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.
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.
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.
Translated Acts is the first large scale exhibition in New York of work by Asian artists since the landmark ‘Inside Out’ show in 1998 at the Asia Society and PS1. In contrast to the previous sprawling survey, this more concise exhibition focuses on performance and body art from Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China. In her catalogue essay, curator Yu Yeon Kim outlines two organizing principles, explaining first that East Asian artists have uniquely conveyed their historical and political positions through performance art, and second, that photography, video and other digital media and are no longer used solely as documentation, but are now integral to the artwork. By flagging this change, Kim herself documents the way in which the particular cultural and economic situations of Asian countries has resulted in an avant-garde art fundamentally different from the West.
While there is a slight bias towards male, Chinese artists, the nearly thirty featured artists are a diverse group that includes those living and working in their native countries as well as ex-pats from different generations. Young, international artists like the ubiquitous Mariko Mori and Michael Joo, whose sculpture was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial appear alongside artists like Xu Bing, Zhang Huan and Gu Wenda. All of the above continue to receive significant attention in the US and provide some anchors to aid the New York audience in understanding this ambitious and intense exhibition.
Translated Acts does not propose to be a ‘who’s who’ of performance artists in Asia, nor is it a historical survey. Instead, the assembled group of work has similarities and differences that inspire reflection on the multitude of conceptual tactics employed by East Asian artists over the past decade. In her catalogue essay, Yu Yeon Kim warns her audience against interpreting the artwork solely in relation to the Western, modernist paradigm. To this end, she briefly outlines the tumultuous political and economic events of the last 50 years in each of the countries represented. She also develops an argument that Asian artists are likely to be influenced by Buddhist or Taoist ideology, which opposed to the hierarchies implicit in Western thought, accepts a more fluid concept of structure. Considering that at least a third of the artists in this exhibition live or were born in the West and taking into account the popularity of Eastern philosophies in the West in the past 50 years, this dichotomy may be less useful than Kim suggests. However, on a less philosophical level, many of the featured artists do acknowledge the importance of their faith in their work. Further, an approach which privileges the spiritual is an interesting counterpoint to the recent observations that China’s lack of “godly morality” has resulted in the use by some artists of the living or dead human body with little regard to its sanctity.
In keeping with Kim’s assertion that video and photography have become inseparable elements of performance art, the exhibition is stronger on performative photography and installation than actual performance. The promising but poorly organized opening events featured appearances by Chiharu Shiota, who slept in one of the many cot-like beds featured in her installation, Wang Jian Wei, who presented a red carpet resting on a bed of glass, which was methodically crushed by the visitors, as well as other performances by Ja-Young Ku and Chun-Chi Lin. A past performance by Chun-Chi Lin is presented on video, and documentation of Tehching Hsieh’s year long projects occupy one room. Hsieh’s performances, which double as feats of endurance, are meaningful in a Western performance tradition, but it is in the context of this exhibition alongside fellow Taiwanese that his radical experiments make fuller sense.
Fellow Taiwanese artist Chieh-Jen Chen’s recent large-scale photographs are the most disturbing pieces in the show, and likely contributed strongly to the Museum’s decision to restrict access for children. Suggesting the invasion of a devastating epidemic, or the impact of a tyrannical regime, the photographs feature scores of prostrate human bodies, covered with sores and invaded by metal clamps, harnesses and tubing. Also unnerving is Yuan Goang-Ming’s “The Reason for Insomnia”, an interactive sculpture in the form of a bed. When the bedposts are touched, different projections of blood, fire and feeling hands appear on the sheets.
These dark images contrast sharply with Kim Atta’s ‘Museum Series,’ in which nude models hold prolonged poses in glass boxes placed in Buddhist temples and serene landscapes. These sublime bodies establish a recurrent theme of the idealized versus the absent, injured or defiled body. Contrasts appear throughout the exhibition, for example between Mariko Mori’s ‘alien body’, a perfect specimen enclosed in a pill-like capsule and deposited in various locations around the world, and the defiling rituals carried out by her countrywoman Chiharu Shiota.
Unclothed bodies result in the most striking imagery of Translated Acts. Collages and videos from Ma Liuming’s nude photo sessions with the public, during which he places his own unprotected body at the disposal of his audience, show the artist in a sometimes meditative, sometimes indifferent state. A public dynamic was also central in Zhang Huan’s ‘My America’, seen in Spring 2000 at Deitch Projects in Soho. This video, created from documentation of a performance in which a large group of Western volunteers shed their clothing and followed Zhang’s directions, is a portrait of the artist as he navigates a place for himself in his new country.
Other fruitful juxtapositions surface in the show’s installation. Gong Xin Wang’s ‘The Face’, his own laughing and eventually disappearing head, is positioned opposite Young Kyun Lim’s serene portraits of Korean youth. In another room, photos from Qui Zhijie’s ongoing Tattoo series, in which the artist continues a pattern from the wall behind him onto his own naked torso, appear next to documentation of the now legendary performance, ‘Cultural Animal,’ by Xu Bing, in which a mannequin and live pig were stamped in nonsensical Chinese and English script. Next to these two pieces is a video document of Gu Wenda’s ritual performances in which he writes calligraphy with an enormous brush. This combination of three uses of calligraphy by three Chinese artists who privilege the body is a mini-exhibition in itself.
Yu Yeon Kim’s triple concerns of ‘…cultural identity, historical legacy and inner expression…” cut across national borders in Asia, and apply to artists living at home and abroad. They also offer a way for Western viewers, unfamiliar with the unique and turbulent histories of East Asia over the past half-century, to engage the artwork. Kim has successfully brought together a mixed body of work that comments on the specific cultural backgrounds of the artists and the political situations in which they find themselves. She also addresses the need to develop an understanding of work that has been produced on the other side of the planet and outside of Western frameworks of thought, in an era of globalized culture. ‘Translated Acts’ challenges Western viewers to look beyond the easily digested and much imported anime inspired artwork seen so often in the US recently, and to instead grapple with East Asian art through the truly universal subject – the human body.
“Nerves connected to the center, we are tied to the machine Invisible and silent, circling overland”
In a storm of hard driving, techno beats, Belgian electro-music band Front 242 chants these lyrics about a nighttime surveillance mission over Western Europe. “Circling Overland” is also the title of one of five new paintings by young German artist, Torben Giehler. In his second solo show at Leo Konig, Giehler presented two large-scale, digitized renditions of famous mountain peaks and three aerial views of fractured landscapes. Each of the latter has a title from a song by Front 242 or the British, post-punk band Joy Division.
In contrast to the dark force of European proto-techno, Giehler’s paintings are patchworks of bright orange, yellow, greens and blues. It’s as if the artist applied Takashi Murakami’s giddy anime color to Sarah Morris’s architectural grids and ran the results through CAD software. In the many reviews of this popular exhibition, critics uniformly identified a reinterpretation of reality through the digital eye, or “…computer flight simulations programmed by Crayola…” as a reviewer for The New Yorker so aptly put it.
In the last two years, Giehler has started to venture away from flat planes to experiment with non-anonymous landscapes. In ‘Lhotse’ and ‘K2-North Spur’, he applies his candy colors to paintings of the world’s tallest peaks. By moving from the generic to the specific, the artist conjures up a different kind of frontier – one in which men and women still risk death, not to go ‘where no man has gone before’, but to retrace those feats faster and with less help. Both bodies of work, the mountains and the planes, express a desire to renegotiate the landscape on our own terms. The latest paintings, ‘Torben Giehler 2.0’, upgrade the terrain to a higher difficulty level while still reminding us that the future is now.
Two days before ‘Penetration” was due to open, Maurizio Cattelan walked into Friedrich Petzel Gallery, took a look at the installation, and pulled his artwork out of the show. Happily, this was an enthusiastic endorsement; he replaced his planned contribution with a sought after installation of two miniature-scale elevators. While Cattelan dug into the gallery wall, Sarah Sze built an elaborate installation around a hole punctured in the floor between the two neighboring galleries.
Grow or Die stretched from the ceiling of Boesky Gallery, through to the front desk of Petzel below, and was curator Mark Fletcher’s starting point for a show that dug deep into various means of architectural, intellectual, and bodily penetration. A silkscreen of a gun by Andy Warhol and Bruce Nauman’s Double Poke in the Eye II in neon tubing warned of violent bodily invasion. History’s most iconic piercing was captured by Mat Collishaw’s Shakin’ Jesus, a projection of a man with pierced side twitching on a cross. A videotaped performance from 1999, in which John Bock squeezed his body through a series of small rooms, eventually popping out into Anton Kern’s gallery space complemented Gregor Schneider’s Haus Ur, a trip through the underbelly of a house constructed within a house. Entangled couples by Sigmar Polke and Jeff Koons appeared alongside a Louise Bourgeouis sculpture of interlocking pink rectangles inset with blue orifices and Douglas Gordon’s video Blue in which a pair of hands engage in suggestive gestures. “Penetration” is an enjoyable probe into a theme with multiple interpretations, and it invites comparisons between artworks that otherwise might never have shared a gallery space.