Category: Reviews

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.

For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine

Not long ago, a cartoon in The New Yorker showed a man passing by a bar that had replaced ‘happy hour’ with ‘lessened anxiety hour.’ John Bauer’s enormous paintings, filling the front room at Bellwether Gallery, pick up on the mood of the nation with a humor all their own. Set against a glossy, black background, each painting is an organized riot of marks and shapes set in the micro-gravity of deep space.

Two things become clear quickly. First, the architectural outlines, grids of color and areas of digitization look like direct quotes from popular contemporary painting. Second, the swirls of gold spray paint, recurring turquoise and purple colored shapes and the occasional v-shaped outline of a bird in flight are a conscious effort at bad taste. The paintings are a parable of taste gone berserk, of what might happen if a cosmic wind swept up the ‘high’ and ‘low,’ contemporary and dated, and blended them together in a chaotic swirl of signs.

This world without aesthetic law, is likened to the country’s current political and economic uncertainty in titles like, ‘Another Layer in the Conspiracy Theory’ and ‘White Collar Crime.’ Other titles refer to heavy drinking and pharmaceuticals, suggesting the extent to which ‘free-floating anxiety’ can take its toll. Abstract painting rarely tells such a clear story.

For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine

As if posing for a magazine spread, five models in colorful fashions lounged and strutted around the gallery. After spotting the woman in the multicolored, ruffled jumpsuit with hood, it became apparently that the fashionistas were pinatas, all sporting Meg Cranston’s angular hairstyle. Cast from her own body and made to order in Mexico, these oversized party favors explored a new means of merging fashion and art. Or so it would seem without reading the press release, which not only detailed the origins of the pinata but dipped into documentary film production in South America to explain the show’s title. To make two long stories short, ‘Magical Death’ is a film made in 1973 about the Yanomamo people, who symbolically kill their enemies, and the pinata originated in China as a form of offering in planting season. It’s not clear what the pinata and film have to do with one another apart from the fact that they both involve exporting and altering foreign customs. It’s also a stretch to see how they relate to the sculpture at hand, other than to suppose that Cranston is playing a role in which she sacrifices herself to bring blessing to the ones who symbolically destroy her. Either way, the pinatas are fun to look at, particularly one in a headdress who dangled a tiny football player in her hand, but the concept is more weird than compelling.

For ‘Flash Art’ magazine

“Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me,” moaned Bjork as 245 slides of loving and lounging couples flashed by. Titled ‘Heartbeat,’ this slide show included many of the images displayed in the gallery and was the centerpoint of Nan Goldin’s fifth solo exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery. The music, based on a Greek Orthodox mass, sung in Bjork’s raw voice, seemed like a cry from the heart, as natural and passionate as the lovemaking of Goldin’s friends.

As she ages, Goldin’s subjects remain young. Simon and Jessica, a sugary sweet young couple, who look and often pose like models, are the subject of a steamy shower scene. Clem and Jens star in a huge, nine panel sex scene. But couples with kids take over the show, with children often joining in post-coital cuddling. Goldin remains focused on documenting her adopted ‘family’ but in the year of her fiftieth birthday, she seems intent on reexamining the traditional, if somewhat updated, family unit.

For ‘Art on Paper’ Magazine

Michael Ashkin might agree with the New Jersey Tourist Board’s claim that the state is, “America the Beautiful, only smaller,” but his idea of beauty is found in the desolate landscape around chemical plants, truck yards and industrial compounds. Last year, he tramped through the undergrowth and slipped under fences to create a monumental photographic series based on the Meadowlands. Developed for efficient production rather than human enjoyment, these active work environments are so perfectly ugly that they challenge the notion of a ‘beautiful’ outdoor environment. Exploring the gritty side of the industrial aesthetic, Ashkin also traveled to the old mining town of Butte, Montana and locations in and around Palm Springs, California, producing eight photographic series for his third solo show at Andrea Rosen Gallery.

‘Meadowlands,’ is a group of 133 black and white photographs that was commissioned by Documenta XI. Presented in a compact grid, the photos formed one large composite that simulated the experience of seeing the Meadowlands as a series of glances from the Turnpike. Most photographs documented traces of a still active human presence: a memorial on a chain-link fence, a graffiti covered wall and a careful arrangement of truck storage containers along a canal. By contrast, the Butte series was a vision of advanced industrial decline. Shot on a hill near an abandoned pit mine, Ashkin’s subjects include a rusting basketball backboard, cracked building foundations and a lonesome bench next to an empty, six lane highway. Occasional disused mines appear in this series, but the focus is on the dilapidated housing and barren landscape of a dying neighborhood. Several shots were taken in or near the artist’s car, suggesting that he, too, would soon make his getaway.

In “Notes Toward Desolation,” a text recording Ashkin’s thoughts on post-industrial landscape, the artist characterizes Butte, the Meadowlands and Palm Springs as places where “…the frenzy of consumption has exhausted itself….” As a consequence, property owners make little effort to conform to landscaping ideals, ironically making these places attractive to the artist for what he calls their, “absence of false beauty.” The Meadowlands photographs document two worlds: one populated by truck drivers and gas station attendants by day, and one in which vandals and joyriders leave evidence of their activities under cover of night. Unlike Butte, which is desolate day or night, the Meadowlands series challenges viewers to see these landscapes not as industrial wastelands, but as sites free from rules imposed by urban planners and the arm of the law.