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Tickle the Shitstem
Phoebe Washburn's work explores generative systems based on absurd patterns of production. In Tickle the Shitstem, Washburn has developed a system/environment in which production and waste are equally important. The Shitstem generates its own products along with the inevitable byproducts or waste, and at times, there is little or no distinction between the two. The installation simply keeps churning, producing and hemorrhaging cyclically unless it is interrupted by a failure. Products of Tickle the Shitstem include beverages, pencils, colored urchins and t-shirts.
Karen Rosenberg:
Over the past few years Phoebe Washburn’s installations have evolved from wavelike aggregations of scrap wood to a more sophisticated form of recycling: working “ecosystems” of plants, water and sports drinks. Consumerism enters the picture in her latest site-specific project, which demonstrates a hyper-awareness of “green” technology and its ubiquity as a marketing strategy. In a Rube Goldberg-esque process, a series of pumps and hoses connect the gallery’s three rooms. T-shirts are laundered in a washing machine, and the “gray water” is then filtered and used to dye sea urchin shells. The candy-colored urchins are offered for sale (as are Gatorade, colored pencils and screen-printed T-shirts) in an elaborately constructed wooden storefront. Eventually, the water is pumped into a kiddie pool-turned-fountain. Some elements of Ms. Washburn’s system — bits of greenery, fish tanks filled with Day-Glo golf balls — seem more decorative than functional, but it’s hard to tell. The work’s scatological title connects bodily and industrial waste. Ms. Washburn suggests that the byproducts of art making must also be dealt with, and that resourceful artists can find ways to benefit from this new economy.
Nuit Banai:
With attractive international interns operating a store and reggae resounding through the gallery, it’s easy to dismiss Phoebe Washburn’s show as a hipster event. Yet this Poughkeepsie, NY, native, who was in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, has a lot more to offer than just good times for sale. Washburn’s multi-part installation, with its naughty, scatological title, is a quirky cross between a child prodigy’s science fair booth and a DIY project gone wrong. Its centerpiece is a washing machine in which used T-shirts are rinsed daily before being branded with the word ort and sold for $25 each. The water used in this process is then slowly purified through a series of vats and tanks. The end result eventually fills a massive barrel, which is emptied by the intern on duty. Washburn’s “rules of the game” stipulate that the excess water needs to be creatively reused. Plants are hydrated; sea urchins, T-shirts and pencils are dyed and sold; soda is peddled so that the bottles might be recycled to hold more water. It’s a never-ending battle to keep the system functioning as production and consumption, usable material and waste, become outlandishly interchangeable. With supply exceeding demand, defeat seems inevitable, and the remainder of each day’s water is transported to a plastic kiddie pool where it ungracefully stagnates. Washburn’s show is a powerful demonstration about the fragility of our natural resources, which, when intertwined with human needs and desires, are placed in grave jeopardy.
David Cohen:
Locating Propriety in the Inappropriate
There is something appropriate in finding Zach Feuer Gallery open for business in mid-August with a Phoebe Washburn’s installation, when the rest of Chelsea is a ghost town. Seeing this Dadaistic riff on productivity in a gallery district that feels like the artistic equivalent of the rust belt cannot but accent an initial response to it. Almost every door on West 24th Street has notices of apology as galleries prep themselves for the relaunch of the season, after Labor Day. Ms. Washburn’s sprawling, complex, decidedly nutty piece, “Tickling the Shitstem,” which is something of a “happening” in the old-fashioned sense, a work poised between sculpture and performance, is all about the foibles of an improvised production-line. Because it is a zany exploration of progress and decay, this is a work that, by its very nature, will unfold and only fully realize itself with the passage of time, when the built in failures inevitable in such as wacko system are bound to take effect. By the time the art world throngs to the gallery for the delayed private view on September 4, therefore, the piece will have had a couple of weeks head start on its audience. This probably explains the odd choice of opening time for such a highflying young artist who, at 35, has already been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Berlin Guggenheim and UCLA’s Hammer Museum. As you enter the gallery, you are confronted with what has become the trademark look of a Washburn piece: a shimmering surface of at first seemingly randomly knocked together 2-by-4s, appearing like a cross between panicked or lackluster carpentry and some outgrowth of nature. But this ramshackle first impression is deceptive, and this is a robust, if primitive seeming, workable structure. Turn the corner and you see that it houses a hive of industry — or to be more precise, commerce, as a pair of workers offer an odd mix of merchandise, in the form of unappetizing soft drinks, printed tee-shirts, and various inexplicable souvenirs whose enigma is their sole attraction.Penetrate further into the gallery and another workstation presents itself, linked to the sales barn by various tubes and wires. There is a washing machine feeding a stepped arrangement of glass tanks, the top three of which are filled with brightly colored golf balls, and the last a hardy water plant. Off to one side, though again linked with hosing, is a big orange Igloo drinks cooler, filled with sand, and feeding a garbage bin over the top of which a dirt tee-shirt is stretched, attached with bright orange pegs that match the cooler and one tank of golf balls. In a third space is a water feature, a fountain surrounded by garishly colored rolled up towels, once again linked to the goings on of the other elements of this playful factory. Such Heath Robinsonian ingenuity — everything works, but only just, and by the most circuitous and intentionally obtuse means — serves to underscore how, despite the efforts of Andy Warhol, “art” and “factory” are a contradiction in terms. A factory, after all, turns out something useful with streamlined efficiency, whereas art, as Oscar Wilde insisted, is by definition useless. The aesthetic experience, in fact, is what is exposed by inefficiency, in the cracks between expectation and actualization. By now, the viewer is itching for explication which is at hand from the press release, or the salespeople back at the souvenir shop. The industry here revolves around the machine washing of found tee-shirts, and the management of the liquid waste emerging from that process. The stuff for sale — soft drinks of the same colors as the golf balls, the bottles to be filled afterwards by undrinkable waste liquids of the same colors — is secondary to the process of its own manufacture. In fact, the “shitstem,” as its name implies, conflates waste and productivity. Faux-industriousness has a long pedigree in the Dada tradition, dating right back to Marcel Duchamp’s meditations on constellations of displaced mechanical objects (chocolate grinders being a favorite) in such works as “The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even” (1915–23). This proceeds via the twittery, jerky pointless-seeming machines of Jean Tinguely to Ms. Washburn’s neo-Dada contemporaries. These include the late Jason Rhoades, with his manically compulsive arrangements of appropriated detritus; Ms. Washburn’s stablemate at Zach Feuer, Danica Phelps, with whom she shares an obsession with color-coding; and the technophile absurdist Roxy Paine, with his elaborate machines for making art. Semantically close to the scatalogy of Ms. Washburn’s Shitstem is Wim Delvoye’s “Cloaca,” a super-elaborate machine that produces excrement. But while there might be some shared intentions and values with these waste generators, with a humor tinged by ecology, Ms. Washburn’s aesthetic stands in contrast to that of Messrs. Paine and Delvoye in that it eschews mechanical streamlining to insist on a homey, hippy aesthetic of the handmade and pieced-together, recalling instead — though without the heavy handed moralizing — the not much fun fair aesthetic of the Swiss Thomas Hirschhorn. Another distinction of Ms. Washburn’s strategy, bringing her closer to the American installation artist Sarah Sze, is a willingness to create elaborate mechanisms in which an allowance of some kind of erosion or failure is built into the life of the work. What Ms. Washburn does have in common with all these artists is a need for narrative. This, however, is a departure from her artistic origins. When she first came to public attention with her staggeringly sumptuous installation of stacked and tacked together shards, such as “Nothing’s Cutie,” her debut solo exhibition at LFL (the precursor of Zach Feuer), the emphasis was on the formal experience, not its underlying meaning, although the very use of detritus and the rushed sense of improvisation undeniably gave the piece an ecological edge. This was a moment in her development when the experience could only be described in abstract, phenomenological terms: Kim Levin, for instance, aptly observed how Ms. Washburn’s “improvisational logic is rhizomic, fractal and not nearly as precarious as it looks.” Now, the emphasis has heavily tipped from form to content, from stasis to process. With more “happening” there is correspondingly less that is sculptural. Recalling the impact of that early work, it is hard not to regret Ms. Washburn’s progress, and to yearn for a reconnection with her initial ecstatic creativity. In the meantime, though, and taken on its own terms, her funky aesthetic affords plenty that is fun and thoughtful, which is not a bad place to be.
Mark Titchner, When We Build Let Us Think That We Build Forever, 2006
Laura Buckley, Cubit 1 (Plywood, Perspex, Motor, Film Projection)
James Ireland, Youve Got To Hide Your Love Away, 2004 (steel frames, nuts, bolts, washers, twigs, glass with vinyl printing)
The works drawn solely from the Zabludowicz Collection and will include a massive new commission by Graham Hudson, which will occupy the main hall of the former Methodist Chapel at 176 Prince of Wales Road. Art works by Buckley, Holme and Hudson act as interchange stations between painting and sculpture, with multiple references to real and abstract space and ruminations on formal properties such as transparency, opacity, colour, shape and line. A combination of formal and emotional undercurrents runs through the works, which will literally inhabit the spaces of 176 in poetic, disturbing, ghostly or uncanny ways. The curatorial approach will highlight both the constructivist heritage that these works draw upon, and the phenomenological impact they can have on the viewer. The impressive scale of the installations will transform the building at 176 into a sequence of powerful experiences. Sound and movement, whether machinic, kinetic or related to moving image, will be important features of these installations, lending them a significant sensory impact.
Laura Buckley’s installations include a variety of components ranging from constructed plywood structures to coloured Perspex surfaces and film projections. Mechanical movement is an important part of her sculptures, and her films conjure up memories of early modernist experiments in form and motion by László Moholy-Nagy. An idiosyncratic use of light also marks out the work: sleek moving surfaces periodically reflect the beams of Buckley’s projections, creating hotspots and dazzling the viewer.
Myriam Holme’s work can be considered as painting in an expanded field. Working with bamboo, chalk, fabric, glass, thread, wood, and paint, her sculptural and painterly language enfolds the visitor in a web of associations both physical and emotional.
Graham Hudson will produce an ambitious new commission for the Zabludowicz Collection, responding to the unique physical environment at 176. Hudson’s practice involves sculptural assemblages made from various materials including traditional building stock and found objects, carefully composed in precarious, expressive or humorous ways. As with the other installations in the exhibition, the use of sound and light plays an important role in Hudson’s work.
James Ireland’s work is characterised by a novel take on the tradition of landscape art. Incorporating natural, artificial and industry-standard elements, his sculptures address our understanding of the sublime and the mundane. Ireland’s works highlight an uneasy sympathy between the fragility and beauty of nature and the constructed environment.
Alexej Meschtschanow’s sculptures inhabit an uncanny realm in which the everyday is transformed and institutional furniture is reconfigured to take on an anthropomorphic or zoomorphic air. Recognisable signs and objects are reconstructed by the artist and adopt sinister undertones, evoking paradoxical feelings of familiarity and anxiety.
Katja Strunz’s work combines formal geometric elements with experiments in texture, finish and nuanced colour. Her expressive constructions inhabit space in a dramatic way, heightening the visitor’s awareness of his or her environment.
Mark Titchner’s major installation When We Build Let Us Think That We Build Forever (2006) includes sound, moving image, light, sculpture and printed fabric in an installation with an imposing material presence. Alluding to Plato’s allegory of the Cave, Titchner’s total environment interweaves references ranging from the Bible to artistic movements such as modernism, surrealism and suprematism, and filmic references such as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). The result is a heavily charged symbolic space in which sound and light are used to create a powerful effect on the viewer.
Jonathan Griffin:
I seem to have been visiting a lot of shows after dark recently. Surprisingly often, this is quite appropriate: the limited hours of daylight and wintry weather outdoors naturally lend themselves to the exhibition of spooky art, of things that go bump and clatter in the night. The latest exhibition at 176, the former Methodist chapel now employed as an exhibition space by collector Anita Zabludowicz, seems to deliberately exploit these seasonal atmospheric conditions. Even before the first art work comes into view, noises reminiscent of wind whistling through windows fill the gallery’s café space; not remembering any such exaggeratedly gusty weather on my way in, I imagine that the building itself had engendered its own microclimate. I follow my ears past Katja Strunz’s wall-mounted sculpture Fall into Space (2008), through a door into the building’s main gallery (once the church’s nave), where a towering wood and scaffold construction looms out of the darkness, creaking and whirring with intermittent lights and sounds from within its planked interior. The installation, a specially commissioned work by Graham Hudson, is titled On Off (2008) – a curt description of its modus operandi, which simply involves a number of record players and lights switching themselves on, then quickly off again, apparently at random. The windy sound effects are produced by the records coming up to speed and immediately slowing down again, an effect that also allows disturbingly distorted snatches of voices and music to emerge from the hubbub. As if that wasn’t unnerving enough (particularly in an unlit empty church at night), a winding and uneven staircase invites the viewer to ascend two storeys to a platform near the ceiling. Once entered, the construction becomes a berserk and disorienting environment, a skeletal and precarious house of horrors. With all its wires, bolts and electrical mechanisms exposed, it plays on the cinematic device so often used in scary movies: when the source of the eerie noise or ghostly apparition is revealed to be nothing more than a radio left on or a dust sheet in the breeze; rather than diffusing the initial sense of alarm, the hitherto innocuous object is imbued with a supernatural sense of foreboding. I hasten next door, where James Ireland’s delicate assemblages of found objects and images reveal, when seen from certain perspectives, sudden flashes of Romantic landscapes – mountain panoramas, sunsets and lonely trees – before dissolving immediately into their constituent parts: steel brackets, panes of glass and twigs. Like On Off, Ireland’s work relies on a physical engagement from the viewer, who crouches and peers to catch the fleeting alignment. Perhaps it’s my mood, but the uncanny qualities of the sculptures seem to evoke a chilly sense of unease – though more Alfred Hitchcock than Wes Craven – through which the objects emphasise their own deadness by their brittle allusion to natural landscape. Mechanical Poem (2007) is an installation by Laura Buckley, comprising four works that variously play with the reflection and refraction of light from DVD projections and lightbulbs through, over and across plywood and acrylic constructions that double as supports and housings for the lightsources. The result is simultaneously enchanting and banal; one element, titled At the Summerhouse (2007), includes a film of a figure arranging and rearranging small squares of Perspex, glass and mirror on a bench outdoors. Scenes reflected from off-camera – sunlit trees, sky, clouds – dissolve over the geometric formations with an unexpected melancholy. The tone is far sterner in the neighbouring room, occupied by Mark Titchner’s When We Build Let Us Think That We Build Forever (2006). The impressive installation, involving animated projections (of Tate Modern being consumed in flames), runic panels, sculptures, lighting devices and films on monitors, seems to aspire to the graphic cohesion and purposefulness of a cathedral, although the meanings of the objects and images were obscured (perhaps as religious imagery would be to the uninitiated) by aesthetic stylisation and linguistic arcana. 176 is a difficult space to show art in; the dilapidation of the building’s fabric and its evident former life as a church does not suit all types of work. Titchner’s and Hudson’s installations succeed particularly well for thematic reasons, and also owing to their theatrical bearings. Strunz’s elegant Fall into Space, whose rusty surfaces and dramatic arrangement I can imagine looking quite striking in a white cube, fares less well here. In two smaller rooms tucked away upstairs, a strange poltergeist seems to have been at work, pressing institutional furniture into perverse agglomerations or unhappy feats of levitation. These are in fact sculptures by Alexej Meschtschanow, which, like Myriam Holme’s spidery and materially eclectic installation next door (combining thread, glass lumps and sticks, amongst other things), seem perfectly at home in these abandoned spaces. Bringing life to inanimate objects – an ambition at the core of the traditional sculptural impulse – is recast by ‘Material Presence’ as a paranormal concern, an alchemical practice of almost sinister implications. Wrapping a scarf around my neck, I scurry out into the night. The wind has risen, and it’s started raining.
Graham Dolphin, 25 Leadbelly Songs
Jacob Dyrenforth, Crowd #3, 2008, Pencil on paper
Kamrooz Aram, From the Series Irrational Exuberance, 2007, Ink on paper
Jesse Coburn:
In this age of big-budget artistic spectacles, an exhibition devoted to delicacy and detail is somewhat of a rarity. As such, “microwave, six” is a subtle but resonant success. Comprising works by 17 artists, it explores the limits of drawing as a medium, playing along the boundaries of precision and distortion. Jacob Dyrenforth’s pencil drawings—exceedingly exact depictions of indistinct, pixilated photos of crowds at ’70s rock concerts—are thoughtful and exhaustive, blending the shortcomings of one medium with the limitless possibilities of another. Ernesto Caivano’s Echo, which employs a similar bare-bones palette of ink and graphite on paper, is an engrossing abstract illustration that evokes movement and explosive force. The precision of Caivano’s rendering is countered by the work’s expression of unconstrained energy—a duality present in Dean Smith’s bi-polar #3 as well. Other artists in the show apply a similar diligence to experiments with methods of communication. In Rambo: First Blood Part Two (1900 + Edit Cuts), Brian Lund represents the famous action film’s plot as a series of dashes and colored dots. As the information encoded within is indecipherable to perhaps everybody but the artist himself, one is left to admire the graphic representation of a camp classic, and to assume that the ubiquitous patches of red signify Stallone, mowing down commies in the jungles of Vietnam. While the show lacks a prevailing conceptual framework, the individual efforts are uniformly impressive, making “microwave, six” dreamy and evocative throughout.
The New Yorker:
Minimal means and pop-culture references guide the seventeen artists in this show of works on paper. Allyson Strafella types colons in colored ink until the paper shreds to lace; Kamrooz Aram’s portraits coalesce from clouds of minute ink dots. Graham Dolphin draws directly onto the cover of the album “Double Fantasy,” tattooing John and Yoko’s faces with hair-thin scripts; Jacob Dyrenforth’s pencil drawings painstakingly transcribe pixellated black-and-white photographs of crowds at rock shows. Renato Orara draws a gorgeous octopus in ballpoint pen on the splayed pages of a book titled “Kant and the Platypus,” though what octopi and platypuses have in common with a-priori knowledge is anybody’s guess.
Work in (for) progress«Ils pensaient qu’il était un monstre, mais il était le roi», chante Daniel Johnston dans King Kong: le musicien texan connu par sa folk sombre et enfantine, ayant subi de nombreuses hospitalisations psychiatriques et gardant un statut culte dans l’underground US (de Sonic Youth à Larry Clark), ne l’avait jamais interprété en public. Invité par Peter Friedl, il se trouve dans un parc de la banlieue de Johannesburg en Afrique du Sud, et cette délocalisation prend un tournant performatif. Il s'agit de Triomf, l’un des grands ensembles qui a le plus essayé de résister à la ségrégation raciste : c’est saisissant d’écouter ici une chanson, à mi-chemin du défi et de la lamentation, sur King Kong, roi de la jungle tombé amoureux d’une femme blanche et victime (en sous-texte) de la paranoïa raciste. Chez Friedl, l’implicite prime souvent sur la mise en forme : King Kong est aussi un opéra jazz sur l’ascension et la chute d’un boxeur noir, réalisé par les blancs anti-Apartheid à la fin des années 50. A côté du chant de Johnston, une jeune fille noire passe avec un masque de gorille et l’on perçoit un parc pour enfants. Ce sont des motifs récurrents dans son travail. Au cinéma comme au théâtre, les enfants et les animaux sont problématiques, imprévisibles. Ici ils sont, évidemment, partout. Qu’il s’agisse d’un lion s’amusant avec un faux serpent au Kunsthalle de Hambourg, ou des enfants enchaînant les jeux de massacre sur un ballon où est inscrit «Nobody knows science» (Untouched), de nombreux projets pourraient rapprocher Friedl d’une «institutional critique» un peu usée. L’autrichien est néanmoins un fils de l’art conceptuel penchant marxiste, en moins restreint que Hans Hacke, et un percutant dynamiteur de la notion de performance. C’est sur cet aspect que la «rétrospective» devient problématique. Si dans King Kong, la question documentaire est absorbée par une vidéo où l’on retrouve de l’intensité, dans la plupart des autres traces d’actions à l’intérieur des institutions artistiques, le potentiel de subversion semble désactivé. En bon praticien de la dialectique, Friedl intègre cette critique dès le départ et annonce l’impossibilité de mettre en place une rétrospective, ne pouvant exposer que des documents. D’ailleurs, le livre peut apparaître comme le format le plus adapté à certains projets, à l’image de Theory of Justice. Ce work in progress – dont le titre évoque la thèse élaborée par le philosophe John Rawls en 1971 autour d’une rénovation politique des notions de distribution et justice sociale – est constitué d’une archive d’images de presse cherchant à augmenter la visibilité de différentes politiques de résistance. La solution formelle des vitrines reste cependant inopérante et met en lumière une tension à l’œuvre chez Friedl entre le caractère passionnant de ses recherches et des présentations formelles qui ne dispensent pas la référentialité ou le commentaire philosophique. Il est évident qu’on n’est plus à revendiquer pour l’art un quelconque territoire autonome, auto-référentiel, mais il y a déjà des modalités spécifiques et très souvent plus judicieuses de réflexion, analyse et traduction du «réel». La simplicité peut donc être renversante, comme quand le chiffre 68 inversé donne un 89 visuellement parlant. Ou dans le cas de Playgrounds, ce projet monumental où Friedl réunit des centaines de photos de jardins pour enfants du monde entier, échafaudant une sorte de typologie de la planification moderne des espaces urbains : «une scène où se développent les premières expériences publiques, institutionnalisées, pour l’émergence d’une communauté». La géométrie de ces structures confond parfois le jeu et l’exercice militaire et reflètent une sociologie de l’éducation qui sous-tend toujours une représentation de l’enfance. Pour Friedl, il y a là quelques exemples parmi les plus réussis d’art public. Il n’est alors pas question d’abandonner le terrain des projets idéologiques : dans une écriture dessinée au néon, «Nouveau Code de la Route» (Neue Straßenvehrkersordnung) évoque le titre déguisé d’un texte de la Fraction Armée Rouge autour des possibilités d’une action révolutionnaire en Europe occidentale. Le huit qui forme ce néon peut enfin évoquer la nécessité d’une révolution «permanente», rejoignant Friedl dans sa conviction d’une modernité dont le travail est toujours en cours (et sans doute à imaginer). Pedro Morais
