For ‘Time Out New York’ magazine Christopher Miner, Still from 'The Best Decision Ever Made', 2004, Courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery
‘How Beautiful Heaven Must Be’
You may never have heard it argued that Jesus had it easy. But, in one of two videos in his second solo show, Christopher Miner points out that at least the Son of God had a purpose in life, something the artist worries he doesn’t. Such unorthodox thoughts – and the total disregard for political correctness in his second video – indicate that Miner is unafraid to grapple with the hot-button topics of faith and race in America.
In ‘The Best Decision Ever Made,’ Miner trains his camera on the memento-filled rooms in his late grandparents’ house, while comparing their stable lives and happy marriage with his own endless string of jobs, girlfriends and homes. It’s a twist on the classic prodigal-son story: Miner leaves home dissatisfied and returns disillusioned, with no one to welcome him back into the fold. By the closing shot viewers are no wiser about the title’s “best decision” as the artist listens to a gospel song by another prodigal artist, Johnny Cash.
In the back gallery, Self-Portrait finds Miner sitting in a dimly lit room, paying the role of a foul-mouthed African-American man. In a rambling phone conversation, which includes a tirade about how wrong it is for “a white man to talk like a black man,” Miner creates a disturbingly complex closed circuit of self-portrait as self-censure.
Both videos employ monologues, a classic trope of introspection, but neither is gratuitously self-obsessed. Instead, they are at once brutally honest and confoundingly evasive, leaving viewers eager for more.
For ‘Time Out’ Magazine Jonah Freeman, Film Still from 'The Franklin Abraham', 2004
Imagine the buildings in midtown Manhattan fused together into one self-sufficient mega-structure and you’ve got the idea behind Jonah Freeman’s 55-minute-long film The Franklin Abraham (2004). It tells the story of a fictional structure-post-“zoning emancipation”-with its own industry, commerce, government and population of around 2 million.
Although such a structure is fascinating to contemplate, the glimpses of life inside the “Frankie” that Freeman provides are underdeveloped, if attention-grabbing. We’re introduced to characters like Isaac, the forelock- and yarmulke-wearing leader of the Sons of Abraham gang; but before we can learn much about him and his buddies, attention shifts to an edible prostitute (pecan flavor) and sundry, unrelated events-the building owners’ explosive family conference and the interactions of unhappy couples.
In the past, Freeman’s photographs have focused on the influence of architecture on human psychology, and The Franklin Abraham expands this investigation to an epic scale. The building Freeman depicts is consistently dreary and weirdly empty, despite its reportedly huge population. This helps explain the miserable attitudes of the residents, but we don’t need an hour of footage to understand that this utopia isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
If more effort went into developing characters’ experiences of their unique environment and less into references to technological advances and off-screen events (such as the rioting reported in a TV news broadcast), perhaps the film might have been more satisfying. It’s a promising beginning, but if Freeman hopes to engross us in his alternative universe, we’ll need to see a sequel.
For ‘Art on Paper’ magazine Yun-Fei Ji, 'The Empty City - Calling the Dead' 2003, Mineral Pigments on Xuan Paper
Yun-Fei Ji is on a mission. In the past year, this Brooklyn-based painter has presented two major solo painting shows in New York that fiercely condemn the newly built Three Gorges Dam in China’s Hubei province. Last spring, Ji’s lively depictions of village life expressed equal parts affection for country life and disgust at the corruption and ignorance that threatened to make that life extinct. Now that the cities and villages along the dammed Yangzi River have been dismantled, millions of people have been relocated and the waters have risen, the mood of the new paintings is mournful. Scavengers, stragglers, and eerie skeletal figures go about their business in literal ghost towns.
Although the series is collectively titled ‘The Empty City,’ the best paintings are ironically those with the most people. ‘Bon Voyage’ (2003), the busiest, juxtaposes frantic villagers leaving their old life in the midst of swirling waters with partying tourists onboard a cruise ship on the newly widened river. In ‘East Wind’ (2003), an equally riotous scene, Red Guards make their way down a rocky, refuse strewn valley wall amongst shirtless village men who look too weak and helpless to object.
Because Ji’s sometimes bizarre animal and human characters are the most intriguing parts of his paintings, some of the less populated scenes run the risk of simply repeating his iconographic repertoire of ghostly figures moving amongst piles of building supplies and equipment. This is especially true of ‘Autumn’ (2003), in which the fall foliage is beautiful, but none of Ji’s skilled caricatures appear.
Nevertheless, by selecting the rock formations and flora of the countryside as the setting for his paintings, instead of the cities where the upheaval is more pronounced, Ji wisely chooses an intimate means to portray the destruction of a lifestyle in place for centuries. He zeros in on the frail bodies and wizened faces of a population familiar with hardship but who will now endure much worse. Haunted by the ghosts of the country’s past and unable to foresee the future in this area, Ji and others look on, helpless to stop the heartbreaking march of ‘progress.’
For ‘Time Out’ magazine Hilary Harkness, 'Matterhorn', 2003-4
The women in Hilary Harkness’s paintings have never seemed like the sort that populate nurturing, feminist communes. But those depicted in the three new works that make up her second New York show are even less inviting. Now her slender and scantily clad stock characters inhabit exploitative class systems on a battleship and a whaling ship, and indulge their animal passions in an art-filled Alpine chalet.
Violence and fear appear to be the factors that keep workers striving toward a collective goal in each dystopian scene. In Crossing the Equator (2003), scores of wounded crowd a battleship’s lifeboats. Details-a guillotine on deck, a bugle player who’s being executed by hanging-suggest that traitors are being flushed from the ship as it is evacuated. Heavy Cruisers (2004) is also set on a ship; the double entendre of the title alludes to both the vessel and the pregnant women onboard. In a lounge area, women view fetuses in jars, while next door, others occupy double-tiered stalls to give birth.
Harkness’s paintings seem determined to challenge stereotypes of women as peace-loving; coincidentally they’re on view at a time when the prison scandal in Iraq reminds us that female soldiers are as capable of abuse as men. Harkness takes this point to an extreme in Matterhorn (2003-4), in which debauched Fräuleins torture, fight and pleasure each other in a sadistic orgy of excess. Harkness may want to imply that sexual or social transgression is the ultimate expression of individuality. Instead, with their clone-like appearance, her women suggest an undifferentiated unit. Harkness’s paintings are a chilling vision of free will yoked in service to a higher power.
For ‘Sculpture’ magazine Tomoaki Suzuki, Humiyasu, 2003, Acrylic on Limewood At first glance, the gallery looked empty, at least until visitors to Tomoaki Suzuki’s first New York solo show looked down and discovered five, knee-high sculptures standing on the floor. From a distance, the intricately carved replicas of Suzuki’s friends and acquaintances looked like a case of “Honey, I shrunk the urban hipsters.” As if they’d just been teleported into the gallery from the streets of some trendy neighborhood, the pint-sized people stood stiffly, arms at their sides or with hands shoved in their pockets. Each was slim, reasonably good looking, and fashion conscious, but it was their size and placement directly on the floor that made them stand out. The artist forced viewers to squat awkwardly for a closer look, putting us off guard and forcing a personal exchange between wooden humans and real humans.
Although Suzuki is a skilled woodcarver, his subjects remain unknown to us. Like participants in a police lineup, each stares directly ahead with a blank facial expression, presenting him or herself to the viewer’s gaze. Suzuki’s portraits are three-dimensional interpretations of the impulse to document the world around us, like Thomas Ruff’s deadpan portraits of friends from the mid-80s, or Rineke Djikstra’s frontal photos of bathers, soldiers and other young people. Abstracted from the activity of their daily lives, their names, details of dress and the figures’ positioning in the gallery are the only clues we have to their identity. ‘Lucy,’ a woman with a long braid down her back wears sneakers, slacks and an unusual jacket with a pattern of handguns. Military themed apparel links an Army green camouflage jacket worn by ‘Humiyasu’ with shorts in the same material on the ironically named skater, ‘Tripp.’ ‘Kerri,’ a blond with long dreadlocks, wears a belt shaped like a round of ammunition, but her look is more Star Trek than Rambo, with her long jacket and flared trousers merging seamlessly with moon boots. Apart from Lucy’s odd jacket, the clothing is fashionable but not outrageous, youth oriented but not rebellious.
By depicting attractive 20-somethings, Suzuki traffics in the idealization of youth. His contemporary kouros and kore join an ancient tradition of sculpture depicting solitary young people, but they represent no deified ideal, just good fashion sense. Their membership in a youthful demographic and uniform adherence to a recognizable dress code set them apart from artistic projects like Karin Sander’s machine manufactured sculptural portraits of people in 1:10 scale, which depict a range of ages and show people in a variety of poses. Even Stephan Balkenhol’s more generic sculptures of plainly dressed men and women are more diverse in posture and background than Suzuki’s. Despite their static poses and limited age and dress, the sculptures are attractive. Handmade, unlike Sander’s sculptures, with a technique more refined than Balkenhol’s, it’s a pleasure to take in the details of each undeniably cute little person.
We are drawn to youth as well as well-crafted materials, but the ultimate appeal of these sculptures relates to their size. Towering over the little creatures isn’t fully gratifying, and so we must hunker down to inspect them, as if bending to interact with a child. Met with no response from the inactive figures, we’re free to use our imaginations to fill in the blanks of their personality, speech and activity. Sculptures like the dreadlocked blond and ‘Juri’ a miniskirted girl wearing earmuffs, with their arms held at their sides, even mimic the posture of action figures or Barbie dolls with realistic bodies. Suzuki reverses the logic of Ruff’s enormous facial portraits of friends by making us the giants. Our sense of scale is disrupted in both cases, but as Suzuki pursues the potentially banal practice of documenting his peers, he shakes up the rules of social interaction, taking his sculptures off the pedestal and sending them out to take their chances amongst the audience.
