white cave

Karl Haendel (Harris Lieberman Gallery, NY)

2009-08-27T09:25:00.000-07:00

Karl-o-gram #3, 2009, pencil on paper

Value, Where Quality and Price Meet, pencil on paper

Scribble, paint on brick

How to Have a Socially Responsible Orgasm and Other Life Lessons

Karl Haendel’s exacting graphite drawings cull imagery from personal and cultural sources that touch on Americanproduction, consumption and conservation, as well as his painstakingly labor-intensive studio practice. The artist has likened his working process to that of a political commentator or editorialist, and this exhibition provides both a meditation on authorship and a cautionary tale for these recessionary times. Finding the recent national interest in recycling to be framed by a particularly American consumerist mindset, Haendel revisits World War II propaganda that encouraged the rationing of gas, food and other materials. Slogans like “Food is a Weapon: Don’t Waste It!” hang alongside renderings of barking dogs, Humpty Dumpty, steam-engine trains and police tape, offering a potent set of symbols for industry and conservation alike.Haendel accompanies these images with suggestions of a depleted economy too long dependent on overproduction and overconsumption, from his largely unframed, rough-hewn, teeming installation, to the graphite and spray-paint drawings that interpolate abstract patterning with representational crumples.

Ken Johnson:

Karl Haendel is a drawing machine. He has filled this gallery with more works of graphite on paper in more different styles and dimensions — from letter-size to near-mural scale — than you’d think any one person could be capable of. Yet it all comes together as one big installation that meditates on the perilous state of the planet. Among the 86 works covering the walls are photorealistic pictures of snarling dogs and objects like clothes pins and pencil stubs blown up to many times their actual size, exactingly made copies of New Yorker cartoons and images of military missiles extending from floor to ceiling. Several patriotic World War II-era posters are reproduced, including one illustrated by a hand holding a rifle that announces, “America Needs More Meat.” Interspersed among all the precise drawings are Cubist-style abstractions made by stenciling and spray painting on sheets of paper that have been crumpled and smoothed out. Mr. Haendel even breaks into three dimensions, with room dividers covered by illusionistic penciled bricks and a pair of trunk-size blocks elaborately drawn on to resemble giant boxes of Morton’s Kosher Salt. Several images of Humpty Dumpty based on found illustrations and photographs offer a clue to what this is all about: the world is teetering on the brink of disaster. If the worst happens, it will be hard to put back together. Impressive as the exhibition is, in pieces and in toto, all that gray graphite can be a little tiring. Two words for Mr. Haendel: colored pencils.

Michael Wilson:

MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE PRODUCTION. The slogan appears on a rendering of a World War II–style poster urging American industry to ever-greater fertility, but might equally be applied to Karl Haendel’s artistic approach. Stuffing the gallery with dozens of his meticulous, often vast, graphite drawings—augmented by a few large sculptures and a scattering of spray paintings on paper—Haendel places himself firmly, if ironically, in the maximalist camp. Juxtaposing his interpretations of vintage propaganda with depictions of rockets and steam trains, Charlie Chaplin and Humpty Dumpty, pencil boxes and scalpel blades, the artist offers commentary on the culture of excess via an aesthetic of overload. And if the total effect is oppressive, the feeling is at least consistent with the point. The temptation to make art about current events is ever powerful, but often yields work that dates quickly. Haendel’s project, with its allusions to consumerism and waste, conflict and danger, might suggest a response to the recession, but sensibly maintains a broader ambition. The artist incorporates historical references, but mixes them with enough iconography of a broader stripe that viewers are unlikely to leave with a sense of having been lectured. Formally, this is an absorbing blend; the exactitude of the drawings is at odds with their rough-cut presentation (many are unframed or stapled to boards), and stands in contrast with the experimentation with crumpling, stenciling, and overpainting that characterizes the exhibit’s works in other media. Sometimes, more is more.

Andrea K. Scott:

Haendel mixes one part Pop, one part Pictures Generation, and adds a dash of neo-Constructivism (thanks, in part, to Walead Beshty, whose photogram appears in the show). Large-scale graphite drawings are arranged in a staggering floor-to-ceiling installation. Works that are evocative of American Second World War propaganda (a cross between James Rosenquist and Barbara Kruger) suggest straight appropriation, until you read their satirical messages: “Save waste fats for explosives—take them to your meat dealer.” Haendel’s debt to the media distillations of Jack Goldstein, the graphite stylings of Robert Longo, and the grisaille deconstructions of Troy Brauntuch are obvious. But he brings a fresh and funny approach, as evidenced by his show’s tongue-in-cheek title.

Mungo Thomson (John Connelly Gallery, NY)

2009-08-22T08:12:00.000-07:00

Mungo Thomson pairs a distinctly West Coast conceptual sensibility with an interest in cosmology, mysticism, and reception. In Thomson’s diverse art—ranging from films and sound works to publications, drawings, and photographic wall murals—simple processes of inversion and transformation are joined with an expansive sense of space and context. His project for the 2008 Whitney Biennial, for example, transformed the Museum’s coat check into an enormous musical instrument that was “played” by the incidental participation of the public, the weather, and chance. b/w, a sound work on a white vinyl 12” LP, applies a principle drawn from marine audio research—where certain deep-sea recordings are inaudible until sped up 16x—to commercial nature relaxation records. One side of b/w speeds up whole albums of humpback whalesong 16x until they resemble birdsong; the other side slows down tracks from birdsong albums 16x until they resemble whalesong. The “birdsong” plays outside onto 27th Street, the “whalesong” plays inside the gallery. Thomson’s 16mm film, The Varieties Of Experience, was made by using Nam Jun Paik’s Zen For Film (1962-64) as a negative. Zen for Film consists of a length of clear 16mm film leader projecting a rectangle of pure white. Over time, the celluloid collects dust from the space of its exhibition; this dust is projected as brown and black smudges on the otherwise white image. Dust is largely composed of human cells, and in this way the audience of Paik’s work has literally become embedded in it over several decades. Thomson worked with the NJP estate to procure a “dirty” copy of the film and to use it as a negative from which to make a new print. The new film is an inversion of the original: a black film with the dust printed as white specks and clouds—a moving starscape, where the stars are composed of dust (and people) instead of the other way around. Untitled (Margo Leavin Gallery, 1970-) is a new film that groups together a series of fading analog technologies: the business card Rolodex, stop-motion animation, and Super-16mm film. It features the Rolodexes of Margo Leavin Gallery, Thomson’s Los Angeles art gallery. Since it opened in 1970 the gallery has accrued a massive, well-thumbed set of card files containing thousands of contacts, including artists, electricians, framers, collectors, customs officials, and so on. Now that the gallery has established a digital database these cards can be viewed as a historical archive of the wide systemic context oriented around the reception of artworks. These cards have been transposed to Super-16mm film, where each card gets at least one frame (Super-16mm film and Rolodex cards share a common aspect ratio); the result is a spinning card file that echoes the looping of the film through a projector. On film, the archive becomes a procession. Like The Varieties of Experience, Untitled (Margo Leavin Gallery, 1970-) is a kinetic, semi-abstract chronicle of a particular set of relationships, accumulated over decades, around and between audiences and artworks. Thomson’s new drawing project, The Ellipses, is also an archive from a pre-digital moment. These drawings are made, in ink on polyethylene, using commercial drafting templates. These templates are made by a number of different manufacturers, in different styles and for different graphic applications. The shapes punched out of the templates represent every projection of the ellipse shape, on a spectrum of 5 to 85 degrees, between a line at one end and a circle at the other. Filled with black ink on a bright white surface, the negatives of these shapes form warping grids and patterns that take on a strong optical character. The drawings are both by and of the templates. As a group they form a graphic record of another disappearing technology. At the same time their abstraction is meant to be evocative of cosmological phenomena like the the phases of the moon and the elliptical rotation of the planets around the sun.

Casey Ruble:

Long interested in both the subtext and paratext of, well, everything--from Road Runner cartoons to NASA images of outer space--Mungo Thomson has built a career on pulling back curtains to reveal the mechanics of production and reception. For "The Varieties of Experience," the artist used predigital tools to expand on his tried-and-true themes and strategies. Best illustrating this return to older technology was the 2009 Untitled (Margo Leavin Gallery, 1970-), a stop-motion, looped 16mm film featuring various shots of the Rolodexes in Thomson's L.A. gallery. As they spin around, the Rolodexes flip through the names of thousands of contacts the gallery has made since it opened: artists, electricians, framers, collectors, customs officials--all the people that exist around and between artwork and its audience. Sharing the exhibition's title, the other film in the show (from 2008) used Nam Jun Paik's Zen for Film (1962-64) as a negative from which to make a new print. In Paik's piece, a clear 16mm film leader becomes increasingly dirty as it attracts dust from the space in which it is shown; the dust appears as dark spots on the screen's white ground. Noting that dust is largely composed of human skin cells (meaning that the dirty film is a composite of artwork and audience), Thomson reversed Paik's film, transforming the clear space into a black ground, and the dust/audience into white specks reminiscent of stars in a night sky. The vinyl LP b/w (2008) sustained the Zen vibe via ambient relaxation sounds--with a twist. For one side of the record, Thomson sped up humpback whale song until it sounded like birds chirping; for the other, he slowed down birdsong until it mimicked the sound of whales. The resemblance is downright spooky--you would never realize the swap without reading the press release--and knowing you can be so easily fooled is equally unsettling.

Suzanne Hudson:

Elliptical has many meanings, from oval, egg-shaped, or oviform to cryptic, ambiguous, or obscure. It might also denote something that has been abridged or is laconic about its means (which is to say nothing of its effects). Less descriptive than functional, this term surfaced sometimes obliquely - throughout Mungo Thomson's recent show, which was gamely titled "The Varieties of Experience" in dual homage to William James and Carl Sagan (James's seminal The Varieties of Religious Experience was taken up by Sagan as The Varieties of Scientific Experience, a 2006 publication based on his Gifford Lectures on natural theology). The resulting constellation indeed highlighted an "elliptical" tendency in Thomson's art - one that was explicitly shown on his announcement poster, which bore a negative image of a lunar cycle, and one that actively figured in his ambitious drawing project The Ellipses, 2009, an archive of predigital commercial drafting templates. Each template renders a particular oval in variously sized holes; each drawing is a stenciling of one template in black ink on white paper. In aggregate, the twenty-five notations trigger an optical phenomenon worthy of Bridget Riley while also evoking planetary rotation and the visual effluvia of cosmological events more generically. Other works likewise relate to the celestial - at a particularly canny remove. Following the installation of his ongoing project Negative Space at the Hammer Museum last year (large-scale photographic murals of galaxies, culled from an online archive of copyright-free starscape shots taken by the Hubble Space Telescope), The Varieties of Experience, 2008, extended Thomson's wry mysticism. Where Negative Space converts black to white - the dark chasm of outer space becomes the antiseptic pallor of the gallery through Photoshop magic - this film in Super 16 mm is predicated upon a comparable, and comparably site-specific, inversion. Thomson sourced a copy of Nam June Paik's Zen for Film, 1962-64, that had been exhibited enough times to have collected a good amount of dust - as in actual traces of the authence - on its otherwise uncomposed celluloid (Paik's piece famously being either a cliché of Zen emptiness or its most profound articulation) and reprinted it in the reverse: a black film dotted with scattered white masses, a formal registration and physical index of those who had watched it in the past, now rendered as veritably new-agey Stardust. Untitled (Margo Leavin Gallery, 1 970-), 2009, a film that screened on the wall opposite The Varieties of Experience, retrospects an obsolete instrument and the community it mapped. A voyeuristic foray into Thomson's LA dealer's old-school Rolodex - an archive-cumsculptural object now that the gallery has gone digital - Untitled shows a lost art world, with its artists, framers, collectors, and the like flashing by on the cards as a collection of so many names. Some still legible, others wholly obfuscated by stray pen marks or the effects of time, these cards plot relationships among those who make, move, sell, buy, view, and write about artworks. Lest the work seem too nostalgic, an artist's book, California City, 2009, registers Thomson's deep ambivalence about representation and the faith that so often motivates it. The book centers around the namesake Mojave Desert locale, where, in 1989, Maria Paula Acuña claimed to have had an epiphanic encounter with the Virgin Mother, prompting pilgrimages in which people tried capturing their own spiritual visions by snapping Polaroids in the sunbeams. It so happened that December of 2008, when Thomson recorded these latter-day spirit photographs by taking his own pictures of them, "marked the end of instant film manufacture by Polaroid" - an elliptical tribute to holy relics of many kinds, ultimately as unwitting as it is Delphic.

Karen Rosenberg:
The Los Angeles-based conceptualist Mungo Thomson specializes in clever reversals and inversions, tweaking art and ideas of the 1960s and ’70s to make them relevant today. This works about half of the time, if his current show is anything to go by. In the title work Mr. Thomson obtained a dusty copy of Nam June Paik’s “Zen for Film” (1962-64), a clear film leader that looks, when projected, like a blank canvas. He made a negative print of Paik’s film, in which specks of dust flicker across a black rectangle. The transformation isn’t sufficient, and the spirit of the original work remains intact. “Untitled (Margo Leavin Gallery, 1970-),” a 16-millimeter film of the ancient Rolodexes once used by Mr. Thomson’s Los Angeles gallery, works on a more profound level. Though clearly indebted to Rodney Graham’s film of his 1930s German typewriter, Mr. Thomson’s project meditates on a different kind of obsolescence: social rather than technological. The Rolodex cards are set in motion by an invisible hand and filmed from various angles. There’s a poetic equivalence between the spinning cards and the rotating film projector, but just as interesting are the contacts that flash by: artists, curators, dealers, critics, celebrities who happen to collect. It evokes a time when the whole art world could fit into a single card file.

Colby Chamberlain:
Today there are more 16-mm projectors in New York’s galleries than in its movie theaters, and it’s common to blame this profusion of celluloid on a nostalgia-fueled vogue for obsolete technologies. Two 16-mm pieces at the core of Mungo Thomson’s solo exhibition suggest a more compelling possibility: that only now, at analog’s twilight, can we appreciate its heretofore unnoticed quirks. In the digital era, transposition––the twisting of one medium into another––comes easily; the zeros and ones move fluidly from one format to the next. Thomson’s films demonstrate that transposition among analog technologies, by contrast, is an intuitive operation, depending on slant rhymes and producing unlikely resonances. In The Varieties of Experience, 2008, Thomson takes Nam June Paik’s 1962–64 Zen for Film––a blank white reel with only some accumulated dust to differentiate the frames––and turns it into a negative. Thus reversed, the errant dust specks become flickering stars in a night sky, and Paik’s original now harks back to August Strindberg’s 1890s celestographs (photographic plates where Strindberg mistook a chemical processing error for the revelation of distant cosmos). In Untitled (Margo Leavin Gallery, 1970–), 2009, Thomson homes in on the curious affinity between film reels and Rolodexes. Brought to life by Gumby-style stop-motion animation, the Rolodex flips through contact cards like so many film frames; the instruments of social networking become an instance of montage. The Rolodex in question, owned and maintained by Los Angeles’s Margo Leavin Gallery, bristles with notable names that leave an afterimage. CASTELLI, KOSUTH, SARET, JUDD: The index of a textbook on postwar American art goes flashing by, complete with phone numbers, and a vanishing world comes into view.

Grégory Cuquel

2009-04-23T04:30:00.000-07:00

La France, 2008

L’univers de la musique a une capacité saisissante à fétichiser les objets, allant d’une couverture d’album vinyle à la marque d’une guitare électrique, ce qui s’accompagne, dans un même mouvement, par un certain attrait dans leur mise à mal, voire leur destruction (en leur faisant subir l’effet de feed-back ou en les brûlant sur scène). Grégory Cuquel semble évoquer l’univers de la musique électrique moins dans une transposition de son iconographie, qu’à travers l’énergie imprimée à son processus de travail.

Marina Bay, 2007

Dans Marina Bay, la forme d’un volcan est ainsi le prétexte à la mise en scène fulgurante de matériaux, à l’explosion de couleurs et à l’assemblage contradictoire de techniques. Sur l’un des côtés de la sculpture est incrustée une sorte de porte, dénonçant l’ambiguïté de cette sculpture, devenue partie intégrante du décor d’un «opéra théorique» (réalisé en collaboration avec Benjamin Seror). Le principe d’un art total est ici toutefois composé de fragments, selon une dynamique qui évoque celle du rapport d’une île au volcan, quand celui-ci détruit autant qu’il construit, reliant le centre de la Terre à sa surface.

Palissade # tout le monde l'a baisé sof toi..., clochard, 2007

Ce principe de la sculpture-décor est aussi développé dans une autre installation combinant un rocher, une plante basse, un guidon de mobylette, des tiges de métal et une palissade faite avec du plexiglas coloré : l’ensemble dégouline de couleurs luisantes et est recouvert de paillettes, verni ou résine, tout en jouant de la transparence. Le titre coup de poing (Palissade # tout le monde l'a baisé sof toi..., clochard) vient déclencher une dimension narrative, induisant une sorte de transpiration qui renvoie à des plans cul dans les parkings, à des virées adolescentes dans les terrains vagues, laissant au visiteur la place ambiguë du voyeur.

Dienasty, 2007

Panneau sur renard, 2008 (réalisé avec Anthony Jacquot Boeykens)

carrelage sur bâche, 2008 (réalisé avec Anthony Jacquot Boeykens)

L’artiste recycle en permanence ses anciennes sculptures, «une espèce de retour à l'atelier mais dans la sculpture même», de la même façon qu’il semble digérer, plutôt que détourner, différents matériaux de la culture pop. Il est d’ailleurs devenu problématique de définir la notion de « pop », tant ses usages diffèrent, surtout au moment où la question de la haute et de la basse culture a été digérée par d’autres approches, à l’instar des cultural studies, qui s’éloignent d'une stigmatisation de la culture de masses. Plutôt que d’envisager la culture populaire comme un magasin de signes, sa dimension la plus prégnante pourra alors se situer dans l’exploration de ses marges où l’inconscient social se modèle et se transforme. «Je suis un Robinson qui reconstruit de mémoire un background culturel.»

Requiem pour un bombers, 2009

Down, 2007

Blow me away you(niverse), 2006

Dans Cercle Pit, il emprunte ses matériaux dans le backstage de la culture heavy metal, explorant la faculté d’un objet à activer la mémoire. Ainsi, une double pédale est customisée de deux sphères de cristal, tandis qu’un M emprunté à l’iconographie du groupe Metallica est recouvert d’une couche de vernis le transformant en «meuble de piscine», posé à côté d’une photo avec un personnage en tenue de bodyboard et maquillé pour un concert de death metal (dans une esthétique rappelant les blogs teenagers).

Cercle Pit (extrait), 2008

Endlesssummer, 2006

Dans ses installations, le plus troublant concerne le paradoxe entre le goût pour une musique anarchique et le caractère étudié et précieux de ses codes et de son iconographie. Ce jeu de rôles trouve une traduction formelle dans des œuvres où leur caractère brut et inachevé, comme directement sorti de l’atelier ou d’un garage pour les répétitions, se dispute à la surbrillance, au maquillage et aux couleurs d’un music hall. Dans un certain sens, les sculptures de Grégory Cuquel semblent vouloir jouer de la capacité de la musique à produire de l’«aura» et à projeter des icônes, confrontant leur séduction et leur romantisme à l’entreprise de déconstruction de ces principes (voire leur démolition) menée par la modernité de l’art.
Pedro Morais, mars 2009

Nicolas Tourre

2009-04-23T02:48:00.000-07:00

Landscape for a letter, 2008

Pour les artistes voulant s’emparer aujourd’hui de l’abstraction, il est inévitable de s’interroger attentivement sur l’opération qu’ils déclenchent vis-à-vis des positionnements engagés dans cette voie par le passé. Coincée entre la citation-hommage et le détournement ironique (qui constate son assimilation par le design), l’abstraction semble n’en pas finir de faire son deuil. Cependant, à l’image du travail d'artistes comme Dan Walsh ou Wade Guyton, l’abstraction entretient des potentialités qui ne forcent pas à tenir des proclamations sur la fin des aspirations modernistes, ou à transformer les expériences passées en simple répertoire de formes à emprunter. Si l’opération reste délicate, il est tout aussi inopérant de limiter la réactivation des formes abstraites au commentaire sur l’échec d’artistes investis dans le récit d’un «progrès».

NON!, 2007

Les méduses, 2007

L'intérêt de Nicolas Tourre pour l’abstraction, concerne d’abord l’envie de se concentrer sur les propriétés de la peinture, sans pourtant adhérer à l’étanchéité du formalisme. Ses réponses s’éloignent à la fois de l’ironie post-moderne des années 80 - celle de John Armleder ou Bertrand Lavier -, et de l’anti-modernisme des néo-expressionistes de la même période. Sa façon d'exprimer et expérimenter un rapport au monde peut autant passer par des actes brutaux infligés aux tableaux (en tirant des coups de fusil), que par leur travestissement dilettante (affublé de pierres précieuses ou de plumes). Il semble emprunter une voie trouble entre le détachement dandy et le romantisme pré-moderne. Loin d’un effet nostalgique, il transfère l’actuelle indétermination de genre dans le champ de la peinture, empruntant des modalités presque camp.

Les spectateurs, 2007

Des choses que je ne veut pas savoir, 2008

Cherchant à sortir de la planéité du cadre du tableau, tout comme en refusant son assimilation à l’image, il expérimente formats et textures selon un principe de jeu qui corrompt toute règle de composition, ou assume leur permanence comme un artifice à réinvestir. Ce désir d'échapper au médium passe aussi par le choix de certains objets-matériaux (pâte à modeler, raquette de beach ball) qu'il qualifie lui-même de « grotesques », ainsi que par un intérêt vis-à-vis de pratiques amateur d'arts décoratifs.

Noeud pap', 2007

Sunset, 2005

Les coups de soleil, 2007

Certains éléments empruntés à l'abstraction géométrique se trouvent ainsi mélangés à l'exercice répandu des jeux d'optique, parfois perturbés par l'irruption de certains accessoires associés aux loisirs. Des raquettes de ping-pong ou des balles de plage, mais aussi le motif des papillons, des méduses, des vagues ou d’un coucher de soleil, semblent alors refuser une certaine doxa puritaine de la peinture - celle qui cherchait absolument à légitimer la pratique artistique comme un « travail » - pour emprunter des routes secondaires, débordantes et improductives comme les vacances.
Pedro Morais, mars 2009

Clément Laigle

2009-04-20T03:31:00.000-07:00

Lewis, 2008

«Il n’est pas possible d’échapper à l’architecture, de la même façon qu’il n’est pas possible d’échapper au langage» - ce constat de Clément Laigle est le point de départ d’une démarche qui cherchera alors à produire des «aberrations de l’espace», recomposant ses volumes, jouant de l’adaptation ou niant son organisation. Difficile ici de distinguer les frontières entre la sculpture et l’installation, tant les architectures qu’il construit (en déconstruisant celles où il intervient) sont des mises en forme indissociables des espaces qu’il investit. En obstruant partiellement des passages, ou en modifiant sensiblement les systèmes d’éclairage, il cherche à déjouer le conditionnement sous-jacent à l’imbrication des limites d’un lieu avec sa perception inconsciente.

Sans titre, Kreuzberg, 2007

Dans une série d’œuvres in situ, il trouble la position du regard, le plaçant à l’extérieur de l’œuvre quand on croit pourtant y avoir accès. Cela peut signifier l’installation d’un pan de tôle en acier obstruant des fenêtres, sorte de palissade paradoxalement tournée vers l’intérieur (Lewis, 2008), ou l’impression que des cloisons cachent la lumière extérieure, équipées de néons auquel on n’a accès que par réfraction (Sans titre, Kreuzberg, 2007). Où se situe alors l’envers et l’endroit du décor ? L’architecture n’est plus l’enveloppe de l’exposition mais son matériau même, prolongée par l’utilisation dans ses œuvres de matériaux industriels liés à la construction ou à l’aménagement d’intérieur (panneaux d’aggloméré, cloisons, néons) et laissant à vue l’artifice de l’intervention (des trous permettant le passage des fils électriques).

Sans titre, Rodney Mullen, 2006

Kasimir, 2007

La transition entre le jour et la nuit, ce moment qui nous fait hésiter entre la lumière naturelle et la lumière artificielle, est rendu encore plus indiscernable dans une installation où deux panneaux éclairés par des néons sont placés autant à l’intérieur qu’à l’extérieur de la galerie, amplifiant le caractère indistinct de leur fonction au moment de l’aube ou du crépuscule (Sans titre, Rodney Mullen, 2006). Dans un mouvement parallèle, la photo d’une énorme palissade installée contre la façade d’un immeuble avec, entre les deux, un système d’éclairage de néons, semble vouloir faire disparaître la nuit à l’intérieur du bâtiment (Kasimir, 2007).

Vince, 2008

Das Aldernest, 2008

Cette réversibilité est aussi explorée lors d’une intervention dans un préau où l’artiste construit des couloirs avec des panneaux en bois éclairés en permanence par des néons (Vince, 2008). Il n’est alors pas étonnant que Clément Laigle cherche à renverser de façon ironique le principe du land art : invité à participer à une manifestation en plein air, il s’emploie à construire des abris pour les œuvres déjà installées, signifiant la contradiction entre leur caractère entropique et l’hypothèse de leur conservation (Das Aldernest, 2008).

Neuwall, 2006

Between the furniture and the building, 2008

Il poursuit la création d’espaces qui déstabilisent le dehors et le dedans, utilisant des palissades de séparation de jardins pour comprimer les dimensions d’une cour extérieure (Neuwall, 2006). Son œuvre se place à l’endroit même d’une relation à l’espace, rendant équivoque notre position (entre acteur, spectateur et figurant), qu’il s’agit toutefois d’habiter. Dans une autre installation, ce qui apparaît comme une accueillante clairière chauffée au feu de bois (des spots halogènes), se renferme aussitôt par une tôle ondulée circulaire, évoquant son titre Between the furniture and the building (2008), expression qui désigne une position intolérable à laquelle il est impossible d’échapper.

Le Pays de Caux, 2008

C’est ainsi que ce corps refoulé par l’architecture surgit, de façon à la fois insinuée et radicalement exposée, dans une série d’images extraites de revues porno recouvertes de formes géométriques inspirées des colombages architecturaux.
Pedro Morais, mars 2009

Julien Pastor

2009-04-19T10:11:00.000-07:00

Architecture continue, édition Crédac d'Ivry-sur-Seyne, 2008

Le logement social a parfois été un terrain formidable d’expérimentation sur les possibilités d’habiter ensemble, interrogeant les notions de propriété et de commun. Cependant, ces constructions ont pu aussi participer à la production de cauchemars panoptiques, en découplant les modalités d’exclusion et en dévitalisant les hypothèses de participation et d'appropriation de l’espace publique. Plutôt que de se réfugier dans un constat écrasant qui dicterait la fin de certaines expériences dites utopiques, Julien Pastor s’est intéressé de près au travail de Renée Gailhoustet et Jean Renaudie, responsables de la rénovation du centre d’Ivry-sur-Seine pendant les années 70. Ce couple d’architectes a mené une critique féroce de la modernité architecturale, s’opposant aux méthodes de construction des premières villes nouvelles des années 1950-1960. S’ils critiquaient leur principe de séparation rationnelle des fonctions, ils n’ont pas pour autant rejeté leur projet d’émancipation, excluant l'idée de revenir à la ville traditionnelle. Prônant des principes d'imbrication et de prolifération, ils ont diversifié en permanence leurs approches, refusant obstinément de systématiser leur architecture. Julien Pastor contextualise cette démarche par le biais d’un texte, «Architecture continue» (édition du Crédac d’Ivry-sur-Seine), où il remonte à la création des banlieues au XIXème siècle pour décrire l’histoire des rapports entre constructions périurbaines et jardins publics du XIXème siècle.

L'Ivryenne, 2007

Dans l’espace d’exposition, il a réactivé le kiosque construit en 1968 à Ivry par Renée Gailhoustet, dont la forme géométrique complexe semble contrarier les lignes rectilignes de l'immeuble en face (1). Pastor transforme toutefois le kiosque en tente individuelle de camping, l'associant au principe d'une architecture éphémère liée au nomadisme et au plein air. Le titre de l’œuvre (L'Ivryenne, 2007) et l’appropriation du format commémoratif de la carte postale (pour perpétuer la mémoire de cette construction tenue pour anodine), signalent l’humour mélancolique qui traverse sa démarche.

Grand Charmont, 2008

Dans une série de collages (Des grands ensembles, 2008), le caractère abstrait de rectangles et carrés découpés en papier noir, s’avère finalement très concret : il s’agit des « plans masses » qui figurent les bases d'implantation d'unités d’habitation construites en France pendant les Trente Glorieuses. Leur organisation rationnelle est toutefois entièrement bouleversée, rappelant un jeu mikado : l’artiste a mis chaque groupe de bâtiments en papier dans une boîte, les mélangeant avant de les faire tomber sur une feuille, introduisant le hasard autant dans l’organisation de l’espace urbain que dans son œuvre.
Cette façon de jouer sur un mode mineur, de déconstruire le « geste » artistique, se retrouve aussi dans Tree diagram (2005), où il découpe de façon rectangulaire toutes les feuilles d’un arbre, introduisant la géométrie dans une « sculpture » organique. En diffusant une sélection musicale de death et black métal, pendant dix jours, auprès d'une plante d’intérieur, il essaye de lui réveiller une sensation de révolte en jouant avec nos croyances animistes (Une plante est une plante, 2005). Dans la performance L'élixir d'amour ou Le spectateur (2008), il se met lui-même à l’épreuve, applaudissant pendant plus d’une heure: il s'agit du reenactment d’une ovation historique faite à Luciano Pavarotti (à la suite de sa prestation dans L’élixir d’amour de Donizetti en 1988), malgré qu'ici puisse manquer autant la cause que le dispositif du spectacle qui légitime ses propres codes.

Bob Marley Yellow T-shirt, Peinture à l’huile; Bob Marley B&W, Peinture à l’huile, 2007

Un évidemment du signe qu’il applique aussi à la peinture : en effectuant un travail de copiste de certains posters vendus à la sauvette dans les couloirs du métro (Bob Marley, Bruce Lee ou des dauphins), il signale le devenir générique d'images qui naviguent entre l’industrie multinationale de la contre-culture et des mythologies traditionnelles locales. Pedro Morais, mars 2009
(1) Le principe du kiosque actualise une figure classique des architectes paysagistes des Lumières, influencés par les constructions orientales du XVIème siècle.

Thomas Klimowski

2009-04-19T09:29:00.000-07:00

Polonia, 2006

Si l’invention de la perspective en peinture a participé à la constitution d'une théorie du paysage, pourquoi les derniers développements de celle-ci n'auraient pas, en retour, influencé les pratiques artistiques? Depuis les années 70, surtout avec les travaux du philosophe Alain Roger, la réflexion sur le paysage a beaucoup évolué : il est désormais évident que la notion de paysage n’existe ni partout, ni toujours, qu’elle est, en somme, une construction culturelle. Thomas Klimowski semble avoir nettement assimilé cette place de la subjectivité sociale dans le rapport au territoire, désignée en sociologie par «géographie des représentations».
Dans l’installation Polonia (2006), le titre est placé comme une enseigne sur une armature métallique, entourée au sol de plaques de bois, des archipels disposés de façon aléatoire. Polonia est un terme tiré des racines latines du mot Pologne, qui désignait la diaspora polonaise éparpillée dans le monde entier à une époque où le pays n’existait plus, annexé par les puissances voisines. L’enseigne désigne ainsi un territoire mental, réunissant les fantasmes d’une mémoire commune, dont les carrés de bois disposés autour fonctionnent comme les pièces dispersées du puzzle. Parmi ceux-ci, une boîte lumineuse donne à voir la photographie d’un échangeur autoroutier, prolongeant le principe d’un non-lieux, d’un horizon commun dont le chemin est moins à retrouver qu’à réinventer.

J’aimerais revoir les cactus en fleur, 2006

Ce même principe d’un territoire mental, tel un puzzle fragmenté, se trouve aussi évoqué par J’aimerais revoir les cactus en fleur (2006), composé de toiles de différentes tailles aux tons terre et ocres, tendues par des câbles, composant la métonymie d’un paysage. Ici, le monochrome se trouve paradoxalement associé au principe du point de vue, de la «venduta», revisitant l’abstraction par le biais d’une mise en espace de la représentation cartographique.

Dérives, 2006

Dans Dérives (2006), l’idée de puzzle semble intégrer la vision subjective et mobile apportée à la cartographie par les dernières technologies. La possibilité de déplacer un espace composé de « parcelles » de bois, signifie les mutations d’un territoire et l’artifice des frontières, tandis que la représentation photographique de cette composition vue de haut, à l’image d’une carte, fige la multiplicité de points de vue pour créer l’illusion de contrôler un espace.

Lances, 2008

Le caractère générique des différents éléments de ce paysage peut évidemment évoquer des compositions picturales de l’abstraction des avant-gardes, mais il ne s’agit plus ici de construire une autonomie interne au tableau mais de signaler la dimension partielle de toute cartographie et le caractère transitionnel de sa signification. Le monochrome assume ainsi un caractère guerrier (dans une autre installation où il les accroche à des lances), face à un contexte social et artistique dominé par l’efficacité du « message ».

Panneaux, 2006

Cet épuisement des signes se trouve encore dans Panneaux (2006), où des modules de panneaux publicitaires que l’on trouve sur le bord des routes, dessinent les lignes d’un paysage générique (avec la superposition de couches de bois différents) au caractère cinématographique accentué par l’éclairage en contre-plongée et l’enfilade des panneaux dans l’espace.

Balkanisme, 2008

Il cherche aussi à mettre à l’épreuve les notions de territoire et de frontière en les transposant sur la géométrie d’un terrain de foot, dont il divise l’un des deux camps successivement à moitié, jusqu’à l’absurde évoqué par le titre (Balkanisme, 2008), lorsqu’un conflit se scinde en de multiples conflits. En convoquant autant les avant-gardes du modernisme que l’imaginaire de la culture populaire, Thomas Klimowski interroge comment la géographie et les limites de sa transposition abstraite (codes couleurs, planéité) peuvent dissimuler une géopolitique.
Pedro Morais, mars 2009

Chloé Dugit-Gros

2009-04-19T08:39:00.000-07:00

Alligator People, 2007

Affichée au mur, une photo noir et blanc reprise du film Alligator People donne à voir une femme menacée par un mutant à tête de crocodile. Directement sortie de l'imaginaire des monsters B-movies des années 1950, qui connaissaient à l’époque un regain d'adhésion populaire dû à la paranoïa nucléaire (en plein climat de guerre froide), cette image est ici ramenée à sa théâtralité et à sa surface, dans une planéité renforcée par les ombres portées des personnages. La matérialité de l'image est brusquement interrompue par les couleurs de deux sweat à capuche, accrochés aux personnages, la transformant en poster d’une culture contemporaine qui inscrit les produits de l’industrie dans une relecture des liens entre l’histoire culturelle et l’inconscient collectif.

La mort de l’homme sandwich, 2007

Cette façon d’éloigner les images dans le temps à travers un regard porté sur les transformations de leur technique et texture, dessine en quelque sorte une archéologie de la culture visuelle. La mort de l’homme sandwich (2007) est une photo présentée sur caisson lumineux avec un individu portant des affiches : une modalité publicitaire désormais désuète où le corps venait quelque part intercepter l’efficacité de l’image, effet redoublée par le geste de l’artiste qu’y découpe des formes géométriques donnant au message le caractère abstrait d’une constellation lumineuse.

Sans titre, 2008

Dans Sans titre (2008), ce qui ressemble à un immense tableau noir d’école est sauvagement affublé d’une photo montrant un jeune garçon posant fièrement en zorro des rues, avec des gants noirs qui tiennent un couteau. Mais là encore, c’est la théâtralité de l’image qui est mise en évidence (dans le mimétisme de la posture fantasmée d’un anti-héros), et la matérialité de la reproduction (à travers la colle qui dégouline sur le tableau).

Bach is back !, 2006

Ce goût du low-fi autant que de la low culture, apparaît aussi dans Bach is back ! (2006), une palissade installée entre deux salles où il reste la trace d’affiches arrachées, aux couleurs acidulées rappelant les annonces de dancehalls jamaïcains ou de combats de catch mexicains. Si l’on peut y voir un renversement du geste des affichistes (ici l’attention est portée au vestige), il s’agit aussi de signaler une mobilité entre des pratiques et des références culturelles (la seule affiche épargnée annonce le compositeur Bach), qui constitue aujourd’hui nos identités.

L’occupation des sols, 2006

Par le biais d’interventions frontales, proches des modalités du décor, l’artiste s’intéresse à la fonction de l’espace d’exposition dans une installation où le trompe l’œil (une image de cheminée collée sur une structure en bois) et des objets détournés (des tapis de gym rouges) peuvent suggérer une appropriation performative (Gymnastique sur les toits, 2005) qui ne cache pas son artifice. Cette dimension de son travail peut aller jusqu’à introduire une menace de destruction des structures mêmes de l’espace, à l’image de cette cimaise recouverte d’une bâche où l’artiste taggue Do not bulldoze à la bombe aérosol (L’occupation des sols, 2006).

L’approche du résultat, 2007

Chloé Dugit-Gros s'est ensuite plutôt tournée vers la déconstruction du travail classique d’atelier, invitant brutalement ses outils à s’exposer. Ainsi, des tables d’atelier découpées et assemblées servent à construire un cheval d’arçon où restent visibles des tâches accidentelles de peinture, dans une mise en parallèle ironique entre le culte de l’effort sportif et la bravoure théâtrale du geste expressionniste. Elle essayera aussi d’isoler les éléments qui constituent le langage du dessin (une pratique qui, avec la maquette, est au départ de la plupart de ses projets) : transformant la cimaise en feuille blanche installée dans l’espace, elle y appose des traits de couleur sous forme d’élastiques (Fils conducteurs, 2008) ou la précipite au sol, tranchée par des tasseaux de couleurs (Matières Premières, 2008). La cimaise peut encore être mobile, sorte de tableau d’école posé sur roulettes, où elle dessine un motif abstrait à la craie, qui renvoie autant à la calculette rudimentaire utilisée pour les scores d’une compétition sportive, qu’à la méthode de travail de l’artiste, allant progressivement d’une multitude de sources vers la mise en forme (L’approche du résultat, 2007).

Code des cambrioleurs, 2008

Ce principe d’une abstraction qui se révèle figurative est encore présent dans une installation composée de formes géométriques aux allures de maquette d’architecture moderniste. Celles-ci s'avèrent être la transposition en volume d’une série de symboles que les voleurs dessinent sur les façades des maisons, indiquant les éventuels dangers à considérer dans une prochaine intrusion (Code des cambrioleurs, 2008). L’abstraction peut ainsi se confondre ici avec un code infiltrant et voyou, échappant à la propriété du sens commun.
Pedro Morais, mars 2009

Ann Lislegaard (Murray Guy Gallery, New York)

2009-03-12T06:29:00.000-07:00

Crystal World (after J.G.Ballard), 2006

Left Hand of Darkness (after Ursula K. Le Guin), 2008

These works comprise the second and third parts of a trilogy of 3D animations based on science fiction novels that began with Bellona (After Samuel R. Delany), exhibited in 2005. This trilogy continues Lislegaard’s longstanding investigation into spatial perception and cognition and, in particular, divergent forms of narrative. She draws here on science fiction not to illustrate its imaginative content but rather, as Frederic Jameson articulates it, because of science fiction’s potential to provide “something like an experimental variation on our empirical universe.” The works reference modernism and historical visions of the future to reflect on our present triangulation of space and knowledge and temporality; as a whole, they comprise a far-reaching investigation into the structuring of cognition in the digital age. Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard) is a looping double screen animation showing a modernist glass hotel in a tropical jungle that is slowly invaded by crystalline growth. Text drawn from Ballard’s 1966 novel, which describes a viral crystal found deep in the rainforest that petrifies all organic matter, mingles intermittently with shifting digital images of shadows and the jungle seen from vague interior spaces. Taking the glass house as conceit for a modernist structuring of knowledge, Lislegaard’s animation directly references the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi’s 1951 Glass House, and the work of Robert Smithson and Eva Hesse, who investigated crystalline and organic structures as a means of articulating nonlinear time. Set in a similarly extreme climate, Left Hand of Darkness (After Ursula K. LeGuin) is a three-channel projection that draws on LeGuin’s 1969 novel describing an icy planet populated by a single sex of androgynous humanoids. Pages of the novel are inscribed on top of another and rotoscopic images spin next to drawings of male and female genitalia. Here identity and behavior seem at once both paralyzed and in a state of constant flux; the novel’s radical re-imagining of gender is inscribed in a fluid space between cinema, architecture and writing. As in The Crystal World, Lislegaard works to reconfigure polarities—between interiority and exteriority, male and female, organic and inorganic—in an explosively horizontal digital terrain, where nothing aligns as we would expect.

Merrily Kerr:
Ann Lislegaard’s mesmerizing new digital animations take inspiration from classic science fiction without illustrating it, and connect to hot-button current events without relying on them for meaning. This is strange territory seen anew. The frozen land of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness and the tropical jungle of J.G. Ballard’s 1966 The Crystal World—whose settings and titles the artist borrows—host abstract alternate worlds where opposites are conjoined to enchanting and disorienting effect. Lislegaard’s Left Hand of Darkness (after Ursula K. Le Guin) is a riveting whirl of geometric patterns, moving text and ski gear. Though the exact combination of images is calibrated not to repeat, the combined effect remains deliberately less nuanced than Le Guin’s meticulously imagined planet. Lislegaard’s literally black-and-white environment has a chilly, nervous energy, with a crackling static soundtrack suggesting a futile search for communication. Superimposed anatomical diagrams of male and female sex organs (referring to the novel’s androgyne race) bluntly deny pleasure. The mood in Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard) is equally stark. There may be environmental overtones in Lislegaard’s struggles between human(oid)s and nature, but her work’s appeal, both aesthetic and intellectual, lies in its extreme contrasts: a setting simultaneously snow-white and white-hot, an icy crystal suddenly melting into a black pool, modernist architecture surrounded by overgrown vegetation, and sharp tonal contrasts punctuated by blinding flashes of light. In reimagining Le Guin’s and Ballard’s already eccentric departures from the norm, Lislegaard has created stunning, binary-busting visions, both horrible and beautiful.

T.J. Carlin:
One of the most disturbing aspects of the recent economic domino-effect is that some of the key components that factored into the disintegration – a credit default swap, for example – are structural elements most people had never even heard of prior to the crisis, and yet govern and profoundly affect our individual existences. The Orwellian edge to our current reality is more terrifying even than the strangest science fiction. In her exhibition at Murray Guy, Ann Lislegaard effectively harnesses the sense of the alien among us through an investigation of perception as manifest through several contemporary constructed versions of reality. Lislegaard’s combination of multiple reference sources in her videos serves to frame perception without taking any of the vehicles directly as subject matter, though Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard) (2006), one of the two animations on view, does seem to effect a subtle, broader critique of the digital. The video, an unsynced two-channel loop that operates in a continuously recombinant stream, delivers surreal visual renderings of a variety of spaces. It is accompanied by an excerpt from J.G. Ballard’s haunting 1966 work by that name, which chronicles the progress of a viral crystal as it gradually petrifies a tropical landscape. The tension between abstraction and representation jangles as our viewpoint is led through a series of sparsely furnished architectural interiors with modernist overtones, many of them giving out into densely forested space; sometimes there is just enough visual information for the interiors to come together, while the outdoors is more richly detailed, though rendered rather flatly. Undercurrents of the passage of time and of the limits of perception nibble everywhere in the video like pangs of compunction. In reference to the advancing crystallisation, the excerpted lines read eerily: ‘I quickly came to understand / that its hazards are a small price to pay / there are immense rewards to be found / in this phantasmagoric place / as more and more time leaks away.’ One could easily imagine the digital being substituted in place of the crystal as subject of this passage. As light and shadow slide across the rooms ostensibly to create the illusion of a passing day, the details of the image get so blown out as to be indiscernible; the uncomfortable sense of having reached the edge of one’s world and one’s perceptual reach. Left Hand of Darkness (After Ursula K. Le Guin) (2008) is less convincing experientially. In a three-channel animation, Lislegaard layers a simplified animation of a sexually ambiguous figure performing what look like various martial arts activities, with medical diagrams of male and female genitalia, schematic renderings of wintertime athletic equipment and superimposed text from Le Guin’s namesake work, in which an icy planet is governed by an androgynous race. Though it is more ‘tell’ than ‘show’ its affect remains squarely in the cold realm of impassive scientific observation that lends the freak factor to Crystal World, though the investigation into the subjectivity of sexuality does register as an intellectual, if not as strongly an aesthetic, force. Together the videos lend a sometimes chilling take on fundamental forces that govern our world and shape our understanding of it.

Rewind 2008: les expositions à Marseille

2009-03-12T03:48:00.000-07:00

The True Artist
Véronique Dutilly, Heather & Ivan Morison, Giorgio Sadotti, Paul Tarrago, Emily Wardill. commissaire: Damien Airault (Triangle, galerie de la Friche)

Faites vos je
Artists Anonymous, Cercle Ramo Nash, Éric Duyckaerts, Claire Fontaine, Anabelle Hulaut, Norma Jeane, Alexandre Lenoir, Édouard Levé, Sylvie Réno, Reena Spaulings, David Vincent (Sextant et Plus, galerie de la Friche)

Clément Rodzielski (galerie RLBQ)

Carlos Kusnir (galerie Athanor et galerie de l'Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts)

Bettina Samson et Julien Tiberi (galerie RLBQ)

Ping Pong Country
Remco Schuurbiers et Bijan Dawallu (galerie SMP)

the white patch had become a place of darkness
Pierre Ardouvin, Cécilia Becanovic, Roxane Borujerdi, Céline Cléron, Frédérique Decombe, Emmanuelle Duron-Moreels, Thibaut Espiau, Yoann Gourmel, Claude Lévêque, Leonor Nuridsany, Julien Prévieux, Maxime Thieffine, Manon Tricoire et Raphael Zarka. commissaire: Guillaume Constantin (galerie Histoire de l'Oeil)

Elise Florenty (galerie Où)

Marc Etienne (galerie Bonneau-Samames)

The MUD Office
Dan Robinson, Charlie Jeffery (galerie Histoire de l'Oeil)

+ Chloé Dugit-Gros (Astérides), Nick Van de Steeg (SMP), Benjamin Hochart (Où), Anthony Duchêne (Bonneau-Samames), David Blondel (Bains Douches), Christophe Boursault (Porte Avion), Colombe Marcasiano (Triangle), Emilie Perotto (Art-O-Rama, Ateliers d'Artistes), Mon Chéri (RLBQ), Marion Mahu (Cul de Sac, galerie du Tableau)

Dispersion (ICA, London)

2009-02-23T11:20:00.000-08:00

Hito Steyerl, Lovely Andrea, 2007

Henrik Olesen, some gay-lesbian artists and/or artists relevant to homo-social culture V,VI,VII, 2007

Maria Eichhorn, 'Film Lexicon of Sexual Practices (Breast Licking)', 1999-2008

Anne Collier, Folded Madonna Poster (Steven Meisel), 2007

curated by Polly Staple:

Dispersion presents seven international artists working with photography, film, video and performance. All deconstruct and re-mix found images, investing them with personal narratives and using them to explore the contemporary landscape of information and image distribution. Today’s endless worldwide archive of found images, from art-historical icons to consumer ephemera, provides these artists with their raw material; while systems of economic exchange, from the art market to the internet, offer a constant reference point. Many of the works exhibited in Dispersion employ idiosyncratic ordering systems, revealing a subjective yet anthropological approach to their material. Exploring hierarchical codes of the visual lexicon, and informed by feminist and gender politics, several works foreground the psychological realm of sexuality or subcultural networks. How ‘ways of seeing’ both form and define subjectivities, shape memory and morality, and participate in the formation of new identities both within and beyond the dominant culture, are common themes. All of the artists in Dispersion explore how identities are constructed rather than given, and how—through investigating the politics of representation—it may be possible to achieve what could be called a ‘critical’ image.They highlight networks of dissemination, the relations between private life and the public sphere, and allude to the secret life of images and the order of things.

Maria Eichhorn’s work often performs an acute deconstruction of the system—economic-social-art historical—employed to construct an image or exhibition scenario. In Film Lexicon of Sexual Practices (1999-2008), exhibition visitors may request to view one of eleven 16mm films from Eichhorn’s developing archive of sexual activity. These three-minute films are influenced, however, by conceptual strategy rather than any pornographic code. A screen-printed wall text details an excerpt of the lexicon, accompanied by textual definitions, and each film presents a close-up view of one of the lexicon’s terms, including both sexual activities and body parts. The unemotional, minimal perspective renders the actions either abstract or clinical. Mouth or Eye, for example, conjure an evocative Surrealistic dream-world, whereas Breast Licking verges on the comical in its precision and Cunnilingus is almost medical. Shown in a neutrally lit room, with the projectionist always present to screen the films, the setting suggests a desire for transparency and a heightened awareness of both the content and conditions of representation, with the viewerimplicated in a contract of exchange through their choice of film and their interaction with the projectionist.

The way in which sexuality is organised within Western capitalist social systems, so that desire becomes categorised within the rule of law, is a constant theme for Henrik Olesen. some gay-lesbian artists and/or artists relevant to homo-social culture V, VI, VII (2007) consists of a set of wood and paper panels (three of which are shown here) carrying an encyclopaedic array of postcards and photocopies from art-historical sources. Olesen’s project presents a studyof the homosexual and homo-visual from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries, his selective rationale in turnpedantic, intuitive and absurdly revealing, his editing highlighting historical vagaries and repetitious gestures. Olesen’s framing turns grand paintings and classical imagery into documentary evidence to be worked over, and the boards have the aura of both the school room and a crime-scene investigation. But the artist’s studied casualness—the low-budget display, cheap photocopies and crossing out—belies a forensic attention to detail. The viewer’s reading of the work replicates Olesen’s role as researcher and archivist, and echoes our own experience of information as montage. Olesen is ultimately interested in a critical investigation of the archive, suggesting potential strategies for the reinterpretation of images and social codes.

Seth Price’s Digital Video Effect: “Editions” (2006) consists of six of the artist’s previously editioned video works, re-edited for low-cost, unlimited distribution. Home-movie footage shot by the artist Joan Jonas in the early 1970s (of fellow artists Robert Smithson and Richard Serra and the dealer Joseph Hellman) is juxtaposed with fragments from a video by artist Martha Rosler (which itself lifts footage from TV advertisements); as well as reportage from the aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s shooting in the 1980s; stills frominternet death sites; and a digital animation clip of a rolling synthetic black ocean played on repeat. Price creates his own field of distribution: both through his reworking of his own films alongside those of others; and through the dispersal of the product itself as an unlimited edition. The production and reproduction of culture and value are shown to be infinitely malleable. Meaning is formed through the constant fluid connections between points—strategically reworking and updating material— and the artist’s manipulation of highly charged material demonstrates the collision of value systems caused by a surfeit of information. The title Dispersion is taken from an essay by Price, reproduced in the book accompanying the exhibition.

Anne Collier explores the recycling of images through acts of appropriation—photographing film posters, album and magazine covers and photographic test plates. The subsequent image groupings form a subjective lexicon of popular imagery, alternately suggesting biographical history and a nostalgic attraction to found material. Collier often chooses particular motifs such as the eye or the camera, or highlights the nuanced gender and power relations of the subjects presented, to emphasise how we look and see. Inherent to Collier’s practice is a sense of claustrophobia, the infinite referencing creating an arrested feedback loop, upsetting any easy consumption of image and instead emphasising a significant void or lack. The marks or folds of the posters and record sleeves evoke memories of lost time and intimate associations, the materiality of each photograph emphasising its status as an object with its own history. In one work, a photograph of a Steven Meisel Madonna poster, Collier revels in the insistent glamour of both the original art direction and its subject’s inscrutable iconicity. Madonna’s masquerade—with painted face and lowered eyes —encapsulates commodity fetishism as a projection screen for fantasy.

Hilary Lloyd’s Studio (2007) derives from the artist’s obsessive filming of paint marks on the floor of her studio—tracking the trace of its previous occupant, a painter. Two video projections play simultaneously, but with shifting combinations of image sequences. Lloyd’s filming activelyconstructs a way of looking at her subject, one that is further exaggerated by the prominence of the projection and playback technology that occupies the exhibition space. The originally intuitive is processed through a series of levels of documentation and display; Lloyd’s exhaustive, repetitive gaze articulating both a personal relationship with her subject, and the mechanical processes of reconstructing the act of looking through the act of image-making. There is a strange sensation of being simultaneously above and within the image, and a tension to the skewed perspective—between intellectual and phenomenological experience, content and form, surface and depth, forensic attention to detail and art-historical inflection. An economyof production is revealed through tightly choreographed gestures of surveillance, while a psychological dimension creates a clinical but highly charged perspective on image-making.

Hito Steyerl’s video projection Lovely Andrea (2007) focuses on the artist’s search for an image of herself performing as a bondage model in Tokyo in the 1980s. Trawling a network of S&M pornography, Steyerl explores the commodification of her own image and uses visual metaphors of bondage to explore the interconnections of sexuality, power and social and labour relations. Steyerl is seen visiting archives and studios, interviewing ‘rope masters’, photographers and editors. Her narrativeis edited together with extracts ranging from Spiderman cartoons to still images of bound Guantanamo Bay detainees. Linked by emphatic inter-titles and a frenetic post-punk soundtrack, the film has all the dramatic tension of investigative journalism but the aesthetic of Quicktime video edits. Lovely Andrea throws into question the ethics of the document when Steyerl—herself tracked by a film crew—is requested to retake certain ‘documentary’ scenes. Ultimately the artist is on a mission to re-appropriate her own image, but initially she is unable to even recognise herself in the original photographic document—memory is shown to be as mutable as the archive of images circulating on the web.

Mark Leckey operates through a multiplicity of media, exploring the relationship between popular culture and high art, commodity fetishism and the economies of exchange. All these themes are tackled in his live performance Mark Leckey in the Long Tail (2009), the latest in a series of ‘lectures’ given by the artist, and one which will be performed in the ICA theatre. Leckey’s lectures have roamed across television history, taking in the role of the BBC, the cartoon icon Felix the Cat and the ‘long tail’ theory of internet-based economics. Investigating the mythology of the internet, the artistexplores its unregulated flow of images and information, identifying a new economics of distribution manifest in the libidinally-charged ‘prosumer’—part producer, part consumer. The first of these lectures (Cinema-in-the-Round (2006)) detailed how flat images can seem to take on weight and mass—how images existing in virtual space can be almost physically experienced—and Leckey’s latest performance occurs within a theatrical installation that explores the relationship of object to image; as well as that of heavy industry to intangible software; the vertical to the horizontal; sculpture to animation; and the secret life of things to the fantasy life of images.

review by Ossian Ward:
Critics grumbled that the Turner Prize was wilfully opaque last year – too clever by half. The ICA is often accused of losing its way whenever it stages similarly tricky and liminal group shows, of the kind that should be the very lifeblood of the institution. ‘Dispersion’ presents the latest in a long line of hard-to-fathom artistic positions, which shouldn’t be ignored just because they’re hard to categorise. Bluntly speaking all the artists here deal in appropriation, but isn’t (almost) all art appropriation, now that there’s nothing new under the sun? This seems to be the real message: it’s all out there, you just have to know where to look. Let’s say you’re into kinky food sex, someone must cater for that, right? Maria Eichhorn is, appropriately enough for her name, building up a library of erotic film and porn standards, so far including ‘Auto-eroticism’ and ‘Cunnilingus’, which you request from the projectionist standing by. Eichhorn (employing professional actors) had yet to complete her mini-treatise on ‘Food Sex’, so like asking for second choice at the video store, I had to be satisfied with ‘Breast Licking’. Or rather unsatisfied, because we’re just as disassociated with the material as she is. Her ‘Film Lexicon of Sexual Practices’ is simply an archive (it could be of sewing techniques) and therefore not titillating, but informative. What else do we learn in ‘Dispersion’? Henrik Olesen goes on an art-historical trawl for homoeroticism and Seth Price gives the game away (and not just by giving his art away for free, ironically for his name) by cutting and pasting bits of his work with that of others to create a skittish, looping video of short circuits and non-sequiturs that brilliantly captures the YouTubeification of culture. Anne Collier treads on similar ground but her works are lost in the fateful ICA corridor, so it’s left to Hilary Lloyd’s filming of her paint-splattered studio floor, left by a previous occupant, to reveal the confused inner monologue of the artist – perhaps wondering why she doesn’t paint, or why she’s so interested in the image and residue of others? Yes, it’s navel gazing, but only because our interconnectedness means that we’re never more than six degrees of separation from one another or from a pre-existing idea. Whether borrowed or recycled, it’s all the same – yet somehow delightfully different every time.

R.H. Quaytman (Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York)

2009-02-23T01:04:00.000-08:00

Chapter 12: iamb
This series use the motif of a painting lit by a lamp as the foundational image around which the other works coalesce. With the context in mind - a commercial gallery -, the subject turns back to painting itself and, specifically, its relationship to the blind spot. Like actual vision, Quaytman’s paintings have a blind spot, whether it be from a light source in the picture, an optical illusion, a trompe l’œil effect, the absence of color in a black and white photograph, or the picture in plan. This recurring ‘absence’ enables the works to activate one another, yet it also often shifts the axis of legibility between neighboring paintings. While the paintings can suggest an alternate position for the viewer’s body moving by the picture, or, further, literally repel vision through optical static, they ultimately affirm their own autonomy. While it can be said that they are made to influence flow from one picture to the next, no single painting suggests what the next will be. Each work allows the viewer to look at and into it, to focus from near and far, to see it as part of a group or in isolation. In the end, the picture always actively refers back to the painting itself, and then out to all that surrounds it.
For a period of three years – until May 2008 – R.H. Quaytman acted as the director of Orchard, a collaborative artist run gallery in New York's Lower East Side reconciling the divergent narratives of movements such as institutional critique, Kontext Kunst, and the legacies of Latin American and Eastern European vanguard practices of the sixties and seventies. It is perhaps then fitting that her artistic practice reconsiders critiques of the autonomous art object wherein the idea of painting serves as a model for the larger discursive meanings of art. Her use of wood panel as material support and her frequent grounding of the picture plane in photo-based silk screening, underscore the perceptual, perspectival and durational experience of painting as an assessment of the larger social, historical, personal and architectural contexts in which her work appears.

Roberta Smith:
The paintings in R. H. Quaytman’s exhibition are cerebral, physically thought out and resolutely optical. They engage painting on every level in a restrained way; they also engage one another. Most involve silk-screened motifs that refer to some combination of light, lamps and subtly Op Art patterns of superfine concentric circles, quietly pulsing grids or tiny black and white checks. Some paintings depict other paintings in the exhibition. Some depict light sources that actually seem to obstruct vision. Everything seems once removed, seen through something else: the addition of a layer of sparkling diamond dust; a graduated shift in pale colors; trompe l’oeil strips of wood grain. The viewing experience is deliberately destabilized. For example, it takes some time to determine if the yellow shading across the surface of a checked painting is inherent or a reflection from the yellow painting next to it. Ms. Quaytman’s work combines the photographic procedures and recycled motifs of appropriation art with the physical eccentricities of formalist paintings or, perhaps more accurately, specific objects. Although her paintings aren’t especially small, they have the careful precision and delicacy of miniatures. It is as if they are trying reduce the processes of both making and looking at painting to the smallest unit of measure and experience possible, a place where atoms of light and matter merge.

David Lewis:
In 1939, R.H. Quaytman’s grandfather and great-grandfather were driving back from the New York World’s Fair when they were suddenly crushed to death by an oncoming train. The accident was caused by a malfunctioning railway light. Much later, Quaytman tracked down the story in New York newspaper The Sun and used it as the basis for her 2001 exhibition at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, ‘Chapter 1: The Sun’. The reaction is characteristic: hers is a deliberate practice with a strong sense of the past (all four of her parents were artists) and of community (she was the director of the collaborative artist-run gallery Orchard for three years). Likewise, the tragedy, with its flickering lights in darkness, attests to the nature of Quaytman’s metaphorical systems, in which vision and disappearance, or blindness and insight, are inevitably intertwined. These elements - the complications of tradition, an intimate and opulent solar weave - are significantly elaborated in ‘Chapter 12: iamb’ at Miguel Abreu. The paintings, all silkscreen on wood, derive from a very simple motif: a painting lit by a lamp, from which comes the idea of the blind-spot. Sometimes the theme is fairly literal - four are titled Chapter 12: iamb (2008), each depicting a painting and a lamp - but there are also formal variations on the theme: sometimes the bulb yields a fuzzy circular glow; sometimes a halo, from which soft light falls; and in one case the verticality of the lamp and painting is dramatized by a tall acidic streak against the otherwise subtle palette. In paintings like Chapter 12: iamb, (lateral inhibitions in the perceptual field) (2008), no lamp is depicted, just a shimmering grid: the blind-spot here is optical - the viewer is unable to bring the grid into focus, not without flickering and ghosts. On the other hand, Chapter 12: iamb (Fresnell lens) (2008) does not emphasize the disruption or inconsistency of vision so much as the sparkle of revelation, achieved with a sprinkling of real diamond dust. The more one looks, the more intricate and self-referential Quaytman’s theme becomes. Motifs, even whole paintings, reappear: Chapter 12: iamb, (lateral inhibitions in the perceptual field) (2008), for example, is vertical. In another painting, however, one sees that first painting again, only rotated 90 degrees and framed by a white border. In Chapter 12: iamb (blind smile), it is again rotated, marked by lamplight in the upper right corner, and held aloft, or at least cryptically pointed to, by a shirtless bearded man (Dan Graham, actually). The addition of two smaller, hand-painted oils from another, earlier series increases the complication. The first, Chapter 2: Lødz Poem—Caption b (2002), literally points towards the paintings that follow; Limbo of Vanity (2003) reiterates the solar metaphor with its concentric circles above a black field, painted with spinel black, an ultra-absorbent pigment invented for the stealth bomber. The big blind-spot here is painting - a question, or void, that one can only circle around: painting as (absent) father and bright and blinding sun. Quaytman has emphasized the absolute centrality of painting to her development as an artist, her desire to ‘maintain and simultaneously disrupt painting’s absolute presence’, as well as the medium’s ‘arrogance’ and ‘ego’, its foundational and even prophetic efficacy. Even when working as a photographer, Quaytman had painting on her mind - or, more precisely, she picked up the camera as a path towards painting, to better ‘understand the symbolic space of painting.’ It is therefore fitting to evoke an image from the history of painting: Quaytman’s motif - the painting lit by the lamp - recalls Georges de la Tour, who attained, with candlelight, and especially the effects of a hidden or obscured candle, an art of occasionally elfin abstract delicacy, as well as a reverential quality that is never histrionic. With ‘Chapter 12: iamb’, Quaytman could be said to achieve much the same thing.

Joan Waltemath:
The two characteristics that according to grammarians define the meaning of the pronoun, ostension and relation, deixis and anaphora, have to be completely rethought here. The mode in which these characteristics have been understood has determined the theory of being, that is, first philosophy, since its origins. —Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community. It’s been a number of years since a solo exhibition by R H Quaytman has appeared in New York. It has been well worth the wait, however, to have the opportunity to view Quaytman’s work at the Miguel Abreu Gallery, a small space on the Lower East Side in an area that has been relatively recently colonized by art galleries. Quaytman’s show, Chapter 12: iamb, which presents work from an ongoing series, has a fresh and austere edge in sync with these new times that signals a clear path to follow. Quaytman makes reference in the title to both the seat of seeing (i am), and the classical meter of poetry, among other things. The manifold nature of these works indicates their significance can neither be pinned down nor limited to one approach. They serve rather as a vehicle for many. One could venture to say the works have been installed to follow the rhythm of an iambic pentameter, the “metrical foot of one unaccented followed by one accented syllable,” but any attempt to prove the point would become lost in the complexities of all that these works touch upon. The photo-silkscreened image of Dan Graham in “Chapter 12: iamb (blind smile),” (2008), looking ever so much like one of the Ancients in front of a Hermann grid, # 6 of “Chapter 12: iamb,” underscores both the classical reference and the tendency to double back. At the entrance, two panels, a cobalt blue silkscreened image of a light bulb shining on a screened panel of a pixelated field, and an oil painting of what feels like pure, yellow light, set the tone for the exhibition. With the simple metaphor of a light shining on a surface, Quaytman has engaged in an investigation of the grammar of mediation using the syntactic elements of visual apprehension. It’s all new ground, albeit a ground that has been constantly shifting since the undermining of painting’s supremacy in the last century and the subsequent proliferation of the means of reproduction. Quaytman’s shifting, cross-referenced world shows one way to marshal the vastness of the terrain. In both an acknowledgement and a clarification of the fact that we have stepped beyond Greenbergian questions, Quaytman playfully determines the image in #5 and #10 of “Chapter 12: iamb” (both 2008) by painting a profile of the wooden support structure on the surface of the panel in a quasi-minimalist gesture. Quaytman’s project reframes the question and in doing so, also eschews Barthes’ declaration in “Is painting a language?” that it is not. In this expanded context, painting is but one language that operates to elucidate the complex relationship between what we see and what we know. Surface takes precedent as a location upon which the imaginings of minds engage in actions, and visual means are relegated to their role as such. Yet it is the means that Quaytman takes hold of to reveal their extremes. In #7 of “Chapter 12: iamb” (2008), a tilted grid of vertical rectangles (each approximately 1/8" by 3/16") that fill the surface reads pictorially as an allover field even as it references the pixel. Floating in an indeterminate space somewhere in relation to this gridded field, three vertical bands of red, yellow and blue fade into one another; visible at a specific distance as you enter the small back room of Abreu’s gallery, they vanish as you approach the panel and the shimmering pixel grid asserts its dominance. At a distance of one foot, the colored bands are completely invisible, but new optical effects, color halos at the edges of the black and white rectangles emerge. Turning to the left to view what at that moment hovers at the edge of your peripheral vision, you can catch the RGB spectrum in the interstice of #4 of the gridded field in “Chapter 12: iamb,” an effect that shimmers only momentarily and disappears when one moves laterally in relation to its surface. In #8 the rectangles are pixelated in a way that reveals the surface grain of the plywood support, an image which also mysteriously vanishes as you move towards the panel and realize that a dot matrix has been layered into the pixilation, bringing into the picture yet another reference to the mediation of what is being seen. The grid and circles in #6 of “Chapter 12: iamb, (lateral inhibitions in the perceptual field)” (2008), provides the most spectacular optical effect, with the white circles at the grid’s every intersection turning grey and/or black in concert. Some might even get a headache from looking too long at the Hermann grid’s dazzling surface. Discovered in the 19th century and modified in more recent times, there is nowhere to rest in a Hermann grid, whose explanation is still being debated. Yet seen through a camera lens in #13 of “Chapter 12: iamb,” which is oriented horizontally in the gallery’s front room, it is devoid of optical effects. Turned on its side also in “(blind smile)” the Herman grid appears in three guises in this exhibition. Such effects, together with the concentric circles of sparkling diamond dust in “Chapter 12: iamb (Fresnell lens)” (2008) at the gallery’s entrance, might indicate that Quaytman’s subject is an interest in optics. I would propose rather that it is an interest that touches on the phenomenology of perception, and the investigation remains within the realm of the means, elucidating the conflicting and overlapping body of rules that govern different media and work in concert to determine how we interpret what we see. Light, the vehicle that both enables and determines sight, appears, if anything, to be the subject; painting stands alone in its directness. Quaytman’s sophisticated dissection of the complexities of seeing and the manifold aspects that inform perception is evident not only in individual works, but also in the relationship between specific works installed in the exhibition, and in the cumulative effect of the whole. In a room saturated with investigations into the mysterious nature of seeing and its mediation in our time, the autonomy of the singular is never in doubt. Individual works that can be read wholly within the context of the history of painting are at the same time open to formally interact with pieces like #8 “Chapter 12: iamb,” which brings to the fore the relationship between the dot screen and the pixel. On the left side of the gallery, the shift from the oil on wood “Chapter 2: Lødz Poem – Caption b” (2002), to a pixelated double-screened panel, to a yellow field of concentric circles, could be read as a position statement. The movement from painting to a screened computer generated digital image and then across the room to screened photographic imagery is seamless; the intent which connects them supersedes the media that contextualizes them, each slightly differently. In addressing a transitory period in which the crosspollination of media has rendered the visual a complex field to decode, Quaytman has foregrounded abstraction as a fundamental to the ongoing evolution of visual language. Quaytman’s fluency across diverse media is apparent in the mixing of the hand painted with the mechanically reproduced, photographic imagery with the language of non-objective painting. In creating a series of seductive wood panel surfaces that draw attention to the plane as the location to be read, Quaytman has clearly moved beyond questions of the viability of any specific media, yet it is in the ambiguities of her project that the shift has become visible.

The Space of the Work and the Place of the Object (SculptureCenter, New York)

2009-02-16T04:54:00.001-08:00

Blake Rayne, Gareth James, Bicycle Grinder, 2009.
Bicycle grinder, balloons, wood, acrylic lacquer, napkins from SculptureCenter gala, 2 cans of spraypaint, plastic drop cloth, inkjet print

Karin Schneider, Tubular, 2009

Melanie Gilligan, Prison for Objects, 2008/2009. Performance/Installation

Melanie Gilligan, Prison for Objects, 2008/2009. Performance/Installation, featuring actor Francis J Exell

A group exhibition that considers the status of the art object within the context of its production. The featured artists build on the ideas and critical positions of Process Art and employ methods that range from documentary to literary, but the emphasis is on a direct engagement with the materiality of the object. The artists in this exhibition all make objects that reflect the facts and fissures of their production. Each artwork is concerned with the conditions in which art and meaning are made and circulated, turning them to their own advantage, or sometimes ignoring or disrupting them. Accident presides alongside necessity as determining factors for this work, which further highlights the central concepts of systems of production, display, and distribution.
Walead Beshty's Federal Express works are made by shipping a glass box made to fit precisely inside the cardboard Federal Express boxes. The boxes are shipped via Federal Express and displayed together with the shipping box in any configuration. The work is "made" and "re-made" through its circulation and display. Beshty will also exhibit new works created with film exposed to X-rays in airport scanners and then drum-scanned and printed. These abstract and visually sumptuous images act as echoes of the artist's movements from city to city. Silver Particle/Bronze (after Henry Moore) (2008) by Simon Starling brings up questions of documentation and materiality. The work comprises a vintage gelatin silver print of a Moore sculpture and a bronze sculpture made by enlarging a particle from the print's emulsion. Michael Rakowitz has created RETURN (offshoots for SculptureCenter) (2009), an installation that documents his attempt to import one ton of dates from Iraq in 2006.
Gabriel Kuri's That Runs Through (2009) is a visual poem that links everyday objects to historical events and simultaneously isolates and creates a context for them. With her Disclaimer Series, Carey Young destabilizes the relationship between artwork, viewer and presenter. Three text panels deny claims to their own status as works of art. Blake Rayne's Knife Sharpener (2009) exists as manifestations of a series of choices that are made subtly transparent. His crates are exhibited as objects that reference transport but also function as partitions, support, and perhaps sculpture.
Prison for Objects (2009), a performance and installation by Melanie Gilligan, dramatizes our experience of commodities in the past and present. The installation includes images of objects from the Renaissance to the 18th century, which depict their contents as both intensely abstract and material all at once. An actress and actor perform the roles of an art writer and artist respectively, their characters playing out various clichés and contradictions of art production and reception.
Karin Schneider's Tubular (2009) is an architectural intervention with a painting and a video projection. The reception desk is expanded and relocated into the gallery space with transparent Plexiglas partitions. SculptureCenter's Visitor Services Manager, Nickolas Roudané, who normally sits at the reception desk and is an artist himself, has been invited to produce an ongoing piece during the show while still performing his usual duties greeting and providing information to museum visitors. Schneider allows the administrative function of the museum to intrude into the gallery while subsuming aspects of the institution into the work.

Kenneth Johnson:
Aesthetic Withdrawal in the Quest for Ideas
Art objects are in crisis. Conceptualists and theorists say that there are too many of them and that we don’t need them any more. Also, people buy and sell them like commodities, which devalues them as vehicles of thought and feeling. If you are one of those who still believe in the object, you may be annoyed by SculptureCenter’s confusing and misleadingly titled current exhibition. Organized by Mary Ceruti, the center’s executive director, the eight-artist show “The Space of the Work and the Place of the Object” is meant, according to a news release, to address “the status of the art object within the context of its production.” But there is almost nothing in the exhibition that you would call an art object in the traditional sense of the term — something made by an artist, more or less skillfully, that is uncommonly interesting to look at because of its formal or representational properties. The exhibition is a disconnected assortment of primarily conceptual works, none of which say anything very illuminating about the status of the object or its context of production. Consider an arrangement of partly broken glass boxes and the cardboard FedEx cartons in which the glass boxes evidently were sent through the mail. This piece by Walead Beshty is briefly amusing, but unless you read philosophical and political ideas into it, how different is it, really, from David Letterman throwing a watermelon off the roof? At least with Mr. Letterman you get to see the object bursting. The most interesting piece is an installation by Michael Rakowitz documenting a project in which he opened a storefront in Brooklyn to sell food products from Iraq. It is almost impossible to find anything for sale in the United States labeled “Made in Iraq,” Mr. Rakowitz said, because customs agencies here and abroad make it so difficult. So Iraqi merchants ship their goods to countries like Syria and Lebanon and have them labeled as made in those other places. Mr. Rakowitz decided to try to import a ton of Iraqi dates in boxes labeled “Product of Iraq” to sell in his store. After many complications, he succeeded, much to the delight of his Iraqi customers. It is an excellent and affecting lesson in geopolitics. Less edifying is Gabriel Kuri’s “That Runs Through,” a presentation of objects on a sheet of white backdrop paper, including a bag of charcoal, a stone on a stack of Financial Times, a bag of kitty litter and a wastebasket with a mop head in it. A poor man’s Robert Gober? Also remarkably derivative are signs by Carey Young announcing various self-reflexive disclaimers, like “The artist does not guarantee that this piece can be sold as a work of art” and “The artist does not represent this to be a work of art.” Ms. Young should know about Robert Morris’s 1963 “Statement of Aesthetic Withdrawal.” Another sort of aesthetic withdrawal is an installation by Blake Rayne and Gareth James consisting of big black wooden crates, a set of empty painting frames and a sheet of plastic and some balloons spray-painted green and gold — the color of money. Perhaps the most entertaining work — at least during the exhibition’s first two weeks, when it was performed by live actors — is a short play by Melanie Gilligan. An art critic tells of a dream she had about wildly multiplying objects, and an artist in his studio gets all riled up about the obsolescence of the traditional art object. The piece is now being presented as a video. A less exciting performance has been orchestrated by Karin Schneider. She built a second reception and ticket-selling booth of wood-framed transparent plastic and has the gallery’s receptionist shuttle between it and the permanent booth, which serves as a studio where he makes paintings when not attending to visitors. Institutional critique feebly lives on. One work that does resemble a fine-art object is a squiggly, multi-lobed bronze sculpture by Simon Starling (winner of the 2005 Turner Prize). A wall label mystifyingly explains that it represents “a single silver particle from a vintage gelatin silver photographic print of ‘Reclining Figure No. 4, 1955’ by Henry Moore” enlarged 300,000 times. So it seems that here, too, the idea is the real object.

Fin et suite

2009-02-07T07:50:00.000-08:00

Quelques jours avant sa performance au FRAC PACA en 2005, assis à une terrasse du Panier, j’essayais de discuter avec John Bock sur le fait qu’il soit constamment associé à l’héritage des avant-gardes historiques (surtout le Cabaret Voltaire et dada). Serait-il une machine à recycler l’histoire de l’art ? Les questions semblaient se perdre dans son imparable flux de pensée, rebondissant en permanence, sans structure ni logique, un corps en éveil, absorbé par lui-même. Il s’arrête un peu, puis tire : « Quand on regarde un film d’Hollywood des années 1930, on croit voir des meubles des années 1930 et l’on oublie qu’ils utilisaient aussi des meubles vieux de trente ans. Ce n’est pas un pas après l’autre, pas une dialectique de progression mais un mixage ».
Il est loin d’être seul à vouloir se saisir de l’actualité du modernisme. De quoi hérite-on ? Plutôt que de « l’échec » des projets collectifs, des idéologies ou des mouvements artistiques, les artistes semblent hériter, plus bêtement, de ce discours des « fins », terriblement idéologique. Une rengaine qui voudrait clore une saison où la pensée s’autorisait à échafauder des outils pour la transformation des structures sociales (certes, nourrie parfois d’une « croyance »). Cette assertion, qui continue de dominer les discours sur l’art, se traduit dans des sous-thèmes : le passage des idéologies à des « micro-récits » (plus sympathiques), la fin des mouvements et groupes organisés d’artistes et l’avènement d’un paysage de l’art finalement apaisé, pluriel, dialoguant, démocratique, et dont, n’oublions pas, la position centrale est assumée par le spectateur, cette entité toujours autre.
Et bien, le contexte ou « milieu » de l’art n’a jamais, pas un seul moment, laissé d’être traversé par des conflits, tensions, oppositions vives et indistinctes, familles formelles, proximités idéologiques, guerres intellectuelles, refus radicaux et collaborations intenses. Et le défi, ne serait que pour ceux qui écrivent sur l’art, devrait être d’essayer d’identifier un débat, d’articuler en réflexion ce que n’est au départ qu’une lecture des pratiques distinctes et des correspondances entre des artistes dans un espace contradictoire, conflictuel et mouvant (y compris dans la tête de chacun).
Le travail et le rôle du critique d’art ont été profondément bouleversés, ces dernières années, concernant le rapport entre périphérie et centre dans la production et la circulation du débat critique, à travers la dynamique de réseau constituée par le web. Mais, d’un point de vue strictement personnel, la question me semble être restée la même : comment traduire la dynamique nerveuse, l’urgence, la fulgurance parfois, de la création artistique en interaction avec un contexte ? Comment cela agit-il sur ma perception de la ville ? Si l’espace virtuel du web permet la construction de communautés d’échange affranchies de la géographie urbaine, la ville résiste, les corps aussi. Le deuil à faire c’est sans doute celui de l’idée de « scène locale », surtout quand celle-ci est envisagée comme la mise en scène d’une identité. C’est suivant ce constat que j’essaie d’esquisser ici une lecture transversale de certaines pratiques artistiques, à partir d’un choix concernant une jeune génération d’artistes avec laquelle j’ai pu engager un dialogue en suivant leurs expositions à Marseille.

Bettina Samson, The World is yours, Cook’s tours, 2005 (Installation, peinture murale, calendrite aluminium) crédit photo: Magali Lefèbvre

L’un des traits identifiables de cette génération concerne leur façon d’enchevêtrer des références d’une façon plus complexe et contradictoire que la simple citation au vocabulaire de l’histoire de l’art ou que le renvoi à la vie « quotidienne » par l’utilisation du ready-made. Ils peuvent éventuellement s’appuyer sur ces deux dimensions mais créent des connexions à la façon d’une navigation très habile sur un moteur de recherche. Quand Bettina Samson s’intéresse à l’histoire de la technologie ou de la science – la découverte des rayonnements radioactifs par Henri Becquerel, l’ouverture de l’immense centrale électrique Klingerberg dans Berlin des années 20, les dispositifs optiques pré-cinématographiques des foires ou le piratage de la fréquence radio d’un aéroport –, ces recherches sont contextualisées dans un environnement culturel plus vaste, englobant la guerre froide, Kraftwerk, l’usage scientifique de la photo ou les roads movies de Monte Hellman. Ce désir à déterritorialiser l’art semble s’intéresser à la façon comme désormais nos cerveaux codifient l’information. Face à l’accélération, plutôt que la stratégie de « détournement » (le mot magique des années 90), Bettina Samson cherche, avec une intensité rare, à créer du sens avec les matériaux de connaissance du monde. A rebours des constats sur le bombardement d’images auxquelles on serait assujettis, théorie des vaches qui regardent les trains, l’enjeu reste celui d’envisager les possibilités pour une action et une pensée émancipatrices (soient-elles dans le contexte spécifique de l’exposition).

L’«ironie», envisagée en tant que stratégie subversive peut parfois accuser les symptômes d’une réponse conformiste et conforme, surtout au moment où l’histoire de l’art lui accorde une place incontournable. Le dynamitage des mythes, le sarcasme, la satire, le détournement d’inspiration situationniste, sont désormais bien plus qu’une branche de l’histoire de l’art, ils en constituent une racine, une « tradition » (même contrariée) des pratiques contemporaines. Dans la proximité de ce pôle, certains artistes y voient cependant un potentiel de résilience négative, au sens d’un refus radical à enjoindre la positive attitude, de surcroît « constructive ». Mais dans l’ironie, ils semblent préférer l’attitude minimale à la blague communautaire.

Alexandre Gérard, Quoi feuze ?, 2002 (Photographie couleur contrecollée sur aluminium Dibon, 30 x 20 cm)

Alexandre Gérard s’intéresse au langage du corps quand il est confronté à ses réflexes conditionnés, ses répétitions involontaires (qu’il s’agisse des réactions des visiteurs d’une galerie, marchant dans le vide d’une fausse marche, ou des réponses électriques des passants à l’angle d’une rue où une barrière donne l’impression de les rejeter du champ magnétique). Le malentendu est ici le principe même de la communication, comprise comme un apprentissage forcément défaillant, où le langage et les corps sont en désajustement permanent.

Damien Berthier, Vaisselier/Simone, 2008, verres, saladiers, cadre bois et miroirs (1er plan).
Sans titre, 2008, chaises dimensions variables (2ème plan). Exposition Meublé à Louer à la galerie Espace à Vendre, Nice

Cette dimension performative se trouve aussi dans le travail de Damien Berthier, plus proche d’un burlesque sans emphase, laconique, en quête d’équilibre (vertigineux, soit-il), à travers des tentatives de rangement et classement, ou la construction de structures par l’empilement instable de chaises, seaux ou échelles. Plus déterminant que la stabilité c’est ici la captation d’un point d’équilibre, indissociable d’un attrait pour le désordre ou la chute.

John Deneuve, Catherine Deneuve (installation à la galerie Porte Avion, 2006)

L’humour chez John Deneuve est une stratégie plus classique d’exploration de l’absurde inhérent au langage, à travers des mises en scène (une salle d’attente, un salon où sont attablés deux couchons d’inde) interceptés par des virus sonores (un dialogue extrait d’un film, un bilan d’incompétences), s’aventurant dans les zones d’un non-sens salace, provocateur, si l’on évacue « l’automatisme » d’inspiration surréaliste. Mais le dynamitage par l’ironie se fait plus rare, après avoir quasiment dominé le tournant des années 90.

Face à dématérialisation progressive de certaines pratiques culturelles (le mp3 remplace le cd, le blog remplace le fanzine, le numérique remplace l’analogique), mais aussi face à l’essor de la vidéo et des technologies dans le champ de l’art, il est curieux d’analyser la vitalité actuelle de la sculpture. Mais, peut-être plus importante dans l’analyse de ce reflux, c’est l’exténuation de pratiques exploitant le filon interactif, « relationnel », dont le discours anti-formaliste, fortement politique au moment de la génération émergente des années 90 s’est vu progressivement remplacé par une vague intentionnalité d’inclusion des publics, aux relents très conformistes. Les « agents culturels » ayant compris l’intérêt de ces activités dans la vaste plaine de la médiation culturelle, l’art a ainsi été enjoint à participer au consensus de la confirmation des liens sociaux, plutôt que le choix de faire dissension, de risquer de couper la communication, d’être violemment incompréhensible, voire désagréable. A force de petites interventions bienveillantes à l’attention du public, de micro-événements modestes, certains artistes ont finit par leur préférer le terrorisme passionné, l’érotisme des matières, la débauche d’une serre électrique et d’un fer à souder. Et parfois, sans renier ce qui était définitivement aboli : le romantisme.

Yannick Papailhau, Projet improbable de lancement d’un socle dans un espace à déterminer, 2008, exposition Astérides à la Générale © Cédric Schönwald

Le bricolage fantasque de Yannick Papailhau s’élance dans la « conquête des arts plastiques de l’espace » avec des sculptures-catapultes dont l’ambition cosmique est contrariée par un bric-à-brac laissant apparentes les connexions aux circuits électriques terrestres, les ficelles d’un système chaotique. Les dessins « techniques » et surtout, les récits qui accompagnent ses projets, irriguent ses œuvres d’un nerf romantique, n’ayant pas peur des expéditions avortées, des explosions au vol, des épopées dérisoires, des mécanismes en boucle.

Sarah Tritz, vue générale de l'exposition à la Galerie de la Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille, 2007 © Jean-Christophe Lett, courtesy Astérides

Les « meubles » et sculptures rocailleuses de Sarah Tritz, à la brutalité précieuse, cultivent une attirance par les déchets du formalisme : le lyrique, le décoratif, l’investissement affectif des matériaux. L’ensemble est néanmoins exposé au milieu d’un paysage bombardé, avec la beauté abstraite des ruines.

Emilie Perotto, Black sculpture, 2007 (bois aggloméré, mélaminé, 115 x 39 x 39 cm)

Tandis que maitrise formelle des sculptures d’Emilie Perotto ne s’oppose pas au désordre méticuleux de ses compositions, ni le «fait main» au design, dans un montage disruptif qui fait l’abstraction rentrer en collision avec des figures sculptées proches de l’image.
L’un des traits d’une certaine sculpture contemporaine consiste à composer par assemblage de matériaux, moins pour ses « qualités » esthétiques que par une lecture de leurs usages dans un champ élargi de la culture visuelle, allant du design industriel à l’architecture, des fluo kids aux fétichistes du cuir. Ce potentiel d’évocation des matériaux et des formes joue de notre capacité à exercer l’œil dans un environnement culturel forcément impur, complexe et luxueusement incohérent.

Yann Gerstberger et Sandro Della Noce, mister helicopter mathematic and the cheap & cheap three free freaky fruits, (détail) 2007. courtesy galerie Histoire de l'Oeil

Des plus jeunes artistes comme Sandro Della Noce ou Yann Gerstberger y naviguent avec l’aisance donnée par l’accès à des bibliothèques entières à la portée d’un click. La gourmandise formelle de leurs sculptures semble vouloir donner un coup fatal au programme de l’abstraction « autonome » : est-il encore possible de parler d’abstraction quand, aujourd’hui, tout signe visuel semble rentrer immédiatement dans une chaîne de significations ?

Julien Tiberi, Le Panthéon, 2008 (dessin mine de plomb, 50x70 cm)

La citation, le sampling formel, la référentialité, s’affranchissent de l’histoire de l’art pour investir d’autres matériaux culturels. Julien Tiberi peut emprunter le trait d’auteurs issus d’une histoire souterraine du dessin (des BD porno des années 30 ou des journaux illustrés du début du XX siècle), il les réinscrit dans un contexte actuel où cohabitent des systèmes de communication à plusieurs vitesses (le fax et la photocopie, la poste et internet).

Marion Mahu, The Flying Dutchman, 2007 (vidéo)

Si Marion Mahu redessine au mur une illustration de l’encyclopédie de Diderot, représentant l’invention d’une lampe à photons et la transforme ensuite en aspirateur de lumière, c’est pour mieux renverser l’idéologie du progrès issue des Lumières, tandis que les « effets spéciaux » d’une tornade maritime presque irréelle, sont accompagnés d’un lointain bruissement aux échos de sirène (en fait, il s’agit du grésillement d’un opéra, premier enregistrement sonore connu, réalisé par Edison sur cylindre en paraffine).

Anthony Duchêne, Why do things get in Phishing ?, 2008 (vitrine d'appeaux, cire caoutchouc, aluminium, verre, bois, 110 x 90 x 40 cm)
Photo: Jean-Christophe Lett, courtesy: Galerie Bonneau-Samames

Anthony Duchêne s’intéresse au potentiel sémantique du son, en transférant ses codes et modalités de fonctionnement dans d’autres systèmes de connaissance, qu’il s’agisse du monde sous-marin, d’instruments de mesure de séismes ou de l’étude de l’oreille interne. Les circuits d’information visuelle et sonore sont interceptés, sans qu’il soit possible de discerner l’exactitude de ses schémas à l’apparence scientifique, surtout lorsque son travail exploite souvent la figure du leurre sonore (appeaux, piratage des lignes téléphoniques).

Cet intérêt pour la science et l’histoire des technologies est souvent indissociable, dans leurs recherches, des représentations dérivées dans la musique, le cinéma ou la littérature de « genre », comme la science-fiction. Cependant, il s’agit moins d’un rapport à l’idée d’ « utopie » comme projection irréalisable (ce qui correspond aussi à une certaine lecture idéologique du mot) que de son potentiel à agir sur le réel par le biais des représentations fictionnelles. Pour ces artistes, la fiction participe à l’invention du réel.

Alexandra Pellissier, sans titre, 2006 (crayon sur papier, 108 x 80 cm), courtesy: Galerie Bonneau-Samames

Les dessins d’Alessandra Pellisier reprennent un mode «hyperréaliste » qui déstabilise le regard en quête d’échelle ou de mimétisme documentaire. Des énormes machines industrielles de l’époque soviétique sont posées comme des monuments oubliés au milieu d’un parc : à travers le motif de la ruine, l’artiste semble vouloir examiner les fictions du présent à la lumière des utopies passées.

Le politique n’est évidemment pas une réserve à l’extérieur de l’art, un « sujet » à traiter parmi d’autres, il dynamise et traverse l’ensemble des choix artistiques. Quelquefois, certains projets peuvent emprunter à sa dimension la plus explicite, associée aux modalités d’action collective.

Colin Champsaur, Monument, mai 2007 (vidéo)

Dans le cas de Colin Champsaur, manifester est un acte solitaire mais persistant : posée sur un transporteur, une étrange machine noire, encombrée d'appareils à l’apparence inutile, s’entête à émettre une version électronique de L’Internationale, toute en produisant un faisceau de lumière défaillant. Y-a-t’il un projet derrière ce sound-system, à la fois enfermé dans une boucle autiste et joyeusement décidé à continuer de fredonner son combat au détour d’une rue ? Monument a la beauté triste d’une solitude partagée, semblant faire écho à des voix dissidentes de la pensée contemporaine, tels Slavoj Zizek ou Alain Badiou, qui persistent à enquêter sur le potentiel d'action politique et esthétique de la modernité.

Mathieu Abonnenc, Le Monde Connu, 2008 (vue de l’exposition à la Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot)

Dans ses dessins tirés d’illustrations de missions coloniales du XIXe siècle, parsemés d’espaces vides, d’oublis, Matthieu K. Abonnenc semble intégrer l’apport des études post-coloniales, d’Edouard Glissant à Stuart Hall, pour explorer les rapports entre mémoire et représentations, signalant l’artifice d’une Histoire commune.

Olivier Bedu, Le Cabanon vertical (Ste Marthe, Marseille, 2002)

Olivier Bedu et sa plateforme d’action collective, le Cabanon Vertical, envisage l’architecture comme un territoire expérimental qu’il s’emploie à ouvrir aux usages, voire à l’appropriation, à partir des notions d’auto-construction et d’architecture autogéré (impliquée dans l’idée même de cabanon) ou en s’inscrivant très spécifiquement dans les contextes dans lesquels il expose (ou qu’il expose), comme c’était le cas de sa fausse agence immobilière à proximité des travaux de « rénovation » urbaine.

Rémi Bragard, midi dix, 2008 (parapluies, tubes cuivres, aluminium miro-silver)

Dans le travail de Rémi Bragard, le principe de construction, souvent à caractère éphémère, participe d’une idée de la sculpture plus liée au dispositif qu’au volume, modélisant le réel à la façon d’un jeu meccano. L’intérêt qu’il porte aux mécanismes techniques d’activation de ses œuvres est en contre-champ d’une économie radicale de moyens, vouant ses sculptures à la disparition progressive ou à l’explosion. A rebours de la métaphore, le pouvoir de signification de ses œuvres réside dans la littéralité de leur activation.

Marie Grégoire, Campanile, 2008

Les sculptures de Marie Grégoire, dont l’échelle imposante semble induire une distance froide, se trouvent paradoxalement chargées d’un défi très personnel, cherchant à démolir le stéréotype d’une sculpture de « genre », où les femmes seraient vouées aux matières souples plutôt qu’à l’acier ou à la charpenterie. S’intéressant de près à ces derniers métiers, à la construction navale, aux modèles de construction géodésique de Buckminster Fuller, ainsi qu’à l’art minimal, elle introduit une déstabilisation, quand ce n’est pas le désastre, dans l’ordre équilibré et rationnel de constructions évoquant l’optimisme technologique des expositions universelles.

Cette quête de ses propres limites, qui peut aussi se traduire dans un désir de désapprendre des gestes conditionnés, laisse percevoir une position romantique, qui semble avoir résistée à toutes les entreprises de déconstruction modernes. Dès le début de cette démolition, ses opposants les plus virulents, les guerriers du lyrisme, se trouvaient du coté de la peinture, donnée un temps pour morte. Si cette logique bipolaire continue quelquefois à faire office d’enjeu artistique, certains peintres se refusent alors à placer leurs tableaux en victimes.

Christophe Boursault, Pattern Painter (installation à la galerie Porte Avion, 2008)

Christophe Boursault joue de cette position jusqu’au burlesque (ou l’idiotie, dans la lecture qui fait Jean-Yves Jouannais du philosophe Clément Rosset), se mettant en scène dans le rôle du peintre qui ne s’interdit rien, ni viscéralité ni lyrisme. Le coté pulsionnel, expressionniste, « intuitif », de sa peinture déborde en permanence dans un excès autant régressif que lucide face à cette posture surjouée, ce qui ne semble pas contradictoire avec le fait de la vivre.

Bärd Kristiansen, Sans titre, pastels sur papier, 51x65 cm, 2006

Bard Kristiansen cherche à dépasser la relecture post-moderne des genres académiques de la peinture (paysage, nature morte, abstraction) en l’investissant d’un pouvoir à interroger les critères instituées par chaque époque dans la détermination de la notion de gout. Refusant le principe de série ou de cohérence, il est une exposition collective à lui-même. Et il assume le poids excessif de la culture picturale comme un terrain privilégié de la négativité, usant de la capacité de la peinture à douter d’elle-même, jusqu’à se faire violence.

Dans le paysage que j’ai essayé d’esquisser ici, sans aucune distance, comme cela se doit, faut-il encore intégrer l’ensemble de ses positions à un contexte précis, disons historique, où des pratiques un temps négligés renversent aussitôt des choix artistiques dominants, à l’intérieur d’un terrain de jeu où chacun joue à être minoritaire. Entre les dispositifs éphémères refusant la production d’objets et la sculpture d’assemblage, l’ironie et le romantisme, il y a des tensions mouvantes. Le risque, s’il y en a un, serait que le changement de paradigmes artistiques puisse étrangement ressembler au lien indiscernable qui s’établit entre l’histoire sociale et la mode.

Pedro Morais, texte publié dans revue IF, septembre 2008

Charles Avery (Parasol Unit, London)

2008-12-22T02:55:00.000-08:00

Untitled (Diagram of the Plane of the Gods), 2006

Untitled (The Eternity Chamber), 2007

Untitled (Globe), 2008 and Untitled (The Grass is Alive), 2007

Untitled (Eternal Forest), 2008

The Islanders: An Introduction

Natasha Degen:
For the past four years, Scottish artist Charles Avery has “inhabited” an imaginary island; his observations form “The Islanders: An Introduction.” Like an ethnographer or a colonial officer reporting from the field, Avery provides exhaustive documentation of this dreamed-up world in the form of text, drawings, installations, and sculptures. The project is well situated in the genre of fabulist accounts of the strange and exotic, indebted to literary works such as Gulliver’s Travels and Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Avery’s tone, however, is obscure and philosophical rather than whimsical. And his island—for all its bizarre creatures and strange cults, its motley crew of gods and its elusive Noumenon—is uncannily familiar. A drawing of “Heidless Magregor’s Bar,” for instance, reveals a typical pub replete with beer on tap, soccer-team decor, a wall-mounted TV, and “cheesy chips” on the menu. The familiar made strange is often a trope of futuristic visions, but Avery’s island, if anything, reaches backward in time: His islanders recall Edward Burra’s Depression-era figures, and his complex, mural-size sketches evoke the fluid energy of Thomas Hart Benton’s work. The project itself harks back to a distant past, when art was primarily narrative and stories were best told through skillful, dramatic renderings. Avery’s talents are particularly suited for such an undertaking; he’s a polymath whose well-executed drawings, woodcuts, watercolors, and sculptures are consistently imaginative.

Chris Fite-Wassilak:
Visitors to the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis would have had plenty to keep them occupied: eating a newly invented ice-cream cone, or walking among the ‘parade of human progress’ of the human zoo. Here you could find replica villages of the indigenous people of Congo or New Guinea, or the tribes of the new American territory of the Philippines, including the dog-eating Igorots, who created countless rumours of missing pets across the city. You would not have been surprised, then, to find a stall nearby detailing with text, sketches and sculptural curiosities the views and inhabitants of a distant land known simply as ‘The Island’. Witness a taxidermied Ridable, a beast with the stature of a llama, the face of a dog and chicken’s feet. Marvel in disgust at a jar of the highly addictive local snack of Henderson’s boiled eggs pickled in gin. Or hear of the Islander’s most popular tourist attraction, the Plane of the Gods, where living Island deities can be visited. Standing alongside, sporting a safari hat, awkwardly holding a rifle in one hand and a leather-bound travel guide in the other, you might find The Island’s creator, Charles Avery. At Parasol Unit, he presents ‘The Islanders: An Introduction’, an anthropological museum of his findings, bringing together several smaller exhibitions since 2004, when he began work on his imaginary territory. A mixture of Cairo, New York and Avery’s own childhood home on the Scottish isle of Mull, the Island is peopled by faint, tetchy-looking women and gruff, wizened men who occupy a world where there is no distinction between imaginary and physical reality. Taking a range of philosophical theories as guidelines, Avery has created a sort of metaphysical ant farm. On the map of the mirrored archipelago that forms his world, clever puns abound: the Analitic Ocean, Cape Conchious-Ness, the Causeway of Effect. The noumenon – Immanuel Kant’s concept, which describes an unknowable thing that cannot be observed with the senses but only conceived of or believed in – is here a debated beast whose existence is unconfirmed but for which the Island’s hunters relentlessly search. Wall texts describe this society’s paradigms, cults, creatures and places. Large drawings and physical artefacts accompany each text, fleshing out The Island as a vibrant place of constantly shifting existence, but the incessant dialectic of which inevitably seems to arrive at an existential stalemate. The drawings are unfinished, erratic in the precise minutiae they focus in on, as if excerpts from Avery’s ethnographic notebook. The black and white drawing Untitled (Place of the Route of the If’en) (2007) depicts a busy market scene, with peddlers of watches, second-hand junk and geometric sculptures selling their wares to an indifferent crowd. Like William Hogarth or George Cruikshank’s bustling street scenes, there is a distinct sense of alienation, highlighted further by his characters’ detailed, emotive faces, whose grim caricature recalls more contemporary illustrators such as Daniel Clowes. The installation Untitled (Diagram of the Plane of the Gods) (2006) produces in miniature the the Islanders’ bizarre pantheon, including two headless dogs joined at the neck in endless tug-of-war and a small creature called Mr Impossible, who resembles an aristocratic, duck-billed version of Guns ’n’ Roses guitarist Slash. The gods, however, like everything else on The Island, are a profane embodiment of abstract concepts. Take, for example, Mr Impossible, who was deemed a god by a trio of drunken philosophers, arguing that owing to his ridiculous physique he was ‘highly improbable’ and ‘therefore he is essential’. The role of philosophy as status-giver in Avery’s project is telling. The drawing Untitled (Avatars) (2006) shows the interior of a shop full of The Island’s small creatures, both mythical and mundane, apparently being sold as personal avatars. The endowing act of creating an avatar pervades his world, each aspect of The Island an emblematic transcription or one-to-one analogy of some philosophical tenet. This endowment extends to our guide’s own choice of presentation, using the museum set-up to provide us with a static portrait of this foreign place. The philosophy of this exhibition is meant to be an exhaustive epistemology, a summary of characteristics presented to us with an air of finality and predetermined readings. Despite humorous moments in Avery’s writing and the seething life of his drawings, it at times feels like a cross between the obsessive detail of the Klingon Dictionary (1985) and the fictionalized ‘Philosophy 101’ of Sophie’s World (1991). As a result, The Island does not feel like a living place we can imaginatively inhabit. Like the badger-esque King in Exile (2008), this is a stuffed and preserved presentation. Rather than taking part in his explorative creation, we are forced to rely on the artist’s numerous explanatory texts, which relegate the visual elements of the show to pure illustration.

Joe Bradley (Canada Gallery, New York)

2008-11-27T02:39:00.000-08:00

Schmagoo Paintings

Drawn with grease pencil on white canvas, the boldness of the "one shot" method is undermined by the absurdity of the subject matter: scrawls and doodles that move in and out of figuration. The paintings are direct in there handling and their conceptual derivation. They are a waste of time to try to understand and a pleasure to pursue. For the past two and half years, Mr. Bradley has reconstituted monochromatic painting into a kind of composite building block. By combining stacks of brightly colored panels Mr. Bradley made paintings that were similantiously abstract and figurative, that both quote high Modernist painting and banana splits. In the Schmagoo Paintings, Mr. Bradley extends this project by using doodles as both Modernist talisman and pop cultural touchstone. These paintings draw on the paradox between the modernist impulse towards a raw source of art in the "primitive" and the seamless presentation of a resolved art object. The Schmagoo Paintings are comparable to both Jean Dubuffet's use of the art of the insane as a road map to authenticity and Robert Crumbs sketch books full of aggressively comic and self aware thought bombs. Mr. Bradley uses own version of "children's art" as source material, months of collected envelopes and receipts full of his Picasso quotes and automatic writing. The Schmagoo Paintings are a compression of Mr. Bradley's endless and playful self-examination and a celebration of his immersion in popular culture. These works are full of playful tweaks to our collective art piety, iconoclastic and dark like the late figuration of Philip Guston. The image could be a light bulb or a stick man but the result is a strange pshcological presence. Who would think a badly drawn tennis racket could hold a spiritual presence?

"I came across the word "Schmagoo" in a book about New York City drug culture in the 1960's, it was (is?) used as a slang for Heroin. This struck me as kind of funny, that a narcotic as deep and dark as Smack could end up with such a goofy nic name. Sounds like a Jewish super hero or something. The word stuck with me, and I began to think of "Schmagoo" as short hand for some sort of Cosmic Substance... Primordial Muck. The stuff that gave birth to everything. Base matter. The Bardo. In approaching this body of work, I have been thinking of Painting as a metaphor for the original creative act. The Word made Flesh. The transmutation of Schmagoo into Alchemical Gold." Joe Bradley

Holland Cotter:
Joe Bradley’s quite large paintings at Canada have modesty to recommend them. All you see when you enter Mr. Bradley’s show is a scuffed-up blank canvas. And the six paintings in the adjoining room offer just one rudimentary image each: a cross, for instance, a Superman logo, the number 23. But because the artist doesn’t call on painterly competence, the work stands out in a gallery scene that has, overall, the ready-for-prime-time surface sheen of an M.F.A. show.

Alex Gartenfeld:
In his second solo show at this gallery, Joe Bradley deploys the minimum formal parameters—faux-naive renderings in grease pencil on unprimed canvases—for a painting to merit study. Titled “Schmagoo Paintings,” the works collected dirt during their creation and installation, while creases in the slackened canvases evince where Bradley has folded them. The only work in the front room is a blank canvas with slight dirt markings: It succinctly combines themes of process and formal purity, yet it is hardly a work at all. In the second gallery, a sketch of an unfinished cross suggests a contemplative mode of viewership, permitting the other nearly empty canvases in the room to resemble devotional panels. Bradley doodles symbols that compare painting to a site of reverence by referencing popular idols: The Superman logo is invoked as guarantor of collective security and metaphor for transformation; the number 23 evokes Michael Jordan’s uniform and the 23 Enigma. In one work, Bradley depicts an ichthys in a rudimentary mouth. Titled Abelmuth, 2008, the work was inspired by an illustration in Philip K. Dick’s journal, but it is rendered solely from Bradley’s memory and his personal associations. In Neil, 2008, Bradley uses a single line to demarcate the bottom third of the canvas, recalling Rothko’s roughly radiant color panels but also a kitschy, knowing smile.

Chris Sharp:
This will be a very un-politically correct piece of art criticism. The faint of heart are encouraged to stop reading now. That said, I was recently impressed to hear a New York artist criticize, with distinctly un-PC disdain, a fellow artist for producing work that was ‘not retarded enough’. ‘Retardation’ being the acme of advanced art and any un-self-conscious betrayals of earnest intelligence an act of philistinism, it is as if, over the course of the past five years, a kind of compulsory Dada has integrated itself into the fabric of a good deal of New York art-making. The higher the ‘durr’-factor, the better, apparently, the art. And with this exhibition at CANADA, entitled ‘Schmagoo Paintings’, Joe Bradley has thrown down the ‘durr’ gauntlet. Because it doesn’t get much more retarded than this. Departing from the slightly less ‘durr’ primary-colour minimalist figures he showed at the Whitney Biennial this year, Bradley has produced an exhibition of seven mid-size ‘paintings’ on unprimed canvases (all works 2008). Six of the seven works bluntly feature stick figures, grease-pencil drawings which can be read as: a human figure, a fish in an open mouth, a cross, a Superman symbol, the number 23, and a line towards the bottom of a canvas (a deadpan mouth?) - while the seventh, titled Untitled (Schmutz Painting), bears nothing but the dirt from the floor upon which it was stretched. There is, incidentally, a lot of schmutz, for the same reason, on the other works as well. One thing that can said about Bradley’s work is that it responds to the art-fair attention-span of our time. It can (and should) be consumed in no less than the time it takes to walk in, chortle, and walk out of the gallery. When Martin Barré (a very generous reference) did just as little with white canvases and black spray paint in the early 1960s, it was radical and even beautiful. But here and now with Bradley it is just plain dumb, though that is the point. Whether I, or anyone, likes it or dislikes it is actually beside the point. Which is also very much the point. This kind of work wields the uncanny ability to render all who enter its orbit complicit. It’s a kind of 2008 Lower East Side counterpart to Jeff Koons - though rendered much more poorly. Squarely operating within a paradigm of post-sincerity - it is neither sincere or insincere, having transcended such issues - its mere existence acts as a cerebral black hole, engendering critical paralysis. Any possible reaction you may have to it has been foreseen and theoretically integrated into the work, such that reacting is vain. Whether you like it or not, you’re a fool. And if you profess indifference to it you’re likewise a fool, because such painterly antics require a stand that no one can make. It’s like a work of high modernist fiction - Borges, or Cortazar perhaps - in which you realize that you are part of the plot, but by the time you do - standing in front of the painting or reading this review - it’s too late.

Daria Martin (Maureen Paley Gallery, London)

2008-11-26T09:56:00.000-08:00

Harpstrings & Lava (2007) focuses on the performances of the actor Nina Fog and the musician and composer Zeena Parkins, both Martin’s long-term collaborators. The two protagonists inhabit separate fictional worlds; Fog, as a feral, child-like character, is enclosed in a darkened space littered with rustling detritus, whilst Parkins, as alchemist, plays both the electric and the acoustic harp in an arcaded set bathed in golden light. As the camera closely follows the performers’ actions and moves between the two environments, oppositions between light and dark, and order and chaos are established and questioned. Martin was inspired to make the film after hearing a friend describe her fantasised vision of molten lava colliding with fine, tensile harp strings, which as a child she wilfully conjured up to arouse intense, but somehow pleasurable, anxiety. In Harpstrings and Lava, Martin attempts to “unpack and unfold the product of another person’s ‘mind’s eye’ “to open its obscurity to others’ similar experiences.

Sally O’Reilly:
Daria Martin’s latest film has an unexpectedly personal origin: the articulation of a dream by one of her friends that hinged on the incongruous tactility of taught harp strings and molten lava. The oppositional premise is represented by a woman playing the harp in a trompe l’oeil colonnaded interior and another more instinctual, even feral, woman, who explores a raggedly organic nest-like habitat, her tentative handling of objects in contrast to the harpist’s attitude of self-possession and virtuosity. As the camera, with its shallow depth of field, roams through a thicket of visual signifiers, themes of empirical knowledge and mystical intuition, connected rather than segregated by their relationship to technology and nature, find form in the dualisms of interior and exterior, light and dark, culture and nature. When the two performers eventually encounter one another, however, Martin does not tip into narrative resolution. The broad, classical themes are made more complex by a collaborative approach to the onscreen performance, the translation from the psychological to the visual seeming more improvisational and convoluted than storyboarded and authored. While ‘Harpstrings and Lava’ can be read in almost essayist terms, it can also be luxuriated in as a painterly experience.

Base: Object (Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York)

2008-11-26T09:38:00.001-08:00

William J. O'Brien, Untitled, 2008

Patrick Hill, Unstable Composition #4, 2007. Concrete, glass, steel, canvas, dye

Sara Barker, abject posture, 2008. Clay, cement, cardboard, paint, mahogany

Base: Object
Sara Barker, Patrick Hill, Matthew Monahan, William J. O'Brien, Sterling Ruby
Curated by Cory Nomura
Base:Object brings together five new sculptures which explore the status of the pedestal in contemporary art. Strictly as a tool to present a sculpture, to clarify what is and what is not an art object, and to signify the importance of what is being displayed, the pedestal has been undermined in modern art history since Constantin Brancusi's sculptures in the earliest decades of the 20th century. All of the works in the exhibition subversively complicate the duality of the pedestal/art object relationship and unlike Minimalist sculpture from the 1960s, choose to work with and through the form of the pedestal without completely obliterating it. The pedestal can act as a kind of barrier between art and non-art, simultaneously anointing the displayed and effacing itself. When the pedestal becomes the art object, these hierarchies are crushed into a shimmering sea of infinite difference.

Do you know how diamonds get to us? Three hundred miles underground are heats and pressures that crush carbon into sparkling shapes, driven for months or days or hours along hotel corridors called diamond pipes until they erupt in a pile of taffeta and chocolate some moonlit afternoon, an event no human has ever witnessed.-Anne Carson

The sculptures in Base:Object figure fragility and precariousness, constriction, binding, and fracturing. Surfaces are rough and raw and scarred. These works are experiments to set meaning in motion. These sculptures deny the autonomy of the art object and yet celebrate the motivations and compulsions to make art. The works in this exhibition and by this generation of artists short circuit the embedded ideologies of presentation and recast traditional signs of importance and value. This subversion is made manifest by working a kind of alchemy on the detritus and cheap materials overlooked in a society of consumption.
All of the works in Base:Object display a marked interest in materiality and the painstaking effort of creating an object both seemingly casual and formally rigorous. Eschewing bronze, porcelain, and carved wood, the works in Base:Object are constructed from the everyday materials of the urban world: concrete, Formica, urethane, nylon yarn, canvas, carpet, sheets of glass, bits of wood, foam, drywall. They are the children of Minimalist boxes, no longer simply reflecting the viewers gaze back into the world at large, but displaying their origins in that world. It's the Minimalist cube or the Rauschenberg combine infected by the desires and conditions of the society that bore them. Barker, Hill, Monahan, O'Brien, and Ruby are all working contemporaneously in a time of uncertainty, war, gross economic inequity, financial collapse, and unprecedented environmental destruction. Heats and pressures erupting form-possibilities of renewal built from the ruins of the present.

Catherine Barker:
Spotting trends in contemporary art is a relatively easy task, yet there is greater difficulty in labeling a “movement” while it is still in the making. One attempt might look something like “Base:Object,” a small, articulate show of recent sculpture curated by Andrea Rosen Gallery’s Cory Nomura. Through the work of Sara Barker, Patrick Hill, Matthew Monahan, William J. O’Brien, and Sterling Ruby, Nomura complicates the conventional purpose and appearance of the pedestal (an idea that isn’t fresh but nevertheless comes across as original here). In these works, the pedestal—that once-reliable mediator between viewer and object—is consumed by the artwork in an act of erasure and supplementation. Ruby’s Absolute Contempt for Total Serenity/DB Deth, 2008, a rectangular urethane form that rests off-center on a scratched and dirtied Formica and wood cube, and Hill’s Unstable Composition #4, 2007, a dyed-canvas and glass assemblage supported by a rectangular concrete plinth, incorporate pedestal-like forms, yet the expressionistically worked surfaces of the bases muddy the distinction between practical support structure and aesthetic object. The slender, four-legged “base” of Barker’s abject posture, 2008, buttresses a clay, cement, and cardboard construction in what seems like a clever exploitation of post-Minimal tropes. Monahan and O’Brien, on the other hand, incorporate busy figurative elements into their raised sculptures in an activation of physical and pictorial space. Each of these objects is human-scale and approachable as furniture, but there is something unsettling about the installation as a whole. Invoking the abject, unstable, or contemptuous, these works embody a kind of material anxiety: a tension between modernist principles, display sensibilities, studio production, and determinants of value.

Anita Molinero

2008-11-12T06:43:00.001-08:00

Râlissam, 2007, 3 plots de chantier infia (au mur). Dépouille, 2001, film adhésif (au sol)

Handy, 2007

Isapsurinfia, 2007, 36000 plaques d'emballages alvéolés

FORMALISME, EFFETS SPÉCIAUX ET CORRUPTION DE LA CHAIR

En 1971, Philip Leider, le directeur d’Artforum, la plus influente revue d’art américaine, démissionnait. Les débats internes avaient atteint un point infranchissable : Lawrence Alloway accusait la dérive « formaliste » de la ligne éditoriale, insistant sur la nécessité de devenir plus ouvertement politique et de soutenir des médiums « plus relevants socialement », comme la photo. Directement visées, Annette Michelson et Rosalind Krauss, qui, paradoxalement, peuvent être identifiées comme fossoyeuses du « formalisme » des années 50 prôné par Clement Greenberg, s’en vont créer leur propre revue en 1975 : October, du nom du film d’Eisenstein qui, déjà, avait souffert des attaques du système soviétique l’accusant de « formalisme ». Si cette querelle semble avoir dominé la plupart des revues participant aux débats esthétiques de l’époque, c’est étonnant de vérifier aujourd’hui la persistance de cette polarisation, malgré des variantes et des lignes de partition déplacées. Pour la modernité artistique, le « formalisme » serait ainsi dans une tension permanente de refoulement, et la décoration, sa hantise. Tomber amoureux des formes fait partie, sans doute, des passions coupables. Les plus savoureuses, rajouterait Anita Molinero, sculpteur, qui ne cherche pas la transparence des raisons artistiques, agies par de très bas désirs, des solitudes cachées, des frustrations petites et grandes, des refus imprécis, des haines cultivées avec soin, du manque, du rire, de l’ennui, des joies simulées, de la dépendance épanouie. La rencontre avec Anita Molinero a été impossible et foudroyante. Mes passions étaient du côté d’un art sans identité, les siennes portées sur un art surpuissant, auratique. Ma réflexion dévie de la philosophie analytique, l’argumentation, le refus du poétique, du goût, son élan allait vers l’attachement viscéral, la mythologie personnelle, le romantisme malhonnête. J’ai aimé l’art des années 90 qu’elle avait trouvé impuissant, agréable, invisible, réduit au commentaire. On aimait Bernadette Laffont, pour les mêmes raisons. A la suite de notre premier entretien, j’ai titré l’article La fiancée du pirate, dû à la cabane du film, une sculpture de sorcière, et j’ai critiqué son envie de tenir la sculpture dans les frontières d’une discipline. Anita Molinero signait l’exposition de son nom propre – un manifeste – et n’aimait pas le mot installation, sans passif lourd, sans dettes, sans conflit. Ses sculptures monstrueuses se sont transformées sous mes yeux à l’entendre parler. Leur brutalité humide, leur refus de communiquer, pouvaient correspondre aux préjugés que j’ai choisis d’avoir vis-à-vis de l’art matérialiste des années 80. Et soudain, elle pénétrait les trous de ses poubelles avec une hystérie revendiquée, mêlant le fantasme de soumission (à leur beauté sale) et le désir de dominer la sculpture masculine. Pour parler des trous, elle dira chattes, des excroissances et verticalités, bites. Une sculpture qui réunit les deux sexes, mais garde les archaïsmes stéréotypés de tout fantasme sexuel. Ses monstres frayent un terrain où dominent les hommes, de Rodin à Jeff Koons, pour le conquérir. Le féminisme inversé de Molinero est aux antipodes de celui d’Annette Messager ou Judy Chicago : il n’y a guère de revendication essentialiste d’une identité « féminine » ni, encore, de transgression transgenre. Ses sculptures semblent vouloir s’approprier, pour le défier, le même terrain d’affirmation dominatrice (sur les matériaux, sur l’espace) tenu par une histoire de l’art dominée par la sculpture masculine. Cette revendication du pouvoir de (ses) formes sexuées a souvent fait peur à ceux qui lui préféreraient, femmes comprises, la sensualité, la sensibilité discrète, l’attention délicate au détail. Les monstres d’Anita Molinero sont sales, grossiers, obscènes et manquent de modestie. Elle agit en pyromane pour intervenir sur des matériaux vulgaires et des objets déshonorants, tels des poubelles ou des emballages en polystyrène extrudé, devenues des créatures malformées. Parfois, elle-même se surprend effrayée de leur anamorphose, le temps d’apprendre à désirer leur violence. Les paysages baroques construits par ses expositions semblent par moments sortir d’un désastre projeté par la science-fiction, où des carcasses éventrées sont suspendues au plafond, extrayant ses « effets spéciaux » de la banalité des matériaux. La toxicité de ces environnements joue aussi sur des peurs collectives fantasmées, des mutations transgéniques, des peaux difformes, des furoncles, ou ce nuage radioactif post-Tchernobyl qui traverse ses dernières expositions. Le grotesque côtoie parfois le ridicule, comme souvent dans un film d’horreur. La chaise roulante recouverte d’une plaque d’aluminium déformée et jaunie par le feu, renvoie au siège d’une solitude indissoluble dans le politiquement correct mais aussi à l’embarras de l’incontinence. Les stratégies ironiques sont malgré tout absentes, Anita Molinero les déborde par la brutalité du premier degré et la littéralité suffisante d’un monde somptueusement impur. Dans le rayon des passions coupables du modernisme repenti, il faudrait ranger, à côté du formalisme, l’expressionnisme. C’est un travail qui vient après la déconstruction analytique des années 70, suite au « champ élargi » défendu par Rosalind Krauss, qui tenait la sculpture entre l’architecture et le paysage, allant du ready-made au land art. À l’inverse, Anita Molinero n’hésite pas à réinvestir des notions rejetées (socle, monumentalité) et préfèrera toujours, plutôt qu’interroger la notion d’auteur et d’originalité, le culte d’une personnalité. Une histoire de l’art personnelle et injuste avec stars, seconds rôles, acteurs injustement oubliés, personnages singuliers et oubliables. D’où son malentendu avec Duchamp, ennemi stratégique, à qui elle peut emprunter la vulgarité des objets de travail, mais dont elle refuse le désir passif. «Je fais de l’expressionnisme contrarié», en y cherchant la séduction et la violence, mais mettant à distance la profondeur mystificatrice du geste théâtralisé, les quêtes de soi et autres ascèses. Plus que d’autonomie de l’œuvre, il s’agit de confrontation au monde. Comment tenir debout une sculpture qui puisse concurrencer le réel, du moment où celle-là est partout, du design au mobilier? C’est un conflit que traverse son travail, entre la proximité aux déchets du monde et le désir d’un royaume de la sculpture qui puisse absorber le fantasme et la déraison, puisant dans un langage qui lui serait propre. Mais lequel ? Molinero parlera d’effets spéciaux pour contrarier la culture du design, l’Allemande Isa Genzken s’intéresse au design, à la publicité, aux médias, à l’architecture et à l’esthétique en tant que vecteur d’idéologie. Les deux s’intéressent à la réinterprétation du langage classique de la sculpture dans une tension entre espace public de l’exposition et domaine privé des passions, perméabilité à l’image et mutisme des formes, subjectivité capricieuse et confrontation à l’histoire contemporaine. Si Genzken a souvent été vue comme une réponse à la domination virile des sculptures massives et parachevées du minimalisme, leur préférant l’impureté, le transitionnel, l’instable, l’excès, Molinero semble réagir à la cohérence calviniste, à la moralisation marxiste de sa génération, par le luxe baroque dont la pauvreté est capable, le glamour un peu suintant d’un dancing d’autoroute. Plutôt punk que post-Mao, elle ne transforme pas la contradiction, la corruption de la chair, en lamentation pénitente. Isa Genzken n’est pas citée dans les principaux récits de l’histoire de l’art, tenue longtemps dans l’ombre de Gerhard Richter, époux encombrant. Anita Molinero est trop intempestive, barbare et sdf pour se tenir sous les sunlights de la gloire, vite détournée vers des backrooms licencieux. Pour ma génération, lassée de voir l’art transformé en timide outil pour commenter le monde, en désir pardonnable, Genzken et Molinero sont une dangereuse montée d’adrénaline, deux des plus fondamentales artistes actuelles, capables de faire bander la sculpture.
Pedro Morais (publié dans revue IF n°31, octobre 2007)

Alix Pearlstein (The Kitchen, New York)

2008-10-17T06:48:00.001-07:00

After the fall, 2008, vidéo, 20'48

Goldrush, 2008, vidéo, 3'05

Roberta Smith:
An Attack on Foam Core and on the Status Quo
Alix Pearlstein’s videos and video installations have always tagged her as a rogue structuralist. She prefers to leaven the mechanics of performance art and the moving image with good-size doses of domestic life, down-to-earth humor and revealing emotion while implicating the viewer in it all through wildly active camera movement. In her show of three new works at the Kitchen, Ms. Pearlstein appears to have taken off the gloves. Perhaps she has paid too much attention to 1970s precedents like the innovations of Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer and Richard Serra. Perhaps the social and political events of the day have made her mad as hell and unable to take it anymore. Her actors often conduct themselves with an animalistic force; the camera is either unflinchingly immobile or relentlessly on the move. The result is a stripped-down, bare-knuckled starkness — not to mention an occasional obviousness — that is both a declaration of ambition and an attack on the status quo. For whatever reason, Ms. Pearlstein seems to have pulled the emotions and ideas in her art apart and is knocking their heads together. In “After the Fall,” the four-channel video installation that is the centerpiece, the action unfolds on four large screens, one to a wall. It doesn’t take long to figure out that a single scene has been shot by four cameras that either face one another in opposing pairs or circle the room — the very room in which we stand. On the screens four men and four women are divided into two teams by their attire. One group tends toward black and gold and seems ready to go clubbing; the other favors identical tones of pink and red, like overgrown members of the Mickey Mouse Club. The actors move back and forth between the center and the edges, taking part in different vignettes or just milling about, looking conspiratorially into the cameras. Their contact involves a bit of sex, a little violence (usually two couples pushing from opposite sides of a large white sheet of foam core), recurring ridicule and all-cast confabs in which they argue, gossip, vent or flirt. We seldom understand a word they say, but the facts of existence are clear: competitiveness, betrayal, manipulation, occasional moments of intimacy. The general sense of moral shiftlessness is echoed in the literal disorientation caused by the revolving images and our attempts to watch events unfold from four different angles. Life is no more pleasant in two single-channel pieces. In “One Side of Two Women 2” two disgruntled actresses in white walk back and forth, toward or away from a static camera, each one carrying a rectangle of white foam core that she holds in front of her face every time she stops to turn around. Three decades ago pretentious ideas about space, mirroring and repetition might have surrounded this piece; today it seems like a sarcastic meditation on the countless women who have figured in generations of avant-garde film and performance by men. In “Goldrush” the camera moves in close as the group of eight returns, this time to tear apart a sheet of foam core and grab at the scraps. Something — cinema, art, a world — is being destroyed by senseless greed. Not too complicated, perhaps, but painfully familiar right now.

Jerry Saltz:
For the last couple of decades, the seriously wily Alix Pearlstein has been making stark videos that combine group therapy, Pavlovian science, theater, slapstick comedy, and angsty existential pathos. For this large-scale outing Pearlstein is in fine form in several works. In the large gallery is the four-channel After the Fall, a combination orgy, hell, and soap opera featuring a number of lost souls, horny chicks, randy guys, and angry young men walking around one another, coming together, fighting, talking, and staring. It’s anyone’s guess what it’s all about, but it does have a look. In the back room we see similar characters doing similar things with similar results. Pearlstein coaxes you into a handsome visual realm, flirts with you, and then leaves you on your own.

Merrily Kerr:
It’s hard to stomach the sneering characters in Alix Pearlstein’s new videos, not the least because they direct their hostility at us. In the title piece, a racially diverse cast acts out a drama in which actors grope each other one moment and fight the next, then turn to give the camera the evil eye. Two more videos, featuring various run-ins between characters, illustrate the truism that all of us are fatally flawed—a point that’s difficult to dispute when political brawling and financial irresponsibility dominate headlines. Like a theatrical version of Survivor, the self-interested characters in After the Fall act out alliances and betrayals, creatively using a sheet of fiberboard as both barrier and weapon. Red and gold costumes evoke blood and money, while the four-screen projection—shot from different angles—not only suggests competing versions of the story, but keeps our eyes hopping around. When the actors break character and fix us with stony or disgusted looks, the ugliness of the story line and our voyeuristic interest hits home. In the end, everyone’s unhappy, which only underscores the postlapsarian state alluded to in the title while denying any possibility of redemption. An even deeper pessimism suffuses Goldrush, as actors brawl over scraps of the broken fiberboard. Humor emerges in Two Women 2, which riffs on Michael Snow’s experimental film “Two Sides to Every Story,” in which two huffy actors compete for the same role. But while the shorter videos allow viewers to see the actors as other people, the title piece compels us to change from viewer to actor.

Andrea K. Scott:
Pearlstein strips drama down to the bare bones—conflict, intimacy, ritual—in deadpan videos that alchemize the theatrical and the cinematic into a seductive third genre. Call it glam minimalism. In the four-channel video “After the Fall,” eight actors—four costumed in black and gold, the others in red and pink—conspire, break rank, and regroup in an absurd power struggle over a flimsy white board. Dialogue, though audible, is largely incomprehensible. There are traces of Bertolt Brecht, Lars Von Trier, Michael Snow, and even the tents in Bryant Park in Pearlstein’s gorgeous, rigorous mind-and-body game.

David Noonan. Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard.

2008-10-16T05:24:00.000-07:00

David Noonan (Chisenhale Gallery, London)

David Noonan's work comprise monochrome silkscreen on linen collages and clusters of freestanding figurative sculptures which expand his graphic images into a more theatrical space of display. Noonan often works with found photographic imagery taken from performance manuals, textile patterns and archive photographs to make densely layered montages. These works at once suggest specific moments in time and invoke disorientating a-temporal spaces in which myriad possible narratives emerge. The large-scale canvases framing this exhibition depict scenes of role-playing, gesturing characters, and masked figures set within stage-like spaces. Noonan's new suite of figurative sculptures, comprise life size wooden silhouettes faced with printed images of characters performing choreographed movements. While the figurative image suggests a body in space, the works' two dimensional cut-out supports insist on an overriding flatness which lends them an architectural quality – as stand-ins for actual performers and as a means by which to physically navigate the exhibition space.

Helen Sumpter:
Mime and experimental dance still have naff associations – especially of black-clad, white-faced figures adopting strange postures – but this is exactly the sort of retro imagery in David Noonan’s new work. Rather than provoking humour or a sense of the bleedingly unhip, Noonan conjures up a mood far more poetic, filmic and, considering the subject matter, oddly still. The artist has collaged monochrome screenprints of these found images – a pasty Pierrot applying lipstick, a group of drama students sitting cross-legged on the floor – on to heavy linen. The black ink on brown creates a sepia-tint effect but the era could be anytime from the early twentieth century onwards, and the imagined context either benignly theatrical or cultish and sinister. Noonan has also carpeted the floor in a jute material and installed life-size cut-outs, allowing the viewers to interact with this giant, 3D film still. Invoking cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky (‘El Topo’, ‘Santa Sangre’) in connection with Noonan’s work seems apt here. Jodorowsky studied mime with Marcel Marceau before picking up a camera, and while Noonan’s work is far less extreme (and with none of Jodorowsky’s gore-factor), there’s a similar approach to the body and a shared romantic sense of the surreal.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard (Kate MacGarry Gallery, London)

Walking Over Acconci (Misdirected Reproches), 2008 video

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard present a new work that pushes their recent series of re-working video and performance work from the early 1970's one step further. Walking Over Acconci (Misdirected Reproaches) is both a re-working and a response to a re-working, again twisting the language of contemporary urban music culture. In 2005, Forsyth and Pollard worked with a young MC Plan B to re-interpret and transform Vito Acconci's Walk-Over (Indirect Approaches) (1973). The result, Walking After Acconci (Redirected Approaches), updated Acconci's harsh second-person narrative address, combining it with the slick aesthetic of contemporary music videos. Speaking directly to the camera, the viewer is cast as the spurned lover watching as Plan B paces the corridor outside detailing the perks of his new lover after leaving "a girl as average as you." Applying the musical tradition of the 'answer song', the new film, Walking Over Acconci (Misdirected Reproaches), gives voice to the other side of the story. Like Smokey Robinson's 'Got a Job' in response to the Silhouette's 1958 hit 'Get a Job', or the song feud between Neil Young's 'Southern Man' and Lynyrd Skynrd's 'Sweet Home Alabama' and more recently Eamon and Frankee's manufactured chart spat with F.U.R.B., there is a fluid space of myth and rumour that moves between each narrative. Casting young female electro MC Miss Odd Kidd, Walking Over Acconci similarly draws on Acconci's original to create a new, stand alone work, while also providing its own direct, razor sharp rebuttal to Plan B's previous claims. In its confrontation?complicit with and completed by you, the viewer?the film extends beyond the re-make to create its own performative genealogy.

JJ Charlesworth:
Getting slagged off to your face by your ex-girlfriend isn’t exactly a pleasant experience. Particularly when the ex in question is a lippy, articulate, loudmouth girl in a stripy top and skinny jeans, who is now going out wiv’ someone who doesn’t give her ANY SHIT, is a great cook and has a big dick too. Lucky you’re in a gallery, and this is just an art video by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, the lippy bird being up-and-coming London MC MissOddKidd. For many years Forsyth and Pollard’s work has explored the border between art, pop music and popular culture. ‘Walking over Acconci (Misdirected Reproaches)’ is their second reworking of seminal video artist Vito Acconci’s 1973 ‘Walk-Over’, in which the artist, pacing to and from the camera in a long corridor, addresses the viewer about the qualities of a third, female subject, comparing her qualities to ‘you’. Acconci’s original tests the question of who ‘you’ is in the relationship between the viewer and an interlocutor who is only really a video image, at the advent of the novel medium of video. Forsyth and Pollard’s remake celebrates how we’ve become used to being addressed directly by a screen image: we’re a generation brought up on the image of the pop singer and now the rapper, addressing the camera and speaking directly to the viewer. MissOddKidd’s songs touch on the generic experiences of young urban life, of drugs and shit boyfriends, and her ‘misdirected reproaches’ are expertly generic and clichéd. Forsyth and Pollard’s insight is in the way they reveal how our culture of TV-mediated emotional authenticity is itself a masquerade, a performance.

RAW, Among the Ruins

2008-10-15T02:42:00.000-07:00

Uwe Henneken, Herbstgedanken, 2006, Bronze

Marres, Centre for Contemporary Culture (Maastricht, Pays-Bas), mars 2007
Curated by Lisette Smits and Alexis Vaillant:

A ruin is defined as the disjunctive product of the intrusion of nature into an edifice without loss of the unity produced by the human builders. Time, proposed as the principal cause of ruin, serves also to unify the ruin. In a ruin the edifice, the man-made part, and nature are one and inseparable; an edifice separated from its natural setting is no longer part of a ruin since it has lost its time, space and place. A ruin has a signification different from something merely man-made. It is like no other work of art, and its time is unlike any other time. A ruin is always ‘over’, in spite of the fact that it necessarily holds fragments of history. Moreover, a ruin is not in front of us. Decay evolves next to us, not to say with us. That's the reason why we can say that at the beginning, there is the ruin. Modern times have transformed the way ruins and monuments are approached and considered to the point where ruins became "contemporary ruins", closer to present than to past. "Contemporary ruins" are produced both by the acceleration of time and the growing fascination with deterioration. They test the very idea of a ruin within a system of objects structured by the invention of permanency. Good ruins do not illustrate or morally demonstrate this, but are able to re-reverse logics of time from science fiction to archaeology, from peplum to I-pod. Ruin lets off the very idea of theme because the ruin uses up any theme.
As soon as you start looking around, you see ruins everywhere.
Did you ever feel like an old bag in front of a work of art?
This show offers you a group of hopeful ruins, displayed in a classical nineteenth century aristocratic Dutch house. Here you will come face to face with the Nelly faggot, the spunky Nordic suitcase, the marble hand tapping his way through a fantastic water colour bleached world, a booty of damaged artworks, a mountain of freshly white sprayed earphones, the Jason mask without a face, the black plexiglass mandala, the silver animated survival cover, the suspended up bird, the celebration-church-bordello, and many more. Once in The Corridor of Who Knows When, some are arriving, others are leaving. If you expect nostalgia, be assured that nostalgic images just reiterate an inherited set of cultural expectations. These hopeful ruins might not fulfil that promise. A ruin definitely alludes to the dissociation of ubiquitous artworks, lost in their photographic "entombed" time. Hopeful ruins resist their representation by being fragmented and, like raw material, ever again available. They point out the fragility of images, which are just thin illusions, doomed to fail our expectations, doomed eventually to crumble.

Farîd-Ud-Dîn'Attar, Robert Breer, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Dee Ferris, Jason Fox, Vidya Gastaldon, Richard Hawkins, Uwe Henneken, Karl Holmqvist, Jonathan Horowitz, Dorota Jurczak, John Kleckner, Petra Mrzyk & Jean-François Moriceau, Alessandro Pessoli, Nathalie Rebholz, Nick Relph & Oliver Payne, Re-Magazine, Markus Schinwald, V/Vm, Camille Vivier, T.J. Wilcox, and several historical damaged art works to be discovered.

Sarah Braman. Wendy White.

2008-10-02T10:02:00.000-07:00

Sarah Braman (Museum 52, New York)

Portland Honeymoon (found objects, paint)

Sleeping Out Summer Night, truck cap, radio, plexi, fabric, wood, linoleum, paint (millieu),
Love Song (soft rock), found furniture, linoleum, mirror, paint (arrière plan)

TV in bed, (found furniture, plexi, foam, paint)

Love Songs
Braman allows the incongruous to coalesce with an elegant, human clumsiness. She has an instinctive admiration for inept materials. The works in the show combine found furniture, linoleum, a camping tent and car panels with wood, plexiglas and paint. Braman appears to work without inhibition, second-guessing or self-consciousness. Each material, as with a fault or quality in a lover, is celebrated equally for its flaws and its successes. It is as if she approaches the works with the same mix of vehemence and disregard of someone penning a love song. The materials used have a sense of lost and found or something fallen and risen again. The instinctual manner of her process is akin to the inherent resourcefulness of a child building a den or the dislocated building a new home. Braman embraces the very human need and ability to reconstruct and piece together. Her work acts likes gestures towards shelter. Creating intimate volumes she reformulates materials and space for the better. In one of the sculptures an unattached, thick, foam rectangle sits beneath an off kilter square formed from a large sheet of plexi and a half broken, half cut desk. The form becomes both a refuge and an empty volume. By intuitively adding paint to the sculptures, Braman emphasizes this divide in the formal reading. The paint presents another human need to decorate and embellish, as well as highlighting structural elements such as joints and surfaces. It is as if, in the departure of the sculptures into abstraction, Braman gives a reminder of the hand that put them there. This is not sculpture based on either/or decisions. Beautifully composed interlocking planes, and subtle contrasts of light and color are built of roughly cut materials, balanced on awkward angles, loosely painted and combined with sagging cloth. The works are not concerned with all that is wrong and all that is right with sculpture, but instead oppose such finitudes, allowing a freedom to exist within the knowledge that the finite has been decided for us anyway.

Roberta Smith:
In its extensive use not only of found materials, but also of found furniture, Sarah Braman’s latest contests between painting and sculpture are larger and more ambitious, if also a little more generic. Her tilted structures now incorporate parts of desks, shelves and car panels, a device that makes them more difficult to understand from any single position. The greater complexity also creates more opportunities for applied color and brushwork, which, in turn, coax you to circumnavigate the pieces. The resulting unfolding and interplay of hand-made and mass-produced is unexpectedly rewarding, although it would be better if the level of slovenliness were lower.

Wendy White (Leo Koenig Inc., New York)

Autokennel, 2007, Acrylic and spray paint on canvas, metal and softball

Pile Driver, 2008, Acrylic on canvas

Autokennel
Wendy White’s compositions utilize a distinctive abstract language that alludes to the bombardment of the everyday. Urban sprawl, space junk, graffiti, buried hazardous material, and the accumulation of refuse are punctuated by heavy black areas that map a direct trail from the ubiquitous to the subconscious. Unafraid to conjure real feeling and emotion in these works, White gives new form to the bombast of rock concerts and the mass elation of sports arenas. Built organically and intuitively, these works balance accident and scrappy paint handling with compositional coherence. While White seems to work with reckless abandon, her off-kilter compositions prove well considered with time, though perhaps deliberately confounding. Just when one begins to get involved in a lush patch of painterly abstraction, a field of blank white canvas, almost large enough to topple the composition, is encountered. Flatness combats depth, black is balanced against white, and fluorescent colors fade and emerge on top of a surface that is consistently finessed.

Jerry Saltz:
There are so many artists inspired by Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, and Charlene Von Heyl right now that you’d think those people were Greek Gods. While many of their imitators’ work can look dandy-like and mannered in its nonchalance and quasi-expressionism, a number of younger folks are hitting pay dirt. One is Wendy White, who balances wildness and withholding, with a dose of something almost diabolically planned. She delivers three punches at once: Color, graffiti-like agility, and formal structure. This prevents her work from looking angsty, imitative, and fake. Her paintings have a presence the reminds one of billboards and websites, something at once physical and disembodied.

Jennifer Coates:
Wendy White’s debut show at Leo Koenig features paintings made of multiple canvases abutting each other, as though the frantic activity that splays across them can barely be contained. Airbrushed passages recalling graffiti tags create sooty densities that are offset by large expanses of white. Bits of fluorescent colors appear here and there, glowing like toxic embers. White’s technique ranges from sprays and smears to taped-out areas that have been painted over, leaving a glyphlike residue that evokes the relationship between the written mark and the painted one. White places sculptures assembled from found materials beside her paintings, creating a theater where real life is pulverized into abstraction. The objects, which look like they come from a 99¢ store, provide a reference point for the paintings, preventing them from seeming too utopian, while allowing the possibility for narrative readings. In Autokennel, a softball sits atop a metal rod in front of three frenzied canvases, as if to say that the paint has been pitched out or run around the bases of a game. A small white-and-black soccer ball juts out next to Mrs. Dash, invoking the speed and aggression of the World Cup. The brushstrokes seem to track the ball’s trajectory as players struggle to get it into the goal. Athletic and spastic, White’s work sparks with style and energy like Ab Ex on Gatorade.

Phoebe Washburn (Zach Feuer Gallery, New York)

2008-09-24T07:52:00.000-07:00

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.

Material Presence (Project Space 176, London)

2008-09-12T09:11:00.000-07:00

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)

Work by artists who use found, industrial and pre-fabricated materials to produce immersive works that directly affect the viewer’s senses.
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.

microwave (Josée Bienvenu gallery, New York)

2008-09-10T06:28:00.000-07:00

Graham Dolphin, 25 Leadbelly Songs

Jacob Dyrenforth, Crowd #3, 2008, Pencil on paper

Kamrooz Aram, From the Series Irrational Exuberance, 2007, Ink on paper

An exhibition of drawings by seventeen artists who set up various processes of fragmentation and erosion of information. Close attention is given to execution, a concentration on the production process itself. A microwave is useful everyday to cook fast, or once a year to look at slow drawings. Since 1999, the (almost) annual edition of microwave has been an opportunity to confirm the emergence of a new attitude. As an alternative to an inhospitable era, microwave identifies an international host of artists who commit to the obscene activity of paying attention. With intense focus, patience and precision, the artists in microwave document the relentless propagation of delicacy as a subversive attitude. Ernesto Caivano, Dean Smith, Károly Keserü and Renato Orara bring drawing to an extreme, as a sort of “maximalism.” Through the endless weaving of minute components, they accumulate signals and vibrations impossible to detect without an extraordinary level of attention. Tones, hues, and shades combined with density, shapes, and intangible forms result in a grand yet subtle game, always remaining just a fragment of a whole. With obsessive attentiveness to detail, Jim Hodges, Stephen Eichhorn and Kamrooz Aram subvert the conventions of monumental practice, poetically linking evanescent moments in works of self-confident beauty. The works in the exhibition touch upon the very fragile nature of communication and exchange. Allyson Strafella’s typewritten drawings on transfer paper, Alexandra Grant’s multilayered wordscapes or Rivane Neuenschwander’s Ze Carioca altered comic books, explore ways of recording, fragmenting and obliterating information to create new non-verbal narratives. Data manipulation is also at the core of Brian Lund’s graphic translations of film sequences and of Jesse Pasca’s charted drawings: Moore’s Law, My Heart as a Stock Market and How To Be Human, map the correlation between human activity and systems of scientific data. Through minor operations on paper the artists in microwave disturb established systems of expectations. Jacob Dyrenforth’s pixilated pencil drawings of crowds at rock and roll concerts and Graham Dolphin’s scripted vinyl records disrupt and reprocess the clichéd aspirations of popular culture and the glamour industry. Growing up in Utah in the Mormon Church, Casey Jex Smith explores narratives in ancient scripture. Andrew Scott Ross’ Re-Collections inventory given museums. Randomly floating in space, artifacts are depicted in a constant curatorial drift, suspended from interpretation and hierarchy. Phoebe Washburn exposes generative systems based on absurd patterns of production. With their elaborate notations and coding, the un-monumental drawings are microcosms of her convoluted architectural environments.

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.

Peter Friedl (MAC Marseille, 2007)

2008-09-09T04:40:00.000-07:00

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

Sights From a Steeple (IBID Projects, London)

2008-08-22T16:06:00.001-07:00

Skafte Kuhn, Vergagen ist das firmament (The sky's gone out), 2007

Ulla Von Brandenburg, Geist, 16mm film (2007)

‘Sights from a Steeple’ deals with issues such as a romance that has failed, a Poe-esque approach to the subject of the night or attitudes of austerity and self-restraint. The exhibition takes its title from the chapter of a book by the Nineteenth-century novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. Each story in the book had previously been published or told before. In the chapter ‘Sights from a Steeple’, an all-seeing narrator surveys the world around him from the heights of a church tower. His reflections create a sense of dizzying vertigo but also relay a sense of liberation that can come from looking at an environment from a distance, whereby the past and future can be seen together in one moment. In a similar way, many of the artists in the exhibition can appear forward-looking in their vision whilst equally sharing a fascination for pre-Modernist canons. Through multiple references from Post-punk music to Nineteenth century literature and scientific photography, each have found similar possibilities in the past in the way that music groups such as The Cure or Joy Division explored Nineteenth century links between disaster and romance, and saw them as closely related; or, looked at recent subcultures that are still somehow unknown or have already been claimed by others. Additionally, the show can be described as an antidote to the traditional summer exhibition. Some of the works are moody and foreboding, black and monochromatic, contain obscure references, or are formed purely from text and diagrammatic structures. (...) Because of, rather than in spite of, this aesthetic sensibility that could be described as shadowy or austere, displaying an almost Protestant attitude to materials, these practices suggest a richness of content that is borne from studious research, that invites a certain level of engagement from the viewer and has an expectation of investigation.

Dan Kidner:

The summer has arrived at last so instead of complaining about the fact that it hasn’t we can now complain about how ‘muggy’ it is. Another thing usually worth complaining about at this time of year are the ‘summer shows’ put on by commercial galleries. Always hit-and-miss affairs, these are normally either filler whilst the gallerists go to wherever they go in the summer, or a chance for someone at the gallery (or a hired freelancer) to stretch their curatorial muscle with a thematic group show. Ibid’s summer show, ‘Sights From the Steeple’, falls into the latter category. The works presented, according to the press release, take their cue from late-Romantic views on love and loss, as well as ‘attitudes of austerity and self-restraint.’ The title, taken from a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne first published in the collection Twice-Told Tales (1837), gives some sense of what is on offer here: the works, imbued with gothic wistfulness, will constitute an ‘antidote to the traditional summer show’. But all is not lost. Two works in particular, by Karl Holmqvist and Ulla Von Brandenburg, make the trip worthwhile. The other artists in the show – Gregor Hildebrandt, Jorinde Voigt, Barbara Wolff and Skafte Kuhn – are too easily packaged and explained away by the theme. Kuhn’s diptych, an etching on glass, Untitled (Hervor aus Gebrigen des Nichtmehr / Coming from the mountain of the bygone) (2007), depicts English goth rockers Bauhaus alongside a sampling of their lyrics, translated into antiquated German. Referencing the collision of ‘80s pop music with gothic imagery is well-trodden ground. Von Brandenburg is represented by a film, Geist (2007), in which a figure draped in a white sheet activates a 16mm camera, aimed at an area of park land with trees in the distance. As the figure nears the trees, moving almost out of view, the reel finishes and the film loops. This pastische of Victorian quasi-scientific recordings of paranormal phenomena juts uncomfortably – or maybe all too comfortably, which is of course the point – against the form of performance-based video from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The fact that the theoretical underpinnings of conceptual and post-conceptual practices can be mapped to certain tropes of late-Romantic thought and art is by no means revelatory, but in this context adds a touch of critical sophistication. Holmqvist accompanies a small photocopied book of his poems (available to peruse, but not to take away) with a manifestation of a work that has been recycled several times since its first outing in 1991, and which normally accompanies a performance. It consists of three empty wine bottles with simple orange labels emblazoned with the title of the work: Give Poetry a Try (1991–2008). Behind these, on the wall, there is a framed list of handwritten instructions encouraging viewers to make candle holders out of recently emptied bottles and to write their own poetry. The last two read: ‘4. Read poem out to yourself and/or someone else’, and ‘5. Ready.’ Holmqvist humorously punctures the Romantic view of poetry as a privileged, exulted form, while simultaneously casting doubt on the contemporary dictum that everyone has ‘talent’.

Martin Herbert:

On the face of it, ‘Sights from a Steeple’ shamelessly bundles together several recent curatorial trends: the doomy summer show, the fixation on the gothic and pre-modernist in general and post-punk music. Actually, it’s a tiny bit subtler than that. Drawing on a Nathaniel Hawthorne story, the show themes itself around a dual orientation: looking backwards and forwards simultaneously. That’s true enough of Karl Holmqvist’s installation of three empty wine bottles and a text, the latter inviting one to participate at home by drinking a bottle of wine, sticking a candle in it, writing a poem and performing it – a sort of democratisation of the Romantic impulse. Meanwhile, both Ulla von Brandenberg and Gregor Hildebrandt consider the affective potential of foregrounded – and outmoded – technologies. The former does so through her scratchily evocative, eerily self-contained 16mm film showing a ghostly figure switching on the camera that’s filming a shiny bauble, in which is reflected the recording device itself. Hildebrandt, for his part, appends a Cure song title to a black abstract canvas made from neat rows of cassette tape. Elsewhere, we get intermittent sparks amid chaotic, would-be obsessive diagrams of songs (‘loop’ and ‘volume’ being among the categories), dangling sculptures combining dreamcatcher-like forms and pot plants and texts translating Bauhaus lyrics into German. As long as artists and curators remember their miserable adolescences, it looks like this stuff is here for the duration.

Painting Now

2008-08-22T15:28:00.000-07:00

Kai Althoff et Erin Allen, Moving Circus, 2008 (à droite), Cosima von Bonin, Straight, No Chaser, 2007 (à gauche)

Kelley Walker, Untitled, 2008, four-color silkscreen on canvas with USA TODAY

Anne Truitt, Primrose, 1972 (premier plan), Blythe, 1998 (au mur)

Painting Now and Forever, Part II

(Greene Naftali + Matthew Marks Gallery)

Avec Kai Althoff, Cosima von Bonin, Merlin Carpenter, Mathew Cerletty, Wojciech Fangor, Katharina Fritsch, Gelitin, Isa Genzken, Poul Gernes, Daan van Golden, Jack Goldstein, Rodney Graham, Wade Guyton, Richard Hawkins, Mary Heilmann, Sophie von Hellermann, Charline von Heyl, Ull Hohn, Sergej Jensen, Mike Kelley, Ellsworth Kelly, Karen Kilimnik, Martin Kippenberger, Michael Krebber, William Leavitt, Michel Majerus, Bjarne Melgaard, Laura Owens, Blinky Palermo, Stephen Prina, R.H. Quaytman, Ugo Rondinone, Paul Sharits, Josh Smith, Reena Spaulings, Lily van der Stokker, Atsuko Tanaka, Paul Thek, Anne Truitt, Kelley Walker, Christopher Wool, Katharina Wulff

Roberta Smith:

“Painting: Now and Forever, Part II” exudes enough skepticism to evade the Valentine sincerity of its title. Ranging through several generations and numerous styles and methods, it includes works by more than three dozen 20th- and 21st-century artists, living and dead. For what it’s worth, the show’s news release notes that none of them, except Mary Heilmann, were in the first version of this show, organized 10 years ago by the Matthew Marks Gallery and the late, lamented Pat Hearn Gallery. This time the Marks gallery has teamed up with Greene Naftali. Both are filled to the brim with what might be called “painting and its discontents,” and although they form one exhibition, the displays are as different as the galleries themselves. The arrangements at Greene Naftali, especially, convey the impression that the only way to take painting seriously is to treat it as some kind of joke. The show’s first small gallery can be read as a playful ode to early Modernism, beginning with a small, Fauve-like landscape by Paul Thek, which has a gold frame that includes a little lamp, and proceeding to the pure early-1970s abstractions of Poul Gernes, a Danish painter, designer and teacher who thought art should improve everyday life. The main gallery presents a version of the continuing free-for-all between figurative and abstract, and between paint on canvas and something else. Figuration and canvas are in the minority. A rectangle of carpet brushed with fluorescent orange by Mike Kelley stands out, as does Kelley Walker’s optically and physically odd four-color silkscreen. It presents a triptych of red and white brick walls whose cement interstices have been masked with cut-out newsprint: ephemeral life lived in the cracks, or perhaps a reversal of Jasper Johns’s use of newsprint in his early paintings. Even more reduced is R. H. Quaytman’s tightly wound moire bull’s-eye (also a silkscreen), which hangs next to Sergej Jensen’s Minimalist “Werewolf,” in which little threads of saffron suggest scattered whiskers. In additional tiny galleries three terrific, suppurating versions of the Mona Lisa by the Austrian collective Gelitin grab the eye by its lapels; Stephen Prina, Isa Genzken and Ugo Rondinone make varying use of spray paint; and finally, Ellsworth Kelly, a Marks artist, adds a dose of Mandarin rigor with “Green Relief,” a 2007 work that hangs in splendid solitude. Despite opening with a wall painting by Lily van der Stokker, things are considerably more hushed at Marks. The large gallery mixes usual and unusual suspects. Abstraction dominates, as do canvas and other stretched fabrics, along with an air of studied nonchalance, especially in works by Michael Majerus, Michael Krebber, Blinky Palermo and Reena Spaulings (spots of red wine on a tablecloth — how daring). Rodney Graham’s little confectionery abstractions remind us how many nonpainters end up painting (as does a work on canvas by the structuralist filmmaker Paul Sharits at Greene Naftali). Fuzzy rings of color by the Op artist Wojciech Fangor counter the bright burn of late work by Jack Goldstein, which is in turn reflected in a painting by Katharina Fritsch that is really a mirror. Three smaller side-chapel-like galleries are devoted to a progression of artists with Minimalist leanings: the colored steles of Anne Truitt, the slathered process paintings of Ms. Heilmann and finally a series of big, stuttering black inkjet X’s on white linen by Wade Guyton that pledge allegiance to painting while crossing their fingers behind their backs. His attitude is seconded in more Expressionist terms by a separate display of 14 new paintings by Josh Smith in the adjacent Marks space.

Daniel Kunitz:

"Painting: Now and Forever, Part II," a group show occupying both the Matthew Marks and Greene Naftali galleries, refers back to a survey of contemporary painting (Part I) held a decade ago at Marks and the now defunct Pat Hearn Gallery. At the time, when painting was considerably more embattled and the market for it much smaller, the show's title rang defiant; today, it sounds ironic. Part II explores a medium — or approach, since the paint is often absent here — in a state of productive entropy; it is painting that pushes at whatever limits are left. The show pushes harder against those limits at Greene Naftali than at Matthew Marks, though both venues offer a mix of the very contemporary with a few historical works that continue to exert an influence. At the former, a small, ugly mishmash of red and purple and green called "Towards an Abstract Icon" (1980), by Paul Thek, prefaces the current naïve style. To establish a suitably tongue-in-cheek context for this canvas, Mr. Thek set it in a gold frame, replete with a viewing light. This sort of wide-angle art, in which the frame as well as the canvas constitute the work, took hold in the early '80s and, by our time, has generated enough branches of ironic painting to fill out a bush. So in 1981, William Leavitt hung an intentionally pedestrian painting of a blue sea creature on a wall of faux-wood paneling, left a potted plant on the floor in front of it, and called the whole thing "Manta Ray." In 2003, Mike Kelley reversed the procedure. Instead of calling the room with the painting the work, he made a little piece of the room his focus, framing a square swath of carpet doused in orange acrylic and calling it "Carpet #2." Cosima von Bonin dispenses with the paint altogether in her wonderful "Straight, No Chaser" (2007), in which patterned pieces of fabric, affixed to a canvas, form a hard-edged abstract background for a small drawing sewn with white thread. "Moving Circus" (2008) retains the paint but removes the canvas and stretcher. This flag-like work, by Kai Althoff and Erin Allen, consists of interlocking "L"s of blue and red fabric decorated with tempera paints as well as strips of gauzy gray fabric. Unlike the Bonin, the effort in this one seemed as limp as its materials. Among the best of the unpainted paintings is Kelley Walker's untitled screen print on canvas, in which convincing brickwork floats atop images of USA Today pages, from May 27, 2008. Among the blandest are the gloppy versions of the Mona Lisa done by the art collective Gelitin, heavily built up in plasticine on wood. The world might still need to investigate the limits of painting, but it surely doesn't need another Mona Lisa joke. And what is Ellsworth Kelly's elegant "Green Relief" (2007) — an allover green canvas askew atop an allover white one — doing in such raucous company? Although the work here is recent, Mr. Kelly represents a historical precedent for two current, and at times related, tendencies in painting. One is toward treating the picture as an object, like sculpture, as in the Althoff and Allen contribution. The other is toward hard-edged abstraction drained of its Modernist theoretical justification, as in Sergej Jensen's "Werewolf" (2003), a brownish allover rectangle with a bespeckled (the work uses oil paint and saffron) yellow oblique triangle at the left side. At Matthew Marks, the Reena Spaulings piece "Enigma 15" (2008) gestures at both tendencies. It offers a square swath of white tablecloth from a recent art-world dinner with the leftover stains as its "imagery." But on the whole, the work at Marks seems quieter, and certainly more blue-chip. The precursors here are not seldom-seen artists' artists, such as Thek, but names bloated with market value, such as Martin Kippenberger, here representing naïve-style "ugly" painting, and Blinky Palermo, who's on the abstraction-without-ideas team. Recently made pretty, or not so pretty, abstractions — by Daan van Golden and Charline von Heyl, among others — outnumber the limit-testing works. And when they are included, the more challenging pieces at Marks are likely to seem declawed for fine living rooms. Thus, Katharina Fritsch's "Picture with Mirror" (1998), a rectangular mirror in a gorgeous frame, seems more decorative than daring. Ditto "Boston Store" (2008), a throwaway by the talented Mathew Cerletty, in which an abstract logo atop the title words are carefully rendered in oils. Wade Guyton's untitled black "X"s and arrows, all ink-jet prints on linen, retain their house-kitty claws, but do not necessarily require a room of their own, as they're given here. Still, the theme of paintings prodding the notion of painting holds up sturdily in both venues. And for those who wonder why such ironic works stand for painting now, there's another, less impish way to read this show's title: Painting is now and will forever be going through some point in the cycle of destruction and rebuilding. Artists always destroy what was with what is. If the territory of "Part II" is by now well trodden, the vistas offered are, at least, sufficiently exciting to justify the trip.

A Rictus Grin (Broadway 1602, New York)

2008-08-22T11:45:00.000-07:00

DUNCAN CAMPBELL
HARIS EPAMINONDA
ÖYVIND FAHLSTRÖM
EUSTACHY KOSSAKOWSKI
SAM LEWITT
MARIA LOBODA
MIKLOS ONUCSAN
JOYCE WIELAND

Commissariat: Christopher Eamon and Anke Kempkes

A rictus grin connotes a communication that does not express interior emotions. Instead, as a metaphor, it can be said to summarize a particular state of affairs such as paralysis or rigidity and yet the grin is received affectively as a smile none-the-less. The artists grouped in this exhibition have each created incisive positions in, and attitudes toward the milieux that they have chosen to inhabit, using public space and the symbolic sphere of mass communications as their media. Changing circumstances in the current art world in relation to the broader culture suggest a need for a return to historical forms and artistic approaches, today, in more subtle and fragile ways than ever. The contemporary world cast as a seducing cadaver is dealt with in this exhibition by artists who have worked with mass media and publicity in the past in intuitive if not analytical ways and by younger artists who relate specifically to the space opened up by artists of the 60s and 70s, while managing to escape the pitfall of an exhausted nostalgia. Public space and institutional politics or, the street as a target, have been notoriously exploited as a site by artists throughout the decades since 1968. In the course of this evolution art as “intervention” has become yet another form of the acceptable in art, or even an ultra-sophisticated pastiche. How do artists today approach the political sphere through public space? How do we look back at artworks that dealt with these issues in the first wave of the genre from the distance of today’s vastly more commercial context? Should we be fulfilled merely by a sentimental look back? Is our longing for the (politically) relevant in art to be satisfied only by a nostalgic return to the 1970s, via black and white footage, documentation, cinéma vérité, etc? And can, or should we, fully and seriously resist this embrace? How much should we ‚forgive‘ this ‚innocent‘ material by historicizing it as the primary effort of a previous avant-garde, thus unwittingly emphasizing its potential lack of relevance today as a cultural expression? Artistic and intellectual sentiments for historicism is all around us now, at times unchallenged and/or uninspected. At the same time as there seems to be strong urge to reassess work of the 60s and 70s among younger artists. Just as there are, and have been, artistic moves in the area of mass media and other public spheres, some attempted, as they now do, to deal simultaneously with the doublebind of avoiding nostalgia while retaining an urgent sense of engagement. (...) An outright criticism of nostalgia and sentimentality for the past as cultural regression may at times seem short-sighted, since there is a reason for the intensity with which contemporary artists address these forms with a silent urgency of their own. One of the subjects of this exhibition is a need for further interference in this zone—a knowing one—an insightful look into practices at times when they were not fashionable. Many of the artists included here look back to art forms created for the first time while at the same time test new forms adequate to expression today. The reflex by some artists may be at once fairly formalistic and yet, on another level, acts on the psychological behind the political, being more than a literal take on former or even current political agendas.

Holland Cotter:
Webster’s defines rictus as a grin or grimace, and it usually implies an expression that’s fixed, as in paralysis. This serious little mystery of a summer group show, organized by Christopher Eamon and Anke Kempkes, touches on all of this in an oblique, conceptual way. Its essayistic press release is framed as a series of questions that are being asked about art today. Like, how do we revisit and reuse avant-garde art of the recent past — the 1960s and ’70s — without dropping into nostalgia or turning into archivists or copycats? How do we make an art engaged with ideas that can maintain rigor under the softening, flattening, cute-ifying, but here-to-stay pressure of the market? And how, while pondering such matters, do you prevent yourself from coming to a dead stop, thinking, “Well, I guess the only future is figure painting after all,” and then heading in that direction? This show has no answers, which may be the best thing about it. When you talk of the past, you talk about time, as several artists here do. In a strange, choppy, abstract, four-minute video, “1933,” the interesting Canadian artist Joyce Wieland (1931-1998) goes back to that year, for no apparent reason except that film allows her to, over and over again, though she never stays there long. A 1966 video by Oyvind Fahlstrom records a fictional demonstration he staged in New York that year with “protesters” carrying pictures of Bob Hope and Mao, and a “newscaster” asking passers-by if they were happy with their lives and why. The British artist Duncan Campbell sends us to the late 1960s and early ’70s in his 2008 documentary about the Irish activist Bernadette Devlin; and it’s great to see her, so unpretentious, fearless and smart. Eustachy Kossakowski’s photographs of defaced street posters in Paris that leave film stars and pop singers grinning and grimacing takes us to 1976; and Miklos Onucsan’s framed poster of an art exhibition derailed by right-wing popular politics in Bucharest, Romania, lands us in 1990. Work by other artists — a necklacelike sculpture by Maria Loboda, and carefully marked-up photographs by Haris Epaminonda — are less date-referencing. But Sam Lewitt’s funereally dark 2007 print of ads for designer watches brings us back to the show’s starting-point themes: time, market, pleasure, inertia, forward, backward, and how art can partake of, and stand back from, all of these.

T. J. Carlin:
The various pieces in “A Rictus Grin” highlight the struggle artists often face in pitting revolutionary spirit against the constraints of media; much of the work in the show engages the problematic of documenting or archiving public gestures of dissent. There’s no better example of this than the exhibition’s centerpiece, Bernadette, Duncan Campbell’s assemblage of documentary clips about ’60s Irish activist Bernadette Devlin, the youngest woman ever elected to Parliament, at age 22. While the discrepancy between the woman’s impassioned speeches and the distance imposed by time, the technical imperfections of archived film, and the artist’s hand in editing the footage all make it difficult to allow her fiery vision to fully resonate with the viewer, there’s inspiration aplenty in Devlin’s story. This work is the most resonant item in the show; some of the other pieces are effective though a bit lacking in emotion. Sam Lewitt’s offset print of magazine watch ads is a reminder of the onslaught of time; his obsessive visual repetitiveness recalls Quentin’s in The Sound and the Fury. Eustachy Kossakowski’s photos of defaced Parisian posters of cultural icons from the ’70s highlight one of the more immediate methods of response against the tyranny of cultural pressure. Overall, the unflagging attempts to manipulate popular means of communication in service of expression are admirable.

Andrea K. Scott:
Expressions devoid of emotional content—like the eerie fixed grin on a corpse or the insincere smile of a glib politician—inspired this intriguing sleeper of a show, curated by Christopher Eamon and Anke Kempkes. A cynical world view predominates, as seen in Öyvind Fahlström’s delightfully unsettling 1966 film, in which bystanders watch fake demonstrators parading by with posters of Bob Hope and Chairman Mao. But some works break ranks. Duncan Campbell’s Godardesque video portrait of the feisty, cigarette-wielding Irish activist Bernadette Devlin, who was elected to parliament in 1970, at the tender age of twenty-one, is surprisingly poignant.

Some Thing Else (Peter Blum Gallery, New York)

2008-08-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

Mika Tajima, Installation view with the following works: I Can't Feel My Face, 2007; False Positive, 2007; Free We Said, 2007; Untitled (Slow Video), 2008

Mika Tajima, Untitled (slow video), 2008.80 slides in carousel

Nin Brudermann, Das Patent, 2008

Erin Shirreff, Knives, 2008

Julien Bismuth, A Specific Object (Version 2.1- Builds and Lapses), 2008. Felt, wood box, ink jet print, audio equipment variable dimensions (image is detail of poster)

David Adamo, Anniversary Waltz, 2007

David Adamo, Untitled (Margret), 2007. Mixed media installation with 17 bronze tomatoes, 6 sledgehammers, wood shavings, wood stage, painting, sparkling red shoe, violin case, bow, pair of socks and plywood floor

Charles Goldman, SIGN.SC/PRO.PTG, 2008. Wood, plastic, hardware, found photograph (reversed and laminated)

Commissariat: Simone Subal
David Adamo, Julien Bismuth, Nin Brudermann, Charles Goldman, Erin Shirreff, Mika Tajima

Some Thing Else features six New York-based artists who probe the definitions of an art object by expanding its vocabulary with music, text, video, and performance. The formal issues explored in these works build a platform for unexpected narratives and compositional variations. These gestures open up the function and meaning of sculpture, while also creating a context for reconsidering the visual and conceptual possibilities of formalist objects.

Julien Bismuth works in the space between visual art and literature. In Specific Object, Bismuth combines a cut felt carpet and an empty pedestal, from which plays an audio recording of a text written by the artist. The viewer is invited to become part of the sculpture by sitting on either the carpet or the base, while listening to the text—a multi-layered description that encircles different qualities of the object itself. This fictitious description animates the object but also raises complex questions about how one should name a work of art.
In Sculpture Park, Erin Shirreff is interested in the experiential and durational difference between looking at a sculpture and looking at a video. Over the course of 11 minutes, four models of Tony Smith sculptures (i.e. Spitball, Amaryllis) slowly emerge from a black screen. The pixilation of the digital image gives way to fake falling snow, which gradually defines and makes visible the outlines of the sculpture. The result is a hybrid between video and sculpture that makes viewers aware of their own perceptual assumptions.
David Adamo’s installation Untitled (Margret) consists of a stage-like platform on which an empty violin case, two stripped socks, and squashed tomatoes cast in bronze sit forlornly. This composition is contrasted with a group of sledgehammers with most of their handles hacked away, leaning against the wall. This metaphorical setting alludes to the absence of a performance and the performer, emphasizing a durational quality only present in the interpretation of the work.
Mika Tajima integrates a range of disciplines into her artistic practice: sculpture, painting, music, performance, graphic design, and architecture. Her installation here comprises double-sided silkscreen paintings mounted on plywood and set on wheels, with a loop of images of past performances (often with her minimal noise band New Humans) projected on one of the panels from a slide projector. These movable modular architectural structures (their color and pattern drawn from late 1960s design) reference sound barriers in recording studios and allow for a synergetic flexibility in the installation.
Charles Goldman is invested in what he calls “concretized experience.” In 24/24/24/24, he explores distance and time as containers for individual experiences. The sculpture consists of four 24 feet “distance paintings” (exactly 24 feet of paint was used in the creation of each) and a fiberglass object resembling a natural rock that in fact contains a speaker playing four different ambient sound pieces, each six minutes in duration and adding up to 24 minutes total.
The starting point for Nin Brudermann's installation is a functional garment—a body suit that she invented and for which she holds the Austrian patent. This ready-made object provides the framework for investigating the absurdities of governmental patent language as well as the theatrical and practical permutations of the object itself. A live performance featuring the body suit take place during the opening.

Jerry Saltz:
In the group show she organized here last summer, gallery director Simone Subal seemed to predict all the “Unmonumental,” piece-by-piece, “lessness” that cropped up in galleries and museums all this season. This show’s another real keeper. The work is more thought-out, organized, and formal, and explores narrative and self in cryptic ways. There’s Nin Brudermann’s invented unitard for women, which can be taken off while going to the bathroom, without the person getting naked (think M.C. Escher). Erin Shirreff presents a brilliant slo-mo journey into the heart of minimalism, as well as a large book, Knife, which showcases homemade Paleolithic-type art infused with Robert Mapplethorpe’s sexiness, danger, and elegance. The works by David Adamo, Charles Goldman, Mika Tajima, and Julien Bismuth are also noteworthy.

Andrea K. Scott:
A violent performance with no actor (an installation by David Adamo), a protest sign with no message (an absurdist sculpture by Charles Goldman): this witty, intelligent show, organized by Simone Subal, presents works in which absence activates form. Sit on Julien Bismuth’s carpet-covered cube and feel an audio text rumble up your spine. In Erin Shirreff’s moody video, the planes of a model Tony Smith sculpture are visible only when covered in snow. Mika Tajima’s high-design prints on wheels, which double as a screen for a slide show of past performances, evoke a missing figure, a theme reiterated by Nin Brudermann’s wacky project, centered on a patented bodysuit.

Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn (Elizabeth Dee, NY)

2008-07-23T07:21:00.000-07:00

Masters of None, 2006, vidéo

I See You, Man, 2008, vidéo

All Together Now, 2008, vidéo

This new body of work, which unites the spontaneous with the tightly scored, continues to develop a performative strategy that combines forethought, action, and acute attention to the present moment. Here, the risk-taking, vulnerability, and fearlessness which have customarily played a central role in Dodge and Kahn's practice constitute an urgent appeal to reinvigorate our sense of agency as citizens. I See You, Man takes place on a cold and foggy beach in California and features the character Lois (Let the Good Times Roll) as she scouts a beach location with Peter the cameraman, ruminating on the physical and psychological detritus they discover along the way. A one-take revelation in improvisation, the video skirts a line between found footage documentary and an exposé on process, revealing the complexities, triumphs and fractures of communication. Masters of None and the epic All Together Now mark Dodge and Kahn's departure from the dialogue driven, narrative nature of their earlier work. Ambient and textured, Masters of None captures the domestic life of a hooded tribe whose mundane activities coexist with the surreal. All Together Now presents a more complex universe set in a post-apocalyptic moment hauntingly close to the present. The twenty-six minute video, with a richly layered soundtrack, follows various "clans" as they forage for resources, develop interdependent relationships, and negotiate what's left of civilization. The threat of extinction looms alongside a sense of liberation from consumer trappings and corporate ownership, while an unanswerable question persists: how will we survive? In both pieces, facelessness and the absence of language push the artists' ongoing interrogation of communication, meaning and the possibly inextricable relationship between words, thoughts and forms. A deepening of their meditation on the collaborative process, Nature Demo is a partly choreographed, partly improvised piece in which the pair appears as an amateur film team attempting to make a "How-To" video about post-civilized life, but without any of the real skills needed for the task. Their methodical journey hovers between document and orchestrated farce as it poses questions about the average citizen's claim to competency in an unregulated landscape.

Amoreen Armetta:
“You’re not saying humans are bad, you’re saying things go wrong, right?” Stanya Kahn says to the cameraman (Harry Dodge) at one point during the Los Angeles–based duo’s video I See You, Man, 2008. Kahn draws out the sentence so one expects that it, too, will be punctuated with a man. The peripatetic camera, its path as winding as Kahn’s improvised monologue, follows her goofy jaunt along the beach and into and out of the ocean. Dodge and Kahn have wooed audiences since 2004 with this kind of idiosyncratic storytelling, which hinges on Kahn’s sharp comic timing. Here, the duo also stretch into new territory; two of the four new pieces on view completely eschew language. All Together Now, 2008—titled after the Beatles song—is their most ambitious work to date. Apparently set in a postapocalyptic near future, it features several tribes wearing color-coded hoods, most of which bear comically crude faces delineated by tape or marker. They gather supplies, forage for food and water, make out, cook, and enthusiastically watch one another on surveillance cameras, while an unmasked contingent is staked out in a grubby modernist hotel room. The editing and sound track here are also fractured; funny bursts of pop songs are interspersed with ambient noise and backward-running audio loops. A touch of Yellow Submarine–style loopiness prevents this from being a bleak vision. The new society Dodge and Kahn envision offers the possibility of interdependence, resourcefulness, new family structures, and modes of emotional expression in the midst of dwindling resources. Human beings aren’t bad, they seem to suggest, but things have definitely gone wrong.

Howard Halle:
An artist duo puts the id in idiocracy.
I’d missed Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn’s debut at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in 2006, which is why the work of this Los Angeles–based duo was such a surprise to me at this year’s Whitney Biennial. In a show that was otherwise meh, their video, a sort of lo-fi tour de horizon of L.A. titled Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out, was a true standout. In it, Dodge and Kahn excavated the psychological terrain beneath Tinseltown’s urban landscape and found, not surprisingly, that the place was a psychotic mess. Judging by their latest exhibition, so is the rest of the country. Dodge and Kahn offer up a quartet of videos, three of which (I See You Man, Nature Demo and 2006’s Masters of None) run around ten minutes long; the show’s centerpiece, All Together Now, clocks in at just under 27 minutes. Taken together, the pieces are as insightful a look at Bush’s America as anything I’ve seen in the past eight years. Not that the works are overtly political: They’re too surreal and caught up in their own nuttiness for that. But in its own way each paints a portrait of a body politic that’s all but brain-dead—if not completely headless. In Masters of None and All Together Now, this last punch line is telegraphed quite literally, as both offer images of groups of people wearing hoods over their noggins like hostages in a Hezbollah video, or prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Dodge and Kahn take the irony that both sides of the War on Terror have adopted this device, and leverage it into a symbol for the post-9/11 state of mind—which, as they apparently see it, is a tabula rasa, as if the shock wave of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers wiped away all critical thought in the home of the brave. Masters of None focuses on what’s evidently a suburban family wearing orange jumpsuits and bright pink sacks over their heads, each with a different, crudely drawn expression, from happy face to sad. They do everyday things, like squirting each other with hoses in the backyard, or mashing food into their “mouths” while watching a python devour its prey on television. At one point, a female member of the clan leads everyone in a game of charades. None of the others get the clues she’s signalling, and soon, her frustration grows until she finally collapses on the floor dead (we know this because after a quick edit, her cartoon eyes become Xs). She’s then carried outside and solemnly buried under a pile of leaves. This narrative, if you can call it that, is conveyed wordlessly; the soundtrack is filled with mumbles and grunts and voices distorted electronically beyond all recognition. The far more elliptical All Together Now is similarly “silent”: It begins with Kahn at the scene of what we can only presume is murder, since she’s covered in gore; as the video concludes, she’s naked in a pond, scrubbing blood off her bruised body. In between, her character takes a long strange trip that might be in flashback—or not. Once again we see a family, or maybe it’s two families, it’s hard to tell. One group, relaxing at what seems to be a spa, is covered in grime and dressed in matching purple pants and shirts (like Kahn, in fact). The other group seems to be in an unfinished basement or attic; they wear hoods and busy themselves, filling small sacks with dirt, or breaking up furniture or checking surveillance imagery on a laptop. These activities seem pointless and nefarious in equal measure: Imagine the Three Stooges in a bomb factory, or members of Heaven’s Gate running a supremely inept bed and breakfast. Kahn drifts in and out of such scenes and others, including a clam bake at the beach with a pair of kids, and an afternoon of pulling weeds from an abandoned highway. Both point to a peculiar leitmotif that seems to occur in all of Dodge and Kahn’s work—the environment’s total indifference to man. This subtext becomes text in Nature Demo, which follows two would-be survivalists (Dodge and Kahn) as they bumble around the woods and natter endlessly about building a “windblock” (a word that gets repeated like a mantra), without ever managing to do so; the best they can come up with is a sad, site-specific driftwood sculpture. I See You Man features Kahn at ocean’s edge, dancing into the water while shouting “I see you man!” and “I’m going to vote for you!” before ending with “I feel like I found what I was looking for.” Would that we all had. But, as this work suggests, we’re permanently trapped in an imperial idiocracy. If you think real change is coming this November, this show just might disabuse you of that notion.

Fia Backström (White Columns, New York)

2008-07-11T07:43:00.001-07:00

That social space between speaking and meaning
Dear XYZ,
A preemptive war of evacuated words and unlawful combatants, it's more than we can take. Luring language reigns rampant and generic, while iconoclastic moves on the image abound. I can't smoke you out, because smoking indoors is not permitted. In with the good air out with the bad. This carpet of slipping senses, handy words to twist meanings for cunning and calculated usage - a visceral occupation of territory set up for US to inhabit. So Words, Don't Fail Me Now!
These are the bankrupt words of the undermined rhetoric no longer yours:
a for agency
f for freedom
r for resistance
exceptions made for CO-rporations or your CO-operative spirit turning them into secret mantras for soulful enlightenment or entertainment - a for Parisian model agence or f as in F U Calvin Klein far out signification. r as in rotten rhubarb pie, somehow anti-slogans enters the ads. Language development from think tank to focus group, market research into politics, finding selling words for a movement of merchan-dizing ideas. Resonating words which obscure the issue; ethnic marketing as site specificity, then criticality, a little whipping à la S/M... the right name is everything for enhancing policy sales. Rhetoric matters!
Looking for CO-ntemporary text (caption, tagline, keyword) in this list-headlines culture. A tailored message for you and you and you, that iconic place in your heart. The critical review, our only public chance to interact with the system in a registered way, a bit like voting in a democracy. Circular logic of the art text, for what is independent discourse if we are all part of one literary community... exchange as in affirmative description. Endless lists of names decorating the ubiquitous ads in the Art magazines, apparently you can build mystery as long as you believe in the story. The axis of art: t$xt–cli$nt–obj$ct. What is at stake, if anything at all? It is not an easy task to grasp a frontier. So don't forget sometimes words are more than enough, or not sufficient at all.
The illusory split between the siamese twins image-logo and text-slogan, a CO-dependant duality dancing the dung around. Currently China totals 85 million illiterate people, mark my words! but then again who needs ABC for logo reading or to visualize a tag line. The collapse of letters with visual culture; to read to think to see... decorative conceptualism turned plain CO-mmercial jargon. A CO-mmunist shared paper situation and a marketplace consumer experience, a public forum, a piazza - a poetry club. A testing ground for language and words that work. A place for reading gone awry, that inter-public feeling beyond ideology and inundating data flow. Writing a grey zone of who is what, where in which position; sliding articulation for another formation shift. A CO-authored environment, an evolving letter, a background where language's communal bead of labored meaning is continually altered. A public discussion and a personal address of merging tongues so that Poetry must be made by everyone or not be made at all.
Walking billboards and word peddlers! A ripped chain of signification for a shifted audience interpretation. I am. I war I write, my life, I misunderstand therefore I am, to Mean, to Do, to Use, to Score, chart upon chart, value more value. A worthless rupture, without meaning or speed, an un-sanitary structure where I and I together make mass of confusion and eruption. For you, for now, for ever!
Yours truly,
xo Fia

The project continues Backström’s ongoing investigations into “corporate address and political rhetoric.” The installation – which acts as a counter-point to radical modernist proposals such as El Lissitzky's “pressa” exhibitions and Herbert Bayer's Road to Victory - is an environment without any "images" that takes the form of a discussion club: a space to be socialized through informal and formal meetings, gatherings and readings. Traces of these conversations, either in the form of audio recordings or written transcripts will subsequently be posted into the space. The installation includes Backström’s own works and texts (including wall paper designs), alongside works and texts of other artists and writers (including Julieta Aranda, Julie Ault, Roe Ethridge, Claire Fontaine, Wade Guyton, Matt Keegan, Sister Corita Kent, Jutta Koether, Sean Landers, Olivier Mosset, Bob Nickas, Jack Pierson, Seth Price, and Alexandre Singh amongst others) as well as “found” objects such as the traveling frame for a Jasper Johns painting or the Sculpture’s Center’s “donor panel.” The project will culminate after the exhibition’s closing with a six hour “Poetry Club” – beginning at midnight – with readings from participating artists and guests.

Roberta Smith:
Fia Backstrom, a New York-based Swedish artist known for producing exhibitions, events, posters, magazine ads and conversations mostly as art, or close to it, is having her most substantial solo show in New York to date. Like many artists, Ms. Backstrom favors collage. As with Barbara Kruger and Lawrence Weiner, her main subject and material is language, which she reconfigures and layers together in ways that collapse mental, social and aesthetic notions of space. At White Columns she layers most of the walls with printed matter of some kind, either designed or appropriated, including wallpaper using the words of Ralph Nader or clusters of keywords from the image-retrieval system at Getty Pictures. There are wry letters and statements from the artist — who is adept at conflating linguistic conventions — as well as fresh printouts of conversations that Ms. Backstrom is having in and about the show itself. “Tablecloths for Commercial Galleries” is paper printed with geometric designs using the names of Chelsea galleries and available on rolls like butcher’s paper. Deviations from art-world norms dominate one wall: multiple copies of a Frieze magazine review by the artist Sean Landers of his own work, and unusually clever gallery press releases, mostly for hip group shows. A thoughtful review of one show is appropriated by the artist Jesse Ash and handsomely reprinted and framed. This wall is topped off by an incoherent word painting by Mr. Landers titled “Shut Up and Paint.” Ms. Backstrom has also appropriated works by Sister Corita Kent, Wade Guyton, Olivier Mosset and Roe Etheridge for the occasion; they use language or involve forms that can be construed as letters. A series of sculptures reminiscent of Manfred Pernice provide basic punctuation. Ms. Backstrom reveals the prison house of language in which we all exist to be a soft, inescapable web, ever available for repurposing and revelation.

Joshua Mack:
Fia Backström’s texts and performances employ mind-bending—and sometimes mind-numbing—conceptual conceits and word associations to critique the glut of information that floods our daily lives. Her exhibition at White Columns is replete with dense if often witty writings that skewer such usual targets as fashion, art criticism and advertising. Along with her own pieces, Backström includes and contextualizes works by artists like Roe Etheridge, Seth Price and Wade Guyton—all of whom likewise explore the slippery relationship of image and meaning. An “open letter” at the entrance cites the prevalence of “walking billboards and word peddlers.” A glass panel nearby juxtaposes the names of football players with those of New York Times writers and editors; another lists donors to Queens’ SculptureCenter. Taken together, they seem to suggest that art, news and big-league sports are all equally scripted forms of entertainment. But the artist is interested in more than just exposing the manipulation of information: She’s also intent on creating a sort of mental space for independent thinking. Her installation, equipped with stools and tables of her own design, functions as a reading room while her press release promises planned formal discussions. What she’s encouraging is a form of social interaction beyond the commercially determined exchanges created by marketing. Solo viewing, then, is a bit beside the point. Leaving aside, for the moment, the obviousness of including names like Guyton and Price, Backström’s proposed public programs should add a touch of fun to a show that can sometimes seem overdetermined, albeit completely dead on.

Crop Rotation (Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY)

2008-07-11T06:56:00.000-07:00

Neil Campbell. Bloodline, 2007. Acrylic on wall

Ferdinand Kriwet. Rundscheiben, 1960–63 Offset print, 10-parts

Marc Bijl. Urban Modernism (Lozenge with 4 lines and grey) Stenciled and borrowed , just to survive, 2007. Stencil and spraypaint graffiti

Commissariat: Clarissa Dalrymple
Avec Marc Bijl, Neil Campbell, Jeroen Jongeleen, KRIWET, Jochen Lempert, Marlo Pascual, Jeffrey Wells

Within the work of each artist in this group show is an impetus toward constantly reusable procedures, which becomes a contained art practice in and of itself. Marc Bijl, Jeroen Jongeleen, and Neil Campbell make much of their work directly onto the wall. Bijl and Jongeleen also make constructions from prosaic material such as wood and plaster board or in the case of Jongeleen transferring a wall work onto canvas. Marlo Pascual makes tableaux from retrieved photographs, re-assigning form and role to selected images. Ferdinand Kriwet traduces television events such as the 1974 election in America and the first moon walk. He uses graphic process in the composition of discrete works. Jochen Lempert is a zoologist. In the banks of photographs exhibited there is an intense focus on the birds and animals combined. Jeffrey Wells's examination of sensory perception is constantly re-employed throughout his art practice. In this case the nature of a solid corner is betrayed with a video of laser light.

Ken Johnson:
Organized by the independent curator Clarissa Dalrymple, “Crop Rotation” is perplexing, but theatrically engaging. The words “walk” and “talk” printed in yellow on black on a length of plastic stuck to the floor — a piece first made in 1970 by Ferdinand Kriwet — lead to a room where a rickety wooden structure by Marc Bijl holds up three horizontal mirrors reflecting words spray-painted in reverse on the wall. They read, “The construction of life is at present in the power of facts.” In a corner of the main gallery two enormous black circles painted on each wall by Neil Campbell give the momentarily thrilling illusion of openings into infinite space. But a poetic tableau by Marlo Pascual involving old photographs under glass, a seashell, a large rock, electric lights, an antique telephone and a much enlarged page from Walker Percy’s novel “The Moviegoer” is portentously heavy-handed. Don’t miss Jeffrey Wells’s video projection of an almost invisible line wavering in one corner of the gallery or Mr. Kriwet’s video montage of television clips from the 1972 presidential race between Richard M. Nixon and George McGovern.

Standard Sizes (Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York)

2008-07-10T07:56:00.000-07:00

Matt Sheridan Smith, Untitled, 2006, Newspapers

commissariat: João Ribas
Avec Ricci Albenda, Kjell Bjorgeengen, Kerstin Brätsch, Martin Creed, Liz Deschenes, Morgan Fisher, Rachel Harrison, Imi Knoebel, Camilla Low, Allan McCollum, Brian OíConnell, Blinky Palermo, Richard Pettibone, Josh Smith, Matt Sheridan Smith, Sturtevant

Standard Sizes surveys a diverse group of artists over several generations whose work resists the notion of art as the product of an expressive subject - the radically individuated self largely equated with the figure of the artist. In place of this vestige of Renaissance self-fashioning and the affectations of Romanticism, the exhibition presents works that look to standards and formal procedures to displace the idea of expressive subjectivity as the domain of art. If the figure of the visionary artist was once emblematic of the emancipatory idea of the 'individual', in a society where it had not yet fully emerged, this notion is deradicalized by the democratization of subjective expression today. As a result of this abiding 'selfness,' it seems more pressing to understand the structures and standards built into the parameters of ëexpressioní and the production of meaning itself. By foregrounding an effect, rather than the affect, of meaning, Standard Sizes looks to practices that solicit content from standards or procedural form, cede subjective control through generative systems, or that elicit meaning from iteration, standardization, or repetition. Ranging from work based on standard formats and materials, to the rhetorical use of tropes such as the expressive brushstroke, the works in the exhibition looks to the implicit, if now obscured, values and norms present in standardized form. This is to evince how frames dictate content, how the values assimilated in standards belie whose feet and fingers are measured to arrive at consensus, and to discover meaning by way of slippages in the process of standardization. Standard Sizes takes its departure from Pierre Menard's line-by-line rewriting of Don Quixote; the standardization of canvas sizes in the French Academy; the Kuleshov effectís suggestion of affect from juxtaposition; Duchamp's 3 Standard Stoppages; CMYK color; imperial units of measurement; lorem ipsum text, based on a dark passage from Cicero; standard paper sizes; modernism as a rhetorical vernacular; stochastic music and seriality; cinematic aspect ratios; T.S. Eliotís poetics of 'impersonality'; generative algorithms; as well as the possibility of meaning in the difference produced by repetition.

T.J. Carlin:
As the discrepancy grows between the exponential amount of information in the world (including art) and our ability to absorb it, it’s become necessary to invent new ways of framing ideas and considering them afresh. “Standard Sizes,” organized by João Ribas, does just that. Billed as a group show of works that avoid personal expression, the exhibition contextualizes the pieces in such a way that almost all of them exert an undeniable pull. As the title suggests, the 16 artists here have limited themselves in one way or another by a process of standardization. The majority of the works are overwhelmingly formal, and some of them would be unremarkable on their own, were it not for a setting that makes them shimmer with meaning. Matt Sheridan Smith’s rather flatly executed geometric canvases, for example, take their form from technical paper sizes but also nod to Josef Albers’s system of color. They have a particularly elegant (and art-historical) conversation with Josh Smith’s small works across the room, which look like oil palettes mounted on the wall. Kerstin Brätsch’s copper shelf units are laden with photocopied booklets featuring pictures of vacation getaways, reproduced in various colors. Color is key to many of the contributions, which could be why you might find yourself scrutinizing these groupings for relationships. “Standard Sizes” offers a mash-up of processes stripped bare while maintaining the residue of human experience, making the objects in it seem refreshing.

Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns? (Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York)

2008-07-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

commissariat: Urs Fischer et Gavin Brown

Jerry Saltz:
Two Coats of Painting
Tony Shafrazi, the man who tagged Guernica, tries another way of superimposing new art and old.
'Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?” is an early contender for Gallery Group Show of the Year. It has 22 artists—or 25, if you count those on view in reproduction. But really it has no artists at all. The show centers on a collaboration by the two impresario-organizers, gallerist Gavin Brown and artist Urs Fischer. It is all about memory, morals, redemption, tribal loyalty, and railing against cozy cliché. One of its causes can be traced to February 28, 1974, the infamous day when Tony Shafrazi, a 30-year-old Iranian-born artist, entered the Museum of Modern Art, yelled, “Call the curator. I am an artist,” and spray-painted KILL LIES ALL in red letters across Picasso’s Guernica. I’d always assumed Shafrazi meant to paint “All Lies Kill.” However, he recently told me he wrote exactly what he wanted to write, and that it was meant to be read in “a Finnegans Wake way” so that it said something whichever way you read it. (It’s still gibberish to me. Whatever.) Asked about it later, Shafrazi stated he wanted to bring Guernica “absolutely up to date, to retrieve it from art history and give it life.” Regardless, the painting had a protective coating, was cleaned soon after, and now hangs at the Reina Sofía in Madrid. Shafrazi was arrested, charged with “criminal mischief,” and released on $1,000 bail. The story gets weirder from there. Around 1980, Shafrazi opened a Soho gallery and began exhibiting artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat—who also graffitied over things. Shafrazi’s gallery became a hot spot. Or so I heard: My inner Church Lady got the best of me, and, except for occasional shows, I smugly boycotted Shafrazi’s gallery for the next two decades. By the time my moralism calmed down and I started going again, the gallery was only a shadow if its former self. These days, Shafrazi isn’t in the limelight so much. No one would have expected to see this new show in this gallery. He’s known mainly as a dealer of secondary art and blue-chip artists, but “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?” changes that, at least temporarily. Shafrazi claims, “I put my life in their hands.” Gavin Brown puts it this way: Shafrazi’s previous show had been up for months, and “there needed to be an intervention.” The intervention they came up with produces a discombobulating retinal wallop. Fischer, the living master of visual disorientation, had the previous four-person exhibition photographed, including the ceiling and the guards. These images were reproduced in perfect one-to-one scale and wallpapered into the gallery, even on the ceiling, in an exact replica of itself. Then a new show was hung atop the old. Initially, you don’t know what you’re seeing. Everything looks as if it’s on top of everything else, an optical overload. It’s uncanny. There’s a Picabia on top of a Donald Baechler, Francis Bacon atop Kenny Scharf, a Lawrence Weiner overlapping a Jean-Michel Basquiat. Lily van der Stokker has painted over graffiti painters, a Cady Noland leans on a Haring, a real Haring hangs on top of a photographed one. Some juxtapositions are nasty. Sue Williams’s man slapping a woman while calling her “stupid cunt” is next to Richard Prince’s rephotographing of the naked preteen Brooke Shields; Cindy Sherman’s picture of vomit is placed in the mouth of a Scharf. Other juxtapositions read like homage: Rob Pruitt’s eternally burning lighter in front of a John Chamberlain sculpture. Knitting this whole phantasmagoria together is a fantastic smudged white carpet by Rudolf Stingel. “Who’s Afraid” is like some mad replicating vision machine, or a walk-in Louise Lawler. The ghosts of shows past have their way with the present; the art of now elbows aside the art of “then.” “Who’s Afraid” allows you to optically experience how every work of art is in dialogue with, building on, reacting to, or fighting against every other work of art ever made. The gallery says that the show “demonstrates how each work of art has many selves hidden within, and how forces outside the frame constantly … limit a work’s interpretation.” Brown and Fischer suggest that the purposeful white cube of the modern art gallery is also a curse, that it neutralizes art and our thinking about it. Some visitors have called this show adolescent and self-serving. Time Out’s Howard Halle called it “deeply cynical.” But cynicism can also be a creative force. “Who’s Afraid” isn’t insincere and misanthropic. True, the organizers are criticizing the insider art world from as deep inside the belly of the beast as possible. Everything here is A-list. Yet “Who’s Afraid” is a labor of love and a rebel yell. It communes with artistic ancestors and resurrects art no longer in fashion. Insularity notwithstanding, Brown and Fischer want to set art free from the context of the white box. Successful or not, something freeing did happen the night of the opening. It was Shafrazi’s birthday. At the large after-party, Brown and Fischer presented him with a five-foot-long cake decorated with a perfect rendition of Guernica. Brown climbed atop a table and, amid much yelling, toasted Shafrazi. He then thrust a cake decorator filled with red icing into Shafrazi’s hands. As the crowd screamed, Brown implored, “Write, Tony! Write!” Shafrazi started moving the device over the cake. Slowly he wrote the words I AM SORRY. Time stood still. It was like an angel of redemption had entered the room to take away Shafrazi’s guilt. The room went silent. I was shocked. Then, Shafrazi began writing again. He wrote one more word: not! It was like the Sopranos finale. Just as you thought everything was going to change, everything only became more of what it already was.

Roberta Smith:
When Artworks Collide
“Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?,” a group show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in Chelsea, is the latest proof that you don’t have to be a museum to shake things up. It was organized by Gavin Brown, who has a downtown gallery of his own, and Urs Fischer, a Swiss artist he represents. Demonically aerobic for brain and eye, the show conflates two exhibitions and several different times, styles, art markets and notions of transgression. Highly site specific, it may also be one of the last words in appropriation art, institutional critique and artistic intervention, not to mention postmodern photography and, especially, wallpaper. The histories entwined here begin with Mr. Shafrazi, an infamous one-hit-wonder graffiti artist and longtime graffiti art dealer. In 1974 he spray-painted, in red, the words “Kill Lies All” on Picasso’s “Guernica,” then at the Museum of Modern Art (he meant to write “All Lies Kill”). By 1982 he had a SoHo gallery known for showing graffiti-related artists like Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Donald Baechler. In 2004 Mr. Shafrazi relocated to an austere second-floor gallery in Chelsea, putting up long-running shows and concentrating mostly on the resale market: not only the graffitists but also blue-chip works by Picasso, Picabia and Francis Bacon. In October he reprised his glory days with “Four Friends,” an echt-’80s exhibition of paintings and a few sculptures by Haring, Basquiat, Mr. Scharf and Mr. Baechler. Mr. Brown and Mr. Fischer had been lobbying Mr. Shafrazi to let them organize a show at his gallery, and “Four Friends” only spurred their determination. “The show had been up for six months,” Mr. Brown said. “There needed to be an intervention.” About six weeks ago Mr. Shafrazi finally agreed; Mr. Brown and Mr. Fischer went to work. The resulting exhibition is an adventure in juxtaposition and visual argumentation; either way it’s a far cry from the quiet contemplation of isolated art objects. Nothing escapes unimplicated or unmanipulated, least of all the show’s announcement: a picture of Mr. Shafrazi being arrested at MoMA in 1974. You suspect that curatorial limits will be tested even before you ascend the gallery’s broad concrete staircase. Water is cascading down half of it like a mountain stream in April. The work, “Viagra Falls,” by Rob Pruitt, is sophomorically titled but noisily invigorating. But the dominant fact, stage-setter and to some extent gimmick of the show is Mr. Fischer’s wraparound wallpaper extravaganza. It continues his penchant for radically altering art spaces by knocking holes in large walls (as he did for the 2006 Whitney Biennial) and in floors (as he did last winter at Mr. Brown’s Greenwich Street gallery, creating a 10-foot-deep wall-to-wall pit that was part earthwork, part bomb crater). What he has done at Shafrazi is much gentler and far more pervasive; it unsettles perception by subtly confusing original and copy. To begin, Mr. Fischer had every square inch of the “Four Friends” show photographed: not only paintings, frames and their shadows, but also blank walls, windows, ceilings, views through various doorways and the gallery’s two guards. He then converted the images into trompe l’oeil wallpaper that, meticulously applied, lines the gallery with a same-size simulacrum of itself, which enables “Four Friends” to stay in place while a second show is installed on top of it. All this is a lot less obvious than it sounds. The oeil is really tromped in a veritable echo chamber of stylistic and generational clashes: real artworks “deface” real-looking copies of other works, evoking Mr. Shafrazi’s transgression against “Guernica.” In the first gallery, for example, Malcolm Morley’s 1976 “Age of Catastrophe” — a vibrant blue painting of a mangled airliner and colliding ships that is a precursor to both 1980s Neo-Expressionism and appropriation art — hangs atop a Haring graffiti canvas of purple and green figures on yellow. The Haring is only an image on the wallpaper, but it’s a sharp, convincing one. A Picabia pulp-fiction portrait of a woman is affixed to a Baechler depicting an old-fashioned man in a top hat. A gray-on-gray Bacon portrait is atop the wallpaper copy of a bright Scharf painting, which is also partly draped by a pink dripping blob. This is actually painted directly on the wallpaper by the Dutch artist Lily van der Stokker. The Bacon has some of the Scharf’s cartoonishness, but its Expressionism also counters the kitschy cool of the Picabia, which in turn presages the Morley. Finally, a thin bundle of wood studs — a sculpture by the German maverick Georg Herold — leans against a wall that is bare except for two trompe l’oeil wood wall mounts. A painting was removed from the “Four Friends” show before the photographer arrived. In the second gallery, an enormous wallpaper Basquiat triptych, “Gastruck” (1984), is seemingly stamped with a piquant word piece by Lawrence Weiner — the phrase “As Long as It Lasts” — in big letters of a bright red that matches the fiery hues of the burning truck. On other walls a more classically photorealist painting by Mr. Morley, as well as works by Christopher Wool, Richard Prince, Sue Williams, Mike Bidlo, Robert Ryman, Gilbert & George, Cindy Sherman, Cady Noland and Sarah Lucas, argue among themselves and also with the “Four Friends” paintings. Topics include appropriation, high and low, art and history, materials and abstraction. Ms. Van der Stokker returns in the third gallery, swamping especially handsome efforts by the four friends in what appear to be bright blue waves: perhaps the 1980s art market, or our present one, going under. Other than the guards standing next to their own images, this room contains the only matchup of art and double: a real Keith Haring white-on-black subway drawing, cut from its original site and framed under glass, on top of two similar Harings (which also include the reflection of the Baechler across the way). In a little space where even the windows, brick walls and view of the stairs are actually wallpaper, a Jeff Koons painted wood sculpture of flowers from 1991 hangs like a big corsage on a 1982 Scharf of Fred and Wilma Flintstone. The summary of found-object sculpture that began with Mr. Herold’s work in the first gallery continues — on the show’s smudged wall-to-wall carpet piece by Rudolf Stingel — in works by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Robert Morris and John Chamberlain. The show might be seen as concluding with Mr. Pruitt’s “Eternal Bic,” a perpetually burning cigarette lighter that answers the elemental waterworks at the show’s start with fire. There is a refreshing fearlessness to this exhibition, which takes its title from a story that Mr. Shafrazi told Mr. Brown and Mr. Fischer: that the original title of Barnett Newman’s four primary-colored abstractions, “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?,” was “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?” The kicker — that Mr. Johns objected — is probably apocryphal. Objections are overruled in this show. The network of references it unleashes defies any coherent visual or interpretive cartography, and it is pleasantly impossible to know which of them are on purpose, which are dumb luck and which are simply your own reading. It can’t be by chance, for example, that Mr. Prince’s “Spiritual America” (1983) — a photograph of a photograph of an under-age, overly sexy Brooke Shields — and “Dessert” (1990), an acidly feminist early painting by Ms. Williams, share a wallpaper Basquiat like two strangers on a beach blanket. With their play of copies and originals, Mr. Brown and Mr. Fischer might mean to imply the triumph of appropriation art over 1980s painting. But then you realize that quite a bit of the visual firepower is coming from the works in, not on, the wallpaper. On top of the exhibition’s view of art as a continuing form of argument is a visceral reminder that art history’s books are never closed.

Jimmy Robert (CAC Brétigny)

2008-06-12T07:31:00.000-07:00

Sans titre, 2005. Mixed media. 20 x 45 x 60 cm

Sans titre, 2008. 1,58 x 1,12 m. Jet d’encre sur papier Arche. Papier scotch A3

Légèrement Manipulés
Jimmy Robert travaille indifféremment la photographie, la performance ou le film, essayant de créer une conversation entre les pièces individuelles mais aussi les utilisant comme des entités indépendantes. Ses installations composées de photos, de collages et d'éléments sculpturaux évoquent l'instabilité de la représentation via la porosité des images, les dynamiques des surfaces créant des images pluridimensionnelles. Dans ses films, l'artiste explore l'idée de juxtaposition et de performativité des matériaux à travers l'utilisation de proches et leur aliénation dans un espace donné. Avec ses performances, l'artiste explore plus directement l'idée du corps comme matériau, ajoutant intentionnellement des couches pour mettre en avant la complexité de la lecture des images. L'intertextualité ou le potentiel des références joue un rôle important dans son travail, la narrativité du contenu et la narrativité de la forme sont ainsi toujours en dialogue que ce soit dans une oeuvre indépendante ou lorsque des oeuvres sont juxtaposées. L'artiste explique ainsi sa démarche: « Mon travail gravite autour de l'espace entre la matérialité et la représentation allant de la photographie au film et à la performance. Il questionne mon insatisfaction à l’égard de l'image objet. J'essaye de regarder l'image comme un objet et par conséquent d’envisager sa relation au corps. A partir de là, ma recherche s'oeuvre sur l'idée de désir et d'image, mais aussi sur la dynamique des surfaces. J'essaye d'activer la porosité de différents supports identifiés comme la littérature et le cinéma, pour aller au-delà de la page ou de l'écran en intégrant l'image ou en incarnant le texte; c'est de toute manière dans la lignée des ‘Correspondances’ Baudelairienne ou d’une synesthésie. En sublimant le désir, j'établis une relation entre tactilité et visualité. Ces dernières années, je me suis très précisément intéressé à Marguerite Duras et sa relation à l'écriture, aux films ainsi qu’à son traitement de la répétition et de la condensation de l'histoire d'amour absolu qu'elle enlève pratiquement du texte et donne comme un souvenir universel à récrire au lecteur/spectateur, amenant l'histoire vers de nouveaux lieux de récit. Sa façon de traduire l’expérience de la vie en une représentation tout autant que la manière dont elle soutient, restitue le désir et la mémoire dans ses thèmes et parallèlement dans la forme, sont constitutifs de ma pratique. Etant moi-même des Antilles françaises, ayant été amené en France, ayant vécu à Londres et en Hollande et maintenant installé à Bruxelles, la notion d'espace, en rapport à l'absence et à l'aliénation, est une problématique qui questionne constamment mon travail, où les doutes et la fragmentation sont moteurs. J'examine la relation entre l'image et le corps sous la forme d’une recherche autour du corps et sa redondance à l'égard de différents médias, en produisant des performances, performances pour la vidéo ou pour des films ; j'explore l'échec des processus d'identification, leur limite, mais aussi, par la productivité, la possibilité de leur constante réinscription dans une signification nouvelle et différente. »

Joanna Fiduccia:
Jimmy Robert’s artworks are liable to attract a whole range of catchall terms for contemporary art: They are performative, yet object-based; cinematic, yet haptic. In this exhibition, ink-jet prints, film and video, MDF boards, and A4-size sheets of white paper manage to make all these descriptors strangely happy consorts. Boards and blank sheets divide and chart the space, functioning not only as makeshift walls and supports but also as compositional elements in their own right. But rather than obscure or modify the standardized format of these elements, Robert embraces their standardization in all its banal glory. In one work, an ink-jet print of a forlorn bedside table is thumbtacked to the wall, partially obscured by a quintet of blank A4s. Other sheets slump together at the floorboard, one printed with a waggish narrative fragment that, as if in the windfall of all this paper, has lost the rest of its tale. By creasing and furling these sheets and distributing their silhouettes throughout the show, Robert uses the blank page, and the ink-jet technology associated with it, to both exploit subtle textures and thwart narrative completion. Such gestures of concealment are like an elegant striptease: in collages tucked behind MDF panels, in a photo portrait partly covered with a twisted page that references the chiffon bodice of Sargent’s Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (a postcard of the nineteenth-century painting rests beside it), or in an undulating torso viewed through a doorway in the film Saynètes, 2004. But in his most stirring works, elusion can also occur in the illusion of full disclosure. Robert’s collages, scanned and reproduced on large posters, seem to crackle with graphic precision, every arabesque of tape precisely affixed behind the inviolable surface of digital technology—masquerading, almost successfully, as textured surfaces. But this nearly pornographic precision is less the byproduct of any technological fixation than an effort to eke delicacy out of standardized, indelicate modes of reproduction. Tacked up with an entomologist’s self-conscious care, these reproductions put forth rare pleasures.

Stuart Bailey & David Reinfurt

2008-06-04T09:20:00.000-07:00

Entrée du workshop "juste à temps" et de la librairie occasionnelle Dexter Sinister au 38 Ludlow Street dans le quartier Lower East Side de New York

Blake Rayne (Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York)

2008-06-02T05:36:00.000-07:00

Untitled, 2008, 16mm anamorphic film by Megan Fraser, Tour d’Ombres, 2007, Bell Howell projector, looper, laserjet print on 8 ½ x 11 inch paper

Blake Rayne’s exhibition revolves around a number of paintings, each of which results from a standard operation of construction. Rayne unfolds, primes, folds and directs an aerosol spray of pigment onto a roll of linen from which sections are then chosen, sewn and cropped into a consistent scale. Rayne’s paintings, which situate themselves between a history of reflexive material procedures and structures of linguistic description, produce the canvas as a site of conflict between an impossible autonomy and a dispersed referentiality. If Rayne doubles the readymade weave of his canvas in a textile patterning, one whose folding and merging he chromatically designates, then these paintings are also textualized as scripts of production: displacing material process into the flat, graphic space of linguistic signs. (Indeed, one might be forgiven for perceiving the spatial structure of distorted majuscules as a result of the folding process through which the paintings are produced.)
Displayed alongside these canvases are the crates in which they were shipped. The latter, hung on the walls along side their supposed content, are cast as the gestural co-presence of painting’s movement from studio, to display, to storage. During the exhibition Rayne will extend the weft which binds his particular type of textile/textual processes, reaching from the material sign of “painting” to yet another container: the gallery will be closed for a set duration of the exhibition, to be re-opened for its final four weeks.
The logic of painterly abstraction which Rayne deploys, thus extended into a gesture of folding – of closing and re-opening – the gallery, weaves container and contained in an imbricated and inextricable relationship: one structuring the other according to the un-sutured fabric of cultural abstraction. Neighborhood gentrification, that which envelopes the gallery as a specific sort of place in a specific time, could be a potentially enfolded element, its cycles and un-even developments closing and opening to certain classes of people and certain types of investment. Far from neutrally designating these cycles, Rayne claims the title of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, as an emblematic textual element, inscribing a stance onto canvas positioned to one side of the line demarcated by his folds. Rayne describes the novel as illustrating “a moment at which a certain class reflexively discovers the hollowness of the conventions and means of self-representation upon which it is founded, just at the moment before the depression,” and this seems topical enough with Bear Sterns throwing-in the devalued chips that they had so recklessly invested in the sub-prime mortgage debacle. It is that other side, relative to but definitely not paradise, which appears in Rayne’s work as the breakdown of historical projects of painterly abstraction. But this reiteration of breakdown comes latent with new conditions for work to be done, ones which Rayne suggests urgently need to be unfolded.

Jerry Saltz:
Blake Rayne’s looming new show is very full and very good. The large-scale paintings look like Pattern & Decoration crossed with fabric design, geometric abstraction, and Russian folk art. Near the paintings—which are hung cheek-by-jowl, salon style—are dark-brown wooden rectangles. At first these come off as comments on the wood-paneled rooms of the gilded age and seem to echo the rampant gentrification of the Lower East Side. They turn out to be packing crates for the paintings. This turns the actual artworks into something like transient or displaced visitors—personalities that you connect to. This is Rayne’s clearest, most optically satisfying show in some time.

Anne Doran:
For theoretically inclined painter Blake Rayne, self-reflexivity is something of a contact sport. In this lucid and lively show, Rayne puts painting up against two heavyweight Conceptualist strategies: process art as practiced by such artists as Robert Ryman, and the institutional critique of Daniel Buren and his successors. The canvases—produced, like Rayne’s earlier work, according to predetermined steps—have undeniable visual punch. Here, using a technique borrowed from Simon Hantaï (an artist much admired by Buren), Rayne folds pieces of primed linen, spray paints the exposed surfaces and cuts the material into strips, which are sewn together. The results, executed in muted ochres, purples and blue-greens, are reminiscent of typography, tribal textiles and early Ellsworth Kelly. Each painting is customized, sometimes with just a drip of paint, other times with high-modernist quotations—an Art Deco numeral five in one work, for example, references both Charles Demuth’s The Figure 5 in Gold and e.e. cummings’s Is 5. Rayne situates these paintings in an economic, cultural and temporal context by staining and hanging the work’s shipping crates like paneling, moving the gallery office to the center of the space and including a film from the previous exhibition here. The show’s most intriguing element is a vintage photograph depicting a bicycle retrofitted as a stationary machine for sharpening knives. Its message seems unmistakable: In repurposing painting to Conceptual ends, Rayne suspends the modernist ideal of forward progress, even as he creates the conditions in which new possibilities might unfold.

Holland Cotter:
The abstract paintings in this show, an important one for this impressive New York artist, were made with aerosol spray directed at folded, cut and stitched-together canvas. And the pictures are only part of a larger conceptual package that includes the display of the paintings' shipping containers and has involved closing the gallery for a week. Mr. Rayne's taking apart of art conventions is erudite, visually effective and of a piece: the installation looks like a cross between a paneled library and a spreading bruise.

Gedi Siboni (Greene Naftali Gallery, New York)

2008-05-19T07:42:00.000-07:00

The more it omits

Side show, slide show

Of equal strength

For the first and last day

Gedi Sibony utilizes a vocabulary of doors, curtains, carpet remnants, pipes, plastic, cardboard and foamcore--the basic supplies of both architectural construction and artwork storage and transportation. These raw materials operate as phenomenological staging grounds which are highly tuned to their surrounding architectural spaces--individual elements recast as provocations and indicators of the theatrical presence of the interior spaces in which they exist. They are installed within a spatial perceptual field that unlocks and dramatically heightens their psychological conditions while highlighting their formal qualities of texture, surface, scale, form, and reflectivity. Sibony's work exhibits a strong leaning towards poetic and even mystical or literary concerns, while at the same time employing the subtle spatial and linguistic logic and material appropriations first presented in post-minimal and conceptual art. But unlike, for example, Richard Serra's deployment of hard industrial materials, Sibony utilizes contemporary consumer-grade rudiments, more suited for "remodeling," which is precisely the register on which his work operates. Preferring an intellectual physicality to a purely conceptual approach, Sibony treats each installation as an unfolding and physically involving meta-narrative. Notions of presence and being both emerge and disappear throughout each exhibition with the viewer, the sculptures, and the space playing equal weight in its encompassing tableau. The material and immaterial logic of this theatre makes available Wittgensteinian insight into the relationship between objects, language and perception.

Karen Rosenberg:
Gedi Sibony’s sculptures, made of packing materials and architectural castoffs, are at the forefront of a popular genre of sculpture (see the fourth floor of the Whitney Biennial). Where his contemporaries emphasize roughness and fragmentation, however, Mr. Sibony finds harmony and affinity. In his first solo at Greene Naftali, the raw materiality of garbage bags, hollow-core doors and galvanized steel pipes is neutralized by the artist’s delicate touch and the gallery’s clean, light-filled space. Shades of “greige” (the decorator’s neutral of choice) dominate the main gallery, particularly in two works consisting primarily of carpet remnants. In several more intimate viewing rooms, Mr. Sibony exhibits doors and cardboard boxes adorned with bits of paper and tape and sections of Masonite and plexiglass modified with crude geometric cutouts. The works’ quirky titles and just-so placement can seem overly precious, as in “The Middle of the World,” a set of vertical blinds fanned out to form a kind of bird’s wing, and “Its Origins Justify Its Oranges,” a stretcherlike wooden frame illuminated by colored lights. Taken as a whole, the exhibition suggests some kind of narrative — perhaps that of a contractor who walked off the job to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy.

Anne Doran:
Gedi Sibony finds grace in the waste products—battered boxes, hollow-core doors, carpet remnants, packing material, broken blinds—of our entropic plenitude. Presented with little or no alteration, these banal objects hover between the chaste self-containment of Minimalist sculpture and the promiscuous appropriations of assemblage art, their most obvious antecedents being Robert Rauschenberg’s sublimely factual “Cardboards.” Sibony’s current exhibition emphasizes the interplay between individual works and their surroundings. The main gallery is dominated by two large pieces of industrial carpeting shown wrong side out, whose opposing fields of visual static seem to extend into the room. The first, a horizontal expanse of gray, has a piece cut out of one corner—a void that echoes a nearby column. The second, a sand-colored swatch hung floor-to-ceiling, is precisely aligned with the gallery’s entrance on the opposite wall. Elsewhere, a truncated sprinkler pipe on the floor engages the resident system on the ceiling in an illusory ballet mécanique. In a shadowy side gallery (as part of Sibony’s understated environmentalism, the show is illuminated only by natural light) hangs a piece of Plexiglas, still in its protective paper, from which a series of mysterious shapes have been excised. It communes silently with a ghostly white cardboard box with a rectangular hole cut out of it. If such arrangements seem somewhat overdetermined, they also call to mind Seurat’s pavanes of isolated figures, whose schematism is not, in the words of historian T.J. Clarke, “necessarily at odds with the final impression of intense life.”

David Cohen:
Gedi Sibony's aesthetic is sparse without being severe. To the baroque and rococo of other sculptors, his sensibility is almost neoclassical, revisiting minimal art — but minimally. He favors slight but decisive interventions in humble building-trade materials — the show, at Greene Naftali, which fills the sprawling loft premises of this high-ceilinged warehouse gallery, favors materials such as leftover cuts of carpet, pipes, foamcore, blinds, curtains, and so forth. The show plays a joke on this postindustrial space by including the kinds of stuff that might easily have been left here by workers. The removal, by the artist, of any track lighting reinforces the pre-gallery raw state of the space. His vocabulary directly recalls Arte Povera, and indirectly many other moments in Modern and Postmodern sculpture (Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Tuttle), but with a minimum of fuss: There is neither tragedy nor humor in the materials. There is no heavy-handed ecological agenda in recycling. There is little sense of the materials coming with baggage, of angst or attitude in the materials' desuetude. On the contrary, the materials have transparency, and his motives for choosing them seem formally and emotionally clean. What at times tilts his interventions toward preciousness is his penchant for poetic-absurdist titles: "Its Origins Justify its Oranges" (2008) is a rectangular wooden frame with bowed diagonal appendages and colored lights; "The Is should be capitalized" (2008) (a title where it only slowly dawns on one that "Is" refers to the plural of the letter "I," not the participle of the verb to be) is an arrangement of hollow-core door, paper, and staples against the edge of a corner of wall. Generally, however, this is sculpture that hovers between intentionality and nonchalance: The very act of remaining in that gray area is what defines his artistry.

Andrea K. Scott:
An alchemist of the everyday, Sibony makes stripped-down sculptures that may test the limits of your faith in art, but they’ll also renew it. “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees,” the French poet Paul Valéry wrote, and in Sibony’s work—congeries of carpet, Masonite, cardboard, hollow-core doors, garbage bags, tape—the stuff of a Home Depot shopping list assumes ineffable grace. The down-and-dirty game of Arte Povera and the gnostic wit of Rachel Harrison are branches of the same sculptural tree, but Sibony is out on a limb of his own.

Rewind 2006: expositions à Marseille

2008-05-12T11:47:00.000-07:00

clicquer sur les articles pour la lecture

Raphaël Zarka (galerie des Bains Douches), Stéphane Le Mercier (RLBQ)
01/02/2006
Strangers in the night: Camille Henrot, Emmanuelle Bentz, Christelle Familiari, Myriam Mechita, Lina Jabbour, Patrick Martinez (Triangle, à la galerie de la Friche)
08/02/2006
Denis Brun (centre d'art contemporain d'Istres)
15/02/2006
Partenaire Particulier: Marceline Delbecq, Francesco Finizio, Tatiana Trouvé, Patrick Everaert, Absalon, Olivier Dollinger, Loris Gréaud (FRAC PACA, commissaires: Claire Moulène et Mathilde Villeneuve)
22/02/2006
Rainier Lericolais (SMP)
22/02/2006
Lili Reynaud-Dewar (RLBQ)
08/03/2006
Alain Domagala (galerie de l'école des beaux-arts), Olivier Bedu / le Cabanon Vertical (Bureau de Compétences et Désirs)
15/03/2006
Marijke van Warmerdam (Musée d'Art Contemporain)
22/03/2006
Peter Bogers (Vidéochroniques, à la galerie District)
29/03/2006ça s'ouvre? ça s'ouvre pas? : Kurt Schwitters, Olivier Cadiot, Peter Friedl, Jimmie Durham, Claire Fontaine, Jordi Colomer, Marc Quer, Jean-Luc Moulène, Francis Alys, Berdaguer & Péjus, Frédérik Pajak, Michelangelo Pistoletto, On Kawara (Ateliers d'Artistes, commissaire: Jean-Pierre Rehm)
19/04/2006
Stéphane Bérard (RLBQ)
10/05/2006
Jean-Luc Moulène (La Compagnie), Bruno Peinado (Buy-Sellf Art Club)
24/05/2006
Sculptocracie: Grégory Cucquel, Sandro Della Noce, Stéphanie Cherpin, Yann Gerstberger, Benjamin Hochart, Philippe Chevrot, Sarah Anstett, Nicolas Gomez (District et RLBQ, commissaire: Anita Molinero)
07/06/2006
Thierry Ollat, nouveau directeur du Musée d'Art Contemporain
21/06/2006
Claude Lévêque (MAC), Christoph Büchel (Sextant et Plus, à la Friche la Belle de Mai), Jan Kopp (RLBQ), Joël Bartoloméo (SMP), Body & Soul: Clemens von Wedemeyer, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Kai Kaljo (FRAC)
28/06/2006
rentrée 2006
10/09/2006Barthélemy Toguo (FRAC)
11/10/2006
I Like Politique... : Bernadette Corporation/ Reena Spaulings, Gail Pickering, Alain Declercq, Jana Sterback, Steven Cohen, Sabina van Der Linden, Pierre Zaoui, Tania Bruguera, Jota Castro, Till Roeskens, Flavia Muller Medeiros (Triangle, à Montévidéo)
06/12/2006
bilan des expositions 2006
20/12/2006