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.
