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.
