between individuals and nations, and between first and third person, makes for a confusing and overwhelmingly despairing indictment. However, as a grating tour de force of ugly truth, the piece is powerfully effective and makes a loud riposte to one text’s assertion that “Knowledge comes in the form of whispers of those in the know.”
Aleksandra Mir, ‘Newsroom 1986-2000’, courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery
Visitors were in for a surprise at Mary Boone Gallery recently, when the normally frosty atmosphere was melted by the folksy artwork of artist Aleksandra Mir and her team of assistants. Music blared from a boom box, while collectors rubbed shoulders with young hipsters in what looked like an art studio. In a back office, cordoned off but publicly visible, Mir hand-copied onto huge sheets of paper the front pages from hometown tabloids the Post and the Daily News, dating from 1986 to 2000. When she was done, her drawings were transferred to the main gallery where a Sharpie-wielding team of young artists and students diligently filled in her outlines. All in all, some two-hundred drawings from approximately ten thousand front pages were generated.
Mir claimed that she couldn’t care less about the gallery’s newly congenial or keyed down ambience, saying, “That’s the subject that interests me the least. I’m not interested in institutional critique but in having been a citizen of this town.” Yes, it’s true that the project broadcast a fond nostalgia for the city that the Polish born, Sweden-raised artist recently left after a fifteen-year stay. In some the headlines emphasized the entertainment value of the New York tabloids: a ‘Burger Murder’ poisoning was treated with as much import as a ‘Milk War’ waged on grocery prices. In another group, the headlines were linked by money— ‘Killed for a Quarter’ and a $1.5 billion coke bust—highlighting one of the city’s fondest obsessions. Here was a city perpetually enchanted by the same recurring stories; the drawings seemed geared to prove the cliché, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Yet, the high-polish context begged otherwise, revealing instead just how much the art world had changed. The exodus of galleries from SoHo to Chelsea began during the period Mir examined and, in the opinion of many, precipitated a new fashion in art for work made on a scale and volume calculated to fill newly pristine and vast galleries, as well as an unprecedented alignment of real estate and art. By working in the gallery, Mir aimed to emphasize the fact that she never maintained a studio in New York, working instead without the need for one. But the effect was somewhat different, unintentionally acknowledging a situation whereby artists can no longer afford the city’s rents. Mir became the emblematic displaced artist of today, shunned not to the sidelines as in times past, but to center stage, a peripatetic entertainer in a theater of gold.
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 many New Yorkers, Chris Ofili’s name will bring to mind the brou-ha-ha around his painting of the Virgin Mary supported by two clods of dried elephant dung, exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. Ofili’s choice of materials aimed to beg the question of what kind of art he should make as a Caribbean-British artist, a topic that he revisits in a show of new work at David Zwirner Gallery. A recent move to Trinidad appears to have influenced the subject matter and style of his recent paintings, with languid characters, intense colors and tropical landscapes making references to European masters like Gauguin and Matisse, who ventured abroad in search of the exotic. With several standout paintings and sculptures, Ofili peels back another layer of his complicated identity, making this the ‘don’t miss’ show of the moment.
For more information on Chris Ofili’s ‘Devil’s Pie’ exhibition, visit David Zwirner Gallery.
After two long years of itinerant existence, the New Museum of Contemporary Art is poised to open its brand new building at the intersection of Prince and Bowery on December 1st. Though noteworthy galleries have long called the Lower East Side home, the Museum’s move is boosting the neighborhood’s contemporary art cachet in a big way. Uptown galleries Salon 94 and Greenberg Van Doren have opened satellite spaces just around the corner, while galleries including 31 Grand, Envoy, Luxe and others have relocated from other parts of town to be part of the burgeoning scene. Tiny storefront spaces that are the opposite of Chelsea’s pristine white cubes make for an intimate and fresh art viewing experience while suggesting that the LES trend is one to watch.
Sexually, politically or aesthetically provocative contemporary art is easy to find, but true controversy is rare. For nearly a decade, Kara Walker’s artwork has excited loud response – both enthusiastic and horrified – and is bound to generate even more discussion now that her highly anticipated survey exhibition ‘My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love,’ is open at the Whitney Museum. Pilloried by many African American artists in the late 90s for trafficking in negative black imagery, Walker’s signature installations of black-paper silhouettes on white walls, drawings, projections and texts mine America’s past and present race relations in all their ugly complexity. If you gravitate towards art that demands a personal response from its audience, this is the hottest show in town.
For more information, visit the Whitney Museum’s website:
Mika Rottenberg, ‘The cardio solaric cyclopad-work from home as you get fit and tan’, 2004, Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun, New York
The female body, in all its potential fantastic proportions, obsesses Mika Rottenberg. Her eccentric videos have featured body builders, dancers, wrestlers, and porn models laboring in confined, assembly-line settings to manufacture unusual objects related to the body: fast-growing fingernails morph into cherries, perspiration becomes the scent for tissues, and in the video ‘Dough’ (the highlight of her first New York solo gallery show early in 2006 at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery), the tears of an obese beauty cause dough to rise.
More recently, Rottenberg has abandoned her cramped studio in favor of the wide-open spaces of the natural world. Inspired by the story of the Sutherland Sisters, a 19th century family of girls who displayed their extra long hair in a Barnum & Bailey performance and marketed their own hair growth formula (supposedly including mist collected at Niagara Falls), she worked with members of a present day long hair club to make the short trailer, ‘Chasing Waterfalls: The Rise and Fall of the Amazing Seven Sutherland Sisters (part one).’ As winner of the inaugural Cartier Award, Rottenberg screened the video at the 2006 Frieze Art Fair, giving her audience a tantalizing glimpse of the related project on which she is now working.
MK – Your videos have been set in an enclosed space; now you’re working outdoors. What has that shift been like?
MR – In past pieces like ‘Dough,’ I built one part of the set at a time and worked individually with each actor. I wanted to see what I could do with limited space. Now, I’m interested in finding out what I can do with no spatial limits, so I’m building a set completely from scratch in the middle of the woods.
MK – How did you choose the location for your shoot?
MR – The actors in the trailer are part of a long hair lovers Internet club, and three of them live near one town in Central Florida. I actually wish I could write a sitcom about the RV park/ retirement community where I’m staying. People there have a lot of time on their hands, which makes them creative – they do things like have their own parades. The Boy Scouts are even going to help me behind the scenes. Thanks to a piece in Vanity Fair, I got permission from a local farmer to do whatever I want with a huge piece of land that includes a petting zoo that no one visits.
MK – Has your normal working process had to change?
MR – My process usually follows several distinct stages: I start with drawings, which come purely from my imagination; then I try to find people I want to work with; I build the set or sculptural environment; then work with the actors in the space, making a lot of set changes. Eventually, there are always moments over which I have less control, as when I introduced the dough in ‘Dough.’ There’s gravity and you know it’s going to go down, but I don’t know how a person is going to behave. I try to keep the camera on all the time so I have hours and hours of footage, but often, the material I actually use is from moments when the actors forget the camera is on. My first thought for my current project was to mimic a reality TV show by creating a space – in this case, a functioning 19th century farm – and asking the women to just be there for a week. The scenario, along with their bad acting could really make it ridiculous and funny.
MK – Will there be similarities to your previous themes?
MR – The project is in the beginning stages and could still go in so many directions. But like my other videos, I want the whole story to revolve around cause and effect – presenting a problem and then solving it. It may be a poor farm and the women bad farmers. Something will break and that will trigger the next thing, a method that will promote the story and develop the characters. I’m thinking in an almost sculptural way and trying to have the story be more physical, because I can’t write dialogue!
I’m inspired to think of the farm as a giant Earthwork in the sense that it’s a zone for experimentation with earth. There are parallels between the incredible amount of labor that goes into farming and the routines the women adopt to care for their hair, such as brushing it daily for two hours. I spent this week trying to make a device that would convert the strokes of a hairbrush into an energy source that could power other things on the farm, though I’m not sure I’ll even use the device in the final version.
Mika Rottenberg, Chasing Waterfalls, 2006. Video Still. Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun
MK – You closely associate the women with nature, whether it’s being near a waterfall or on a farm.
MR – My videos employ clichés about femininity, and this one involves associations between women, fertility and the earth. I’m attracted to how these trite ways of thinking about women offer a kind of bliss, that is, they satisfy a basic desire for resolution and simplicity. I’m a sucker for the related visual images – girls playing with little lambs and bunnies, waterfalls, and long blond hair blowing in the wind. But the fun really starts when I dissect the clichés, turning them inside out and showing them as they really are – creepy and uncanny.
The Sutherland Sisters started selling their hair fertilizer as a result of the Industrial Revolution. They marketed their product right after chemical fertilizers for the soil came on the market, implying that if you could grow grass that much faster, then you could also grow hair. I like the contrast between male baldness and a super abundance of female hair.
MK – Certain aspects of the trailer remind me of a romance novel or soap opera.
MR – Absolutely, because its about entrepreneurs and new horizons. It blurs the line between cheesy, funny and genuine.
MK – Have you intentionally used humor in your past work?
MR – Whenever I try for it to be funny, it’s probably not, so I don’t. In ‘Dough’ there’s more of an awkward weirdness and element of grotesque that might come across as funny. It actually depended on the reaction of the other people watching the screening; if people were laughing you felt like it was funny whereas if people were serious you felt unease.
MK – That video seems to intentionally subvert conventional notions of beauty. The obese woman is pretty whereas the thin woman’s proportions are grotesque.
MR –I don’t know if I consciously think in terms of beauty or subverting beauty. My interest is more in things that the body produces and the way you use the body and it becomes more like an object. Some long-haired women relate to their hair like it’s a pet. The Sutherland sisters were smart not to cut and sell their hair, but to keep it and use it as an object in their Barnum and Bailey act.
MK – Is your art about society’s response to their extremes?
MR – I don’t think it’s about society’s reaction to long hair or fat people. It’s about society’s interaction with the body in all its possibilities. Of course, there’s a layer that relates to American obesity, but that’s not my focus. Instead, it’s more about taking something to an extreme to examine it. If the dough is a stand-in for the body, there’s a fantasy about the body’s ability to stretch as if there’s nothing inside.
And it’s also more about my personal attraction to long hair or to big bodies, for example. For my video ‘Time and Half’ I’d been looking on the Internet for someone with really long hair and then saw a woman on the subway. In that piece, I manipulated the background (a Chinese takeout restaurant) by adding more palm trees to emphasize how the girl and her hair are so exotic.
MK – Could you be accused of exploiting your characters? ?MR – I’m always waiting for that question. In a way, I am using the actors almost as objects, which is supposed to be a bad thing to do. I’m not trying to be a saint, and I don’t think the artist’s part is to be “the good guy.” I often feel uncomfortable in the position in which I put myself, but my connection with the actors runs like an experiment, a behavioral observation or a motion study. I can see how that can be exploitative, but it’s hard to make work about that without actually doing it. You could argue that we have an equal and satisfying relationship serving each other’s needs as exhibitionist and voyeur.
MK – Does your work come from a feminist perspective?
MR –I’ve always defined myself as a feminist. There is an aspect of misogyny in my work that is a response to the way society in general is. So I have to ask myself what it means to be a “good” feminist. If I use peoples’ bodies and objectify them, then I’m a bad feminist, or I’m promoting the usual stereotypes. But since these are so common in daily life, it’s a way to negotiate or understand them and make them empowering. I keep questioning my own morality.
MK – There’s another –ism that relates to your work. Can you tell me about your references to Marxism?
MR – The very definition of labor is the process between a person and nature, but actually, I’m interested in Marx’s writing in an abstract way, as more poetic than political. The way he describes production and a person in motion is both beautiful and very visual. What’s inspiring to me is his way of measuring units of energy, materials and time involved in labor. Everyone assumes that in ‘Dough’ there is an end product, but in my mind, the rising dough is constantly growing in volume so the excess that is pushed out is really more of a unit that measures work. The process of handling the dough also uses the forces of nature like gravity, allergies and other reactions. In the new video, I’m growing crops and thinking of how to control the animals’ movement by harnessing their desire for food. It’s almost as if they’re the dough.
MK – What do the women in the long hair club think of reconnecting with nature?
MR – They’re each different but are all high maintenance. You have to be when you have hair that long. It gets delicate and they count every hair and split end. Most of the time it’s up, but when they take it down, it’s like a ceremony and their mobility can be almost paralyzed. But each has a unique relationship to her hair, and unlike my past videos only one of them makes a living (running a soft-porn website) from her unique feature. Very long hair is attractive to a lot of guys, but the women distinguish between the fetishists and the long-hair lovers. If they meet a man, he has to pass tests to make sure the attraction isn’t sexual, although, of course, it’s sexy.
MK – This sounds like a whole new way in which truth is stranger than fiction.
MR – Like my other videos, I’m setting up a situation and trusting reality to do the job. People might say that my work is absurd, but reality is even more so.
Feminism is dead? Think again. Touted as, ‘The first international exhibition exclusively dedicated to feminist art from 1990 to the present,’ ‘Global Feminisms’ at the Brooklyn Museum proves that women around the world (with quite a few art stars among them) are making artwork about specifically female experience. The show opens the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, implying not only that feminism is here to stay, but that the artwork identified under that title will be continually worthy of a significant swathe of Brooklyn Museum real estate. Judge for yourself if this controversial investment is truly groundbreaking or ‘a false idea wrapped in confusion,’ as New York Times critic Roberta Smith recently put it. (Show closes July 1st.)
For more information on Global Feminisms and the Elizabeth A Sackler Center for Feminist Art, visit The Brooklyn Museum’s website.
If you weren’t already aware of Richard Serra as one of the country’s most respected sculptors, you will be after taking in his forty-year career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA actually accounted for the requirements of Serra’s enormous sculptures in its recent rebuilding and renovation, a fact which underlines his esteemed reputation and makes for a stunning installation in the 2nd floor contemporary art galleries and sculpture garden. The show’s 550 tons of undulating steel sculpture include three new pieces as well as iconic favorites, making it not only one of the most anticipated shows of recent years, but the hottest show of the summer.
It’s the season for group shows in New York galleries, but one upcoming solo show stands out this summer. Starting June 29th, Banks Violette, known for his Goth-inspired aesthetic, will show new work at two collaborating galleries: Barbara Gladstone Gallery and Team Gallery. More than another example of how hot artists are increasingly working not just with one New York gallery, Violette’s dark vision promises to be an intriguing counterpoint to the sunny summer season. (Show runs June 29 – August 17.)
Paula Cooper Gallery May-June 2007. Wayne Gonzales' paintings of crowds zero in on the American public, emphasising its divisions. Take Merrily Kerr's video tour of this work
Allen Ruppersberg, The Singing Posters, 2003. Installation at Rice University Art Gallery, c. 2004 Hester and Hardaway. Photo by Paul Hester (detail)
At sixty-three, Allen Ruppersberg, the thoughtful maverick whose work has returned again and again to posters and books, is finally getting his due.
Today collectors are hunting for underappreciated talent – value-investing, you might say – while young artists with an apathy or a disdain for the machinations of the gallery system are looking for less market-friendly role models. Both may, in part, explain the increasing interest in Allen Ruppersberg, the Los Angeles and New York-based artist whose work was recently the subject of a survey in Europe and was brandished on the March cover of Artforum magazine. Ruppersberg’s cross-disciplinary approach, his embrace of pulp fiction, film, and quotidian graphics, and clever recycling of his old art for new have defined an innovate career that is still unfolding. Of particular interest, especially to artists, is his ongoing use of both posters and books, formats that remain excluded from the art historical canon.
From the early days of his career, Ruppersberg pushed the boundaries of what art could be. In 1969, two years after graduating from the Chouinard Institute in Los Angeles, he established a short-lived cafe in which he served plate-size helpings of environmental art, followed by a similarly short-lived hotel/art installation. By the early 1970s, his love of literature began to manifest itself in artworks based on books, which, since then, have taken many forms, among them text-paintings, installations, and public art projects. In the early 1980s, he hit on the idea of making artwork that mimicked the highly commercial, colorful advertising placards ubiquitous in L.A. at the time.
Ruppersberg has a vast collection of postcards, books, movie posters, films, magazines, ephemera and other pop culture artifacts that he uses as a resource for his work. Speaking about the time the artist spent in New York (from the mid-80s through the 90s), Christine Burgin, a New York dealer who has worked with him since the late 1980s, recalls, “Al came to New York and collected CBGB and Mud Club posters, archiving them as if they were fine art.” Burgin adds that in his artwork, “he uses posters of his own making – along with leftovers from jobs printed by other clients of the company that prints them – to disavow authorship, presenting them as they exist in the world.” ‘The New Five Foot Shelf’ (2001), a major installation by the artist, includes a fifty-volume publication with texts written or collected by the artist, and forty-four poster scale ink jet prints that document—photographically—the interior of his old library-like Manhattan studio.
‘The Novel That Writes Itself,’ an epic work that is ongoing, has to be the crowning poster project of his career. Although originally intended to be realized in another form—Ruppersberg sold roles in an autobiographical novel back in 1978 but the project languished before being reborn in poster form – it now consists, in Ruppersberg’s estimation, of more than 800 posters. These include the pages with ads, duplicates, and his own text. More posters are produced each time the piece is installed. Displayed floor to ceiling, the posters have an eye-catching quality while perversely championing a form of communication considered lower than pulp.
In a multi-part work from 2003 and 2005, titled ‘The Singing Posters’, Ruppersberg used this formal precedent to pay homage to a now historical text once deemed obscene: Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl.’ The piece consists of a phonetic rewriting of the poem, using changing typefaces, that is printed on nearly two hundred multicolor posters. Whereas most posters are designed to be read at a glance, but these force the viewer to puzzle out the poem, word by word, poster by poster.
Ruppersberg may be reflecting on his own influences in projects like ‘The Singing Posters,’ but others are looking to his example as they find their own artistic voice. Artists like Mark Bradford, Evan Holloway, Scott King, and Carl Pope have all used posters in this work, while other young artists have closer conceptual parallels to Ruppersberg, including Carol Bove’s sculptural installations of books from the 70s, Bernadette Corporation’s cribbing from other people’s works, or North Drive Press’ treasure troves of artist-conceived ephemera.
The new interest doesn’t signal that Ruppersberg has passed the torch, however. He has several new projects afoot, including an installation in June for the Art Unlimited section at Art Basel, for which he is preparing banners (printed by the same company that makes his posters) and thousands of photocopies based on parts of his collection which visitors can take away. There, at the momentary center of the international art world, he will be perfectly positioned to influence and be influenced, to participate in the market and distance himself. “It’s the same dialogue and process of artists talking about common ideas,” he observes, “…but a new generation looks at things differently, and that’s inspiring.”
The empires of major Chelsea gallerists continue to expand. On April 10th, Paula Cooper will open a third space in an unlikely location: London Terrace Towers, between 9th and 10th Aves with a show of work by Sherrie Levine. In addition to 192 Books and two spaces on 21st Street, the more intimate new venue (1,100 sq ft) will offer the gallery the option of complimenting exhibitions or offering a third show.
Speaking of gallerists who’ve made good, be sure to check out ‘The Art of the Deal’ at the Kantor/Feuer window between 25th and 26th Streets. An installation opens April 1st of artwork created by several well-known dealers before they traded in their ambitions as artists for successful careers as gallerists. Is this an April Fools joke?
Dana Schutz hasn’t shown many paintings in New York since her knock-out piece in PS1’s 2005 Greater New York exhibition, so anticipation is growing to see what she’ll unveil in her next solo show, due to open April 12th. Judge for yourself whether the painting in this intriguingly titled show, ‘Stand By Earth Man,’ is just eye candy or if Schutz is making a breakthrough contribution to figurative, expressionist painting.
This month, the exhibition mostly likely to get people talking earns its ‘hottest show’ tag by literally applying the heat to gallery visitors. As part of an installation, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, his assistants, staff at David Zwirner Gallery, or volunteers are preparing daily vats of feisty Thai curry to which visitors can help themselves. Dealers, critics and art world luminaries have been spotted indulging in a spicy lunch at tables and chairs scattered around a plywood structure which replicates 303 Gallery’s space in Soho, where the piece was first exhibited in 1992. Tiravanija reveals his indebtedness to Gordon Matta-Clark’s precedent-setting café, ‘Food’ and his unconventional use of real estate by sharing the gallery space with a recreation of Matta-Clark’s ‘Open House,’ a sculpture made in a dumpster which coincidently occupied the same SoHo address as Tiravanija’s exhibition when it was created in 1972.
For more information, visit David Zwirner Gallery’s website.
This month, the exhibition mostly likely to get people talking earns its 'hottest show' tag by literally applying the heat to gallery visitors. As part of an installation, daily vats of feisty Thai curry are prepared, to which visitors can help themselves. Dealers, critics and art world luminaries have been spotted indulging in a spicy lunch at tables and chairs scattered around a plywood structure which replicates 303 Gallery's space in Soho, where the piece was first exhibited in 1992. Tiravanija reveals his indebtedness to Gordon Matta-Clark's precedent-setting café, 'Food' and his unconventional use of real estate by sharing the gallery space with a recreation of Matta-Clark's 'Open House,' a sculpture made in a dumpster which coincidently occupied the same SoHo address as Tiravanija's exhibition when it was created in 1972.
Attention all photo enthusiasts, don’t miss three shows set to close April 7th. Selections from Mitch Epstein’s series, ‘American Power’ may feel a little disjointed – images representing family and romantic power relations are shuffled in with photos depicting refineries, fuel processing plants and the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina – but are still a sobering visual essay on the cost exacted by American energy consumption. Justine Kurland’s subject matter is likewise tied to the American landscape, but her photos of mothers and their children posing nude in the wilds are idyllic scenarios suggesting a thwarted yearning for prelapsarian perfection. Meanwhile, over at 303 gallery, Karel Funk’s photorealist paintings (OK, it only looks like photography) prove it’s not just God who can count every hair on your head. Check out the lavish attention paid to the minutest detail of his male subjects, including the wispy locks on one magnificent hipster in the back gallery.
It’s nearly the time of year when the international art world descends upon New York for the annual weekend extravaganza of art fairs. As usual, the week’s anchors are The Art Show, presented by the Art Dealers Association of America and featuring 70 galleries offering art by artists of all periods, and The Armory Show, which despite today’s plethora of art fairs, still boldly dubs itself, “the world’s leading art fair devoted exclusively to contemporary art.” If these two fairs aren’t enough to keep you occupied over the weekend, satellite fairs abound and include: Scope New York at Lincoln Center, Damrosch Park, Pulse New York at the 69th Regiment Armory at Lexington Ave and 26th Street, and the Digital and Video Art (DiVA) Fair at the Embassy Suites Hotel, Battery Park. Better get your rest now!
Exhibition closings come in waves; the next set is due to break on February 10th. Don’t miss Stan Douglas’s video ‘Klatsassin,’ a murder and revenge story set during a gold rush in 19th century British Columbia, at David Zwirner Gallery. Presented in Douglas’ characteristic looping format, with 850 possible permutations, the entire effort runs over 70 hours, both teasing and enticing viewers with an elusively juicy plot. Though their subject matter is decidedly less dramatic, at least two other shows merit a last minute trip to Chelsea. Dike Blair’s tiny, mundane, but mysterious still life paintings at D’Amelio Terras Gallery muster a murky noir feeling, while Charles Long’s elegant, white sculptures at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery recall Giacometti but were actually modeled on bird droppings, giving them pedigree in an art world long obsessed with bodily function.
For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine Huma Bhabha, 'J.C.', 2006, Private Collection “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.
Huma Bhabha, 'Untitled', 2005, Private Collection
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. Huma Bhabha, 'Untitled', 2005, courtesy ATM Gallery 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.
Yun-Fei Ji at his drafting table, courtesy Yun-Fei Ji and James Cohan Gallery
Yun-Fei Ji’s monumental new landscape paintings, depicting scenes along the winding banks of the Yangtze River just prior to the area’s flooding by the Three Gorges Dam, are composed of imagery sampled from a vast archive of photographs, notes and sketches he has developed on several trips to China over the past five years. In the paintings, day laborers, moving trucks and departing residents occupy the cities and villages amid tranquil, mountainous scenery. The inclusion of fantastical characters and otherworldly scenarios distances the delicate ink on paper paintings from pure documentary. Still, the volume of primary research behind each image is in and of itself highly significant.
Digital images taken by Ji in 2002 for source material in different areas near Three Gorges Dam. All of the buildings in these photographs are underwater today.
Before Ji made his first research trip to the Three Gorges region in 2001, he investigated the area’s rich history and turbulent politics, delving into its literature, following news reports, and reading blogs detailing often tragic stories about locals affected by the dam project. During his travels, he amassed tens of thousands of images and reams of notes, which he organizes by geographic location upon returning to his studio, storing the digital photographs on CDs and filing away clippings and other ephemera. Although he has no routine habit of accessing his archive (and sheepishly admits to sometimes losing track of what he’s collected), for the latest series, Ji dug back through his images in search of the period before the flood. “In each picture, I can point out a detail that interested me,” he says. The photographs in Ji’s archive depict a wide range of subjects, among them tidily stacked building materials, doors and windows waiting to be taken and reused, scavenging day laborers and the ubiquitous camps of holdout residents who refuse to move until the last minute.
Ji draws from computer printouts or while looking at photos on his monitor, improvising as much as he copies. “I’m not just adding things up when I work,” he says. “I find details that trigger my interest and imagination and act as a stepping point to something else.” Ji’s sketches can also originate just as easily from an idea generated during a conversation, from a found photograph, or, from other found source materials. In one case, a propagandist magazine cover from the 1950s showing happy farmers in a time of widespread famine inspired an etching of cadaverous landsmen, while in another, accumulated tales from the demolition workers resulted in a painting of a scavenger’s wife communing with the dead.
“There is almost nothing that I don’t draw,” says Ji, referring both to the large number of drawings that cover the walls of his studio and fill his sketchbooks and to their varied subject matter, from studies of plant life to half demolished buildings. More often than not, he’ll sketch a subject multiple times; occasionally, Ji collages together disparate sketches, then paints from those. In keeping with his unique style – informed by studies in both Eastern and Western art – Ji explains his process as “…translating everything into line and brushstroke. Though my work uses photography as source material like many Western painters, its very different because I’m not using light and dark shadow.”
Ji’s paintings, like his drawings, result from tireless preparation and intuition. “Sometimes, I’ll start with a vague idea, not knowing where I’m going, and slowly it will emerge what the painting is about,” he explains. This approach requires a concentration that the artist likens to walking a tightrope. Each careful step of the painting involves using calligraphy brushes to build up an area with layer after layer of paint, which is applied using brush strokes like the staccato ‘ax’ or curly ‘buffalo hair.’ Working on a table covered with felt for absorbency, Ji applies paint and sometimes washes it to reduce its intensity, giving the mulberry-paper background of his most labored-over pieces a weathered appearance.
That Ji’s recent paintings derive from images and notes he recorded as he witnessed the mass relocation effort is poignant, but also helpful in explaining the surreal, disjointed quality that these works sometimes possess. Buildings, people and plant life can appear to float on the painted page like objects bobbing on the water after a shipwreck, and a rock formation is as carefully rendered as a cluster of displaced villagers. The technique evokes the dreamlike way in which memory can function, or history is written, bringing certain details into clearer focus than others and telling stories that might otherwise remain submerged.
Just can’t get enough Picasso! No less than three major New York museum exhibitions currently feature the art master, arguing for his allegiance to historical Spanish painting (Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso at the Guggenheim), identifying his influence on American art (Picasso and American Art at the Whitney Museum) and his importance to one of the early 20th century’s greatest art dealers (Cezanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Factor in the extensive permanent collection display of the artist’s work at MoMA, and this could be one of the city’s biggest Picasso moments in recent history.
Christmas is just around the corner, but amid the shopping and festivities, don’t forget that many gallery shows are slated to close right before the holidays. The most obvious must-see is John Currin’s racy, exquisitely rendered portraits at Gagosian Gallery’s uptown location. Meanwhile, don’t miss the huge show of late Warhols at the gallery’s two downtown spaces, where self-portraits in fright wigs butt heads with Mao and Jesus makes an appearance in monumental Last Suppers. For something out of the ordinary, catch Martha Camarillo’s photographs of horse-riding culture in the heart of inner city Philadelphia (as in, hanging out on the street on a horse), at the Jack Shainman Gallery. (All shows close December 22nd.)
If getting to galleries in this busy season is impossible, don’t stress. Shows may be closing soon, but the good news is that several promising ones open this week. Tops among them may be Jenny Perlin’s unconventional video and film work at The Kitchen, based on research into FBI wiretapping in the ‘50s. At the opposite geographic end of Chelsea comes a completely different kind of exhibition: ‘Primitivism Revisited’ at Sean Kelly Gallery which matches classical African Art with work by major contemporary artists (including Robert Mapplethorpe, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Marina Abramovic and more) to demonstrate changing attitudes toward African culture. (Jenny Perlin at The Kitchen opens Dec 15th and runs through February 10th. ‘Primitivism Revisited: After the End of an Idea opens Dec 15th and runs through January 27th.
What do you get when you mix a hot art star, Hollywood luminaries including Tilda Swinton and Donald Sutherland, and the exterior walls of the sleek, midtown Museum of Modern Art? A highly visible, super-stylish art video in the form of Doug Aitken’s seven screen projection, Sleepwalkers, which began screening nightly outside MoMA in mid-January. Times critic Roberta Smith concisely summarized the effect as “dazzling and a bit bloodless.” But considering that New York magazine anticipated this to be the “most seen show in MoMA’s history,” and the fact that the museum reported over two and a half million visitors last year, that’s a huge audience for Aitken’s film, without a doubt making it the hottest show in town. (Sleepwalkers screens nightly at MoMA from 5pm – 10pm until February 12th.)
See the trailer and visit the on-line exhibition on MoMA’s website:
For ‘Time Out’ Magazine Evan Holloway, 'Asymmetry Demonstration', 2006, courtesy of Harris Lieberman As the title of L.A. sculptor Evan Holloway’s New York solo debut, “$ocial epi$temology,” suggests, the artist is known for two things: formal whimsy and theoretical sources. This show of seven sculptures makes good on the former, but hits a snag when works fail to do more than turn postulates into punchlines.
Several sculptures refer to scientific or social principles, but eschew complexity for humorous effect. Second Law,” a spindly metal wheel poised over a plaster box studded with batteries, illustrates a Newtonian law of motion: An object will change velocity if pushed. Visitors are invited to spin the wheel as if they were playing a game on the midway. The show takes its satirically heady title from a tower of multicolored, clownlike heads with Rudolph-style bulbs in place of noses – a carnivalesque spectacle that sheds little light, blinking or otherwise, on the social significance of knowledge.
The number of one-liners here makes you wonder if these are the strongest examples of the artist’s work (some viewers may fondly recall the subtler objects included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial). One happy exception is the diagrammatic “Asymmetry Demonstration,” which pairs a large, colorful cornucopia with a smaller black-and-white cone, each suspended in its own metal frame and resting on a chartlike drawing. A better illustration of the artist’s caprice than any intricate system, it reminds us that beauty and a way with materials are the bedrock of art.
New York-based painter Yun-Fei Ji’s lively depictions of Chinese village life express equal parts affection for rural ways and disgust at the corruption and ignorance that threatened to make them extinct. Using Classical Chinese painting techniques, he has spent years documenting The Three Gorges Dam project and its displacement of millions of Chinese citizens. What will the paintings show now that the dam’s waters have risen? Find out when the exhibition opens, Nov 17th at James Cohan Gallery
A trio of shows south of the border (e.g. just beyond the Meatpacking District!) are a cinch to draw visitors below 14th Street this month with excellent offerings by young West Coast artists Evan Holloway and Jennifer Bornstein and Swiss legend Dieter Roth. Holloway at long last presents his first New York solo show after attracting attention in the 2002 Whitney Biennial for his abstract sculptures, while Bornstein departs from her usual photo and film-based work to present intimate portraits created by copperplate etching. Meanwhile Carolina Nitsch Contemporary Art shows editioned graphics and objects by the master of odd art materials (including chocolate and sausage) as part of a two-gallery show also at Josee Bienvenu Gallery in Chelsea. (Evan Holloway’s and Jennifer Bornstein’s shows are open until Nov 18th, Dieter Roth’s is open until Nov 25.)
Two shows vie for the title of ‘most talked about’ this month: young, German maverick John Bock’s new video and zany rooftop installation at Anton Kern Gallery and painter of curvaceous women, Lisa Yuskavage’s latest bevy of babes at David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea and Zwirner & Wirth uptown. Those who love Bock’s signature mad scientist behavior will delight to find the provocateur slithering through cabinetry, eating from a can of ravioli with a spoon attached to a chair leg and performing other bizarre feats. Likewise, Yuskavage fans will enjoy a spectacular array of light drenched, color-soaked portraits of fecund females. Neither will leave you short of conversation. (John Bock is at Anton Kern Gallery until November 25, Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings are up until November 18.)
Christian Marclay’s last solo show was a memorable installation of 16 monitors arranged in a circle and playing a composition of sounds made by shaking, rattling and rolling objects from the Walker Art Museum’s Fluxus archive. This and other imaginative projects (including one front and center in MoMA’s newly reinstalled contemporary art galleries) ramp up the excitement for his next show, titled ‘The Electric Chair’ after Andy Warhol’s famous image from his Death and Disaster series.
For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine Jesse Bercowetz & Matt Bua, Installation View of 'Things Got Legs', 2006, courtesy of Derek Eller Gallery Jesse Bercowetz and Projects (a collaborative with Carrie Dashow) felt compromised by restraint. Judging by the riot of knockabout sculptures assembled from junk crowding “Things Got Legs” at Derek Eller Gallery, the pair seems determined not to make the same mistake twice. From the spinning head located inside the front door to the flashing lights of a dungeon-like installation in the back room, a carnival atmosphere prevails. But at times, a lack of focus threatens the potential punch.
The show’s energy and disorder stem from the same source: the artists’ enthusiasm for conspiracy theories and folktales, with many pieces confusingly alluding to several at once. The book-laden sculpture “Library” includes an extensive cache of audiotaped interviews with writers on topics like non-Al Qaeda 9/11 plots, secret government experiments and ESP. Across the room, “Can Jet Fuel Melt Steel?,” a rickety model of the WTC towers, constructed from shish kebob skewers and topped with a bowling ball, seems to mock a theory that many of those authors take very seriously.
Bercowetz and Bua’s uncritical approach sometimes backfires. In the rear gallery, an altar festooned with black fabric and lanterns suggests Halloween-party décor more than its purported subjects, child abuse and murder. But questioning the line between truth and fiction – as most of these works do – relates more than a little to the endless spin of our own political climate, giving this show a relevance that insouciance doesn’t diminish.
for ‘Time Out’ magazine Dario Robleto, 'If We Fly Away, They'll Fly Away' 2006, Courtesy of D'Amelio Terras Gallery He has had more than a dozen solo shows (including one at the Whitney Altria); now Dario Robleto makes his New York gallery debut with a deceptively modest exhibition titled “Fear and Tenderness in Men.” Small, intricate, folksy-looking keepsakes are displayed in frames and vitrines, lending the gallery the look of regional historical society. Fitting, since Robleto’s untitled sculptures originate from relics, which the artist transforms into moving meditations on loss.
To evoke the “male tenderness” of the show’s title, Robleto uses tokens of personal affection salvaged from American wars (Revolutionary to Gulf). His raw materials include correspondence between soldiers and loved ones, scraps of uniform fabric and shrapnel recovered from battlegrounds. In most cases, the mind-bogglingly complicated processes used to create the sculptures are their most arresting feature. A delicate birdcage is constructed from bone dust: love letters are pulped to make elaborate flowers.
At times, Robleto crowds too many layers into his pieces, Facsimiles of Civil War era bullets (used to bite down on in surgery in lieu of anesthesia) are cast in a material made by dissolving audiotape used to record poems about war and death – the checklist gives viewers a lengthy syllabus to chew on. The gesture seems excessive because the artifacts Robleto recycles – including antique wedding rings and tiny flowers made from braided human hair – embody sorrow eloquently enough on their own. Still, without making specific reference to current conflicts, Robleto’s sculptures bear witness to the grievous toll of war.
After an August lull, the art world has suddenly come to life with hundreds of new exhibitions opening within the first three weeks of September. With so much competition, it’s hard to single out a solitary, ‘best’ show, although a few stand out primarily because of their spectacular new surroundings. Powerhouse dealer Marianne Boesky’s new building on 24th Street houses Barnaby Furnace’s enormous paintings depicting the parting of the Red Sea, while solo shows by John McCracken, Jockum Nordstrom, and Yutaka Sone inaugurate David Zwirner’s new empire of art galleries (three in a row) on 19th Street. (Barnaby Furnace’s show runs Sept 16 – October 21. John McCracken’s and Jockum Nordstrom’s shows are open Sept 8 – October 14th and Yutaka Sone’s is open Sept 21 – Oct 28.)
Every summer, galleries showcase their finest talent with group exhibitions of work by their artists, and every year the standout shows are those that have gone the extra mile with creative themes and new artists. The current offerings include a lively sampling of work by young Rio de Janeiro artists at Daniel Reich Gallery, ‘I’m Yours Now’ a selection of artwork created directly on the gallery walls at Sikkema Jenkins, and a quirky exhibition at Andrew Kreps Gallery for which one artist invited another to participate, who invited one other artist and so on. The only problem? There’s so much to see. (Through mid-August)
It’s no wonder ‘Helter Swelter,’ Justin Lowe’s first New York solo show attracted reviews in The New York Times, the Village Voice and Time Out. This young collage artist turned the gallery itself into an artwork by creating a convincing, full scale corner store in the front room, parking an ice cream van in the hall, and covering the floor of the back room in fabulous psychedelic swirls of fabric. This meeting of life and art may not explain the mysteries of the universe, but the experience is unique enough for a visit. (Through July 28th)
It’s never too soon to start looking forward to the big fall shows, and ‘Ectopia: The Second International Center of Photography Triennial of Photography and Video’ promises a strong start to the new season. Goodbye nature photography! Nearly 40 artists or collectives will exhibit art that explores mankind’s interaction with the natural world, revealing “new perspectives on the planet that sustains, enchants and – increasingly – frightens us.” (Sept 14 – Jan 7th)
The group shows of summer are nearly upon us, offering a unique opportunity to discover new artists and enjoy familiar artists in new contexts. Paula Cooper Gallery leads the pack this year with, ‘An Ongoing Low-Grade Mystery,’ an exhibition of mostly minimal artworks that opened earlier this month. It sounds preposterous for a self-respecting gallery exhibition, but the show’s premise – all artworks are predominantly red – somehow manages to work. On a decidedly more serious note, on June 9th, James Cohan Gallery opens ‘A Brighter Day,’ an ambitious show of work that seeks to address the ‘ominous tenor’ of today’s uncertain world. Also noteworthy, the venerable, now rejuvenated performance and exhibition space ‘The Kitchen’ promises an injection of new talent into the New York scene with a survey of video art by Eastern European artists, which opens May 31st.
Wangechi Mutu’s exhibition of violently beautiful collages could be one of New York’s most anticipated solo show debuts ever. After receiving rave reviews for her participation in what seems like endless group shows around New York over the past few years, the Kenyan-born Mutu is having the dramatic coming out, with a dual show at Sikkema Jenkins and swanky uptown gallery Salon 94. Come see for yourself what all the chatter is about.
For one week only, New York hosts an extravaganza of Asian art made here and abroad in a series of non-stop lectures, exhibition openings and events. Highlights include an array of video works presented at art venues across the city, sculptures by legendary Indian outsider artist Nek Chand, and even an intergenerational showdown between two action painters on a blocked off street in Tribeca. With so many events happening in so many venues, it ’s a sure bet that something good with be happening near you.
For ‘Time Out New York’ magazine Mika Rottenberg, Installation View of 'Dough', 2006, Courtesy of Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery Mika Rottenberg’s unsettling videos – eccentric characters manning absurdist assembly lines – have already earned the artist fans, thanks to standout pieces in group shows over the past year. For her first solo show in New York (one large-scale video installation and a selection of drawings), the young artist ups the ante on her signature format, drawing an unnerving analogy between dough and the human body.
The video is set in a claustrophobically small, distinctly low-tech dough-packaging factory, where decorative touches – bunches of flowers, piles of towels, spray bottles – also suggest a beauty salon. As it is massaged by women in tidy uniforms, the dough clearly stands in for flesh. But far from evoking the pampered form of a spa client, the dough assumes the shape of the workers¹ bodies: An obese woman at the head of the line kneads globs of the stuff, as voluminous as her own flesh, into a skinny rope that she then passes into the elongated hands of a tall, thin woman.
Rottenberg renders grotesque both dough and flesh, baking and beautification. But fantastical moments lighten the pervasive sense of disgust. In one scenario, a woman sniffs flowers to which she is allergic, and her falling tears keep the rising mixture moist. But it is the abject subject matter of the artist’s drawings – which echo the video’s references to beauty parlor workstations, but also feature projectile vomiting, vats of yellow liquid and swarms of disembodied, snapping jaws – that laces this auspicious and entertaining solo debut with menace.
For ‘Time Out New York’ magazine, Otabenga Jones & Associates, Installation View, 'Symmetrical Patterns of Def', 2006, courtesy of Clementine Gallery Otabenga Jones and Associates, a Houston-based collaborative that will participate in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, takes its name from an African pygmy who was put on display at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. As this detail suggests, the group is interested in the intersection of African and American history, specifically their own richly imaginative version of it as told in the show’s centerpiece: a sound installation recounting the outlandish story of Mudbone, a South Bronx MC who travels to the land of his ancestors during an out-of-body experience.
Mudbone’s tale is full of engaging magical-realist details (his crew shakes the earth as they walk to a competition; his hair takes on a life of its own and absconds). But the installation itself—a small stage decorated like an altar with a microphone; swags of red, green and black fabric; and offerings of junky items, including old sneakers and LPs—doesn’t do justice to the fabulous images conjured by the soundtrack. An amateurish wall mural, drawings and related sculptural objects feel like little more than a backup act for the main attraction.
We’re informed that Mudbone is empowered by knowledge of his ancestors, but the specifics of this revelation aren’t divulged. The tale’s ambiguity communicates an ambivalence about the possibility of constructing an African-American history. Inspiring historical figures like Harriet Tubman make cameo appearances in the tale but always in the confines of a stereotypical setting—either an urban ghetto or a forest’s dark interior. In the end, Otabenga Jones and Associates’ show hovers somewhere between an affirmation and an acknowledgment of futility.
For ‘Time Out New York’ magazine Christopher Miner, Still from 'The Best Decision Ever Made', 2004, Courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery ‘How Beautiful Heaven Must Be’ You may never have heard it argued that Jesus had it easy. But, in one of two videos in his second solo show, Christopher Miner points out that at least the Son of God had a purpose in life, something the artist worries he doesn’t. Such unorthodox thoughts – and the total disregard for political correctness in his second video – indicate that Miner is unafraid to grapple with the hot-button topics of faith and race in America.
In ‘The Best Decision Ever Made,’ Miner trains his camera on the memento-filled rooms in his late grandparents’ house, while comparing their stable lives and happy marriage with his own endless string of jobs, girlfriends and homes. It’s a twist on the classic prodigal-son story: Miner leaves home dissatisfied and returns disillusioned, with no one to welcome him back into the fold. By the closing shot viewers are no wiser about the title’s “best decision” as the artist listens to a gospel song by another prodigal artist, Johnny Cash.
In the back gallery, Self-Portrait finds Miner sitting in a dimly lit room, paying the role of a foul-mouthed African-American man. In a rambling phone conversation, which includes a tirade about how wrong it is for “a white man to talk like a black man,” Miner creates a disturbingly complex closed circuit of self-portrait as self-censure.
Both videos employ monologues, a classic trope of introspection, but neither is gratuitously self-obsessed. Instead, they are at once brutally honest and confoundingly evasive, leaving viewers eager for more.
For ‘Art on Paper’ Magazine Felix Harlan & Carol Weaver printing Louis Bourgeois's 'Twosome', 2005. Photo by Johee Kim, courtesy of Harlan & Weaver Felix Harlan and Carol Weaver met as young printers at a print workshop in downtown Manhattan. When it closed, the couple founded their own printshop with a rented press, inherited equipment, and a desire to push traditional techniques to meet the needs of contemporary artists. Now celebrating its twentieth anniversary, Harlan & Weaver is a well-respected, specialty workshop where some of the best-known young and established contemporary artists make prints, using a variety of intaglio techniques. Art on Paper’s Merrily Kerr talked with the couple in their bustling studio.
MK – How did you start out in printmaking?
FH – We met each other in 1980 in New York at Aeropress, which was run by Patricia Branstead. She had been Kathan Brown’s assistant at Crown Point Press in Berkeley, California and brought some of Crown Point’s techniques and professionalism to New York printmaking.
CW – Crown Point Press’s method, was to use standard etching techniques but keep the process contemporary by eliminating preconceived ideas.
MK – What was it like when you went out on your own?
FH – In the beginning, we rented a press, and also printed with Jeryl Parker, who was doing work for Parasol Press, including big prints by Donald Sultan. Jeryl would approach problems with a different kind of thinking, sometimes doing the exact opposite of what most people would do. Even the way he designed his aquatint box, which we now have, was unusual. When we moved here, it was with his equipment, which was a big boost. Working with Jeryl was kind of a bridge. Then we began to get jobs ourselves, and the business took hold, despite a downturn in the market.
MK – The market is strong now. How are things different?
FH – It’s a very productive time in printmaking in general in New York, particularly for etching. There are more possibilities now to publish and to show graphic work. Also, the potential of small letterpress, etching or litho shops is finally being realized. It used to be that printshops had to be large and offer every technique possible. There has also been a shift in taste on the part of people who are buying prints and in curatorial interest in specialized shops. Being a part of that shift, we feel a kinship with a lot of other printers in New York and around the country.
MK – At the same time, you’re a fixture on the Lower East Side.
FH – Twenty years ago, when we went out to look for a studio, the only space we could find in our price range was on the Lower East Side and it was small.
CW – At the time, we were friends with several artists who showed in East Village galleries, and they introduced us to the area and to other artists.
FH – In fact, back then, we met James Siena, who has been doing engravings with us for ten years, because he’s a neighbor in the building. He introduced us to Steve DiBenedetto and Michele Segre, so now we’re working with them. We mostly work with artists who live and work in the New York area, who can drop in and do something and then see it printed a few days later and do more work the week after.
CW – We have also stayed here because we were able to expand within the building, and because artists like the space, which has good natural light.
MK – What’s unique about the shop’s abilities?
CW – When we were younger, we strove to learn all the techniques. We were fortunate to have worked with some painters who wanted to do multi-plate color prints – technically challenging work.
FH – But we’ve continued to use fairly traditional techniques, which we customize according to what the artist wants. We rarely use photo processes or a lot of handwork after printing. The emphasis in this shop is on what you can do with the platemaking – how to alter the metal and then print in a very straightforward way.
CW – We believe that etching is versatile within every technique, whether aquatint, hard ground, or engraving. There is a myriad of ways of approaching etching, and we want to keep all the options open.
MK – Do you work with equal numbers of returning and new artists?
FH – I know there is an emphasis now on working with artists who haven’t been published before. There is a certain cachet about doing the first print, but I don’t think it’s all that important. I’m happy to work with an artist who has done a lot of prints and can bring that experience to the studio.
CW – We enjoy working with artists, young or old, over a period of time. There are artists who have returned many times, including Kiki Smith, Richard Artschwager and Louise Bourgeois. We published prints by Louise and Kiki for the first time in 1999, and we continue to work with both of them frequently.
MK – What will the next twenty years bring?
CW – We’ve always done contract work, but have more recently begun publishing more, which is where we hope we’re headed in the future.
For ‘Contemporary’ magazine Kutlug Ataman, 'Kuba', 2004, courtesy of Carnegie International, Pittsburgh Manhattan’s New Museum of Contemporary Art is remaking itself from the ground up, aiming to become ‘a truly world class museum’ via its new building (opening in 2007) and recent curatorial appointments. Fresh from curating the 2004 Carnegie International, Laura Hoptman joined the museum’s staff this winter as a curator, bringing with her an ambitious, internationally oriented agenda. Merrily Kerr spoke to Hoptman about the New York art world, what she learned from the Carnegie International, and the New Museum’s new role.
MK – Will you bring your experience curating on an international level to the program at the Museum?
LH – With an important building under construction, a larger staff and a bigger budget, the New Museum is going to move to another dimension. I haven’t joined the staff yet, so I don’t know exactly what my parameters will be. But there is a gap in exhibition making here in New York City that can only be filled by a serious institution that concentrates on contemporary art. We have PS1, but it is a Kunsthalle, rather than a museum; of course, the big museums look at the contemporary, but not in the way that an institution that’s devoted only to contemporary art can.
MK – Is the Museum’s expansion part of a national trend of museum growth?
LH – Mid-sized institutions are creating a very important niche everywhere. The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, for example, is the star institution for contemporary art in Los Angeles, the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London is giving the Tate a run for its money, and the Castello di Rivoli in Torino is the best contemporary exhibition venue in all of Italy, bar none.
Over the past fifteen years in New York, we have witnessed the demise of the not-for-profits which left the commercial galleries with the task of exposing new art and artists, by organizing idea-based exhibitions that addressed trenchant issues in culture and/or visual art in particular. Times are changing. There is a new kind of energy being generated in mid size institutions which concentrate on contemporary art. They are more flexible, faster on their feet than the larger museums and as a result, have a stake in leading the discourse. And that, after all, is the ideal goal of a contemporary art museum; not to reflect, but to act and to make something.
MK – Will you consider what other art is being shown in New York when planning the exhibition program?
LH – Absolutely. My first job in New York was at the Bronx Museum in the South Bronx. It was a real introduction to community based programming and, in a sense, I haven’t changed at all even though I did curate the Carnegie International. By comparison, the Carnegie International and all big international exhibitions don’t really have a local community. Pittsburgh wouldn’t want a Pittsburgh oriented exhibition. So I was curating for an imaginary audience – the art world and the world at large. I found this particularly challenging and am happy to return to a more community based kind of programming, albeit in the savviest, most international art community in the world.
MK – You’ve said that ‘every era gets the art it needs – or deserves.’ Is there a new kind of art being made since you planned the International?
LH – I can speak with most authority on what I have observed in the U.S. Here, it seems that we’re still in a moment of apocalyptic uncertainty. Two or three years after 9/11, people were still searching for the reaction, but the self-questioning really began before that, with the impeachment of Bill Clinton and subsequent election of George Bush. I think the country changed. The way this change has been reflected in contemporary culture I think is one of the most pressing and interesting questions of the moment.
With the last Carnegie International, I tried to explore, with the help of the thirty-seven artists that I worked with, an attitude toward art making that differed from a kind of frivolity that had been proliferating, especially in New York City, in the late 90s and early 2000s. That kind of ease in the world is losing its relevance, though it’ll come back, I’m sure. It has been replaced by unease and desire to seize the power, whether it be in a spiritual or even supernatural sense, or through philosophy or even politics.
MK – Doesn’t the legacy of Pop still hold sway?
LH – Yes and no. It’s certainly not the only strategy for a relevant, politicized art. The last Whitney Biennial, quite wonderfully emphasized the Pop and post-Pop strain of contemporary art; the show was the polar opposite of the International, a fact that emphasizes the notion that there are many ways to define contemporanaeity. Whereas the Biennial was to me filled with art about our own backyard – racially, socio-economically and in other ways, the work in the International was about more macro issues like ethics, and spirituality. The International posited a different purpose for artmaking, a larger one I think.
MK – Reviews of the International were mixed. Were they fair?
LH – It is important to say at the outset that the Carnegie International hasn’t gotten a positive review in the New York Times since the nineteen eighties, and that all massive group exhibitions of this kind are naturally magnets for creative art criticism. How easy a target is a show that claims to sum up an entire world of contemporary art from one point of view?
That said, the breakdown of good and bad reviews for this last show were telling. European and Canadian publications liked the exhibition; so did regional papers like Philadelphia and Cleveland. The problematic reviews mostly came from the American newspapers. I think that this proves that there is a big gulf between what’s going on in the contemporary art worlds in Europe and American centers like New York; we have a very provincial streak here in New York, and what we look for in exhibitions might be different than what others look for. Our concern, or lack of concern, about some things is not necessarily translatable to Zagreb, or even to Berlin, and the universalist ‘us and them’ attitude that we can’t help but have here in the center of the art market is one that is not necessarily right. That’s why, to quote a friend of mine, I curate on the basis of need. I consider the needs of the people who are looking at an exhibition, as well as the needs of the artists, and most importantly, the needs of our time. That’s the ultimate aim; to do the best one can for the time one lives in.
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.Aaron Romine, 'Untitled' (Esso, Taise and Kerry), 2000, Oil on CanvasIn fact, they are staged, using borrowed clothes and starring friends or hired actors. Romine employs these artifices in order to recreate a type of idealized situation, familiar from fashion photography, which leaves the characters’ identities ambiguous.
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. Aaron Romine, 'Untitled' (Charlie and Tasha), 2000, Oil on Canvas on Board
For ‘Time Out’ Magazine Jonah Freeman, Film Still from 'The Franklin Abraham', 2004 Imagine the buildings in midtown Manhattan fused together into one self-sufficient mega-structure and you’ve got the idea behind Jonah Freeman’s 55-minute-long film The Franklin Abraham (2004). It tells the story of a fictional structure-post-“zoning emancipation”-with its own industry, commerce, government and population of around 2 million.
Although such a structure is fascinating to contemplate, the glimpses of life inside the “Frankie” that Freeman provides are underdeveloped, if attention-grabbing. We’re introduced to characters like Isaac, the forelock- and yarmulke-wearing leader of the Sons of Abraham gang; but before we can learn much about him and his buddies, attention shifts to an edible prostitute (pecan flavor) and sundry, unrelated events-the building owners’ explosive family conference and the interactions of unhappy couples.
In the past, Freeman’s photographs have focused on the influence of architecture on human psychology, and The Franklin Abraham expands this investigation to an epic scale. The building Freeman depicts is consistently dreary and weirdly empty, despite its reportedly huge population. This helps explain the miserable attitudes of the residents, but we don’t need an hour of footage to understand that this utopia isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
If more effort went into developing characters’ experiences of their unique environment and less into references to technological advances and off-screen events (such as the rioting reported in a TV news broadcast), perhaps the film might have been more satisfying. It’s a promising beginning, but if Freeman hopes to engross us in his alternative universe, we’ll need to see a sequel.
For ‘Art on Paper’ Magazine Wangechi Mutu, 'The Rare Horn- Hair Thought', 2004. Ink, Acrylic, Collage on Mylar Wangechi Mutu creates collages of fantastical creatures, beautiful but damaged.
Her studio was just as I expected: body parts littered everywhere, a tray full of lips on the table, a pair of sleek legs in strappy heels affixed to the wall. In the telling, Wangechi Mutu’s workspace at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where she is a resident artist, sounds like a campy crime scene. In fact, it is a sort of laboratory in which she uses collage and drawing on paper and Mylar to inscribe real crime stories onto hybrid bodies. “Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male,” says Mutu. “Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body.” This includes everything from the violence perpetrated against innocent civilians in war zones to the ‘modifications’ made in order to follow fashion.
Artists from Cindy Sherman to Orlan have explored the chameleon-like nature of female bodies for decades. So what makes Mutu’s work unique? Apart from being skilled in montage she coherently refers to race, politics, fashion, and African identity in portraits that pack an aesthetic punch. This cocktail of influences strongly recalls Weimar artist Hannah Hoch’s collages of African artifacts and European bodies in her portrait series, ‘From an Ethnographic Museum.’ But Hoch’s montages beg the question, like ethnography itself, of whether her then-colonial subjects themselves are represented as they think they are or in a manner that reflects Hoch’s view of them. Eighty years later, an artist who was raised in Kenya and has traveled and lived overseas ever since, gives an answer as complex as her experience.
After completing her MFA at Yale in 2000, Mutu found herself in New York without the school’s resources and faced with a crisis of direction. With pen and paper as her chief art supplies, she created the ‘Pin Up Series’ (2001), which established her interest in adaptable female bodies. In two grids of twelve small images, topless women preen and posture for the viewer like calendar girls. “I wanted you to walk up to them assuming you were going to see these pretty, interestingly posed females,” explains Mutu. “It takes people some time to see that every single one of them has some trauma or alteration that is severe and aggressive.” The women, who strike come-hither poses, are amputees. The series was inspired by violence in Sierra Leone, where an illegal diamond trade fueled fighting that maimed many civilians – in effect, trading one person’s well-being for another’s beauty.
Ironically, the more severe the violence done to her subjects, the more attractive they become, until their flesh, mottled with colored blotches produced by trauma, is as decorative as it is damaged. In ‘Riding Death in My Sleep’ (2002) a bald woman with bloodshot, Asian eyes and huge red lips crouches in a field of mushrooms, her beautiful orange, red and black skin resembling that of a poisonous snake. Mutu graphs animal or mechanical body parts onto other characters, such as two figures in ‘Intertwined’ (2003), from the ‘Creatures’ series. The scantily clad women have the heads of hyenas, animals whose name is an extremely derogative slang term for women in the Swahili language. In other collages, the figures adopt mechanical prosthesis, with several motorbikes becoming a foot, for instance, or joining together to be worn in a shoulder pad arrangement.
For all their mutations and injuries, Mutu’s characters come across as empowered. Using the body language of fashion divas, they simultaneously play the roles of victim and aggressor, adapting to the harm inflicted on them by whatever means necessary. ‘Centipede’ – a series of site-specific wall drawings accompanied by racially-charged texts that appeared in several New York group shows last season – best conveys Mutu’s intentions for her audience. “The point is to get people to access their own position, to enjoy and work at understanding what role they have to play,” she says of her hybrid, exploding insects, which represent the destructive creature foretold by African soothsayers before the arrival of European colonial powers. We are attracted, repelled, and implicated all at once by Mutu’s solitary survivors who remind us that the past is both behind us and looming ahead.
For ‘Art on Paper’ magazine Yun-Fei Ji, 'The Empty City - Calling the Dead' 2003, Mineral Pigments on Xuan Paper
Yun-Fei Ji is on a mission. In the past year, this Brooklyn-based painter has presented two major solo painting shows in New York that fiercely condemn the newly built Three Gorges Dam in China’s Hubei province. Last spring, Ji’s lively depictions of village life expressed equal parts affection for country life and disgust at the corruption and ignorance that threatened to make that life extinct. Now that the cities and villages along the dammed Yangzi River have been dismantled, millions of people have been relocated and the waters have risen, the mood of the new paintings is mournful. Scavengers, stragglers, and eerie skeletal figures go about their business in literal ghost towns.
Although the series is collectively titled ‘The Empty City,’ the best paintings are ironically those with the most people. ‘Bon Voyage’ (2003), the busiest, juxtaposes frantic villagers leaving their old life in the midst of swirling waters with partying tourists onboard a cruise ship on the newly widened river. In ‘East Wind’ (2003), an equally riotous scene, Red Guards make their way down a rocky, refuse strewn valley wall amongst shirtless village men who look too weak and helpless to object.
Because Ji’s sometimes bizarre animal and human characters are the most intriguing parts of his paintings, some of the less populated scenes run the risk of simply repeating his iconographic repertoire of ghostly figures moving amongst piles of building supplies and equipment. This is especially true of ‘Autumn’ (2003), in which the fall foliage is beautiful, but none of Ji’s skilled caricatures appear.
Nevertheless, by selecting the rock formations and flora of the countryside as the setting for his paintings, instead of the cities where the upheaval is more pronounced, Ji wisely chooses an intimate means to portray the destruction of a lifestyle in place for centuries. He zeros in on the frail bodies and wizened faces of a population familiar with hardship but who will now endure much worse. Haunted by the ghosts of the country’s past and unable to foresee the future in this area, Ji and others look on, helpless to stop the heartbreaking march of ‘progress.’
For ‘Time Out’ magazine Hilary Harkness, 'Matterhorn', 2003-4 The women in Hilary Harkness’s paintings have never seemed like the sort that populate nurturing, feminist communes. But those depicted in the three new works that make up her second New York show are even less inviting. Now her slender and scantily clad stock characters inhabit exploitative class systems on a battleship and a whaling ship, and indulge their animal passions in an art-filled Alpine chalet.
Violence and fear appear to be the factors that keep workers striving toward a collective goal in each dystopian scene. In Crossing the Equator (2003), scores of wounded crowd a battleship’s lifeboats. Details-a guillotine on deck, a bugle player who’s being executed by hanging-suggest that traitors are being flushed from the ship as it is evacuated. Heavy Cruisers (2004) is also set on a ship; the double entendre of the title alludes to both the vessel and the pregnant women onboard. In a lounge area, women view fetuses in jars, while next door, others occupy double-tiered stalls to give birth.
Harkness’s paintings seem determined to challenge stereotypes of women as peace-loving; coincidentally they’re on view at a time when the prison scandal in Iraq reminds us that female soldiers are as capable of abuse as men. Harkness takes this point to an extreme in Matterhorn (2003-4), in which debauched Fräuleins torture, fight and pleasure each other in a sadistic orgy of excess. Harkness may want to imply that sexual or social transgression is the ultimate expression of individuality. Instead, with their clone-like appearance, her women suggest an undifferentiated unit. Harkness’s paintings are a chilling vision of free will yoked in service to a higher power.
For ‘Sculpture’ magazine Tomoaki Suzuki, Humiyasu, 2003, Acrylic on Limewood At first glance, the gallery looked empty, at least until visitors to Tomoaki Suzuki’s first New York solo show looked down and discovered five, knee-high sculptures standing on the floor. From a distance, the intricately carved replicas of Suzuki’s friends and acquaintances looked like a case of “Honey, I shrunk the urban hipsters.” As if they’d just been teleported into the gallery from the streets of some trendy neighborhood, the pint-sized people stood stiffly, arms at their sides or with hands shoved in their pockets. Each was slim, reasonably good looking, and fashion conscious, but it was their size and placement directly on the floor that made them stand out. The artist forced viewers to squat awkwardly for a closer look, putting us off guard and forcing a personal exchange between wooden humans and real humans.
Although Suzuki is a skilled woodcarver, his subjects remain unknown to us. Like participants in a police lineup, each stares directly ahead with a blank facial expression, presenting him or herself to the viewer’s gaze. Suzuki’s portraits are three-dimensional interpretations of the impulse to document the world around us, like Thomas Ruff’s deadpan portraits of friends from the mid-80s, or Rineke Djikstra’s frontal photos of bathers, soldiers and other young people. Abstracted from the activity of their daily lives, their names, details of dress and the figures’ positioning in the gallery are the only clues we have to their identity. ‘Lucy,’ a woman with a long braid down her back wears sneakers, slacks and an unusual jacket with a pattern of handguns. Military themed apparel links an Army green camouflage jacket worn by ‘Humiyasu’ with shorts in the same material on the ironically named skater, ‘Tripp.’ ‘Kerri,’ a blond with long dreadlocks, wears a belt shaped like a round of ammunition, but her look is more Star Trek than Rambo, with her long jacket and flared trousers merging seamlessly with moon boots. Apart from Lucy’s odd jacket, the clothing is fashionable but not outrageous, youth oriented but not rebellious.
By depicting attractive 20-somethings, Suzuki traffics in the idealization of youth. His contemporary kouros and kore join an ancient tradition of sculpture depicting solitary young people, but they represent no deified ideal, just good fashion sense. Their membership in a youthful demographic and uniform adherence to a recognizable dress code set them apart from artistic projects like Karin Sander’s machine manufactured sculptural portraits of people in 1:10 scale, which depict a range of ages and show people in a variety of poses. Even Stephan Balkenhol’s more generic sculptures of plainly dressed men and women are more diverse in posture and background than Suzuki’s. Despite their static poses and limited age and dress, the sculptures are attractive. Handmade, unlike Sander’s sculptures, with a technique more refined than Balkenhol’s, it’s a pleasure to take in the details of each undeniably cute little person.
We are drawn to youth as well as well-crafted materials, but the ultimate appeal of these sculptures relates to their size. Towering over the little creatures isn’t fully gratifying, and so we must hunker down to inspect them, as if bending to interact with a child. Met with no response from the inactive figures, we’re free to use our imaginations to fill in the blanks of their personality, speech and activity. Sculptures like the dreadlocked blond and ‘Juri’ a miniskirted girl wearing earmuffs, with their arms held at their sides, even mimic the posture of action figures or Barbie dolls with realistic bodies. Suzuki reverses the logic of Ruff’s enormous facial portraits of friends by making us the giants. Our sense of scale is disrupted in both cases, but as Suzuki pursues the potentially banal practice of documenting his peers, he shakes up the rules of social interaction, taking his sculptures off the pedestal and sending them out to take their chances amongst the audience.
The sense of expectation was huge. In the first issue of Artforum published after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, the first sentence of the first article read, “In the days following September 11, it was agreed upon by just about everyone that art, along with everything else, was going to ‘change forever.’” Two and a half years later, nothing as obvious as a revolution towards the political has come about. Instead, the way we look at art has changed. Aware of political events in which we have a direct stake, we look for corroborating references in artwork. At the same time, there is a growing consensus among U.S. critics and curators that there is a resurgence of craftsmanship and the handmade, a widespread interest in art and culture of the 60s and 70s and a tendency amongst artists to create fantastical worlds of their own.
Recognizing these trends in an article on young art dealers, a New York Times reporter recently observed that, “Nobody is protesting anything.” Lack of protest doesn’t automatically disconnect art from politics, however. This article samples from the recent work of three young artists who are making waves with artwork that explores the consequences of American politics at home and overseas. Aaron Spangler’s woodcuts of anarchic Midwestern communities are a vision of American ‘can do’ spirit gone horribly wrong. On the international front, several artists have traveled to Baghdad before and after the war, including Paul Chan. His DVD ‘Happiness’ makes no illusion to the Middle East, but is highly relevant to the topic of war. In her latest five-screen installation, showing in the current Whitney Biennial, Catherine Sullivan responded to a terror attack that took place on the other side of the world, but which she nevertheless felt personally. Aaron Spangler, Mercenary Battalion, 2003, Carved and painted maple, Courtesy of the Rubell Family Collection Anarchy in the U.S.A. On Aaron Spangler’s studio wall hangs a photograph of a young man with long thin hair grasping a megaphone and shouting for all he’s worth. The picture depicts a younger Spangler and the occasion is his war, that is, one that he planned and staged with a friend at college. Since he was a child, the Brooklyn-based, Minnesota native has been fascinated by war’s devastation and its potential as a metaphor for psychological conflict. However, while the U.S. is obsessed with terrorism in its cities and abroad, Spangler focuses on anarchy in rural America in large woodcarvings of battle ravaged landscapes.
Blowing apart the stereotype of the quiet farming community, Spangler carves hellish scenes set in the Midwest. In ‘Mercenary Battalions’, a 7 x 3 ½ foot panel, a helicopter hauls an old wooden farmhouse into the air, centuries-old trees topple to the ground and an electrical tower lies on its side to act as a makeshift bridge over a river filled with debris. Similarly, ‘The Revelers’ is an apocalyptic account of a town’s destruction seen from the main street. The buildings that have not been bombed out are being used as bars and meeting places, their awnings painted with anarchy symbols, pentagrams and upside down crosses. Directly overhead, a bomber drops its payload, intent on wiping out whoever has occupied the once tranquil burg.
With rebellious zeal worthy of an adolescent, Spangler reverses the social order of small town America – damaging it physically and disrupting the prevailing morality. ‘Revelers’ and ‘Battalions’ are so given over to chaos, that you’d think the artist delighted in the idea of wiping out his roots. The opposite is true. In fact, Spangler feels an allegiance to country life and culture that is virtually unknown in the cities, an idea elaborated on in the monumental drawing, ‘The Poachers,’ which depicts rural citizens reclaiming land from the government and big business. They are ‘poaching’ from the powers that be by planting crops and trees and by pulling down the huge electrical towers that cut through their farmland and increase cancer rates. This resurgence of self-reliant, pioneer spirit, likely as it is to be crushed, belies notions of the peaceful heartland evoked by politicians. Spangler’s scenarios are a mix of utopian, anarchic freedom and hellish destruction, American ‘can do’ mentality and radical anti-social insurgence. They’re dark and pessimistic, despite their irony, but ultimately envision a fascinating and frightening revolution against passive consumerism ‘of the people, by the people’. Paul Chan, Happiness (finally) after 35,000 years of civilization, 2003, Digital Video Installation, 18min, courtesy of Greene Naftali, New York Trouble in Paradise Paul Chan keeps his art and politics separate. His consequent double life leads him back and forth between the roles of artist and activist. Case in point – when he traveled to Baghdad last year, he went not to produce his own work, but as a volunteer for the peace organization ‘Voices in the Wilderness.’ Nevertheless, the trip impacted Chan’s artwork, making it, as he explains, more extreme. When he returned to New York, he finished the DVD ‘Happiness (finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization’ which was so well received in a group show at Greene Naftali Gallery that a still from the DVD landed on the front page of the New York Times arts section.
‘Happiness,’ more than Chan’s previous moving image and graphic work, is politicized rather than political. The 18 minute animation tells the story of a community of pre-teen hermaphrodites who live in harmony, suffer an invasion, and then wipe out their oppressors. The protagonists are direct relations to outsider artist Henry Darger’s Vivian girls, while their lifestyle is modeled on the ideas of 19th century ‘outsider’ philosopher Charles Fourier. Following their passions, they loll about in flower-filled meadows with piles of books, enjoying each other’s bodies and their own as they laugh, run and play. Soon, men in suits and army uniforms disrupt the tranquility. Their houses burn and the girls are brutally murdered by a host of men in the guise of various authority figures. As brutalities are inflicted on their helpless bodies, a mysterious wind begins to blow. Just as suddenly as the invasion began, it is over; the men lie dead and dying on the ground as the girls run free again.
In ‘The Communist Manifesto’, Marx and Engels briefly discuss the Utopian Socialists, including Fourier, commending them for their willingness to “…attack every principle of existing society.” Chan combines Fourier’s method of radically rethinking social structure with Darger’s outlandish band of heroines to introduce us to a land far removed from our own. Viewers may not relate to the girls’ utterly abandoned lifestyles – wild to the point of eating flowers and relieving themselves like animals in the fields. But we’re asked to imagine abandoning our inhibitions and letting our passions lead us to fight against injustice. We don’t know how the girls recover their autonomy, but Chan’s insistence on dreaming of a better life is clear. “Utopia is a proxy that stands in lieu of absolute freedom,” he has explained, “…to imagine what this looks like is…an exercise in hope.”
Theater of War Audiences are well advised to take a deep breath before trying to unravel the series of references that lead from Catherine Sullivan’s inspirations to her finished artwork. Sullivan, an L.A.-based artist whose work usually inspires confused admiration from critics, merges performance with visual art in film installations of alarming complexity. Her most recent production, ‘The Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land’ results from a trail of references that begins with the hostage drama in October 2002, when Chechnyan rebels took over a Moscow theater. Storming the building in mid-performance, they not only captured the audience but interrupted the simulated reality of the musical with a terrible drama of their own.
When it was overtaken, the theater was performing ‘Nordost’ a production adapted from a novel featuring the long suffering lovers Sanya and Katya. Their story is transplanted to the time-warped ambiance of Chicago’s Polish Army Veterans Association, where most filming took place. This building’s ballroom, small bar area and offices provided Sullivan’s cast of 25 with idiosyncratically decorated spaces in which to enact five pantomimes from each of the novel’s ten sections. Each actor learned all of the parts, so a motion performed by a row of women representing Katya at different points in her life is, for example, performed at other times by male and female actors in a variety of costumes. At the same time, odd characters, like two stony-faced pilots who put on masks, refer to the actual events that took place in Moscow. Catherine Sullivan, Production Stills from Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land, 2003, courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York Sullivan invests ‘Ice Floes’ with many more layers of meaning than most viewers will ever realize, particularly if they only watch the piece without reading about it. The disconnect between what is seen and what Sullivan means to communicate would be a problem if we didn’t realize that this probably occurs with most art that we see. Although the installation is overwhelming, with actors constantly swapping roles and costumes and action happening on five screens simultaneously, what we do see references the conventions of old Soviet and American film enough to capture the imagination. Most vignettes, particularly those in which only a few actors are involved, are staged and acted in a way that entices viewers to stay and try to figure out the meaning. Of course, a search for narrative will be frustrated. But what may remain is the memory of how Sullivan marshals acting conventions and snippets of action to consider the Moscow siege without making it into another story, burdened with its own point of view. Sullivan doesn’t seem to want her viewers to ‘understand’ ‘Ice Floes’ but somehow, this doesn’t make it any less tempting to try. Instead, the artist correlates confusion in the art gallery with the confused and tragic events of the real world.
For ‘Time Out’ Magazine Alec Soth, 'Lenny, Minneapolis' 2002 Alec Soth’s exhibition may be titled “Sleeping by the Mississippi,” but no one sleeps in his photographs and the river makes only cameo appearances. His real subjects are the oddball characters that populate the cities and countryside along the waterway. Starting in Minneapolis where he documents a weight lifter, Soth moves down the river, stopping in Iowa for a picture of a lingerie-clad mother and daughter before arriving in Baton Rouge to capture a man clutching a bible and a branch on Palm Sunday.
Portraits can trigger our inner detective; we look for clues as to why a man stands on his snowy roof holding two toy airplanes, for example. But sometimes settings alone start the imagination racing, as when Sugar’s, Davenport, IA (2002) presents a room with poisonous green walls, a classic ‘70s floral patterned chair and a bright red copy of Hustler on the floor. In the gallery, Soth’s photos of unpopulated interiors infect his portraits with a loneliness reinforced by the time of year when they were taken – the bleak months of winter and early spring.
Surprisingly, apart from a freakish wax figure from a museum in Missouri, all subjects are white. By eliding geographic and racial differences in favor of exploring lives unified by their nonconformity, Soth undermines the lore of life on Old Man River. The photos don’t express nostalgia about the mighty Mississippi and there’s no Huck Finn thrill of adventure. Instead, they focus on people who, despite their hardscrabble lives, assert unique identities with a passion unfettered by circumstance.
For ‘Flash Art’ magazine Roni Horn, Cabinet of 2004, Special Project for Flash Art They’re jarring, garish, disturbing and…they’re portraits of us. Roni Horn’s clown photographs are a departure from previous projects, more provocative than the stony-faced Icelandic woman in ‘You Are the Weather’ (1996) or the roiling surface of the River Thames in ‘Still Water’ (1999). Nevertheless, they’re still intended to make her audience reflect on its own response to the work. As Horn explained in a discussion with Merrily Kerr, the viewer’s experience is paramount, even more important to her than the aesthetic aspects of the photographs and sculptures themselves. Acting as ambiguous symbols, the clowns lead viewers to analyze their process of looking and the reactions that arise.
MK – In the book format of ‘Cabinet of’ you see the clown’s face one image at a time, while this project for Flash Art is arranged in a grid. How will the viewer’s experience be different?
RH – I originally conceived of it as a grid on one wall. When I had the working photographs up for the pieces I did with Dia, they hadn’t been color corrected or scaled, but that’s how I had them on the wall – going 12 feet up. I thought, it’s very harsh [and] really aggressive, but it has a quality that interests me. I’ve [also] installed it as a surround like ‘You Are the Weather’. Sometimes a work has more than one option in terms of the kind of relationship it can have with the viewer. Book form offers a very different experience than an ‘in the round’ experience. I’m interested in these differences. So I often work in dual forms.
MK – The viewer’s experience is the goal of your work, right?
RH –There is no other point for me. There is no other reason to involve an audience unless you’re dealing with the quality of the experience you’re putting out there.
MK – You’ve been quoted as saying that you don’t consider yourself a visual artist. Could you explain?
RH – The thing is, I prefer not to be anything, because then I keep all my options. Once I say what I am, then it’s like excluding everything else. So why bother saying it? I don’t think most of my work comes from the visual. It starts in a more conceptual realm and the visual precipitates out of it. Language is a big factor in the development of the work. It’s kind of pre-visual.
MK – Speaking of language, you often talk about Emily Dickinson’s writing in relation to your work.
RH – There is something in the way that Dickinson uses language that allows me to cultivate the idea of presence around it. And that’s what I’m doing with those objects [text sculptures]. When I think of language it’s an intangible form. Language is, to some extent, a philosophical device or mind device. It’s based in the need to express or communicate, perhaps, but there is this interesting amalgam that occurs in Dickinson that is both of language and of actuality.
She, for whatever reason, in a very isolated fashion, was having this extraordinary dialogue with the empirical – what was in front of her. Basically, I’m amplifying her implications. [It relates to] that idea of language in Jewish culture which is really a substitute, in part, for not having access to the graven image. So there is an element of that in where these pieces come from. They are views in a room. What I mean by that is that when you look at it, you have to enter another space to have that experience. And that other space is the vertical dimension of what it says and where that takes you. In the sense of your understanding where that takes you. And that is all yours.
MK – Does ‘Cabinet of’ challenge viewers to look for the experience instead of musing on the clown imagery?
RH – ‘Cabinet of’ is a kind of self-portrait, definitely. But, it’s a self-portrait of the person looking at the work. And that’s the way I see it. Clown is just a metaphor for mirror. Because what a clown originally functioned as was an amoral symbol enabling viewers to imagine themselves in these roles or to understand their own morality through the clown figure, which was a kind of symbolic form. You could say it’s a generic portrait of humanity or you could imagine it as a self –portrait of the viewer expressed through the clown image – these are the same thing.
Basically, the clown thing isn’t what interested me originally. Not historically [but] more in the idea of appearance. The clown is not about actuality. It’s the opposite, it’s of appearance; it’s a symbol. And the cloud, all it is is appearance; it’s moisture and air. Now this isn’t very interesting to me to break the thing down that way, but really, the two objects are immaterial realities. One in the fabric of nature and the other in the fabric of humankind, but both functioning exclusively through appearance. They have no other life. So that was how they came together. ‘Cabinet of’ came out of that and that obviously is connected to ‘Cabinet of Dr Caligari’ the film. It’s again, not literal, but every cabinet is an interior of some kind.
MK –Your work requires viewers to have a degree of self-knowledge. Are people able to be that self-aware?
RH – I have to work, in a way, with these assumptions about my audience. Because these are the things I value and seek to embody or activate. I think a lot of people won’t. A lot of people will see an object and they’ll go on to the next show. It’s about individual character and what moves you. I think the work acts more as a mirror for one’s limitations or one’s potential. I’m not trying to educate, I’m not trying to communicate or impose my morality. This is what I have to do.
For ‘Art on Paper’ magazine During last summer’s blackout, New Yorkers walked home to all corners of the city and beyond and learned the value of public transportation. Life went back to normal after a day or two, but for America’s poorest citizens, lack of mobility is a daily obstacle. In his latest body of work, ‘American Night’, British photographer Paul Graham turned his camera on lone individuals in locations around the U.S. as they trudged by roadsides or waited for a ride. By overexposing his film and intervening in the developing process, Graham obscured each photograph with a veil-like overlay of white color. The resulting bleakness of the images not only emphasizes the barrenness of the urban and rural landscapes he photographs but introduces a metaphor for social blindness.
It’s difficult to make out the subject matter in each photograph, but gradually the seedy details of industrial streets and low-end strip malls start to materialize. A figure walks or stands alone at the center of each scene. Excluded from America’s car culture, these individuals are left to wait for the bus, as a one-legged man outside the Yum Yum restaurant does. Next to an empty parking lot of a housing complex, a woman stands with hands upturned in pleading or frustration as a car passes by without stopping. Equally poignant is a tiny figure in a parking lot, vast and barren as a desert.
Although each picture features one person, the focus is less on particular circumstances than the general plight of those forced to exist on foot in a hostile, car-centered environment. Like Graham’s photos from the mid-80s of English welfare offices, the images elaborate on the hardships and indignities of poverty. But while the subjects of those pictures waited together for assistance, survival for these solitary individuals requires active struggle. Their presence emphasizes the impersonal nature of both urban and rural planning in the U.S., which, in its glamorizing of the open road, also reinforces social exclusion. The photographs, shrouded in their white veils, suggest society’s willingness to ignore the problem. Despite their difficulties, the loners in ‘American Night’ have a mysterious quality, saving the photographs from pure social commentary and imbuing them with intrigue.
For ‘Art Review’ magazine Sergio Prego, 'Tetsuo Bound to Fail' 1998, Video Still Royalty doesn’t travel the way it used to. In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabela of Spain commissioned Christopher Columbus to travel for them. Not a bad idea, considering that the adventurer’s fourth and final voyage not only ended in shipwreck and mutiny, but initiated Spain’s rocky relationship with America’s natives. Despite the limited success of ‘The Royal Trip’, as it was known, the journey inspired ‘The Real Royal Trip,’ a show by powerhouse curator Harald Szeeman. Promising a different kind of voyage – one of cultural exchange not conflict – the exhibition showcased work by several artists from Spain and a handful from South and Central America. Originated and part-funded by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it also aimed to demonstrate, in the words of MOMA director Glenn Lowry, “…the emergence of Spain as a major center for contemporary art.”
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 ‘Tema Celeste’ magazine Jason Rhoades, 'Meccatuna', 2003, Installation View Cod Canal. The Flounder. Fish Hole. Tuna Town. These phrases and hundreds more were spelled out in bright, neon lights high on the walls of David Zwirner’s gallery. At first, aided by an enormous, multicolored cube-shaped construction made entirely of lego, they created a festive atmosphere. The show seemed dazzlingly fun, at least until the artist’s symbolism was decoded. The seductively colorful lights in fact spelled out mostly derogatory slang terms for vagina, and were joined by less ambiguous words like “wound,” “monster” and “cum dumpster.” With a little explanation, the show flipped from impressive to oppressive.
The title, Meccatuna, summarized two competing trains of thought. First, Mecca—the home of the cube shaped Ka’ba considered by Muslims to be the center of the world—is represented in the show by the lego structure. Second, tuna—slang term for vagina—is symbolized by the neon words arranged on the walls and on metal shelving units, shiny metal disk sculptures, tires, and sculptures in the shape of a camel’s toe bone. Mecca and tuna are united in the narrative of a journey commissioned by Rhoades, who supposedly paid a man in Saudi Arabia to document the purchase of a box of Geisha brand tuna in Mecca.
The artist’s conceptual starting points are clear, but they initiate disturbing chains of association. His primary comparison is between the Muslim center of the world and the vagina as L’Origine du monde, as Courbet titled his famous painting. East also meets West in the donkey and camel, submissive beasts of burden and secondary actors in Rhoades’ tableau. Does this designation extend to women, whose vaginas are represented by the camel in this show? How are we to read a photograph on the gallery wall of the Ka’ba, surrounded by circumambulating worshippers? The relationship between animals, the faithful and women are too undefined; Rhoades may not have intended to directly insult women and Muslims, but his practice of encouraging ambiguous associations backfires in Meccatuna. Provocation for its own sake is like a drum roll followed by nothing—attention grabbing but ultimately disappointing.
Jenny Gage, Helen, 2001. Color photograph, 76 x 100 cm. Courtesy Luhring Augustine, New York
“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.
Katy Grannan, Meghan, Saw Kim River, Annendale, NY 2002. C-Print, 122 x 152 cm.
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.’
Justine Kurland, Magica, 2003. Courtesy Gorney Bravin + Lee, New York
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. Deborah Mesa-Pelly, Garland, 2002. C-Print, 76 x 100 cm. Courtesy Sandroni Rey, Venice, CA It’s hard to pin down Mesa-Pelly’s subject matter, because the work is driven by the pursuit of wonder. Malerie Marder, on the other hand, has reduced her subject matter to its essence. Known for her nude images of friends and family, Marder captured the objects of her interest in their most vulnerable state for ‘At Rest,’ a video and portrait installation shown at Salon 94 last January and more recently at blackbox in Edinburgh, Scotland.Malerie Marder, At Rest, 2003. Video still. Courtesy Artemis Greenberg Van Doren, New YorkThe video features a collection of young and old men and women as they lie in bed, the bath or a hot tub. Unlike Warhol’s film of a man sleeping, Marder isn’t interested in teasing her audience with boredom. Instead, she looks for traces of the subconscious in her subjects’ outward appearance, manipulating her footage by altering its speed and adding a soundtrack of labored breathing and energetic snoring. An obese woman appears, accompanied by sounds of heavy breathing that suddenly speed up as her side begins to rise and fall rapidly. This change signals anxiety, whereas when the chest of a pregnant woman begins to rise and fall at speed near the head of her sleeping husband, the breathing is erotically charged. Many of the sleepers also appear in unflattering headshots installed near the video. Like a playbill, the pictures of the actors don’t tell us nearly as much about them as we learn from watching the action. Nikki S Lee, Part 6, 2002. C-Print mounted on aluminium, 76 x 66 cm.
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 Taryn Simon: Larry Youngblood, Alibi location Tucson, Arizona, with Alice Laitner, Youngblood's girlfriend and alibi witness at trial. Served 8 years on a 10.5-year sentence for kidnapping, sexual assault and child molestation. 2002. C-Print, 46 x 59 cm “I kept saying to my lawyer, ‘Doesn’t the truth have to come out?’ And he’d say, ‘Nope, the truth don’t have to come out.’ But the truth is all coming out now. It’s pretty wild.” Taryn Simon’s large-scale photographs of men like James O’Donnell, who had this conversation with his lawyer, are anything but wild. Instead, their stillness conveys a sense that time has stopped. Commissioned by the lawyer activists of ‘The Innocence Project,’ Simon traveled around the country taking photographs and conducting interviews with men and women who were wrongly convicted of violent crimes and later exonerated by DNA evidence. Fifteen of the resulting forty-five portraits were exhibited at PS1 accompanied by an absorbing catalogue and a video of interview footage.
Most of the subjects stand still, looking steadily at the camera with mix of anger and wariness as they pose in locations related to the crime or their alibi. One man lies under a filthy mattress in a seedy motel where the police found him, others appear in front of the rundown stores where they were arrested. Beauty finds its way into the tragedy in photos of a man seated in a field of what look like brilliant red and orange flowers, but which are actually broken targets at a skeet range. The more chilling scenes are those where crimes took place, like the shrubby riverbank illuminated solely by truck headlights or the flooded wood behind some houses.
By photographing her subjects in a quiet setting usually alone or with a person related to their case, Simon extends the isolation of prison into the men’s free life. The men, with their similar poses and expressions become icons of injustice who are only really understood as individuals in the videotaped footage. Here, emotions rush to the surface as they struggle to comprehend what has happened to them and the difficulty of finding a way forward. When he was in prison, Marvin Anderson explains, “I used to make myself look at the world as being total darkness and me being the only person in it.” Anderson and the others fought for and won their freedom, but in the eye of Simon’s camera and a mistrustful society, many are still pretty much on their own.
Too many cooks spoil the broth, but a superabundance of curators doesn’t have to be tasteless. At least that is the lesson taught by “The Year of New Work: Contemporary Asian Photography,” a four-part exhibition at New York’s Japan Society organized by photography curators Noriko Fuku, Alice Rose George and Christopher Phillips. Beginning in November 2002, the external curators presented quarterly, themed exhibitions of contemporary photography and video by Japanese, Chinese and Korean artists in the new ‘Lobby Gallery.’
Most artwork in the four exhibitions came from the collection of JGS, Inc. (standing for Joy of Giving Something) a non-profit arts organization eager to partner with institutions to show its extensive photography collection. Besides supplying the art, JGS, Inc. brought the curators, each of whom acts as a specialist consultant for different parts of the collection. George, an independent curator, photo editor and art advisor who has worked with JGS for eleven years succinctly said, “We’re interested in whatever talent that is coming that hasn’t been before.” A quest for the new took the organization as far as Asia, where it began collecting work by emerging artists in the mid 90s.
The collection now includes work by artists familiar and new to New York audiences, a mix which was reflected in the exhibitions. The first show, ‘Character and Choice’ featured photographs by Nikki S. Lee, Yasumasa Morimura and Tomoko Sawada and delved into the theme of physical transformation. Lee’s makeovers as a skateboarder, a Hip-Hop diva and a senior citizen and 400 surprisingly diverse self-portraits taken by Sawada in a photo booth captured the artists’ chameleon-like ability to alter their appearances. ‘Flesh and Flames,’ the second show in the series, opened in Spring ’03 with photos of dying flowers by Nobuyoshi Araki, close-up shots of the aging Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno by Miyako Ishiuchi, and images of Buddhist rituals in the Kumano Mountains by Risaku Suzuki.
If the first two exhibitions favored the human body and ritual, the final two shows focused on the collision of past, present and future. ‘Spatial Narratives,’ which opened in Summer ’03, featured a collaged scroll by Hong Hao, a scroll-like series of photos by Xing Danwen, photos by Tomoko Yoneda and Atta Kim and a video by the New York- based Korean artist Seoungho Cho. Cho’s work also appeared in the final installment, themed around the fast changing Asian cityscape. Photographers included Naoya Hatakeyama whose series ‘Slow Glass’ captures city lights at night though a car windshield and two Chinese artists: Beijing based Zhang Dali, who alters the appearance of buildings scheduled for demolition, and Weng Fen from Hainan Island in south China who takes high format photographs of the new cityscapes with children in the foreground.
The year-long exhibition is another demonstration of the increasing importance of Asian photography in New York. Though, the lobby venue seemed inappropriate for three curators with such international stature. (Despite the tranquil sounds of a waterfall and gorgeous black stone walls, it’s still a lobby.) But other shows are on the horizon in the city. Phillips, a curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP) who is co-curating an exhibition of Chinese photography with Wu Hung at the ICP and Asia Society opening June 2004, points out, “Slowly, you’re starting to see mainstream galleries, and photography galleries starting to recognize that this is an untapped body of work of extremely high quality, which we can all learn something from.”
For ‘Flash Art’ magazine Amy Sillman, 'Me & My Ugly Mountain', 2003, Oil on Canvas, 152 x 183cm Against all odds, a tiny figure pulls an enormous bundle filled with a jumble of surreal forms by a slender rope across the white expanse of a snowy mountainside. This literalization of ‘personal baggage’ was the subject of ‘Me and Ugly Mountain,’ the first painting to greet visitors to Amy Sillman’s sixth New York solo show. As suspiciously humorous as the diminutive soldier who famously encouraged his buddies to “…pack up their troubles in their old kit-bags and smile, smile, smile,” the opening painting provoked a grin, but it was one that could quickly turn quizzical. ‘Me and Ugly Mountain’ juxtaposed oddball characters with semi-abstract, expressionist compositions, creating a unique mix of levity and gravity.
Titled, ‘I am curious (yellow),’ the exhibition’s bright colors and quirky, cartoony figures suggested a lightness that was wasn’t upheld by the subject matter. Dramatically divided landscapes dominated in pieces like ‘Hamlet,’ which presented a cross-section of earth, with flattened human bodies representing layers of subsoil. Shooting from the earth like a jet of water, a long-necked, balloon-like head shouted ‘hello.’ Likewise, in the apocalyptic ‘Unearth,’ brilliant red and orange streams of light in the heavenly realms are separated from the drab earth below save for a mountain, straining to meet a little blue cord dangling from above. In the back gallery, a colorful patchwork of twenty-five paintings on paper shifted the focus onto abstract shapes and drawn figures, like the irritated beauty whose body was stretched like a trampoline supporting several pairs of feet.
In her work on paper, Sillman tempted viewers to decode her private symbolic language. The paintings, on the other hand, defied verbal description. Their roiling compositions and vibrant colors were a visual experience, unraveled through determined looking. But in ‘Letters from Texas,’ the third major component of the exhibition, Sillman abandoned her de Kooningesque tangles of line and the energy dissipated. This end-to-end installation of paintings flipped the focus onto the cartoony figures, losing the drama of the large canvases and suffering from a lack of continuity. Nevertheless, the main body of painting combined the fantastical and the funny, abstract and figurative, in a way that rewarded viewers who took the time to enter into Sillman’s zany universe.
For ‘Flash Art’ magazine Untitled, 2002-2003, Enamel on Aluminum, courtesy Anrdew Kreps Gallery Ruth Root’s paintings have reached their ‘mature-cute’ phase. Spread out evenly along the gallery walls, ten new pieces flaunted a grown up sophistication, with their hyper slick surfaces and tightly controlled geometric divisions. Gone were the little eyes and the smoking cigarettes that characterized previous work, and the hanging was arranged, with a few exceptions, in a traditional way. The paintings may be on their best behavior, but plenty of quirky touches in the relation of form and color still lent a mischievous character to the compositions.
Each untitled painting was an assemblage of overlapping rectangular, square and triangular shapes in various shades of purple, gray and orange with accents of yellow. All had an aerodynamic quality, with rounded edges and were hung flush against the gallery wall. One untitled piece had the look of an airplane fin or an Ellsworth Kelly painting jazzed up with more color. The rounded contours of another evoked the shape of a cartoon speech bubble, waiting to be filled by a jokey text. But what really gave the pieces their idiosyncratic, ironic character were the little blocks of color that appeared out of nowhere, usually accenting the edge of the paintings. Their diminutive size and outrageous colors gave them a cheekiness that pervaded the whole show.
For ‘Flash Art’ magazine Liam Gillick, Reconciliation Corral, 2003. Installation view, courtesy Casey Kaplan Liam Gillick offered a new take on glitzy art openings by washing the floor of Casey Kaplan’s gallery with cheap vodka and covering it with black glitter. Visitors tracked the sparkly stuff into the main space, where a row of aluminum corrals as colorful as jungle gyms faced a line of black text on the wall opposite. Arranged in a broken Greek key pattern and missing the usual colored Plexiglas panels, Gillick’s architectural sculptures tempted viewers to interact with them. On the wall, a repeated text reading, ‘sit now on a ridge,’ referred to a journey described in the artist’s recent book, ‘Literally No Place’ (a translation of the word utopia), which in turn was inspired by behavioral scientist B.F. Skinner’s proposals to alter human behavior through environmental stimuli.
Without reading Gillick’s book, which was not part of the exhibition, it was next to impossible to understand what was taking place, particularly with the unnecessary glitter and vodka element. The show was elegant but so highly conceptual that viewers who bought the book instead of the art came out ahead. Gillick’s signature retro-chic sculptures are meant to provoke discussion about how the built environment effects human thought and behavior, but it’s only in his writing that these complex investigations into social science are developed. Structured as a series of proposals for fictional stories, the book forces the issue of how space is constructed, and it’s here that the audience is taken ‘literally some place.’
For ‘Tema Celeste’ magazine Robert Wogan, Below (United Radiance), 2003, Video Projection, Sound, Installation View A low light bobs along a gangway in the belly of an abandoned cruise liner accompanied by the sound of heavy breathing and footsteps. It could be a scene from the film Ghost Ship, but it’s a video installation by Robert Wogan, featuring footage from the lower decks of the decommissioned SS United States. The artist made his way through room after room of mechanical apparatus, filming a journey that never seems to end. In a loop lasting just under an hour, Below (United Radiance) perfectly recreated the experience of being lost, complete with a sense of deja vu. It also documented a fall from glory by what was once the fastest and largest ship in the world.
To reach the video at UCU, viewers had to wind their way through two corridors that partially recreated a more elaborate installation from the Liverpool Biennial 2002. The metal-clad gallery walls didn’t come close to reproducing the alien atmosphere of the ship, but did transport viewers into an unfamiliar environment. The video was almost immediately disorienting and at times slightly dizzying as it followed Wogan’s unrelenting progress, never stopping to explore a room or plan a route. While the scenario would be perfect for a horror movie, the artist didn’t hesitate long enough to make his footage scary. Instead, his steady march suggested that the point was not to find a way out, but to cover as much territory as possible.
As the camera delved further and further, the ship’s enormity became apparent. At over five city blocks in length, it was unsurpassed in size and speed when it embarked on its maiden voyage in 1952. Ironically, this was also the year of the first jet airliner, an innovation that essentially paved the way for the ship to go out of service less than twenty years later. Below (United Radiance) is an exploration of loss on an industrial scale, a subject that many contemporary artists explore. The uniqueness of Wogan’s project lies in his selection of an American icon that was once world-renowned, the epitome of progress, but which now languishes in obscurity. In a unique plot twist, during the run of the exhibition, Norwegian Cruise Line bought the ship in order to renovate and recommission it. A tidy story of progress and decline is disrupted as Wogan’s documentary approach reminds us that life doesn’t stop when the cameras do.
For ‘Flash Art’ magazine In nearly five years as art critic for the Village Voice, Jerry Saltz has written over 200 essays on art exhibited in New York. A selection of these appears in ‘Seeing Out Loud,’ a book that Saltz calls a ‘core sample’ of art seen in the city. Whether he is musing on the state of the art world or examining exhibitions by artists as diverse as Kai Althoff and Norman Rockwell, Saltz never shies away from making his opinions known.
MK- How did you determine the book’s contents?
JS –I kept most of the one-person reviews, a few of the two persons, and most of the museums. Like a lot of people who make things, I hope I’m getting better not worse, so I put the more recent reviews first. My deepest fantasy is that my work could be like desert island reading, where you could dip in and out over and over.
MK – Your writing is self-aware. Do you think that’s an important part of what criticism should be?
JS – I want subjectivity, subjectivity, more subjectivity. I think that’s all there really is. There is no one rule that says ‘Rubins is great’ or ‘Rubins is not great.’ I think it’s all a matter of taste. I write what I think, but I hope that plugs into a bigger, shared feeling so it’s not just some cockamamie nut, running around going, “Oh I like this; I hate that.” To me an ideal review has an opinion in every sentence – some temperature. I hate it when I don’t know what a critic thinks.
MK – Are you unusual in that respect as a critic?
JS – It’s strange. Only in the art world do people say, “Why write about things if you don’t like them?” You would never say that to a restaurant critic or to a sports writer, “Write about the Mets, but only say they’re good.” I think critics let everyone down, especially artists, when they don’t share a strong opinion one way or the other. Frankly, that’s the situation we’re in, and I think that has to stop.
MK – You’ve written that the critic has no power. Can you explain?
JS – I don’t say this to be a provocateur, but art critics don’t have true power. Theater critics have power; they close shows. Art critics can’t do that (Although I sometimes wish we could). If something I write curtails a sale, I’d like to think that those collectors shouldn’t be buying that work anyway. If a dealer backs off you because of what I write, then something’s really wrong with the dealer.
MK – Do you need an eye to be a critic?
JS – Everyone has an eye, and everyone, I suppose, has a voice, so anyone can be a critic. But only a few people can be good critics. For that I think you do need a good eye. But you also have to write clear, entertaining, jargon free prose; you should never take anything for granted, talk down to the reader, or think you understand everything you see. Art is about experience, not understanding. In a sense, it is beyond words. Of course, that hasn’t stopped me from trying to put what I see into words.
Reporting recently from Baghdad, writer Jon Lee Anderson described an Iraqi man’s assumption that the U.S. population was anti-war because of comments he had heard on American satellite television. This exchange suggested a game of media ping-pong, a ‘us watching them, watching us’ scenario that provided a glimpse of how information is exchanged on a global scale. This kind of sudden insight, and more obvious evidence of how the world is organized in both discrete and interlocked systems, was the subject of ‘Living Inside the Grid.’ At the core of the exhibition concept was curator Dan Cameron’s observation that “…the inhabited grid has become the irreducible sign of the world we live in today.” Cameron supported his assertion by assembling twenty-four artists or artist groups from twelve countries, whose work in some way acknowledges or interacts with the systems that order our worlds.
Surprisingly, the exhibition excluded web-informed artwork. Instead, art in a range of media explored how the concept of the grid, made so pervasive by the Internet, is reapplied to other aspects of life from the intimate to the international. Using themselves as their subject matter, Danica Phelps applied systemization to her life by logging all her art sales, expenses and activities, while the late Israeli artist Absalon videoed himself hitting and kicking at invisible bonds. An impressive sculpture, constructed of common materials used to build fences, by Monica Bonvicini and a portable group of interlocking, triangular plastic ‘Public Things’ by N55 each challenged prepackaged design for the masses. The grid extended to the international level with drawn diagrams outlining conspiracies by Mark Lombardi and a mesmerizing projection of patterns made with three letter airport abbreviations by Langlands and Bell. Rico Gatson’s collages of manipulated movie clips critiqued the dissemination of racial stereotypes, while Tomoko Takahashi’s lighthearted video of shredded paper being thrown from a tower played on a stack of nine monitors.
Monica Bonvicini, Turning Walls, 2001, Wooden Metal and Plastic Fencing over a Wood Armature, Plants
This exhibition proposed that grid systems are so ubiquitous that they are integral to perception and representation. However, the success of this thesis undermines the criteria for selecting artwork for the show by suggesting that most art in touch with contemporary culture would in some way replicate the grid. If fact, several pieces in the show were similar to work by artists who have been more visible recently in New York. For instance, Douglas Blau’s installation of film stills of women in bed strongly recalled Christian Marclay’s video montage and German artist Roland Boden’s portable urban shelters are similar to Andrea Zittel’s live-in units. This only serves to prove Cameron’s point, however, while reminding us that several artists can work in similar ways at one time. ‘Living Inside the Grid’ brings together a variety of diverse artwork under the theme of the grid, but viewers who took time to connect the dots will see patterns emerging in galleries across town.
For Flash Art Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov, Our Best World (detail), 2003, Oil on Canvas, 190 x 196 cm As the backdrop for countless cold-war spy dramas, Moscow’s Red Square is usually depicted as cold and menacing, perhaps with a dusting of snow and certainly with a few suspicious looking men lingering in trench coats. But theses stereotypes were nowhere to be seen in Russian artists Alexander Vinogradov and Vladimir Dubossarsky’s painting installation at Deitch Projects. The onion-domed cathedral and the Kremlin are visible in the distance but the foreground is dominated by beautiful young things who flirt, play and apply makeup with the best of the international jet set. Presented as one continuous painting, the scene in Red Square changes into different locations, all a backdrop for the artists’ engagement with the post-Glasnost world of privilege enjoyed by the wealthy in Moscow and abroad.
Vinogradov and Dubossarsky, known for their fantastical paintings of utopian scenes, composed a surreal celebration of ‘fun’ for their first U.S. solo show. ‘Our Best World’ started out in Moscow but quickly jumped to a flowery meadow full of picnickers and ended up in a surreal anti-gravity world of floating toys and cartoon characters. Each scene was a composite of half-recognizable advertising images presented in an uncritical fashion. Amongst images of handsome young people enjoying themselves sat Madonna, flanked by cute animals and a cherub. The Material Girl played Madonna of the Commodity, benignly blessing the marriage of mass marketing and kitsch and granting the most superficial wishes of the consumer.
The characters in ‘Our Best World’ are the picture of health, happiness and economic prosperity. But their innocent delight in the good life is a mirage – a utopia created by marketers. Critics have questioned the apparent lack of irony in Vinogradov and Dubossarsky’s paintings, and there is little in this installation that directly critiques consumerism. However, the context of the installation completes the meaning of the artwork. Three years ago, before the economic slump, the terrorist attack on New York and, more recently, war in Iraq, ‘Our Best World’ might have been read as pure celebration and kitsch. But in light of current events, the painting simultaneously exposes viewers’ uncomfortable familiarity with the barrage of media images and forces the contrast between the happy world presented and the reality of daily life.
For ‘Flash Art’ magazine Nikki S. Lee, Hip Hop Project, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Yo, peep this out. Supa fly artist Nikki S. Lee is takin’ over da city this month with photographs of Hip Hop’s dopest scenes. Nikki throws down some bustin’ new work at The Bronx Museum and in her solo show at dealer Leslie Tonkonow, plus showing highlights from the past four years in “Purloined” at Artist’s Space. The ‘Hip Hop’ project is Lee’s latest series of photographs, taken as she hung out with newfound friends on the New York Hip Hop scene. In work that is half photography, half performance, Lee is an outsider giving her audience the inside view of Hip Hop culture.
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 ‘Flash Art’ Magazine John Bauer, Another Layer in the Conspiracy Theory, 2002-3.Oil, Alkyd and enamel on linen 77.5 x 93 in. Not long ago, a cartoon in The New Yorker showed a man passing by a bar that had replaced ‘happy hour’ with ‘lessened anxiety hour.’ John Bauer’s enormous paintings, filling the front room at Bellwether Gallery, pick up on the mood of the nation with a humor all their own. Set against a glossy, black background, each painting is an organized riot of marks and shapes set in the micro-gravity of deep space.
Two things become clear quickly. First, the architectural outlines, grids of color and areas of digitization look like direct quotes from popular contemporary painting. Second, the swirls of gold spray paint, recurring turquoise and purple colored shapes and the occasional v-shaped outline of a bird in flight are a conscious effort at bad taste. The paintings are a parable of taste gone berserk, of what might happen if a cosmic wind swept up the ‘high’ and ‘low,’ contemporary and dated, and blended them together in a chaotic swirl of signs.
This world without aesthetic law, is likened to the country’s current political and economic uncertainty in titles like, ‘Another Layer in the Conspiracy Theory’ and ‘White Collar Crime.’ Other titles refer to heavy drinking and pharmaceuticals, suggesting the extent to which ‘free-floating anxiety’ can take its toll. Abstract painting rarely tells such a clear story.
For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine Meg Cranston, Magical Death, 2002. Papier mache with colored tissue, pastel, 188 x 50 x 41 cm As if posing for a magazine spread, five models in colorful fashions lounged and strutted around the gallery. After spotting the woman in the multicolored, ruffled jumpsuit with hood, it became apparently that the fashionistas were pinatas, all sporting Meg Cranston’s angular hairstyle. Cast from her own body and made to order in Mexico, these oversized party favors explored a new means of merging fashion and art. Or so it would seem without reading the press release, which not only detailed the origins of the pinata but dipped into documentary film production in South America to explain the show’s title. To make two long stories short, ‘Magical Death’ is a film made in 1973 about the Yanomamo people, who symbolically kill their enemies, and the pinata originated in China as a form of offering in planting season. It’s not clear what the pinata and film have to do with one another apart from the fact that they both involve exporting and altering foreign customs. It’s also a stretch to see how they relate to the sculpture at hand, other than to suppose that Cranston is playing a role in which she sacrifices herself to bring blessing to the ones who symbolically destroy her. Either way, the pinatas are fun to look at, particularly one in a headdress who dangled a tiny football player in her hand, but the concept is more weird than compelling.
For ‘Flash Art’ magazine Nan Goldin, Simon and Jessica, faces lit from behind, Paris 2000, Cibachrome, 76 x 100cm, Courtesy Matthew Marks “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me,” moaned Bjork as 245 slides of loving and lounging couples flashed by. Titled ‘Heartbeat,’ this slide show included many of the images displayed in the gallery and was the centerpoint of Nan Goldin’s fifth solo exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery. The music, based on a Greek Orthodox mass, sung in Bjork’s raw voice, seemed like a cry from the heart, as natural and passionate as the lovemaking of Goldin’s friends.
As she ages, Goldin’s subjects remain young. Simon and Jessica, a sugary sweet young couple, who look and often pose like models, are the subject of a steamy shower scene. Clem and Jens star in a huge, nine panel sex scene. But couples with kids take over the show, with children often joining in post-coital cuddling. Goldin remains focused on documenting her adopted ‘family’ but in the year of her fiftieth birthday, she seems intent on reexamining the traditional, if somewhat updated, family unit.
for Centro de Arte de Salamanca, Spain. Torben Giehler, 'Circling Overland, 2002, Acrylic on Canvas, 244 x 305cm
“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 on Paper’ Magazine Michael Ashkin, Untitled (NJ Meadowland Project) Gelatin silver prints (dimensions of grid variable; detail # 6, 4 x 10 in.). 2000-01. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery Michael Ashkin might agree with the New Jersey Tourist Board’s claim that the state is, “America the Beautiful, only smaller,” but his idea of beauty is found in the desolate landscape around chemical plants, truck yards and industrial compounds. Last year, he tramped through the undergrowth and slipped under fences to create a monumental photographic series based on the Meadowlands. Developed for efficient production rather than human enjoyment, these active work environments are so perfectly ugly that they challenge the notion of a ‘beautiful’ outdoor environment. Exploring the gritty side of the industrial aesthetic, Ashkin also traveled to the old mining town of Butte, Montana and locations in and around Palm Springs, California, producing eight photographic series for his third solo show at Andrea Rosen Gallery.
‘Meadowlands,’ is a group of 133 black and white photographs that was commissioned by Documenta XI. Presented in a compact grid, the photos formed one large composite that simulated the experience of seeing the Meadowlands as a series of glances from the Turnpike. Most photographs documented traces of a still active human presence: a memorial on a chain-link fence, a graffiti covered wall and a careful arrangement of truck storage containers along a canal. By contrast, the Butte series was a vision of advanced industrial decline. Shot on a hill near an abandoned pit mine, Ashkin’s subjects include a rusting basketball backboard, cracked building foundations and a lonesome bench next to an empty, six lane highway. Occasional disused mines appear in this series, but the focus is on the dilapidated housing and barren landscape of a dying neighborhood. Several shots were taken in or near the artist’s car, suggesting that he, too, would soon make his getaway.
In “Notes Toward Desolation,” a text recording Ashkin’s thoughts on post-industrial landscape, the artist characterizes Butte, the Meadowlands and Palm Springs as places where “…the frenzy of consumption has exhausted itself….” As a consequence, property owners make little effort to conform to landscaping ideals, ironically making these places attractive to the artist for what he calls their, “absence of false beauty.” The Meadowlands photographs document two worlds: one populated by truck drivers and gas station attendants by day, and one in which vandals and joyriders leave evidence of their activities under cover of night. Unlike Butte, which is desolate day or night, the Meadowlands series challenges viewers to see these landscapes not as industrial wastelands, but as sites free from rules imposed by urban planners and the arm of the law.
For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine Sanford Biggers, They Wants to Join You, 2002, Mixed Media on Steel, Double-sided ‘New Wave,’ a group show curated by Franklin Sirmans, inaugurated Kravets/Wehby’s new gallery space last December. Still located on the same block of 21st Street in Chelsea, the formerly closet-like space has given way to a gallery big enough to accommodate large paintings by emerging artist Kehinde Wiley and expansive work on paper by William Cordova. Five other young artists with an urban sensibility rounded off what seemed like a mini-spin off of Sirman’s popular ‘One Planet Under a Groove’ exhibition at the Bronx Museum last year. Paying homage to an influential exhibition at PS1 in 1981, the show presented artwork indebted to hip hop music and culture with a focus on portraits. Iona Brown’s painting on a Japanese screen of a half Asian, half African woman with Louis Vuitton logos stamped across her skin complimented Kehinde Wiley’s painting of young man nearly swallowed up by his over inflated puffer jacket. Jeff Sonhouse painted two sharply dressed men whose faces, clothing and hair were created out of burnt matchsticks. Sanford Biggers altered an old army recruitment sign, one of the first to feature an African-American man, to read as a statement of inclusion and exclusion, while pieces by William Cordova and Luis Gispert speak to a fascination with boomboxes and turntables, the instruments of DJ culture. Set to the beat of a sound installation by DL Language/Josh Taylor, the exhibition smartly mixed admiration of and critique of hip hop culture.
For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine Jay Davis, It's time to leave, 2002. Acrylic on canvas, 137 x 183cm Photons blast into a menacing blob, a rock monster stalks his terrain, and two otherworldly demigods, only their faces visible, square off in a bloody battle. Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic in six new paintings with Davis’ signature blend of hard edge abstraction and sci-fi menace. Davis’ abstract patterns are so dynamic that they lend themselves to a narrative, aided by the painting’s suggestive titles and the recognizable, figurative elements.
In ‘I Think It’s Time to Leave,’ a goofy looking figure of a goat’s head with blindfolded, gem shaped eyes and a flame coming out from under his chin seems to blast off from a ground composed of various geometric patterns. Splatterings of blood red paint dot the patterns, suggesting violence even if it’s not obvious what might have happened. This painting, with its clear differentiation between ground and sky, is one of the few that connects these paintings to Davis’ early work. ‘Who’s Asking Questions,’ on the other hand, enters a whole new dimension of space, with a mirrored ‘v’ shape dividing the canvas between top and bottom. A mask-like face dominates each sphere. Above, an indistinct, oval shaped face, outlined in wavy blue and red lines and framed by what looks like bloody gashes, peers down at a second visage, this one with distinct features composed of clear lines.
It’s unclear why these Janus faces are locked in confrontation, but this feeling of conflict comes across in nearly all of the new work. It’s a fight that seems to extend to the composition of the paintings themselves. As if from the tightly controlled blocks of seemingly random patterning, the creatures have managed to wrench themselves free, allowing abstraction and representation to go to war against each other. Under the spidery trace of a psychedelic, tie-died snowflake pattern that appears in some variation at least once in every painting, Davis expands to a cosmic stage where the fundamental oppositions of painting can battle it out alongside other masters of the universe.
For ‘Tema Celeste’ magazine Eddo Stern, Sheik Attack, 2000, Still from Digital Video In a unique spin on being “true to the medium,” Eddo Stern appropriates clips from violent video games to reconstruct historical events. For his first New York show, the Israel-born artist presented the video Sheik Attack, a history of Israeli military attacks on Palestinian leaders during the 1990s. In the back gallery, Stern pulled together a mini-exhibition of Afghan war rugs decorated with images of weaponry used in the fighting between the Mujahideen and the Soviets during the 1980s.
Sheik Attack begins in 1966 with an army of little men and women from a simulation game building a house to the upbeat sounds of a nationalist 1960s Israeli folk song. The video cuts to 1999 and a view of an unending metropolis created with the computer game SimCity. Later, nighttime commando raids, sampled from games like Command and Conquer and Nuclear Strike, are contrasted with an Israeli pop song about a peaceful night of rest and dreams. In the second gallery, handwoven Afghan rugs from the ’80s and ’90s lined the wall. At first glance, they appeared to be decorated with traditional abstract and floral patterns, but on closer inspection the decorative elements turned out to be precise renderings of helicopters, AK-47s and hand grenades. Sheik Attack has been described by the curator as a video “woven” from various inspirations, suggesting a parallel between his vernacular medium and that of the rug makers. The weapons on the rugs bear a striking similarity to some of the low resolution digital video images in his work. And now that the Israeli military’s attacks on the leaders of Palestinian political groups are front page news again, the work has even more relevance. Stern’s use of video game imagery implicates viewers, who are usually the active agents in the game, drawing us into the Middle East conflict in a highly personal way.
For ‘Flash Art’ magazine Karel Funk, Untitled, 2002, Acrylic on Panel, 46 x 37 cm Since its supposed rebirth in the past decade, painting has been the subject of international exhibitions, books and magazine articles. Last fall, ‘Painting as Paradox’ at Artists Space took its own look at the genre in an exhibition of work, hung salon style, by over sixty emerging artists. Hanging on the wall at the entrance to the show, ‘Minotaur 1.1,’ a labyrinth constructed of gilded picture frame by Jan Baracz, alluded to the multiple paths available to the artist without employing an ounce of paint. It also introduced the ‘paradox’ of the artist who still manages to work in what has been called a ‘dead’ or underrated medium. The show’s main proposition was that painters are avoiding dead ends and make the medium relevant to contemporary art and life by embracing the influence of photography, architectural images and computer ‘painting’ software. Jose Leon Cerillo, Eden, Eden, 2002, Acrylic on MDF Panel, Formica on Wood, 60 x 92 x 89 cm One long wall devoted almost exclusively to photographically influenced realist portraiture included Octavius Neveaux’s black and white self-portrait that mimicked the act of looking into the camera, and Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ sunbather, painted from composite photos. A wall of landscapes favored abstract compositions like Millree Hughes’ light infused lenticular prints and Odili Donald Odita’s angled horizontal planes painted on canvas. In a separate room devoted to architecture as subject matter, Carla Klein and Marc Handelman each presented foreboding futuristic interior spaces, that contrasted with the kitschy Miami Vice vibe of Australian painter Kieren Kinney’s hand painted island cityscape at night that resembled a computer generated image. Several paintings adopted a mechanical look, and several digital prints affected the look of painting, like Claire Corey’s complex skeins of looping color. Artists even used video to ponder the concerns of abstraction, like Robert Bermejo’s software program generating patterns on a flat screen monitor and Perry Hall’s DVD of paint, bubbling like lava.David Nicholson, The Garden of Love, 2002, Oil on Canvas, 193 x 254 cm The conceptual framework of “Painting as Paradox” was built on the understanding that painting is still not entire out of trouble. By focusing so heavily on paintings that adopt elements of digital technique, the show implied that the genre needs to ‘do something’ to make itself more relevant to those who would dismiss it in favor of new media. This point of view isn’t surprising given curator Lauri Firstenberg’s own tastes and respectable track record, both of which tend toward exhibitions of photography and architecturally inspired artwork. But this organizational principle doesn’t do justice to the wide range of painting being made today. A more concise exhibition that clearly stated its biases could have avoided a true paradox, which is that the tired discussion of painting’s health continues to occupy center stage in art discourse.Milree Hughes, Krill, 2002, Lenticular Print, 56 x 71 cm
For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine Cheryl Yun, Botox Purse with Beaded Handles, 2002 A mini wave of exhibitions focusing on feminist art and its present day legacy hit New York last fall. White Columns led the way with two shows: ‘Gloria,’ which featured feminist art from the 70s, followed by a modern day sequel, ‘Regarding Gloria’, that tried to gauge the impact of feminist art on contemporary women artists. From over 1000 responses received in an open call for submissions, the curators chose work by ten young women artists who reinterpreted the old slogan ‘the personal is political.’ For example, MK Guth’s DVD, in which she plays a caped superhero was reminiscent of Dara Birnbaum’s 1978 images of Wonder Woman. But in her humorous narrative, Guth’s valiant deeds not only critique the usually male superhero persona, but also act out a fantasy of empowerment. Likewise, Jenny Holzer’s statements to the general public contrast Kathleen Kranack’s highly personal list of the comments and insults she has received from men. Shocks like Carolee Schneeman’s 1975 performance, during which she pulled a scroll from her vagina, weren’t replicated in ‘Regarding Gloria.’ Instead, several artists crafted slick displays or featured the bodies of other women, to comment on the ways in which women can be complacent in their own oppression. For instance, one of Cheryl Yun’s fashionable handbags featured tiled images of a woman’s Botoxed face, Melissa Potter’s ‘Price Per Fuck’ series paired photos of luxury items with a calculation of the price for the sexual favors which secured these gifts, and Edythe Wright’s deconstructed Wonderbra was pinned in a glass case like an exhibit at a natural history museum. Thirty years after feminism’s heyday, women still challenge sexism and assumptions about the ‘ideal’ woman, but ‘Regarding Gloria’ suggests that they now do so with less urgency and more humor.
For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine Jaishri Abichandani, Vishnu: Haridwar India, 2000, From the Series, 'Under the Western Sky', C-Print The history of art often boils down to an account of groups of artists who lived and worked in proximity to each other. Occasionally, those who leave the fold (think Gauguin when he set sail for Tahiti) interrupt this narrative. Situated just across the East River from Manhattan, Queens isn’t exactly the South Pacific. But most of the borough is off the map for the Manhattan-centric art world and, apart from Long Island City, there are few ‘artist neighborhoods’. “Queens International” gathered over forty independent spirits who choose to live and/or work in Queens in a group exhibition as diverse as its name suggests.
Tom Finkelpearl, the Museum’s new director, makes a point of avoiding competition with art venues in or near Manhattan. Instead of devising a counterpart to last year’s “Brooklyn!” show of young artists based in that borough, he and the other curators focused on the Museum’s unique selling point: the incredible cultural diversity of surrounding immigrant communities. The resulting exhibition featured artists from fifteen different countries and included work as diverse as Jaishri Abichandani’s small-scale photographs of young people in India and New York and thick oil paintings combining classical Chinese painting styles with the techniques of Van Gogh and Monet by Zhang Hongtu.
A slide projection of photographs by six different artists drove home the point that you don’t need to leave New York City to see the world. One highlight was Audrey Gottlieb’s shot of a Brahmin priest laying a stone statue of the elephant god in Flushing Meadows Lake, which looks like it could have been the bank of the Ganges. Elsewhere, Evie McKenna’s photos of quirky New York houses exemplify American outsider architecture and Gerard Gaskin’s photographic portraits of the residents of LeFrak City housing project lend a dignity to the sitters that belies the project’s rough reputation. James Johnson, The Copper Airplane, 1998-2001, Mixed Media, 9 x 27 x 29 ft Although the participants ranged from Yale MFAs to artists who had rarely, if ever, exhibited their work, there were not dramatic fluctuations in the quality of the artwork. This speaks for the diversity of contemporary art itself and the mainstreaming of ‘outsider’ art as well as the curators’ success in drawing from a pool of untapped talent. Formal similarities also helped homogenize the show, linking Gilberto Triplett’s minutely detailed, organic abstractions to nearby drawings by John Morris. Obsessive devotion to detail tied together Emily Jacir’s hand embroidered tent listing the names of 418 Palestinian villages evacuated by Partition and James Johnson’s hand crafted, 29 foot long copper repousse replica of an airplane. Unlike recent curatorial experiments (remember “Black Romantic” at The Studio Museum?), the curators at Queens Museum might have discovered a way to simultaneously appeal to an art world audience and the larger community.
For ‘Tema Celeste’ magazine Michael Joo, 'Untitled (Coyote) #19,' 2002. Plasticine, medex, polyurethane foam & wire. 81.3 x 71.1 x 64.1cm In its early days as an art center on the far west side of Manhattan, Chelsea was jokingly referred to as the Wild West. As such, it was a fitting location for The Pack, a sculptural installation of fifty life-sized coyotes by Michael Joo. Had these animals, symbols of the American West, come to life on the opening night, they would have filled the gallery with the sounds of yelping and howling. Instead, the hairless, plasticine models stayed motionless on their individual plinths, like a canine version of a Vanessa Beecroft performance. But in contrast to the snarling replicas in natural history museums, these life-sized animals are benign, the little ones even cute. In the back gallery, a second sculptural installation, provocatively titled God, featured a human figure wearing work clothes and a fur jacket lying sprawled on a bed of ice. Unlike the lively animals in the first room, the man seemed to have succumbed to the elements despite being warmly dressed. His exposed face and one hand, rendered in clear polyurethane, revealed skull and bones underneath, emphasizing his frail mortality.
The coyotes, desert loners but here assembled in an enormous pack, are survivors despite their lack of hair and skinny bodies. The man, on the other hand—ironically clad in fur—has fallen victim to icy northern temperatures. The installation’s design suggests that the ice on which he rests would gradually creep up over his body, reinforcing the idea that nature has taken control.
Expansion in all its forms produces unlikely neighbors, whether it’s pristine, white-walled galleries adjoining grimy auto body shops in Chelsea, or coyotes, bears and other animals rummaging through garbage cans in the suburbs. As Americans continue to expand their reach into the habitat of wild animals, the boundaries between civilization and the wild become blurred. Joo manages to subtly provoke viewers to question their assumptions about the mastery and adaptability of mankind as we play God with our environment.
