For ‘NYArts’ Magazine
A young woman perches tentatively on the arm of a sofa in her studio apartment, near a poster of Leonardo DiCaprio. She could be any single, young woman just starting out in life. But in fact, as explained in a caption below her picture, she is in the process of selling her home in the Favela Vigario Geral, Rio de Janeiro’s shantytown notorious for military police violence.

This photograph is the first of nearly one hundred that fill the first thirty pages of the catalogue for Documenta11, this summer’s blockbuster exhibition of contemporary art in Kassel, Germany. On page after page, crowds protest, soldiers patrol, and relatives hold up photos of missing or dead loved ones. Photographs, not by artists but by press photographers, from around the world set the tone for the most socially conscious Documenta to date.

Like an aesthetic Amnesty International, the tragic effects of war and bad governance are highlighted in the exhibition halls as well. Artistic director Okwui Enwezor identifies the current age as a, “…turbulent time of unceasing cultural, social and political frictions, transitions, transformations, fissures and global institutional consolidations.” This assessment comes across well in work like Belgian filmmaker Chantal Ackerman’s video on 18 monitors of illegal aliens crossing the U.S./Mexican border, which suggests the difficulty and perhaps futility of patrolling a porous border. Leon Golub’s large-scale paintings of murderous soldiers threatening, “We can disappear you,” are emblematic of corrupt military power. Nearby, a sculptural installation of metal chairs by Doris Salcedo memorializes the wholesale slaughter of a guerilla group by the Columbian government.

Before embarking on what was bound to be a controversial exhibition, Enwezor took two major steps. First, he appointed a team of six international curators. They then organized a series of four discussion ‘platforms,’ international conferences attended by more intellectuals and academics than artists, which began over a year ago. The meetings decentralized the exhibition itself, instead foregrounding debate on topics like the developing nature of democracy or the contrast between judicial justice and truth and reconciliation in countries where enemies must once again live as neighbors.

Although the curators have warned that the exhibition as the fifth platform is not a way of summarizing the first four, there are definite connections between the themes discussed and the work on display. For instance, Isaac Julien’s video “Paradise Omeros” explores the impact of globalism on post-colonial identity and was filmed on St Lucia, the setting for Platform 3, a workshop on Creolization. Likewise, reconciliation, or atonement for past sins, is a strong thematic element in South African artist William Kentridge’s animations. His new video, ‘Zeno Writing,’ tells the story of Zeno’s tortured self-analysis of his politics.

Kentridge is one of several South African artists in the exhibition who respond to the history of apartheid and its legacy. Kendell Geers presents photographs of security warnings on the gates of suburban homes, while Santu Mofokeng’s unpeopled black and white landscape photographs taken on Robben Island personalize the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela. Mofokeng’s photograph of a limestone quarry is echoed elsewhere by an over-the-top installation by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar. In a darkened room, Jaar presents three texts, one of which describes the damage done to Mandela’s eyes while working in the blinding glare of a limestone quarry. Viewers then walk through two very dark passages that end in a blinding wall of light.

Documenta’s political awareness context casts a new interpretive light on work by several of the show’s best-known artists. Louise Bourgeois’s cruelly caged torsos and dolls push interpretation of her sculpture beyond the usual autobiographical approach. Fellow American Jeff Wall’s ‘Invisible Man,’ a photographed reenactment from Ralph Ellison’s novel by the same name, seems anomalous in Wall’s oeuvre, but no less enjoyable. Similarly, Candida Höfer, the only disciple of German photographers Berndt and Hilla Becher to be included in the show, is represented by her photographs of Rodin’s ‘The Burghers of Calais’, photographed in situ in museums and private collections. The Bechers themselves are represented by two series of photographs featuring half-timbered houses that emphasize the social more than the architectural nature of their chronicling.

Considering how fond the curatorial team seems to be of describing art as a means of ‘knowledge production,’ it should come as no surprise that there is so much documentary video. Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar’s ‘A Season Outside’ repeats the question, “When is violent resistance right?” in a visually rich video documenting life on the India-Pakistan border. Nearby, Israeli born documentarist Eyal Sivan cut together black and white photographs of Rwanda taken in 1996, two years after the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis.

Less violent, but no less political, Ulrike Ottinger’s filmed trips through Eastern Europe and Western Asia include the one described in ‘South East Passage.’ The demanding length of this 366 minute long video, documenting the people and places encountered on a trip to Odessa, will make it a conceptual artwork for most viewers. Although considerably shorter at 25 minutes, Steve McQueen’s journey into the deepest gold mine in South Africa still required patience on the part of the viewer by virtue of the fact that almost nothing was visible apart from an occasional grainy helmet light flickering across the screen. Similarly slow-paced but absorbing, Zarina Bhimji’s ‘Out of Blue’ slowly moves through the empty houses, barracks and commercial properties abandoned in 1974 when Idi Amin banished Asians from Uganda. Bhimji’s own family fled to the U.K., making this thoughtful video both personally and historically meaningful.

If history is still being written, many of these artists intend to be one of the authors. Fareed Armaly, an American artist with a Lebanese-Palestinian background living in Germany, documents the history of Palestine. For Documenta11, he filled multiple rooms with documentary videos, maps tracking the movement and territory of Palestinians, classic films and postcards following the marketing of Palestinian culture and history for the outside world. Armaly’s collaborative accumulation of historical fact and personal stories is an exhibition unto itself and demonstrates the power of history as a form of protest over current events. His foil is New York based Lebanese artist Walid Ra’ad, who operates under the auspices of The Atlas Group to concoct ironically false historical data about the history of the Middle East. Ra’ad presents the fabricated findings of his fictitious organization, for example, the 29 photo prints supposedly found buried under rubble in Beirut, which allegedly turned out to be portraits of those lost in the Mediterranean Sea during the country’s two decade long war.

The superabundance of text in this exhibition was nowhere more evident than in three large rooms occupied by Allan Sekula’s ‘Fish Story.’ The American artist produced series of photographs and wall texts composed during a five-year investigation of the worldwide shipping industry. From Glasgow to South Korea, Sekula’s worldwide travels tracked a migratory industry and the communities in its wake and in its path. It often seemed that just when art seemed to have totally converted to reportage, an installation or film would inject some pop culture to liven things up again. That was the case with Pierre Huyghe’s ‘Block Party,’ a documentary about the early days of Hip Hop, when its founding fathers tapped current from street lights to power their turntables. The recorded recollections of Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash are the soundtrack to a nostalgic remembrance of Hip Hop before it became a multi-billion dollar industry.

Although it seems like it in retrospect, Documenta11 doesn’t only include video and photography. Architecture in the service of social engineering has witnessed many false starts in this century but makes an appearance in the exhibition. Utopian artists/architects like Yona Friedman and Dutch artist Constant push the possibilities far beyond their realistic potential in several models, paintings and drawings. Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez makes similarly unrealizable, Las Vegas-like fantasy architectural models from product packaging, including a plan for a rebuilt downtown Manhattan. Simparch, a duo of American artists, abandoned tiny models and constructed an indoor, tunnel-like structure in which visitors could sit and enjoy an ambient orchestra of micro-sounds. They also transformed a huge room into a wooden version of a curvy swimming pool for skateboarding, which was enthusiastically being used by local skaters.

In a gesture questioning traditional boundaries of high and low, the exhibition includes documentation of grass roots arts groups like Le Groupe Amos. This group of Christian activists based in Kinshasa, Congo uses visual art, theatre, documentary and radio programs for public education. Similarly, Huit Facettes use the arts to create a bridge between local craft and fine art in rural Senegal. Under the title ‘Park Fiction’, community leaders in Hamburg Germany employed art, film, and theater to stage creative demonstrations against a plan to develop the last remaining waterfront property in their neighborhood. As if the curators anticipated that these community-based projects would be perceived as too removed from work by professional artists, they were segregated in the lounge-like atmosphere of the Documenta-Halle.

Doubtless, Documenta11 will be criticized in the U.S. for including too few American artists, being too preachy and not aesthetically engaging enough. Before the exhibition even began, it seemed unfortunate that the various platforms were staged in locations around the world, making it impossible for most people to attend. However, videos from the conference are available on the Documenta website, providing options (fast forward and rewind) that turn out to make home viewing far more convenient.

With so much text-based work to read and so many hours of video to make time for, Documenta is a difficult exhibition to see quickly. It’s even harder to judge as a whole, for the simple fact that very few people will see all of it. And it can seem dry if learning about fluctuations in the world’s shipping industry is not your idea of an enjoyable day looking at art. In fact, the ‘is it art?’ question is bound to surface, this time in relation to whether many of the projects would have been better realized as history books or entries in a film festival.

Documenta11 often seems to challenge the notion that looking at art should be an enjoyable experience, although anyone familiar with contemporary art knows that visual pleasure is not a pre-requisite. This exhibition steadfastly reminds viewers of that. But after so much art meant for our own good, encounters with more aesthetically pleasing or narrative work were all the more enjoyable. Isaac Julien’s visually lush film ‘Paradise Omeros’ was dizzyingly pleasing to watch. Shirin Neshat’s latest film ‘Tooba,’ set this time in Mexico instead of Morocco, is vintage Neshat – mysteriously abstract and engaging. A confessional video on three screens by Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila delves into the minds of a young woman with schizophrenic tendencies and a modern day fairy tale by Stan Douglas is like a never ending choose-your-own-adventure story (the piece runs for 100 days without repeating).

At the beginning of this year’s art season, many questioned whether their involvement in the art world had been frivolous, and others proclaimed that art would ‘never be the same again.’ Documenta’s direct engagement with political, economic and cultural globalism puts art in direct relation to current events. As a form of ‘knowledge production’, art has never been more relevant.

For ‘Tema Celeste’ magazine

To go to work, Diego Perrone goes home. That is, he casts the central characters in his photographs and short videos from among the residents of his hometown in Italy. As a result, an air both of intimacy and rural languor characterizes the work. For his first US solo exhibition, Perrone showed several videos and “I Pensatori di Buchi” (The Thinkers of Holes), a series of photographs featuring a plot of land marked with cavernous holes. The images position men, usually nude, in various acrobatic postures near recently dug circular pits. It has been raining, the bodies are wet, and rivulets of mud run down into the ominous darkness. Holes in the ground usually signal burial, but in this case the men’s contortions suggest a birth out of the primordial ooze.

Although the photographs occupied the entire front gallery, the videos in the back room were the highlight of the show. They ranged in style from an animated cartoon about a group of young boys in a playground, who punch, push, and taunt one another in the name of fun, to a scene shot with two actors in a parked car at night. In this disturbing drama, a man and woman embrace lovingly and then, with her full cooperation, he methodically cuts off her ear with a razor. In another video, an elderly man and woman sit side by side, doing and saying nothing while turtles crawl around at their feet.

In his modern-day version of the three ages of man, Perrone documents the cruelty of children, creates a metaphor for the disfiguring pain of adult relationships, and wisecracks about the slow pace of old age. The artist spotlights ordinary people who deal with extraordinary situations. In a video from 1999, also included in the exhibition, a mentally retarded man makes frustrated attempts at building a shelter from a pile of bamboo sticks. His disappointing results are less interesting than his quiet concentration and hesitant strategizing, two working methods that Perrone himself seems to employ to captivating effect.

For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine

Gregory Crewdson grew up in Brooklyn, far removed from the wooded hills and neatly mown lawns that provide the backdrop for his photographs of small town America. The distance is all the better to spur his imagination as he creates the highly detailed scenes that have been compared to stills from an alien abduction film. This is the second solo show of work from the ‘Twilight’ series, on which the artist has worked for four years, and which was shot in the waning daylight or at night. In each photo, individuals or groups of citizens stand frozen in time, pausing in disbelief at some supernatural intervention or freak occurrence.

The new photographs still evoke an eerie ‘not quite right’ feel but with a fairy tale twist. In one scenario, a man has just abandoned his car, stripped out of his drab brown suit, and started to climb a gigantic flowering vine. Elsewhere, a strong searchlight (or alien spacecraft’s tractor beam?) cuts through the night illuminating a sky full of butterflies. During the day, dazed young people construct a mountain of flowers in the middle of the street. Prompted by the unnatural events, some characters lose their inhibitions or senses, like the nude and dripping wet, mother who enters the dining room while her husband and two teenage kids finish dinner.

The recent pictures lack the gore and direct menace of some of Crewdson’s earlier photographs, in which decaying human and animal bodies were not uncommon. The one cadaver that does turn up is that of a young woman, in a classic Ophelia pose, floating face up in a flooded living room. In general, the photographs are beautifully lit and the subject matter is tantalizing, but the townspeople seem to have lost their ability to respond. They are alive but stunned; there is little action and almost no emotion evident on their faces, which does nothing to create sympathy in the viewer. They wander stunned, like Hamlet’s Ophelia in her insanity before she drowned, their blank stares proving King Claudius right when he said, “Poor Ophelia. Divided from herself and her fair judgment without the which we are pictures, or mere beasts.”

For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine

Five years ago, the sun rose on a group of young sculptors from L.A. who shared nothing so much as a new look. Jason Meadows was one of the promising talents with a willingness to experiment with modernism and a gift for crafting objects at once familiar and strange. From this initial impulse, Meadows kept the momentum going with ‘Microcarving,’ his second solo show at Tanya Bonakdar in as many years.

The new work breaks loose from the strict minimalism and control of his previous sculpture and supplies plenty of evidence of the artist’s hand and his trips to the hardware store. Unhidden nuts and bolts, wooden joints taped together and hardware with the manufacturers labels still stuck on, along with frequent use of a black marker pen create a tension between the overall impression and the ‘micro,’ surface details.

Most of the sculpture is at the average human height (150-170 cm) making intimate viewing easy, and the shapes sometimes mimic the human form in a way reminiscent of Modernist sculptor David Smith. ‘Soldier of Fortune’ and ‘Upskirt’ are horizontal constructions of wooden beams, the former rough and tumble with protruding nails, the later involving a small square platform on wooden ‘legs’, draped by a canvas suggesting a dangerously short skirt.

Canvas reappears on the floor under ‘In the Process of Becoming’, a three-legged construction suggesting an artist’s easel with a shelf holding a Polaroid of a barred window in the artist’s studio. Is the angst-ridden ‘prison window’ and the triumph of the easel as it rests on top of canvas an ironic take on the creative process? Sculptures like ‘Albatross,’ in which a jaggedly cut piece of white, laminated composition board replicates ruffled feathers, suggest that Meadows is a playfully self-aware artist. But one thing is clear. Unlike the ancient mariner who wears the albatross around his neck for his sins, Meadows’ sculpture doesn’t languish in the doldrums.

For ‘Flash Art’ magazine

Since ancient times, Buddhist civilizations have erected monumental sculptures like the cliffside Buddhas destroyed last year in Afghanistan. Carrying on the tradition in a distinctly avant-garde vein, Huang Yong Ping devised an ultimately unrealized project to install a 15 meter high Buddhist prayer wheel in the Christian Chapelle St Louis Salpétrière in Paris and surround it with Islamic tapestries. The enormous, dismantled wheel, and a scale model of the church are the basis for ‘Om Mani Padme Hum’, Huang’s latest New York show.

In Tibet, devotees spin handheld wheels in prayer. With Huang’s version, only a god-sized hand could wield the massive rod, made from an entire tree trunk. The rod and the lid occupy one room, while the circular drum housing a giant scroll covered in written prayers rests on its side in the back gallery. Two spiraling scrolls, one a Tibetan sutra and the other a text from the Koran, descend from the ceiling and a scale model of Salpétrière with motorized wheel rests on a Persian carpet. A modern version of an ancient chariot and a long scroll complete the exhibition.

Huang’s use of monumental scale is not unprecedented in his work. Nor has he shied away from overtly Buddhist imagery, once combining a bottle rack structure on the order of Duchamp, with 50 pairs of arms to create a version of the multi-armed deity Guan-Yin. Since his involvement in the radical Xiamen Dada group in the late 80s, Huang has strategically incorporated Western ideas into his Buddhist influenced philosophy. But given the artist’s past attack on the West’s self-perceived hegemony, it doesn’t seem likely that he is hoping for the reconciliation of three different faith systems by simply placing their symbols in proximity to each other. In previous work, Huang has often used insects and reptiles, often enclosing them together, forcing them to kill or be killed. Considering that the creatures were intended to represent different cultures, the Salpétrière project may be the subversive opposite of a wish to homogenize the world’s religions.