For ‘Flash Art’ magazine

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

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

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.

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

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.