THE ART OBJECT

Perpetual Photos and Videowatercolors: Medium, Appropriation, and Temporality

2012-01-27T19:15:00.000-08:00

Perpetual Photos and Videowatercolors: Medium, Appropriation, and Temporality from palmor on Vimeo.

A comparison of works by Allan McCollum and Carel Balth and an investigation of the meaning of still photos made from moving images.

Presented at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, January 13, 2012 in conjunction with the exhibition "Videowatercolors: Carel Balth Among His Contemporaries," curated by Professor Marek Wieczorek

With thanks to Professor Wieczorek and the staff of the Henry Art Gallery.

Gardens Contained and Floating

2011-10-21T08:35:00.000-07:00

I am very proud to be a part of the Singapore-based UNDERSCORE Magazine, a beautiful publication "attuned to a simple rhythm; quality of life." With every issue, UNDERSCORE surprises me with its glorious design and lush writing. The magazine also includes work by young creatives from all over the world, and I am grateful to be included in the mix.

UNDERSCORE No. 3: THE FIGHT ISSUE has just recently been released, and its publication was celebrated with an exhibition of independent magazines at selected cafes throughout Singapore. It is incredibly exciting to be a part of a publication with such a strong creative vision that also supports similar projects, fostering a true sense of camaraderie and craft among international artists, writers, and designers.

I would like to share my contribution to UNDERSCORE No. 3, though I recommend finding a physical copy of the magazine so you can better experience Annelie Bruijn's beautiful photographs and the overall experience of handling such a gorgeous, thoughtfully-designed publication.

Gardens Contained andFloating
By Lauren Palmor

Half the interest of a garden is the constantexercise of the imagination.

--Mrs. C.W.Earle, Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden, 1897

People have always shaped plants. For the past4,000 years, gardening has had a prominent place in global culture, from theancient hanging gardens of Babylon to the Mughal garden fronting the Taj Mahal and from the gardens of Versailles to Central Park. Since the beginning of thetwenty-first century, gardening and the placement, care, and shaping of plantshave been influenced by developments in visual and ecological culture. Thoughplants continue to affect many aspects of our lives, they do so now through thecontemporary lenses of sustainability, art, radical design, environmentalism,and the strong do-it-yourself approach of young, creative people around theworld. In recent years, the way we physically shape, manipulate, and employplants has been affected by new awareness, imagination and creativity.

Contemporary artists, designers, gardeners, andcraftsmen have been exceedingly innovative in their handling of plants.Around the world, young visionaries are using a wide variety of materials andphysical locations to alter our daily experience with flora, and by sodoing, greatly heightening the public’s awareness of their natural environment. And, despite being raised in various man-made and even somewhat unnaturalconditions, plant life continues to evolve, grow, and thrive.

Terraria are a good example of plants’ abilityto grow under strict conditions tempered by the aesthetic and physicalrestrictions imposed upon them. Though terraria have been in existence fornearly 200 years, they have only recently undergone a contemporary revivalwhich has altered their character and increased their popularity among ayounger generation. The terrarium was invented accidentally in 1829 when aLondon doctor named Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward discovered plant growth in a jarwhich held moss and a moth’s cocoon. While waiting for the cocoon to hatch, thedoctor saw small plants growing from underneath the moss, a surprise to him,given that the jar was sealed. Ward’s interest in his discovery culminated inthe publication of a book on the subject in 1842 titled On the Growth ofPlants in Closely Glazed Cases. This led to a surge in popularity ofterraria or “Wardian Cases” in England throughout the Victorian period, though interest eventually declined over the course of the twentieth century.

In recent years, the terrarium may have experiencedits greatest resurgence in popularity since Ward’s day. A younger generation ofcraftsmen and artists has discovered the appeal of keeping and caring for asmall, contained piece of the natural world within their homes. The revivedinterest in terraria has happened in part due to their special appeal to thosewho live in urban environments in which there may be little access to outdoorgreen space and limited space for indoor gardening projects. A terrariumrequires little effort and fosters the experience of nature on a personalscale. Despite their containment, which obviously removes them from the wildoutdoors, terrarium plants thrive and grow, against all natural odds.

A terrarium is a strictly controlledenvironment, making the plants within it completely dependent on theircaretaker for air, light, water, and food. A closed terrarium, the most commontype, often looks like a wondrous, miniature forest or an entire ecologicaluniverse within a bell jar. To make such a magical world, one must pick fromnature those elements which would be appealing together in a small space,somewhat analogous to painting with moss and fern instead of paint and brush. Awell executed container garden can convey the sense of looking down on a forestfrom the treetops, a snapshot of the wilderness outside.

It’s easy to imagine how terraria would holdsuch appeal to young designers and artists working today: these controlledenvironments allow for the manipulation of nature to a creative end. Thoughtheir roots are firmly in the nineteenth century, terraria have been revived inthe twenty-first--and today’s versions of these miniature gardens don’tstrongly resemble their predecessors. Contemporary terraria marry many recenttrends in design, art, and craft. Some terrarium artists now include miniaturesculpture and found art in their bell jars, while others utilize hand-blowncontainers designed by local artists. And, as more urbanites grow their ownfood and engage more actively in thinking about plant life and the naturalworld, so too can they create beautiful gardens on an intimate scale, bringingthese ideas into their homes. Terraria have also been affected by the growingpopularity of urban farmers’ markets and craft fairs, and both venues havebecome popular points of trade for these miniature gardens. Boutique floristsspecializing in terraria can be found in most major American cities, fromSeattle and San Francisco to New York and Chicago, and their popularity fromcoast to coast can attest to the myriad ways in which plants can thrive andchange our perception of the natural world.

Other young artists and designers have foundways to work with plants outside of the kind of limitations ascribed toterraria. Dutch artist and botanist Fedor Van der Valk has recently beengaining attention worldwide for his “string gardens”--plants grown withoutpots, suspended in the air and supported by nothing more than a ball of rootswrapped in moss, grass, and twine. If anything, Van der Valk’s string gardensfunction as the extreme contrast of terraria: rather than contain plant life ina small container, he grows plants in space, beyond the limitations of any pot,bowl, or jar.

Despite the strange conditions under which heplaces his plants, Van der Valk ensures that they can grow and thrive. He’s hadgreat success with transforming perennials, annuals, shrubs, small trees, andorchids into floating works of art suspended in space. Through experimentation,trial, and error, he has developed a system in which he can capture the beautyof plants in ways previously unseen: he uses a crochet stitch to firstconstruct frames for the plants. Then, he bolsters the root ball of the plantwith moss and earth to maintain the ball’s shape. “For a while I wanted to makeanimated videos with crocheted landscapes which were a kind of three-dimensionalspider web covered in moss and grass” says van der Valk. “The idea was tocreate bonsai-esque plants. To keep the landscapes really airy, I decided towork with hanging plants.”

The landscapes are assuredly airy, and theystrongly resemble kokedama, or a green moss-covered type of bonsaipopular in Japan. Kokedama are bonsai which are grown fully in a pot andthem removed from their container, with the soil and roots maintaining theircompact shape. They are then displayed on plates, also defying expectedgardening practice. But unlike kokedama, string gardens don’t onlyresist containment--they also manage to escape the bounds of gravityaltogether.

Van der Valk’s string gardens make an astonishingimpact on their viewer: hung by itself, a small tree suspended in air is anunforgettable vision. Imagine, too, a room or a window filled with magicallyfloating plants, suspended in the air and seemingly weightless. The impact of ahovering garden far exceeds that of the more traditional variation. Stringgardens form a new kind of indoor garden, a kind of floating forest whichallows us to interact with plants at eye level. This is a radical alteration tothe usual space between us and our potted indoor gardens. By hanging flowersand trees at eye level, we are more easily able to relate to and interact withthem, as we would with our friends and family. Despite such a seemingly trivialchange in the plant’s elevation, the hanging of the string gardens at eye levelis quite unusual, drastically changing the way we are invited to look andinteract with these gardens in the air.

String gardens, when viewed in a group, createan otherworldly sensation not unlike the feeling of peering down into theminiature universe of a terrarium. Both garden types operate on an intimatescale, inviting the viewer to engage not only with plants and the naturalwonder of their existence, but also their ability to thrive in extremecircumstances, whether they are contained in delicate glass jars or suspendedfrom the ceiling by twine. The creation of these microhabitats, in glass or inair, is a testament to nature’s ability to thrive in spite of the limitationsplaced upon it by human endeavor.

The Seattle Scene

2011-09-12T22:58:00.001-07:00

Please excuse the lull in postings. I've recently relocated from Greenpoint, Brooklyn to beautiful Seattle, Washington. With the change of scenery, this blog will surely take on a slightly different shape. In the meantime, I'm happy to receive tips you might be willing to share on the art scene in my newly adopted city. Please send inside scoop to laurenpalmor@gmail.com.

BBC Your Paintings

2011-06-29T12:27:00.000-07:00

Art belongs to everyone. This fact is bolstered by the continual (though increasingly threatened) support for the public experience of art by international governments, public museums, and cultural policy-makers, and the subject of access to art has provoked passionate discourse for hundreds of years. Ideas about the freedom of art have been alternatively impacted by morality, politics, economics, education, and even the gender binary.

The early years of the 20^th century saw an active debate over the role of art in daily public life in the United States. Many newspapers, magazines, and reports of the period eloquently and devotedly wrote about the need for art in the lives of all Americans. (For the best selections of such writings, I recommend reading the magazine Art and Progress, later renamed The American Magazine of Art, which was published from 1909–1953). A common example of this kind of text: “We have tried to show that art belongs to everyone and may be seen in every phase of life–in big buildings, in open spaces, in the streets at the hour of dusk and in the bright sunshine. This view of art gains ground slowly, but if, in the process, some color has been added to the grayness of the commonplace–to keep people from looking as they do when they "think very little, know very little, see very little, do very little"–we have accomplished more than we hoped for” (from the St. Louis Public Library annual report, 1914).

While there is a rich history of art access and its passionate support in the US, it often seems that the UK has been far more successful in truly embodying such democratic ideals of free culture. History and the arts remain a standard part of the British school curriculum today (unlike their impotent American counterpart), and British museums, galleries, and historic homes seem to be both more revered by and accessible to the general public than those in the US.

This week, the UK made another significant stride in the pursuit of art for all: the BBC, in association with the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) unveiled Your Paintings, “a project to create a complete catalogue of every oil painting in the national collection, on a dedicated website. In all, the national collection amounts to some 200,000 works, held in 3,000 galleries, museums, libraries and public institutions all over the country, making it probably one of the largest and most diverse collections of paintings in the world.”

When Your Paintings went live on Friday, the site already contained a database of more than 60,000 paintings by 15,000 artists from 860 collections—with more to come. The paintings are drawn from a large scope of public collections in every part of the country, ranging from iconic works from The National Gallery in London to small, unknown art from the town halls of small Yorkshire villages. Museum collections are well represented, as are the collection s of less obvious places like police stations, universities, hospitals, and county halls. The PCF searched all over the UK to locate these paintings, with 50 coordinators and 30 photographers on staff to manage the task. Together, their efforts ensure that these artworks can now be seen and shared all over the world, by anybody with the inclination and access to the internet.

The site is inviting and easy to use: images can be searched by location, artist, or by keywords. Look up “Essex Record Office,” “John Constable,” or “umbrella” and you are guaranteed to find something you’ve never seen before. Take a “Guided Tour” with famous artists and art historians, where you can view slideshows of their favorite works in public collections (I particularly liked Yinka Shonibare’s selections).

Your Paintings also needs your help tagging the nation’s paintings. The website currently only has very basic information about many of the works such as the title, artist, and date. They do not have more detailed, searchable information about subject, style, or movements represented. Sign up to assist in tagging these works and help to make Your Paintings a more useful and effective resource. Extra points to those who have studied art history in the past: they need “expert” taggers to identify dates and styles. If you have taken more than a few art history courses, please consider offering your assistance. With more input from more participants, this database will grow to become more effective—perhaps it might even influence the creation of a similar tool for the public art of the United States.

Kudos to the BBC, the PCF, and all of those who have contributed to this ambitious and important project.

Image: A Vase of Flowers by Paul Gaugin, 1896. Click here to view it at Your Paintings

www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/

Walt Kuhn's "Dressing Room"

2011-06-21T09:00:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I began giving a tour of American portrait painting at the Brooklyn Museum. The tour, titled “Fantasy and Reality in American Identities,” includes nine paintings in the Museum’s collection of American art. Though I find all nine works to be fascinating and valuable cultural documents, I must say that my very favorite painting in the collection is the last one I discuss on my tour: Walt Kuhn’s Dressing Room of 1926.

I love ending my tour on a meditation of Kuhn’s bold, arresting, and intimate image of a vaudeville performer in a quiet moment backstage. Kuhn is most closely identified with these portraits of vaudeville and circus performers, and in the early 1920s, he made his living by directing and designing stage shows as he continued to paint. He was influenced in equal measures by this experience as well as that of his travels in Europe. In Europe, he encountered the work of the German Expressionists and Cezanne, who he claimed remained his strongest influence throughout the course of his career. These elements coalesce in his best-known works, forming a word of clowns and dancers painted with exaggerated features in bold colors.

Dressing Room is a striking work. A withdrawn female performer stands in her dressing room, ready to go on stage. She is wearing a small, revealing costume, and her short, dark hair is adorned with a large, red bow. Her makeup is heavy, and the blush and lipstick on the dresser imply that she has just completed the task of getting ready. She poses in a seductive stretch, though her face is devoid of emotion and her eyes are empty. Though she is physically prepared for the stage, dressed up in her affected unselfconscious sexuality, she is not yet engaged in the task of performing for the pleasure of others.

The dressing room as a place is a curious space for the staging of self: as a space, it is neither public nor private. One enters a dressing room as their whole self and exits as a character or as an idea of a specific element of their personality. It is a tangible place dedicated to creating character, erasing flaws, putting on costumes. Kuhn subtly reminds the viewer that although the dancer looks pensive in this private moment, that this is definitely not a private space. A sign on the wall is a clue that this is a shared room, and a hat stand topped with many different hats is provides more evidence to support that fact. The dancer’s face and pose, combined with the public/private space of the painting, lends to the general air of tension and unease in the portrait.

Kuhn’s colors are also challenging and uncomfortable. The blood red of the dancer’s lips and hair ribbon scream loudly against the pallor of her skin. His strong brushstrokes and his use of bold blues and reds evoke Cezanne’s blocks of color and an interest in cubism, while he manages to pull feelings of discomfort and confrontation from whites and creams. Kuhn’s clear fascination with Fauve colors and Cubist space make this portrait an unforgettable and arresting image.

Dressing Room makes such an impact largely because he used real vaudeville and circus dancers and performers as his models. He manages to portray these characters in the quiet, reflective moments in which they are dressed in joyful stage costumes, though they remain removed from the stage and the people they are paid to play for the pleasure of others. Kuhn’s Dressing Room is a solemn incubator, holding the dancer in a world between the city and the stage, between herself and the character who dances and smiles for an audience. Staring intently out into the world beyond the walls, Kuhn’s dancer is burdened by her awareness of the impending performance and its disconnect from her interior life.

Visit Kuhn’s Dressing Room in the American Identities installation at the Brooklyn Museum. Live in New York City? Contact me if you’d like information about my gallery tour.

Bye Bye Kitty!!!

2011-05-06T11:39:00.000-07:00

When someone with only a peripheral knowledge of Japanese art is asked to think about the visual culture of Japan, a few themes might come to mind: nature, history, tradition, and cuteness. A lay discussion of Japanese contemporary art is generally influenced by Hello Kitty and 19th century woodblock prints in equal measure. The art of an entire culture is surely not contained by the two isolated phenomena of Sanrio consumer products and Hiroshige’s Views of Edo, but it is the constant struggle of those in the field to push viewers’ understanding of the overlooked genius of Japanese art—most of which is not contained by these basic, widely-accepted concepts.

The Japan Society routinely mounts spectacular exhibitions of Japanese art, past and present, which challenge the limits of cultural understanding. The current exhibition, entitled Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Art, not only challenges preconceptions of contemporary Japanese visual culture—it also elegantly ties the past to the present, showcasing works by artists who are influenced by Japanese art history and modern culture in equal parts.

Bye Bye Kitty!!! features the work of sixteen contemporary artists whose paintings, videos, installations, photographs, and sculptures mix reference to tradition with critical and political views of Japan’s present and future. The work is also surprisingly grim and omniscient, considering that the exhibition was scheduled to open the week after Japan was hit by the devastating Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in March. It is hard to shake the feeling that the many dystopic visions of Japan’s future in the exhibition were informed by supernatural foresight—a fact which makes this exhibition even more important and impactful. The intensity of the exhibition is more than doubled by a complex collection of works which refer to natural disasters, devastation, and destruction.

These elements all point to a clearly underlined fact: stereotypical ideas of Japanese culture are outdated, and it is imperative that these notions be replaced by the more timely works of contemporary artists working in more intellectual and political themes. Even when the works in Bye Bye Kitty!!! borrow from traditional Japanese landscapes and printmaking, the recontextualization of the style elevates such works to the realm of conceptual and critical art. The show tells the story of the standing tension between the man-made world and the natural world, an agitated relationship which has long been dictated by the disaster-prone environment of an island nation plagued by earthquakes and tsunamis. The show is distinguished in equal parts by its beauty, intelligence, and honest anxiety.

Upon walking into the first gallery at Japan Society, the viewer is confronted by what at first appears to be a smoky hilltop landscape. Mountains emerge from grey mist and reach up to and endless oyster-white sky. It is only upon walking closely towards the canvas that the viewer realizes that the mountains are actually piles of bodies—an endless tower of the corpses of men in standard grey business suits, mixed with computers and cubicle parts. The large painting by Makoto Aida, titled Ash Color Mountains, is a shocking and surreal scene combining the style of a traditional Japanese ink painting with a stark (and prescient) vision of modern urban life.

Other standout works include Tomoko Kashiki’s intimate and disconcerting scenes of women and adolescents painted on delicate cloth. Her fragile subjects cling to dangerous peripheries by their toes or engage in muted exchanges with twisted fingers. Kashiki’s soft, secret worlds are about private gestures and the agonies of isolated moments of beauty. Roof Garden (2008) is particularly provocative: a young woman (wearing what looks like Comme des Garçons) stands on the edge of a rooftop, her back to the long drop. A strong breeze blows her towards the precipice, and the gusts of wind are visible rushing through her hair and against her nautical clothes. She smiles, convincingly, and the only visible tension is in the curl of her toes tight against the ledge—a soft image of the critical moment.

Manubu Ikeda’s works on paper are also a highlight: his large-scale works on paper are detailed epics of new, invented worlds. His fantasy landscapes link the worlds of heaven and hell, fabrication and documentary. Civilization seems to emerge from chaos in one square inch while succumbing to entropy merely a few pen strokes away. These works are so demanding in their detail that Ikeda devotes an entire year to each one. In Existence, the tree of life contains the true depth of life, the tree evokes all the permutations of a tree. Within its branches, this tree holds apocalypses, human life, and human destruction. It feels as though never before has so much of the natural world been said on a single sheet of paper.

Broken up into three sections, Bye Bye Kitty!!! explores the work of the other artists under the lens of “Critical Memory,” “Threatened Nature,” and the “Unquiet Dream.” All three themes similarly evoke disquiet and haunting visions of contemporary Japan—visions, which, sadly, are closer to reality than the curator or artists had intended. Though the exhibition was envisioned and organized far in advance of Japan’s recent tragedies, Bye Bye Kitty!!! may be able to offer viewers a helpful context for the contemporary Japanese visual culture which has undoubtedly been affected and which will continue to change in response to those events.

Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art

Japan Society, New York, E. 47th Street, Friday, March 18 — Sunday, June 12

The Japan Society is donating 50 percent of all admission fees to its earthquake relief fund between now and June 30

Image: Tomoko Kashiki, Roof Garden (2008)

Meek's Cutoff

2011-04-29T09:01:00.000-07:00

Minimalist director Kelly Reichardt has a certain predilection for wanderers in Oregon. In her film Old Joy (2006), two friends share a quiet hike through the Cascade mountains—weekend warriors fighting through a fog of regrets on their way to a secret hot spring. Her following picture, Wendy and Lucy (2008), is the agonizing story of a destitute young woman and her dog who are left stranded in Oregon when their car breaks down en route to a job at an Alaskan fishery. These films do not romanticize the Western landscape. Rather, Reichardt manipulates the highways, deserts, forests, and mountains to form restricting, claustrophobic spaces in the great outdoors. No other director so ably draws feelings of tension and constraint from endless expanses of land.

Reichardt’s new film, Meek’s Cutoff, is a testament to her unique vision of the Western landscape. A stripped-down Western, Meek’s Cutoff follows the path of three families traveling on the Oregon Trail in 1845. Their guide, Stephen Meek, may have misled them, and the film begins after they have already spent weeks wandering a foreboding path through the Oregon desert. Their journey is plagued by distrust and suspicion, and as their
circumstances grow dire, the tension slowly builds to a frightening and agonizing conclusion.

Meek’s Cutoff is a bold and visionary film, and its point of view and execution are unlike anything in the rest of the American Western canon. The most obvious distinction is the fact that the story is told from the perspective of the women. While most films about the settlement of the west focus on the conversations of the men designing the journey, Reichardt positions her cameras with the women. When the men walk a few paces away to discuss their route, the camera remains with the women who are left holding the ropes of the wagons and cattle. We can hear only snippets of the conversations in soft whispers, privy to only as much information as if we were also standing there helplessly watching our husbands decide our fate.

In keeping with the women’s perspective, Reichardt shot Meek’s Cutoff in the square 4:3 aspect ratio instead of the usual widescreen sweeping format of classic mid-century Westerns. Speaking with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air (April 14, 2011), Reichardt explained, "I felt like the square [aspect ratio] gave you an idea of the closed view that the women have because of their bonnets. You'd be traveling in this big community where you'd never have privacy. But also, it's a really lonely journey. And I think cutting out the peripheral, it does leave you with the idea that something could be there that you don't know about — and so it offers that kind of tension."

The square frame pulls a claustrophobic feeling out of a seemingly endless desert, a directorial achievement which perfectly communicates the feeling of the film. Although the settlers are walking through endless open space, their fear limits their view, tethering them to their isolation and desperation, insulating them from the usual feeling of freedom that such sweeping vistas provoke.

Overall, Meek’s Cutoff challenges the romanticism usually associated with the settlement of the American west. Reichardt realistically portrays themes which, while mentioned in historical texts, have rarely made the silver screen: xenophobia, violence, hysteria, and the dehumanization of indigenous populations are all handled without sentimentality. John Ford and Sergio Leone it’s not. Reichardt intelligently and bravely resists the standards of her predecessors in order to forge a new genre: an honest Western which considers the frightening truths of our American history and the women who have been disregarded as its footnotes.

Meek’s Cutoff is now in theaters.

Cast: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Rod Rondeaux, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson, Neal Huff, Tommy Nelson

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Screenwriter: Jon Raymond

ATTENBERG

2011-04-01T09:27:00.000-07:00

Can there be love without sentimentality? What happens when biology and reason, instead of emotion or desire, are the driving forces in a person’s world? ATTENBERG, a new film by Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari, asks these questions while simultaneously riding on the new wave of cutting-edge contemporary Greek cinema. Featured as a selection in this year’s New Directors/New Films series at MoMA and Lincoln Center, ATTENBERG is enjoying a positive reception at its first American screenings.

The film takes its title from a character’s mispronunciation of the last name of Sir David Attenborough, whose films are the protagonist’s main source of social observation. Marina (a lovely and confrontational Ariane Labed) is 23-years old—a devoted daughter whose world is filled solely by the presence of Attenborough, her dying architect father, and her best (and only) friend, Bella. The characters seem to be the only people who populate the desolate industrial seaside town which her father helped design in the 1960s.

While Marina is exploring her latent sexuality through pantomiming Sir Attenborough’s nature films, her terminally-ill father tries to come to terms with the stark city he designed. Both father and daughter enjoy an exceptionally close relationship, despite the fact that their bond is not visibly emotional. Through honest debates about biology and sexuality, word games, and make-believe, their small family comes to profoundly understand sex, death, and love.

ATTENBERG co-stars Giorgios Lanthimos, the writer-director of Dogtooth, last year’s breakout Greek cinema tableaux. Comparisons between the two films are inevitable: both films explore the worlds of adult children who haven’t been given the necessary tools for negotiating the modern world (and both films include disarming, awkward dance sequences which make the viewers’ skin crawl). But whereas the parents’ impetus in Dogtooth was abuse, the driving force in ATTENBERG is love. Marina’s father didn’t instruct her to be alone—he taught her to be self-reliant.

"It would be too reductive to insist on attributing Marina's self-willed seclusion to a matter of alienated living in a not-quite-post-industrial environment," writes Andrew Schenker in Slant. "Though unlike the film's obvious point of comparison, Dogtooth, which depicted, by contrast, an enforced seclusion, social context is an important matter here. Finally, as Marina begins to bridge the gap of her isolation and prepares for her father's death, her standing on the threshold of a new century (if, per the father's words, the film takes place around 2000), as cinema then stood on the verge of its own now largely completed digital shift (ATTENBERG was defiantly shot on 35mm), is hugely significant. Tsangari's is ultimately a film that asks how one can be expected to cope with life in what might be termed post-post-modernity. The film's varied segments serve as the answers: an anarchic sense of play; the movies, including this one, that provide us with this manic brand of release; music; sex, of course; and, possibly even, if we're lucky, love."

ATTENBERG is a beautiful, arresting, and troubling film, and Tsangari’s work is a strong argument for the strength of contemporary Greek cinema. Highly recommended.

Read more about the New Directors/New Films series here: http://newdirectors.org/

Andy Warhol Memorial

2011-03-31T13:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, a fitting memorial to Andy Warhol was unveiled in Union Square, not far from the site of the Factory at 33 Union Square West. The chrome-plated sculpture by Rob Pruitt is lovingly exact--it is clearly Warhol at his best. With a Polaroid camera around his neck and a Bloomingdale's shopping bag in his hand, he is at the ready to take your picture at a party and leave you with a copy of Interview magazine before he leaves.

I've written before about my preference for Warhol's ideas over his art. His legacy should be that of a philosopher or cultural theorist more than anything else, with his softcore intellectual musings and hardcore commerce, fame, and glory. I've written here before: "the silkscreens are for beginners: the real crux of Warhol's position as a maker of the twentieth century is in the way he created new ideas about art, advertising, and celebrity. Warhol's philosophy is shorthand for modern American reasoning." I can't think of any other monument like this in the U.S. which is dedicated to a great artist, and it seems fitting that Warhol has been made into the type of sculptural monument more traditionally dedicated to philosophers, statesmen, scholars, and other forces of the social landscape.

A Meditation on John Ruskin

2011-03-31T12:31:00.001-07:00

These words, written by John Ruskin in Modern Painters in 1843, make for a succinct meditation on art and experience. Although Ruskin was urging young British artists to paint in nature and to paint honestly (while championing the work of JMW Turner), I've been thinking about this idea in a larger way. I believe that Ruskin's words can effectively be applied to experiencing art--especially contemporary art, a sphere which is unfortunately prone to rejection and selection. A stirring description of a most fulfilling approach to our visual world.

Save the Arts: Kansas and Shrigley

2011-02-18T12:48:00.000-08:00

In the wake of the recession and steep governmental budget cuts, many states are cutting arts funding. Both Michigan and Texas are looking to zero out arts budgets, but Kansas may be the first state which has succeeded. On February 7, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback killed the Kansas Arts Commission. Before the cuts, the Commission funded music, theater and art education for groups all across the state. Now Kansas is one of few in the nation without a state organization promoting the arts. The KAC had a decidedly modest budget of $600,000 and received support from the NEA. Listeners to Studio 360 may have heard Kansas State Senator Roger Reitz (R) discuss the issue with Kurt Andersen. If you missed the heart-wrenching conversation, you can listen to it here:

So why should it matter to Americans in the other 49 states if Kansas loses a few arts programs? Can we imagine a country without a cultural heritage? What exactly is under threat as the government encroaches on the personal liberties inherent in art making? Just as we passionately defend more abused rights, like our ability to carry a gun and our freedom of speech, so too must we vehemently speak out against the persecution of the arts and the liberties they provide. In 1945, Henry Miller wrote "There's no real life for an artist in America." Sadly, Mr. Miller might be right.

At the celebrations of the MoMA's 25th anniversary, President Eisenhower spoke of the arts the bastion of freedom and democracy: "As long as artists are at liberty to feel with high personal intensity, as long as our artists are free to create with sincerity and conviction, there will be a healthy controversy and progress in art….How different it is in tyranny, when artists are made the slaves and tools of the state; when artists become chief propagandists of a cause, progress is arrested and creation and genius are destroyed." Eisenhower wisely viewed arts as the "pillar of liberty" that they are.

In the wake of the censorship of the Hide/Seek exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, these cuts sting even more. The government has no place in the arts, and as conservative leadership cuts, censors, and radicalizes this "pillar of liberty," nothing may be safe. Politicians have no right to shape cultural products by discarding questionable content or by cutting supportive budgets.

When viewed through the lens of current cuts to state budgets, our American future looks bleak. We are looking at the promise of a nation with a weak educational foundation, a negligible system for cultural support, and the demise of the arts across the entire country. It is not difficult to fathom a near-Apocalyptic desecration of any remaining institutions and programs within our lifetime.

This crisis is by no means solely domestic. The UK has been fighting a similar battle, mostly through the group Save The Arts. In September, Scottish artist David Shrigley made a provocative, accessible, and humorous film illustrating exactly why we all should care about arts funding:

FRED Talks: "The Invention of Children's Clothing," January 9, 2011

2011-02-07T06:30:00.000-08:00

Last month I had the pleasure of giving a lecture on the invention of children's clothing at FRED Talks, a series of presentations based on the TED model which is run out of the cooperative at 3B Brooklyn.

Through the course of my talk, I discussed the invention of childhood and the impact of Enlightenment thinkers on children's clothing using the paintings of 18th century artists like Lawrence, Gainsborough, Hogarth, and Reynolds as illustrative points.

You can read more about FRED Talks here: http://fredtalks.org/

Sergej Jensen at MoMA PS1

2011-02-03T08:32:00.000-08:00

(Originally written as a guest contribution for the Textile Art Center blog)

Textile arts are rarely associated with the stillness, quietude, and self-conscious theatricality of minimalism and post-modernism. Often the phrase “textile arts” erroneously encourages on to conjure visions of patchwork, crazy quilts, and large swaths of bright weavings. One of the great successes of the Textile Art Center is its persistent expansion of our understanding of textile art’s limitations and vulnerabilities through its diverse exhibitions program.

MoMA PS1 is also contributing to the reframing of textile arts in a contemporary context with its current exhibition of the paintings of Berlin-based artist Sergej Jensen. The term “paintings” here is used loosely and echoes the words of artist Ghada Amer (in a presentation recently featured on the TAC blog). Created from a diverse selection of found textiles, Jensen’s works on view include both pieces produced over the past eight years, as well as a number of new works created on site in a studio in PS1. His large canvasses echo the staunch minimalism of Callum Innes and Barnett Newman, and Jensen is remarkable in his ability to replicate the themes of classic abstraction in traditionally maximalist materials like silks, cashmere, diamond dust, and wool.

Jensen’s “paintings” invite the viewer to evaluate the traces of the artist’s mark on the fabric. Silks are pulled and stretched, wools are painted in oils, silk is powdered with diamond dust. Bleach, dye, and stitching are as important as color, shape, and balance. The intentional is lost in the accidental, a natural by-product of working with soft materials which are pulled, stressed, prodded, and manipulated. Jensen is able to physically shape images with the unique attributes found only in textiles and textile arts, balancing the forms of fabric with the classic shapes of modern art.

This exhibition is deceptively pictorial, the works challenging both as paintings and as pieces of textile art. Can painting and textile be so seamlessly combined? Is it possible to display both artistic expressions without one medium being lost or overtaken by the other? Jensen is masterful in the way he elegantly blurs these boundaries with a weighed consideration for his materials and their relationships.

A perfect example of Jensen’s talent for the balance between textile and painting is Blessed, a succinct and surprisingly poetic meditation on fabric and art history. The “painting” is simple in its composition: two pieces of sheer grey cashmere wool (one in a lighter shade, one in a darker shade) are sewn together, cutting the canvas in half horizontally. The resulting artwork looks like a horizon line—the endless expanse conjures references to traditional seascapes, Mark Rothko, and the Western landscape canon.

United Nations is another work which sums up the possibilities for merging the two-dimensionality of painting with the multi-dimensionality of textiles and crafts. The piece features a rainbow-striped, machine-knit afghan stretched and sewn on a linen ground. By framing a piece of machine-made textile as a work of art, Jensen encourages the viewer to consider the divide between high and low art and the gulf between textiles and “fine arts.”

Jensen is consistent in his experimentation and thoughtful pursuit of found textile as a meaningful medium. His works are challenging, intelligent, and humorous statements about the imposed and negligible chasms between art media. Highly recommended.

Sergej Jensen is organized by the Aspen Art Museum. The exhibition is curated by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson and organized at MoMA PS1 by Peter Eleey, Curator of MoMA PS1.

Image: Sergej Jensen, Blessed, 2008, Sewn cashmere and thread. Collection of Charlotte and Bill Ford

Grain of Emptiness

2011-02-01T08:13:00.000-08:00

“Historically, Buddhist art has reflected the concepts of the Buddhist canon. What is interesting is the manner in which artists today internalize these concepts to create new art forms.”—Martin Brauen

Some of the most moving and memorable works of contemporary art are those which are least tangible. I’ve found works like Paul Chan’s digital projections and James Terrell’s Meeting installation at PS1 to be stirring works, despite their lack of physicality. The notions of emptiness and impermanence can be framed as aesthetic strengths, given appropriate insight and clarity.

Grain of Emptiness, an exhibition currently on view at the Rubin Museum of Art, celebrates the voids and intangibility found in contemporary art. Featuring the work of five artists influenced by Buddhist ritual practice, the exhibition explores ideas of transience and voids in a range of media, from video and photography to painting and installation. The artists Sanford Biggers, Theaster Gates, Atta Kim, Wolfgang Laib, and Charmion von Wiegand all poetically incorporate essential ideas of Eastern religious beliefs into their practice.

“These artists are inheritors of a rich tradition that threads throughout modern and contemporary art,” says Martin Brauen, organizer of Grain of Emptiness and Chief Curator at the Rubin Museum of Art. “The ideas of emptiness and impermanence, embraced by the Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s, have since been taken up by such cultural icons as John Cage and Merce Cunningham, as well as by conceptual and performance artists and others who have sought to explore in art how the insights of Buddhism intersect with everyday life.”

Works on view include a video work by Theaster Gates and several paintings by Charmion von Wiegand, a student of Piet Mondrian. Von Wiegand’s orderly and infinite flat shapes of color mirror religious forms in circles, triangles, and rainbow diamonds. Sanford Biggers’ Lotus dominates the center of the gallery space—a seven-foot wide glass circle, etched with what appears to be a lotus blossom. Upon closer inspection, the blossom becomes a collection of African slave ships, detailed with the cross-section illustration of each ship’s cargo: bodies lined head-to-foot-to-head in the petals of the ersatz flower. Atta Kim’s lovely photographs of infinite layers of stillness and beauty in ice, faces, and urban centers act as meditations on emptiness and shared human identities.

But the greatest works, the most arresting meditations on nothingness, change and changelessness, and the possibilities of intangibility are those by the German artist Wolfgang Laib. Laib’s quiet installations, made of natural materials like milk, stone, pollen, beeswax, and rice, perfectly embody the possibilities of this exhibition and the curator’s intent. The best pieces in the exhibition are Laib’s Rice Meals (2003) and Milkstone (1998–2000). Both are poems written in quiet media, testaments to interconnectedness, humanness, and the nature of the natural world.

Laib’s Rice Meals is composed of a line of offering bowls, each filled with a small gift of rice. Each bowl contains an identical offering, all except for one. The odd bowl is filled with hazelnut pollen, bright gold in color, infinite and endless. The endlessness of the pollen is not only contained in its quantity, but also in the idea of the endless number of plants which could be gifted from the offering on view. Milkstone, one of Laib’s most famous works, is a solid piece of white marble with a small dip carved into the top of the stone. This small indentation is filled daily with fresh milk, creating what appears to be a solid surface. To get close to the stone, even at eye level, crouching on your knees, you can’t see where the stone begins and where the milk ends. Laib has created a way to make physical endlessness in natural materials.

Grains of Emptiness is an intelligent, beautiful, and meditative celebration of the too-often overlooked possibilities for contemporary art to be quiet, poetic, humble, meditative, and human. This exhibition is a moving antithesis to much of the chaos often associated with contemporary art in New York. Highly recommended.

“Grain of Emptiness: Buddhism-Inspired Contemporary Art” continues through April 11 at the Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street, Chelsea; (212) 620-5000, rmanyc.org.

Unlovable

2011-01-14T12:37:00.000-08:00

Esther Pearl Watson is a gifted painter, illustrator, and comics artist. Her lovely and naïve paintings of life in a small Texas town are poetic and layered in meaning. But, to most of her fans, Watson is better known for her illustration and comics than she is for her sweet and imaginative paintings.

Once every couple months, I go to the newsstand to ecstatically paw at the new issue of BUST magazine, fresh on the shelves. The first thing I turn to, like clockwork, is Watson’s brilliant comic strip Unlovable—always on the back page. Unlovable, for the uninitiated, is a raw, smart, insanely funny piece of comic genius. The strip illustrates scenes from the life of a pre-teen girl in the mid-1980s named Tammy Pierce. Based on a diary that Watson found in a gas station bathroom, Unlovable expresses the purest, most cringe-worthy aspects of girlhood, social pressure, and the strange culture of a challenging decade.

Executed in wildly loose pen and ink, Watson’s comics are primitive with a style that recalls the school-day doodles of a 14-year old girl. Written in diary format, it’s fitting that the drawings look at home next to passages about crushes on teenage boys, getting stood up at the prom, eating pizza, and shopping at the mall. But Unlovable’s simplicity is deceiving: beneath the quirky and grotesque illustrations lurk the very real anxieties of young womanhood, humiliation, and American teenage vitriol.

Tammy is a fully-formed character. She is persistently unaware, idealistic, superficial, and sympathetic. Her concerns, while completely self-involved, are timeless and sincere. Her vivid, pathetic life is dominated by mascara, acne, leg warmers, and heartbreak. She is routinely teased, her best friend is always looking to borrow a dollar, she receives endless prank phone calls, and she has to bribe boys to hang out with her by buying them burgers and pizzas. Tammy’s life is uncomfortable, and more challenging than she realizes. But Watson’s incredible ability to produce a sympathetic character from grotesque illustrations is a testament to her talent.

Unlovable’s brilliance is its honesty. Watson does not gloss over difficult memories and situations, but confronts them directly, with a faux-naïve pen. Her drawings are scratchy, rotten high-caricatures, brutal and inspired.

The collected Unlovable strips were recently published in two glittery neon volumes in a slipcover case by Fantagraphics. Highly recommended.

Japan Fashion Now

2010-12-17T10:15:00.000-08:00

Japan has experienced countless revolutions in its material culture since the opening of Japan to the West by Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853. Before Perry visited the nation on behalf of the Fillmore administration, Japan was pure, isolated, and left to its own devices in terms of aesthetic development. In 1854, the Treaty of Kanagawa confirmed the opening of Japan to the West and marked an irreversible change in Japan’s development of style, industry, and values.

Since Commodore Perry’s visit, Japan has persisted through tumultuous shifts—from the fall of the emperor to the post-war economic miracle. These shifts have resulted in an aesthetic culture which is inventive, bold, and voraciously hungry for the next and the new. This appetite for invention was perfectly captured in the moment of the Japanese “fashion revolution” of the 1980s: a decade which dramatically shaped international fashion. For the first time, Japanese fashion was lauded around the world for its brilliance as a modern object—not as an element of Japonisme or Oriental fascination. The eighties were a time in which Japanese clothing was judged for the first time primarily by its stylistic, not cultural, factors.

The 1980s saw the rise of influential and radical Japanese designers like Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo. Their legacy has also paved the way for the evolution of Japanese fashion now. The country still breeds innovative designers whose works are inimitable and brilliant. Japan is an undeniable voice in concepts of contemporary dress, and Tokyo is far above the simple concept of a fashion capital.

Japan Fashion Now, the current exhibition at the Museum at FIT, is the first exhibition to explore the full output of Japanese creativity from the 1980s boom to today. Two large galleries explore the roots of modern Japanese sartorial invention: an introductory gallery is dedicated to the 1980s revolution, including asymmetrical, architectural pieces by Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo as well as radical styles by Issey Miyake. The first gallery also displays more traditional-minded, “Oriental” pieces by Kenzo and pop-culture jumpsuits by Kansai Yamamoto.

The second, larger gallery features a dramatic series of designed environments which individually frame the trends which have dominated Japanese fashion in more recent years. Primary themes include ideas of construction/deconstruction, the influence of anime and J-pop, punk, and the cult of super-Kawaii cuteness. Popular themes of Japanese street fashion are also present here, and the represented designers include Junya Watanabe, Tao Kurihara, and Jun Takahashi.

Japan Fashion Now is also mindful of the contribution of Japanese designers to the field of menswear. A large portion of the exhibition is dedicated to displaying the work of a number of Tokyo’s top current menswear designers, including Arashi Yanagawa of John Lawrence Sullivan, Daisuke Obana of N.Hoolywood, Koji Udo of Factotum, Yasuhiro Mihara of Miharayasuhiro, Takeshi Osumi of Phenomenon, and Yosuke Aizawa of White Mountaineering. The display of menswear is particularly symbolic of Japan’s balance on the cutting edge of design and its fanatical attention to detail and tailoring.

A large number of the looks on display are those found in street and sub-cultural styles. Different named and referenced styles include the Kamikaze suits worn by bike gangs to the looks of “Forest Girls” who dress like modern urban pixies. Lolita and Gothic Lolita looks also get their own display, represented by brands like Angelic Pretty and Baby, the Stars Shine Bright. These girly, innocent baby doll dresses are deceptively bold, inventive, and even radical when viewed through the lens of Japan’s cultural history. Lolita fashion is clearly marked by its Victorian influence—what does it mean when a nation is stylistically married to the period in which they were ripped from their isolationist stance?

The recurring theme of the exhibition is Japanese fashion’s domestic significance and global reach. In no other country are so many people aware not only of fashion, but also of the avante-garde, of the deconstructed, and the perfection of utility. Now, more than ever, people are fascinated with Japanese cultural output, its exploding subcultures, its radical appetites for the new.

Now on view through April 2, 2011, Japan Fashion Now surveys the past 30 years of Japanese fashion with a comprehensive and breathtaking light.

Double Tide

2010-11-15T13:36:00.001-08:00

Last week, MoMA presented the premier of Sharon Lockhart’s new film Double Tide (2009), a piece of endurance cinema meditating on labor, pace, and time. The 99-minute film, composed slowly of two long takes, is an intentional and contemplative portrait of a woman digging clams in Maine ocean mudflats. The film was made during a period in which a low tide occurs twice in daylight hours—once at dusk and once at dawn, and each half of the film focuses solely on the act of quiet clam digging at each of these times of day. Lockhart’s film is beautiful in its quiet and meditative depiction of backbreaking work. The sublime landscape contradicts the difficult labor of the clam digger who endlessly bends down and explores the mud with tired hands.

Double Tide also exists as a double-screen gallery installation, much like Lockhart’s previous effort Lunch Break (2008), a film which explored shipyard workers at their resting hour. Lockhart repeatedly returns to the rituals of labor and the way work framed by time. In Double Tide time is physically marked—both by the rising or setting sun, as well as by the physical marks made upon the mudflat by the clam digger as she searches for her catch.

The film opens with an uncomfortable spread of vast grayness. The empty expanse fades into mist and fog, and the landscape seems unpopulated, cold, even scary at first. The sea, sky, and land are all gray and white, though they come to be colored by the rising sun. Soon, a woman walks into the frame, bringing with her a clamming basket and the sole source of the film’s action. Throughout the next hour and a half, we watch the woman walk in circles across the mud, slowly edging toward the water’s edge and into the background. As soon as she’s nearly indecipherable from the edge of the sea and sky, she slowly begins to return to the foreground, lugging a heavy basket of catch behind her. The second half of the film is colored in reverse: instead of the sun rising and eliminating the gray mist, we watch the gorgeous warm colors of dusk become swallowed by dark night.

Double Tide is an endurance test: there is no character development, no story, music, or plot. All we see is physical labor colored by the changing light of day. The soundtrack is composed solely of the sound of hands clipping in and out of dense mud. If you are satiated by natural beauty and meditative acts of cinema, this is a monumental experience. But if you are coming to this film for escapism, look away: in unmitigated silence and still life, it’s impossible to not drift away from the purest state of observation.

Harry Houdini and Contemporary Art

2010-11-12T10:48:00.000-08:00

At the mention of Harry Houdini, one clearly envisions images of magic, impossibility, and sheer captivation. Even members of the millennial generation are prone to feeling remarkably moved, shocked, and inspired by archival films of Houdini’s performances. His legacy shows no sign of fading, and his great escapes have inspired countless tributes, impersonations, books, and films.

Houdini’s life and work also provide rich source material for the work of a number of contemporary artists. Houdini: Art and Magic, a new exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, is the first exhibition in a major art institution to explore his impact on visual culture and contemporary art. Interspersed between a water torture tank, handcuff displays, broadsides and archival films are twenty-six works by artists like Matthew Barney, Vik Muniz, Allen Ruppersberg, and Ray Pettibon.

The surprising number of artworks represented in the exhibition range from literal paintings of Houdini’s feats to conceptual performance pieces based on his icon status. Some of the works draw from a closer reading of the magician’s legacy, like Matthew Barney's 1997 The Erich Weiss Suite, a closed glass room containing live pigeons fluttering around an elegiac coffin. Another Barney work, the 1999 film Cremaster 2, is also included in the exhibition. In the short excerpt on display, Norman Mailer respectfully plays Houdini with masterful grace and purpose.

Vik Muniz’s portrait Houdini, Pantheon, from his Pictures of Ink series, is mysterious, shapeless, and hard to define—much like the magician himself. Houdini appeals to Muniz who similarly pushes himself and his work in aggressive and inventive ways. Muniz says, “If you think of Houdini as a man of art, you have to think of him as a man of science. As most artists in the past, he is always working at the edge of technological development. He knew the latest thing that was invented in technology. That’s why I think when you see interesting magic today you have to think about films, imagination. That is the continuation of Houdini’s legacy.”

Pettibon’s drawings seem to most fittingly relate to the sketchiness and difficulty of defining Houdini’s work and legacy. His works, like Houdini’s, are invested in creating illusions, whether it’s the act of creating a wave from a cascade of straight pen lines or trying to define the riotous sound of Black Flag through the traditionally-demure medium of drawing. More than the other artists in the exhibition, Pettibon’s Houdini-inspired work is a free interpretation. He is able to view Houdini through a conceptual lens, and is skilled in his avoidance of literal references to great escapes. A Pettibon drawing from 1991 of an intense countenance reads: "With each fading breath he (Houdini) vomited up another skeleton key. You see his memory fading upon the page. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. What you hoard you soon spit out."

Houdini’s legacy, with its still-unsolved mysteries and lasting magic, might translate best to the realm of conceptual and performance art. Many times throughout the exhibition, a parallel is drawn between Houdini’s act and the act of contemporary conceptual performance. This correlation is emphasized by the inclusion of works by Allen Ruppersberg, the great Californian conceptualist who often refers to Houdini and his legacy. Works in the exhibition include Houdini Again, a piece composed of five overdue library notices for books on or by Houdini (only one is included in the exhibition). By checking out each book and keeping or destroying it, Ruppersberg was able to both make something “magically disappear” while also maintaining paper records of the disappearances from the library system.

Although the visual art component of the exhibition is a bit jarring and literal, a few of these works deserve worthy reconsideration in this context. The artworks in Houdini: Art and Magic are unfairly treated like footnotes, and it’s a shame—for many of these artists, the pronounced comparison with Houdini’s documented life and work shines an edifying light on their own process and intentions.

Tom Davie: Typographic

2010-10-25T10:18:00.001-07:00

Tom Davie's typographic posters are rare in their beauty and thoughtful consideration of type. For those of us who appreciate aesthetics and the meaning of content and form, his work is a rare gem.

Davie is an artist, graphic designer and design educator whose work can be found at studiotwentysix2. As someone who works more on the editorial side of the arts, I find his posters to be both beautiful and smart.

His series of typographic posters includes explorations of such ideas as white space (seen here), decorative borders, and ligatures. The more sculptural works are photographed in gorgeous natural light.

View Davie's typographic posters here.

Fred Tomaselli in Brooklyn

2010-10-25T07:46:00.000-07:00

Some artists mine great works from the world as it is. Others are able to reach through blackness, stars, and the typology of all creatures to show an imagined world. These imagined places have been built throughout the history of art, from the painted moral playgrounds of Hieronymus Bosch to the physical cells of Louise Bourgeois.

Brooklyn artist Fred Tomaselli creates worlds, though his are distinguished by their sense of humor, inventiveness, and sheer dimensionality. Best known for his large-scale mixed-media collages coated in epoxy, Tomaselli mainly draws from the themes of psychedelia, drugs, nature, and the body. Viewing his subjects in fragments, he painstakingly crafts imagery from thousands of small magazine clippings, pills, leaves, roots, and dots of paint. He builds each work, layer by layer, until the finished product is an endless number of layers --paint, collage, and epoxy all interspersed--and then polished with turtle wax (like a surfboard).

The Brooklyn Museum is currently exhibiting a mid-career survey of Tomasalli's work--a fitting venue for the Williamsburg-based artist. The exhibition, titled simply Fred Tomaselli, is chronological, sharp, and extremely focused. The exhibition begins with works made in the early 1990s and winds through the next twenty years to works created specifically for the exhibition this year. The first work in the exhibition, All the Bands I Can Remember Seeing and All the Extinct Vertebrates in North America Since 1492, is a brilliant and minimalist expression of personal autobiography and environmental negligence. The work looks like the night sky—black paper dotted with stars made in white pencil. On one side of the page, the stars are labeled with the names of hundreds of punk and rock bands from the 1980s and 90s. The other side of the page has the same stars, labeled with the names of extinct animals. Tomaselli’s drawing is funny and sad—like Shrigley at his best. It’s hedonism made physical: “Look at all the great nights I had while these animals were on the endangered species list.”

Fred Tomaselli is remarkable for its clear chronology. It’s exciting to see Tomaselli’s work develop piece by piece, bridging the years between Black and White All Over (an example of Op Art minimalism from 1993) and collages made on front pages of the New York Times within the past year. Black and White All Over is a deceptively smart work. The large panel contains white pills in varying sizes, snaking up into vertical stripes in the hallucinatory manner of a Bridget Riley painting. Tomaselli plays with both the idea of psychedelic perception found in Op Art with the physical psychedelic perception which would be experienced if you were able to consumed the hallucinatory drugs encased in the work.

Many of Tomaselli’s panels are hypnotic and hallucinatory in the same way—and many also contain psychedelic drugs visible beneath layers of epoxy. He forges patterns from the same drugs which, if ingested, would probably leave a person seeing patterns. He toys with perspective, reality, and morality, all within the usually safe medium of collage.

Tomaselli challenges reality—the reality of worlds and the physicality of art. His “paintings” are nearly impossible to photograph, as layers within each work reach forward to the viewer from an infinitely endless place. It’s hard to tell where pieces of collage relate to each other between countless layers of resin, paint, plants, and pills. The images are most interesting when viewed from the two extreme perspectives of up close and far away.

The very best example of the endlessness of Tomaselli’s work in the exhibition is probably Echo, Wow, and Flutter, an expansive, 10-foot work from 2000. The endless, layered curves are inspired by the geometrical concept of the catenary (the idealized curve made by a line suspended between two points and hanging by its own weight). Lines of lips, birds, paint, marijuana leaves, and pills are strung like long strings of pearls, intersecting and crossing in dizzying lines. Each catenary is mirrored in the opposite side of the work, and the effect is pure visual psychdelia. It’s lush and endless, both in the lines of the collage and the infinite layers of material and resin.

Although Tomaselli is best known and respected for these immense, endless collages, his small works on paper are, for some, the highlight of this retrospective. His small collages and mixed-media works were the most interesting works in terms of his skill for detail and his eye for wit and dark humor. In small collages like Greater Pewee, Tomaselli combines the nature found in field guides with the ersatz nature found in outdoor clothing catalogues. He will cut out the body of a bird from a birdwatching page, leaving only the silhouette behind. Then, he inserts a close-up image of a fleece camping jacket behind the silhouette, giving the bird the effect of having bright colorful feathers when viewed from far away. But, when viewed close-up, the collages reveal their biting humor in their mild-mannered attack of the buying and selling of the great outdoors.

The most recent works in the exhibition are also small works on paper. In the past year, Tomaselli has been scanning the front pages of the New York Times and printing the images on archival paper. He sees absurdity in the images of war, politicians, and disgraced financiers, and he manipulates those visions with watercolor and gouache. An apocalyptic scene of industrial chimneys is made even more jarring by the addition of geometric rainbows, and a scene of a financial ponzi schemer leaving his hearing with his wife is turned into the flight into Egypt. Tomaselli challenges current events by framing them in dizziness, hallucination, and manipulation.

Tomaselli’s work is worthy of this mid-career survey. He sees worlds and invents new ones, worlds which can only be seen through endless layers of everything. His work is spectacular in its revision of reality, and his imagination is a rare and refreshing dream in its own right.

Fred Tomaselli

8 October 2010 – 2 January 2011

The Brooklyn Museum

David Shrigley at Anton Kern

2010-10-21T10:31:00.000-07:00

Humor is sometimes overlooked as a significant aspect of contemporary art. But because art is so often visceral, it isn’t a surprise that wit is just as evident as violence and depravity in new artworks. Many artists today are using humor inventively, pushing the boundaries of both acceptability and standard practice. Some good examples of humorist/artists include Maurizio Cattelan, whose most recent work, L.O.V.E., is a 36-foot-tall sculpture of a hand with only a middle finger which is directed towards the Milan Stock Exchange, and Fred Tomaselli, whose brilliant small-scale collages of birds combine a love of the true typological interpretation of nature found in field guides with the ersatz promise of nature found in Eddie Bauer and Lands End catalogs.

When the subject of humor in art comes up, Scottish artist David Shrigley is often a keystone in the conversation. His iconic drawings are subtle, sometimes unsettling, and look deceptively simple. Like the best graphic novelists or most talented journalists, he is able to capture an entire sentiment or philosophy with a few brushstrokes. In his current solo show at Anton Kern Gallery, Shrigley displays his drawings, sculptures, and a black-and-white animation entitled “The Letter.” All of the works straddle the line between comic deception and boldfaced lies, and the viewer is pushed to intermittently feel uneasy, critical, depressed, and lighthearted.

Shrigley is fascinated by simple problems of morality. For example, in the video, “The Letter,” a hand slowly writes a note across the screen excusing a little boy from going to school. Although it is signed by the child’s mother at the conclusion, it is never revealed whether the note was actually written by the mother or by the child himself. Shrigley often frames questions of truth in this poignantly simple way, encouraging his viewers to question the perspective and consequences of his poorly-drawn characters’ actions.

The thirty drawings displayed in the exhibition contain many examples of Shrigley’s succinct wit and unique ability to see complex humor in simple forms. Whether he’s describing an olive green rectangle as a 19th –century workhouse or showing a man being squashed literally underfoot, Shrigley is able to condense vast ideas of language, history, and common fears into a few drawn lines. Shrigley deftly combines the wit and comically dark truths of Larry David with the nihilistic zing of a dedicated philosopher in black.

A series of sculptures accompany the drawings and video, although they are not as provocative as those shown in his previous Anton Kern show. Strewn throughout the gallery are giant ceramic gumboots, a sad white ribcage, and a series of small bronze drips and fingers pointing from the walls. The sculptures are more sad than humorous, and their weight manages to make them far more nihilistic, though less memorable, than his drawings.

While I was walking through the exhibition, an Italian woman approached me. She asked me in a thick accent, “Is this art? Why is this art?” And I explained that perhaps the show might be difficult for those who speak English as a second language, as Shrigley plays on words and common turns of phrase. She insisted “No, no. My English is good. I understand. I just don’t know why this is art.” After I explained that he’s a humorist, that he sees darkness and comedy in a few lines or a smudge of paint, she seemed content with my answer and walked away. Five minutes later, she was laughing and tugging on the sleeve of my jacket. “I get it” she exclaimed with glee. She proceeded to show me a series of drawings of boots, colors, hills, houses, and tombstones. She had finally been able to look beyond the surface of Shrigley’s work to find the brilliant, depraved wit that hides beneath.

ANTON KERN GALLERY IS LOCATED AT 532 WEST 20 STREET, NEW YORK.

David Shrigley
Untitled, 2010
Bronze
1 x 1 3/4 x 2 1/4 inches
Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery

Logos and Contemporary Art

2010-09-28T09:52:00.000-07:00

Art and commerce react to society in tandem. Both facets of visual culture transform as cultural touchstones flex and shift. While art persistently desires to provoke and comment on culture, some elements of consumerism take the opposite tack: they stoke the engines of what we buy, sell, and desire—they form the basis of the culture which is so widely challenged by fine arts.

Contemporary corporate and capitalist priorities persistently pervade millennial visual culture. With each passing year, the general desire to wear logos, buy brand names, and adhere to trends and their makers spreads farther and deeper within developed and developing countries. With this growing awareness of brands, logos, and markets, it is not surprising that art, once the standard means for cultural criticism, has been absorbed by the raging tide of the buying set.

Warhol shocked the art world with Brillo boxes and Campbell soup cans, and the ensuing Noachian deluge of Pop art forced down the barriers between art and commerce, blurring the lines between advertising and criticism of advertising. While art “finds its fulfillment just outside explanation” (James P. Werner), commerce finds its completion in the simplest forms of marketing and visual imagery.

Essentially, the modi operandi of art and commerce should be at odds. Yet somehow, more and more often, one becomes the other. Art is commerce in the eyes of Louis Vuitton collaborations with Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami, and Stephen Sprouse. Art is commerce when framed by Manolo Blahnik boots made in cooperation with Damien Hirst. And what is the meaning of BMW art cars? Since 1975, artists like Alexander Calder, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella and Jeff Koons have designed symbiotic vehicles which straddle the worlds of fine art and that of an international motor works.

The 1960s saw the invention and proliferation of Pop, the 1970s saw an increasing display of logos and brand names, and the 2000s have been a messy and disappointing mix of both inclinations. Logos have “changed the substance” of clothing and accessories (Naomi Klein), and artists have changes the substance of logos. While brands have come to symbolize the retention of identity for some, they mark the end of the individual for others. Where does art fit in this spectrum?

These questions bring me to the work of emerging artist and established costume designer Jason Alper, whose show PROLETARIAN DRIFT AND THE ENFRACHISEMENT OF THE BURGEOISIE IN THE 21st CENTURY has just opened at Guy Hepner in West Hollywood. The exhibition includes eight works in which Alper foists contemporary consumer visual cues onto classic and well-loved paintings from the Western canon. The Mona Lisa wears the classic brown and tan Louis Vuitton printed logo fabric, while Magritte’s Son of Man wears the popular updated version in white. “I feel Louis Vuitton’s logo…emerged as an art form in itself,” Alper says.

While Alper intends his works to be irreverent and humorous, in actuality, they seem like probable truths. Corporate sponsorship of museums is already an important element in arts funding—are we so far off from draping Gainsborough’s Blue Boy in Burberry check? Alper’s wry examination of high art and mass culture provokes an exploration of the symptoms of contemporary consumerism and its ills. His paintings, though a touch contrived, are effective studies of authorship, commerce, inauthenticity, and the high-risk dangers of art mixed with marketing.

Frederick Wiseman: The Store (1983)

2010-08-10T10:02:00.000-07:00

Throughout 2010, the Museum of Modern Art in New York is presenting a comprehensive survey of films by Frederick Wiseman. Celebrating the recent acquisition of many new prints of Wiseman films, the MoMA is screening a few films each month until the end of the year. So far, many well-known and controversial Wiseman films screened at the MoMA have included Basic Training (1971), Primate (1974), and Racetrack (1985). This month, the museum is playing The Store (1983), Wiseman’s first color film.

Superficially, The Store seems like a departure from Wiseman’s earlier, heavy-hitting subjects like public housing, army basic training, and cruel animal testing. But the expected frivolity of Wiseman’s subject soon gives in to his preternatural ability to capture and display the weaknesses of human character in all its manifestations. With uncomprable talent, Wiseman is able to equate the Dallas Neiman-Marcus department store with the prisons, hospitals, and army barracks of the films which framed his career early on. Through Wiseman’s scrutinizing lens, we are able to see the power structure of the store and the regimental approach to controlling all levels of the workforce, from the shampoo girls to the fashion buyers and the board of executives.

Wiseman’s close and considered study of the store’s employees and management focuses a lens towards the instability of a consumer culture and the inequity of the serving and the served. A particularly strong theme is that of the role of personal shoppers and the wealthy women to whom they cater. Many scenes focus on these shoppers who select incredibly expensive garments which will be worn by someone else. Desires are persistently transferred and unfulfilled in this service culture.

The Store is a thorough exploration of the perversities of consumerism: shop girls are forced to practice smiling before the shop opens; the store model (a woman who appears in nearly every other scene, each time wearing a different couture outfit) approaches each of the tables in the shop café, announcing her dress is available for purchase on the third floor; and the manager of the furs gallery calls a man to tell him the sad news that his wife is just too petite to properly carry off a full-length sable coat.

The kindness of the shop girls and the lovely employees is often met with condescension from the wealthy shoppers, and the contradictory manifestations of class are apparent throughout the film. Like many great Wiseman documentaries, authority creates an imbalance of power and the good don’t go unpunished.

Wiseman is a national treasure, and his films should be the measuring rod for American life. He poetically portrays the greatest flaws of American culture without ever standing in front of the camera or saying a word. His films quietly and humanely captures the full range of American lives in a way which never loses potency or a sense of urgency, even decades after their creation. And because Wiseman never makes his presence known and refuses to influence the action on screen, he is trustworthy—a Wiseman film should be accepted as a definitive and poetic truth.

(Frederick Wiseman at MoMA continues until December 31, 2010. For a full list of screenings, please visit MoMA.org)

Alexander Deineka

2010-08-09T11:56:00.001-07:00

While recently reading some art magazines from the 1930s, I came across the work of Alexander Deineka, a wonderful Soviet painter whose works I hadn't seen before.

There's something incredibly seductive about Deineka's paintings from the 1930s-- although he later became synonymous with propaganda works celebrating proletariat workers and the Red Army, his earlier works also portray quiet scenes of youth and family.

The most striking element of Deineka's work is the light. So often paintings of Soviet life are shrouded in grey mists, or we imagine only black and red propaganda posters and Cyrillic agitation. To see these brightly illuminated, almost glowing scenes is captivating-- especially within the context of their creation. Some paintings feature near-impressionist sprays of light and water, others include the soft morning light of life before the dew dries. I was incredibly moved when I saw these paintings in the black and white pages of the old magazines, and to see them in color only makes them lovelier.

Ethereal Materialism: Rivane Neuenschwander

2010-08-06T19:31:00.000-07:00

To fully appreciate and succumb to Rivane Neuenschwander’s art, the viewer must say “yes.” Neuenschwander’s works, ethereal, intelligent, and quiet, all thrive in an environment of acceptance and gratitude. In the contemporary art world where money trumps mindfulness, the Brazilian conceptualist’s work is refreshing and humane. In Neuenschwander’s first museum survey, “Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other” currently on view at the New Museum in New York, those who say “yes” to her art are rewarded with a moving and unforgettable experience.

Neuenschwander’s closest predecessors can probably be found in the work of her fellow Brazilian conceptualists and the artists who propelled Tropicalia to the forefront of South American cultural exports in the twentieth century. Like Lygia Clark who came before her, Neuenschwander embraces the organic, the small, the interactive and the experiential.

The most visible work in the survey, arguably the centerpiece, is titled I Wish Your Wish. Visitors are welcomed into a white gallery space, separated from the lobby by a glass wall. The room is filled with thousands of ribbons in every color, each printed with a different wish written by previous visitors to the installation in its past stages. To fully participate, visitors are asked to write their wish on a slip of paper and put it in place of the ribbon they choose to take. The work is based on a tradition from the Church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim in Bahia, Brazil, where worshipers tie ribbons to their wrists. When the ribbons eventually fall off, their wishes are granted (though a Portuguese friend of mine says that the wish won’t come true until the ribbon is tossed into the sea).

Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of I Wish Your Wish is the collective aspect of sharing our deepest desires. It’s almost an exercise in cooperative dreaming: you select a wish which was not originally yours, but you wear it, look at it daily, and experience the words around your wrist when you write a note or open a door. Eventually, after spending so much time with someone else’s desires, the wish becomes your own. When I visited the exhibition, I found a ribbon with a wish probably written by a child: “I wish I had a turtle and that there were no wars.” I exchanged a far more personal wish written on a slip of paper when I pulled the red ribbon from the wall. But after a few hours, and then a few days, I began wanting a turtle: one for me and one for the child who wrote the wish in the first place. And while I was wearing someone’s wish in a very public manner, adorned on my body, my wish had traveled elsewhere, through Neuenschwander’s art, where it will probably end up on a wall in another exhibition in months to come. In this current climate of desperation of frustration brought on by current affairs and the sagging economy, an exercise in shared dreaming is a welcome respite.

Another memorable and poetic work is First Love (2005). In an upstairs gallery, a forensic artist sits with visitors and listens to them describe their first true love. There is something incongruous about conjuring visions of love with the assistance of an FBI identification book, but the result is breathtaking. The final sketches which hang above the sketch artist’s desk are incredibly personal and sincere proclamations of memory and romance. The loveliest thing of all is that the sketches all resemble people who are about sixteen years old. The only aging factor is hairstyles pictured in each portrait, perfectly dating the era in which the visitor fell in love.

Neuenschwander has the rare ability to push her quiet and transcendent humanistic art across all media. The New Museum survey also includes two films, The Fall (2009) and The Tenant (2010). The Fall is a fast-paced point of view video of an egg being swiftly carried on a spoon. The suspense is palpable: will the egg drop? The video brings viewers’ hearts up through their throats, making us empathize with the perilous situation. The Tenant manipulates suspense in a similar fashion: a camera follows a soap bubble as it floats in and out of the rooms of a spacious, bare apartment. Again, Neuenschwander has beautifully aggrandized the simple act of watching a small, delicate object and praying for it not to break.

A Day Like Any Other is a beautiful and touching display of interactive poetry. Neuenschwander’s art is rare and special in its slow pace and quiet execution, and this survey is a welcome antithesis to most contemporary art of the millennial recession.

“Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other” continues through Sept. 19 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side; (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org.

David Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum

2010-08-06T19:23:00.000-07:00

“Goldbatt’s way was always to go deeper, to find an oblique angle that went right to the heart of the matter: an image bespeaking loneliness, stunted aspiration, fragile pride on both sides of the racial divide, not infrequently with an intimation of imminent violence, or its result.”- Joseph Lelyveld, the New York Review of Books

David Goldblatt is one of South Africa’s most highly recognized photographers and his work is a valued South African cultural export. Growing up before the rumbles of apartheid, Goldblatt felt compelled to document and witness the social upheaval and civic organization that was implemented through the course of his young adulthood. As a Jew, Goldblatt didn’t fit into the clear divide of black and white—he was still something different or “less than.” His Jewish identity, though not viewed as intrinsic to his work when viewed in the world press, is essentially allied with his approach to photography. The Anti-Semitism that he often was subjected to made him sensitive to the humiliation and degradation suffered by other groups in South Africa’s human landscape.

South African Photographs: David Goldblatt, the current Goldblatt retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York, surveys Goldblatt’s brilliant, nuanced, and sympathetic career behind the lens. His photographs do not rely on common imagery of riots, violence, or segregated public space. Instead, they focus on the microcosms of community and the small instances in which everything collides or tension is made visible. He has a marked talent for finding the signal of a struggle in a portrait of daily life.

In this exhibition of 150 black and white photographs, each image is annotated in precise and illuminating detail in the artist’s captions. Like Diane Arbus, Goldblatt has the rare ability to tell a life story through the combined means of an image and a few words. Recurring themes in his work include the lives of Afrikaners; daily rituals and the community of Boksburg, a small white community in Johannesburg; the makeshift puppet states or Bantustans in which many black South Africans were forced to live; the lives of black miners; and the physical landscape of Johannesburg.

The most interesting photographs are those in which both segments of the population come together in surprising ways. One of the more memorable photographs is titled The farmer’s son with his nursemaid, on the farm in Heimweeberg, near Nietverdiend in the Marico Bushveld. Transvaal (North-West Province), 1964. In the photograph, a young Afrikaner boy stands behind his sitting nursemaid, a black teenage girl. He touches her intimately, his fingers lingering on the gap between her sleeveless shirt and her bare shoulders. And the gesture is so casual—the two are clearly physically very close. But although their relationship is appropriate and accepted, it is clear that as he grows older, they will inevitably be torn apart. It just wouldn’t be appropriate for them to be together if he was not a child.

Another memorable image is Holdup in Hillbrow (Johannesburg, 1963). A young blonde boy has snuck up behind a black man in a suit. The boy is playfully aiming a toy pistol at the man’s back. The gesture is loaded and provocative: although at age four or five the boy is only playing, the game hints at the potential for a more violent end. If the boy were only a bit older, this would not be a game: this would be the terrifying violence of apartheid.

The photo Before the fight: amateur boxing at the Town Hall. 1979/80 is also a poignant one. A terrified little boy is standing still in the corner of a boxing ring. He is wearing boxing gloves, but he is perfectly still—overpowered by fear. He is given the tools to fight and expected to rage, and perhaps this is analogous to the situation of many white children who lived in apartheid South Africa—they were given the gloves and expected to fight, despite the fact that they were merely children.

Through Goldblatt’s lens, we are invited to look at the realities of South Africa in a non-judgmental way. He does not form his viewers opinions, he does not proselytize. For Goldblatt, it is just as important to share the truths of his home country as it is to explore the life and values of its citizens. In images of crumbling black states, middle-class white social clubs, and everything in between, he is able to dissect the gestures which cohesively form one of the most complex modern countries in the world.

South African Photographs: David Goldblatt is on view at the Jewish Museum through September 19, 2010. The Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Ave at 92nd St, New York NY 10128. http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/

Greater New York

2010-06-24T17:07:00.000-07:00

You are young. You are making new art. You are drunk with energy. You are probably an emerging artist in New York City.

"Greater New York," the current survey of emerging New York artists at P.S. 1, both praises and questions the status of new work being made in our nation's art capital. Unfortunately, the dizzying showcase is more invested in shock and revulsion than it is in showcasing some of the beautiful and challenging works being made by young New York artists today.

Despite Brooklyn's status as a world capital in the return of craftsmanship, and the returning popularity of contemporary art being made in the realms of drawing and painting, "Greater New York" focuses single-mindedly on black humor, pretension, and a disregard for execution.

All four levels of the former schoolhouse in Long Island City, Queens, are full of artists who are clearly products of the newly-matriculated millennial generation. Their self-esteem is through the roof: how else could you explain an entire room full of brightly-colored masking tape or a wall covered in painted sticks?

Of the 68 artists featured in this survey, a few are monumental disappointments and a few are quiet, intelligent surprises-- the rest are largely forgettable. Of the works which made the proceedings seem like a mockery, a few stand out. There is Sharon Haye's room full of projections of gay-rights rallies. Of course gender and sexual rights are a necessary theme in contemporary art, but by representing New York art now, P.S. 1 should be showcasing something we have not seen and which must be brought to our attention. The fact of the matter is that the relatively simple task of showing gay rights rallies is not art-- it's a current event. In 2010, it is not so different from screening a video of a Critical Mass bike ride or an urban farmer's market. There's also Elisabeth Subrin's silent 16mm "elegy" for lost Italian Williamsburg, Brooklyn. To the untrained eye, it's just a quiet video of storefronts with old-fashioned signs in the windows. But, as someone who used to live in the neighborhood-- well, she just walked a camera down Graham Avenue. Without context, the film is meaningless. And from the incredible number of visitors to P.S. 1 who haven't lived off Graham Avenue, what can be garnered from a silent video of coffee shops and bus stops?

There were a few artists who stood out, however, as being more indicative of the praiseworthy trends emerging in young New York art now. Leidy Churchman is one of very few painters in the show (a negligent oversight on the part of curator Klaus Biesenbach). Fortunately, Churchman's sweetly and forgiveably perverted paintings are a refreshing collection. As one of two figurative painters in the exhibition, he holds up his end of the bargain in acting as a representative for much of the work which was alarmingly left out. Hank Willis Thomas' "Unbranded" is also smart, succinct, and effective. Thomas collected advertisements from black interest magazines like Jet, Essence, and Ebony, starting from 1968 to today. For each of the years (beginning in '68, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated), Thomas features two advertisements from that year. These images have been wiped clean of any brand images or text, leaving behind only the pure image which was used to sell an idea or emotion to an entire segment of the population. Like Ellen Gallagher, Thomas is able to tell an incredible story by forcibly removing black culture from its original context and wisely re-framing it.

Overall, "Greater New York" is prone to leaving art-lovers worse for wear. As someone who lives in this city and loves the arts in this city, it is dismaying to see so many incredible aspects of art-making today be forgotten. These works largely pay little or no regard to the specific times we are living in and the constraints of the economy, the war, and the increasing loss of individualism. Those works which I see elsewhere which do so eloquently and beautifully celebrate our times with honesty and bravery have, unfortunately, not made the cut.

'Greater New York 2010'
P.S.1
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City
718-784-2084
Through October 18

Dead or Alive

2010-05-09T15:34:00.001-07:00

Living in an exceedingly inorganic world has pushed contemporary art towards the sphere of natural materials. In pursuit of the new, and in pursuit of the not seen, some artists now turn towards anti-technological methods and materials. Using natural substances, like hair, bones, fur, and feathers, more and more contemporary artists assert their visions of the new.

"Dead or Alive" at the Museum of Arts and Design is a smart and provocative survey of artists who work with materials found in the organic world. Viewed in the context of the technological capabilities displayed in much contemporary art (like Takashi Murakami's robot-nymphs and Jeff Koons' slick recent paintings), "Dead or Alive" is a refreshing return to pure objects and decoration, executed with the requisite intelligence of any contemporary work.

The exhibition is smart, playful, and occasionally grotesque. Inspired by the idea of curios and wunderkammers, "Dead or Alive" showcases mouse skeletons, butterflies, horsehair, and silkworm cocoons in the same spirit of curiosity and wonder.

Some works were exceptionally challenging, beautiful, or horrifying. One standout work in particular was Untitled (+/-) by Alistair Mackie. Two concrete platforms are placed parallel on the gallery floor, one supporting a loom, the other carrying a pile of small bones. It looks as though the loom has been stopped in the middle of weaving, and cashmere-looking fabric wraps around the spool underneath. Upon reading the wall text, the visitor learns that Mackie spent a year collecting barn owl pellets, removing the mouse fur and bones from within. He used the loom to make a fabric from the found fur, and the pile of bones correlates to the size of the woven fabric. Mackie's medium is his message, and this work perfectly exemplified the potential for the use of such unconventional natural materials in contemporary art.

Another memorable work was Tim Hawkinson's Point. At first glance, the sculpture resembles an arrowhead carved from white marble. But upon closer inspection, the viewer realizes that the piece is actually constructed from hundreds of egg shell pieces, turned inside out and glued together. The contrast between the object (a durable weapon), and the medium (delicate shells), is smart and beautiful.

Susie MacMurray's cave of rooster feathers is hypnotic and dizzying, and Damien Hirst's butterflies behind glass are surprisingly lovely (a trait not often to be expected from the enfant terrible YBA). Kate McGwire's shaped, twisting waterfall of pigeon feathers provokes a kind of breathless, still appreciation. Keith Bentley's Cauda Equina is an eerie form of Victorian mourning-- a widow's cape knotted from thousands of horse hairs collected from processing plants and displayed in the shape of the horse we may mourn.

The exhibition is marked by a number of acts of obsessive collecting, a given considering the materials are often feathers, small bones, insects, or spices. Such obsessiveness, though pervasive throughout, is best exemplified by the works of Lonneke Gordijn and Jochem Hendricks. For her contribution, Gordijn made a beautiful system of LED lights covered in dried dandelion seeds. The dandelion seeds were meticulously collected, dried, and then glued around the small LED bulbs in the shape they would take in their natural state-- poised and ready to be blown on and to grant your wishes. Hendricks' two pieces in the show, titled Hansi and Bubi, both collect the feathers of dead parakeets. The feathers are displayed in rings surrounding a small diamond-- a diamond formed from the compressed carbon of the carcasses of each dead bird.

With a pervasive attention to detail, and an obsessive relationship with their medium, the works in "Dead or Alive" all arouse curiosity or awe. It's an incredibly vibrant show, despite the number of pieces which were once (but are no longer) alive.

Kino! 2010: Next Generation

2010-04-25T14:46:00.000-07:00

The Museum of Modern Art is currently screening its thirty-first annual showcase of contemporary German cinema. Under the banner "Kino! 2010," the series highlights new German films at their first New York screenings, fresh from the Hof and Berlin film festivals.

Included in the survey of new German feature films is a series of shorts from German film schools. A dozen films were selected for the "Next Generation 2009" screening, representing the best and brightest of young German cinematic talent.

Amoklove, by Julia C. Kaiser from the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg, is a fast love story, a rush of feeling without pause. It tells the story of Fabian and Marie, who meet on a subway. They chase each other without reason, they eat and drink their way through Stuttgart. Nothing makes sense and it all happens so quickly-- like love in real life. The shots become shorter and more punctuated as they fall more deeply in love, losing their reason and composure. The audience might lose its breath in the dizzying pace, their hearts beating as if they, too, are in love. See the Amoklove website here.

Another smart and memorable film from the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg is Clean Up by Sebastian Mez. The film is a quiet and forthright documentary showing the cleaning process at the death chamber at an American prison. And though the viewer is not made a witness to the execution, the phone conversation between the warden and the executioner is played as the custodian cleans, bringing the difficult task of cleaning the room into the context of the event.

I Don't Feel Like Dancing, by Evi Goldbrunner and Joachim Dollhopf, takes place somewhere in a war zone. Three soliders of ambiguous nationality stalk a young girl on her way home from an ersatz disco on the base. When they turn their violence and war on her, they are shocked and weakened by what they find.

Keine besonderen Vorkommnisse (No Special Incidents), by Lennart Ruff, is a short film about two German soliders stationed in a mine field in present-day Kosovo. Kosovo, the film explains, was the first German military deployment since WWII-- and troops are still there on patrol. In addition to communication problems and boredom, the soldiers in Ruff's film also struggle constantly with the physical remainders of war. They are unsure if there are any mines left, or if they really have anything to fear or protect.

Lebensader, by Angela Steffen, is undoubtedly a standout in the Next Generation screening, and it was the one film everybody left the theater gushing about. In this animated short, a little girl discovers all sides of the universe in a leaf. The animation is fluid, intelligent, and gorgeous. The story itself, too, is beautiful. Steffen's artwork is inspiring, and it will be exciting to wait and see what she does next.

Rosarot, by Ines Christine Geisser and Kirsten Carina Geisser, is a one-minute animation which so perfectly describes the joys and confusions of love.

rosarot. from kiinanimation on Vimeo.

Lastly, Sunrise Dacapo by Nina Poppe is an absolute standout. Another documentary short, Poppe silently shows the operations in a nature assembly line. The film shows geraniums in mass production, women planting seedlings by the dozens, machinery picking up pots and placing them on conveyor belts. Men pick off dead leaves and hand the pots back to the machines. Click- a sprinkler switches on. Sunlight is moderated. The boxes are slapped with plastic labels. This is the bounty of nature built by machines.

The Next Generation films provide a diverse and egalitarian view into the world of today's young German filmmakers. Perhaps these same directors will soon be snatching up the awards for Best Foreign Film-- but for now, its enough to be causing discussion and heartache here in New York.

For the Love of Maira Kalman

2010-04-23T08:39:00.000-07:00

It’s springtime. Flowers are blooming, birds are singing, and even the Brooklyn-Queens expressway seems to hum with refreshed energy. Indoors, away from the sunshine and reverie, Maira Kalman’s work brings springtime to bookshelves and computer screens, even in the dead of winter.

An established force in design and illustration, Maira Kalman so perfectly evokes the joy and humor that best suits the season. I’ve been looking back at her work with a much deeper consideration in recent weeks, finding that when someone’s work often greets you on the cover of the New Yorker, its easy to forget its artistic merit. Kalman’s work in design, photography, and nearly performative illustration all seems effortless. Her brilliant use of color and type is overshadowed by her spirit and whimsy. Her illustrations evoke the rainbow-hued vistas of Hockney’s Hollywood Hills and recent Yorkshire landscapes, and her portraits evoke Alice Neel at her brightest and most telling.

Kalman was born in Tel Aviv and raised in Riverdale, New York. She taught herself art and illustration, forming an idiosyncratic style free of rules or limitations. Her lack of training perhaps also led to her freedom to move between media: her illustrated version of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style is just as popular as the umbrellas and watches she designed with her husband, Tibor Kalman, for the MoMA. Her New Yorker covers are bright, intelligent, and inviting, and her series of columns for the New York Times (The Principles of Uncertainty and The Pursuit of Happiness) have invited praise from all over the world. There are fabric designs, clothes for Isaac Mizrahi, opera set pieces…Kalman approaches every medium with color, intelligence, and humor.

Like Saul Steinberg, Kalman treads the fine line between art and illustration, her sense of humor only serving to complicate matters further. Some would argue that hers is not high art and would not warrant display in museums. Others would say that her painterly images, her intelligent use of photography and text, and her general aptitude for expression would put her on the same pedestal as the greatest American artists.

Perhaps Kalman’s path to canonization as an artist will follow that of Alexander Calder. Calder was first associated with humorous newspaper columns, too, only to be viewed now as a major figure in the development of modern American art. Kalman would also qualify for such a rise in the ranks, and I look forward to betting on her odds.

Chatroulette vs. Art

2010-04-21T10:46:00.000-07:00

Will Chatroulette have an impact on our culture? Since its creation three months ago by a 17-year old boy in Moscow, the simple video chat program has become a source of fascination for millions. The program is basic and spare: upon logging onto the Chatroulette website, a visitor is greeted by two boxes, one labeled "Stranger," the other labeled "You." By clicking the "New Game" button, you are immediately connected via webcam to a random stranger anywhere in the world. Though some predict the technology is well on its way to becoming a mere graveyard for pornographic behavior, I would like to believe that perhaps it may play a part in the growing collaborative spirit of contemporary artists.

When viewed in light of Nicolas Bourriaud's "altermodernism," Chatroulette displays the potential for new kinds of art making and global creative communication. Clearly visible is "the new modernity that (is) based on translation: What matters today is to translate the cultural values of cultural groups and to connect them to the world network." (Bourriaud) Though I firmly hold belief in Chatroulette's potential, I haven't seen it lead to any new work so far-- that is, until I saw the composite images of French photographer Pierre- Arnaud Gillet. His series "Next" explores the interiors of the random strangers who briefly let him into their homes via the internet. He writes:

"Next" is my latest project, based on the amazing world of Chatroulette. Chatroulette is a very diverse world where the worst alongside the best. A microcosm of our society through the small window of our webcams, there are all due to its random mode. Unlike the practices of social networks today, you never know who or what you're gonna fall. We manage all our image. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Skype, our virtual image is everywhere, and multiple and we try to control it better. Because these people "gave" their self image to strangers at the other end of the world, I wondered how they would react to a goal when they are already at a goal. One of their own webcam. Camera at the screen, I press "Next", click, I take a picture. Fingers, threats and smiles. Some hide in shame, others enjoy the game and play, laugh in his lungs had been caught in the trap. By comparing these responses, creating meetings by associations of images, I create a link between partners who have not met. I tell new stories, probable or improbable. Visually, the frame of each camera, its texture, the choice of framing the "partner" brings an incredible set of images of our world in 2010. Sex, fame, love, talent. Tout est sur Chatroulette. Everything is on Chatroulette.

Via Muuuz. Read more about Pierre-Arnaud Gillet at his website.

Bonhams European Paintings Sale

2010-04-20T19:50:00.000-07:00

Last night I visited the preview of the Bonhams European Paintings sale with a group of Courtauld alumnae/i. Occupying the former space of the Dahesh Museum of Art in the IBM Building, the new Bonhams space is ideally suited for the incredible collection of works currently on display.

The sale, which takes place April 21st, is full of surprising, strange, and beautiful pictures. Standout works include a stunning drawing of a male nude from the school of Rubens, a female portrait from the circle of William Dobson, and a turn of the century sledding scene by the Scottish painter George Houston.

But, between the hundreds of pictures hung in an academic style on the Bonhams walls, only one work made everyone skip a breath. The picture, titled "On the edge of the marsh," was painted by William Page Atkinson Wells in 1917. I had never heard his name before, and the specialist did not elaborate on his biography. The painting is so modern, so quiet and curious, that I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

A woman, all alone, stands in a marsh. The sky is infinite around her, consuming all visible space between the reeds and beyond. The horizon line hovers near the bottom of the frame, sacrificing all unnecessary land for sky. Whereas in most contemporaneous pictures everything is pattern, character, story, decoration, and allegory, here it is quiet. She is not afraid and she is not alone. She is reflected in the surface of the water on the marsh, and her reflection is her only company. The way the sky and earth are so clearly and geometrically divided evokes the clear geometries and considerations of Mark Rothko, while the figure and her psychology remind the viewer of Andrew Wyeth. It's Christina's World found in the Seagram's murals. All this from a quiet picture, painted nearly a hundred years ago.

The European Paintings sale takes place tomorrow, April 21st at 1:00 p.m. Bonhams is in the IBM Building at 580 Madison Avenue.

The 2010 Whitney Biennial: A Humanist Approach

2010-04-19T11:16:00.000-07:00

In recent years, the Whitney Biennial has come to be associated with shallow, grandiose, and grotesque gestures. Every other year, the Marcel Breuer-designed modernist building on Madison Avenue fills itself with works which beg the question, “But is it art?” Cynicism routinely holds court with barbarism, often provoking visitors to wonder if the curatorial staff are not having a laugh at the expense of the art world and its followers. Even Jerry Saltz of New York Magazine writes “By now it’s clear that there is no such thing as a “good biennial.”

Recent Biennials have given us such works as Urs Fischer’s violent holes in concrete walls; Gedi Sibony’s sculpture composed of industrial carpet, plastic bags, and plywood; and musician Momus skulking in the elevator with a bullhorn. These works, though sometimes provocative when framed by context, were more often alienating and inhumane. The Biennial has long been an experiment in marketing the brazenly new, without regard for the more humanist aspects of art-making.

The 2010 Whitney Biennial, simply titled “2010,” is a completely different beast. Where one would expect to find filth, perversion, and black humor, this year’s offering is quiet and dignified. In contrast to its often maniacal scale, this year’s showing is intimate and small, evoking a more thoughtful feeling about the selection and curation of works. With fifty-five artists, the exhibition is half its usual size.

Guest curator Francesco Bonami and Whitney curator Gary Carrion-Murayari designed a more humanist, figurative, and feminist Biennial than ever seen in recent years. Since the last Biennial, the global economy has collapsed, and in light of the recession, our lives have slowed down to include more cooking and growing and thinking. In the age of the contemporary depression and environmental crisis, we have all been forced to be more considerate of our resources, our humanity, and even our artistic output. Modern life has been shifted into a gear of thoughtfulness and intentionality. The attitude, subject, and process of past Whitney Biennial artists would be patently at odds with our current pace and thinking. At its smaller scale and slower pace, “2010” reflects how art and artists have been affected by the general crisis of supermodernity, environmentalism, and the failed economy.

Just off the second-floor elevators are two mural-sized photographs by James Casebere. Like the photographs of three-dimensional models by Thomas Demand (who he influenced), Casebere constructs large environmental scenes on tabletops, which he then dramatically photographs. But unlike Demand’s work, which shows grim places like cubicles, staircases, and airport security, Casebere’s images portray a sweet (and surreal) suburban neighborhood. Modeled on the utopic homes found in Dutchess County, the images are lit to echo dawn and dusk. The homes look idyllic, quiet, and peaceful—a stark contrast to the usual Biennial cacophony and chaos. The little houses, made of paper and cardboard, seem so fragile—like they are waiting to be destroyed. The total absence of people in the homes and on the streets would make someone in 2010 wonder if there had not been a natural disaster (earthquake, hurricane, Icelandic volcano) or a man-made disaster (foreclosure).

A much-discussed work in this year’s showing is “Detroit,” a short video by Ari Marcopoulos. Shot in the city while Marcopoulos was visiting friends, “Detroit” shows two young boys experimenting with amplifiers and pedals as they collaborate on making noise. The boys, aged 11 and 14, kneel and rattle in a yellow bedroom, tackling an immense board of foot pedals. Incredible screeching, buzzing, and beeping erupts in a nefarious style—until the boys look up and you see the rapturous looks of joy on their faces. Despite the aural assault, it’s hard to disdain the boys for their passion.

Personal and provocative photography also has its place in “2010.” Two photographers particularly demonstrate a mindful and sensitive approach to politics as seen through the lives of those directly affected by unrest. Stephanie Sinclair’s photographs of women in an Afghan burn hospital portray those who, without any other options, lit themselves on fire in response to the abuse they suffer at the hands of their husbands. The women bravely share the most intimate moments from an incredibly difficult and physically painful time in their lives. There is no shyness, no awkward relationship between the camera and the sight of singed flesh being cooled by damp linen cloths.

Nina Berman’s work also successfully brings a photojournalistic approach to the artistic context of the Biennial. Her series Marine Wedding, previously seen in the world news as a piece on soldiers coming home, is shown here as art. The photographs show the daily life and recovery of Ty Ziegel, a marine who was horribly disfigured in Iraq. He came home to his small town in Illinois following a year and a half in hospital, following his second tour of duty. Berman follows Ty as he gets stared at by children, manages daily tasks without the use of an arm, and gets his dressings changed by his mother. He also marries his high school sweetheart, Renee, who looks on with a profound degree of acceptance which makes her seem so much older than her eighteen years. Though one may expect such images to be executed in an exploitative manner, Berman’s photos are sensitive and matter-of-fact. Ty clearly accepts his new life, Berman accepts him, and the viewer has no choice but to appreciate such honesty on the part of the subject and the artist.

Other works which stand out are the delicate works on paper: Charles Ray’s flower paintings and Storm Tharp’s portraits in particular. Rays flowers are seldom shown, despite their fragility and intentional, bright bursts of color. Tharp, an emerging artist from Portland, Oregon, makes intelligent and ephemeral portraits, seemingly sculpted from a foundation of ink and water. His portraits are evenly figurative and abstract, and so fragile that the characters seem to be on the brink of breaking off the page.

Aurel Schmidt’s detailed drawings provoke breathless wonder, and Dawn Clements’ full panorama is an incredibly detailed execution of space in pen on paper. Other highlights include Robert Williams’ surreal comic watercolors, and the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s video installation “We Love America and America Loves Us.”

Of course, there are less lovely and breathless things in “2010”—it would be unrealistic to expect non-Biennial behavior from the Biennial, after all. But if we focus solely on the successes of the exhibition, the great leaps and bounds of beauty and goodness that for so long had been absent from the concrete building on Madison Avenue, then there is clearly a great deal here. People will always approach the Biennial with too-high expectations. This is only natural for an exhibition which aims to show the best of the now and the current highlights of contemporary work. But if we focus on this goodness—the perfect paper houses, the boys making music in their bedrooms, the giant painted flowers—well, it says something wonderfully good about America and its creativity. Despite our current circumstances, we are still able to invent joy, beauty, and honesty.

In Conversation: "Otto Dix" at the Neue Galerie

2010-03-30T20:39:00.000-07:00

I'm Lauren Palmor, writer of The Art Object, in conversation with Jordan Rothlein, NY DJ and music journalist. Coming from an art history background, I enjoy discussing artists and exhibitions with people in other fields. These conversations often bring up new ideas, parallel practices, and general questions which may not present themselves when art historians speak solely amongst themselves. I wanted to speak to Jordan about the Otto Dix retrospective currently on view here at the Neue Galerie in New York, both in terms of its installation and its musical undertones.

The Art Object: Jordan, what is your familiarity with Dix's work?

Jordan Rothlein: Hey Lauren! Thanks so much for having me on The Art Object. My main internet gig is writing about electronic music, so this is an exciting change of pace. I honestly knew very little about Dix before walking into the Neue Galerie. One or two of his paintings looked familiar, and I've heard about him from you before, but his work was pretty much all new to me.

TAO: Before viewing the Dix retrospective, what types of images would you have imagined seeing if confronted by Weimar-era German painting?

JR: I came in with a pretty blank slate. My exposure to Weimar-era culture was more or less confined to avant garde movements like Dada, Expressionism, and Surrealism, mostly by way of a film course I took in college. I guess I knew something about the state of art in Weimar Germany, but I didn't have a preconception about what would be represented. I could have guessed that the physical and psychological aftermath of trench warfare would be present, but I was actually a bit surprised at how Dix dealt with a lot of this by way of city life and the debauchery that entailed.

TAO: You bring up Dix’s images of trench warfare, represented in the Neue Galerie exhibition by his “War” series—fifty prints showing all subjects related to the inhumanity of World War I. I found that the exhibition design perfectly transitioned visitors to Dix’s haunting and vicious world. For the sake of readers who are not able to visit the exhibition, could you please speak to Frederico de Vera’s exhibition design and the feeling you had upon entering the show and viewing Dix’s war prints?

JR: The exhibition begins with the war prints, which have been placed in a small side gallery downstairs from the rest of Dix's work. The museum installed a strange, asymmetrical, charcoal wall (with a small reproduction of Dix's signature) in front of the gallery that effectively sucks you into the exhibit. This gallery feels markedly different from the rest of the museum. The lighting is noticeably darker than it is in the surrounding, which certainly adds to the mood of the "War" series (perhaps to the detriment of actually viewing the art). His paintings and drawings upstairs aren't as acutely brutal as the drawings in this series. But seeing them first, aside from whatever chronological sense the ordering makes, really brings out the shadow this violence cast over Dix's worldview on display in his later work.

TAO: One element of the exhibition which was not explained in the media or the show itself is its use of scent and sound. The room of war prints had the soft scent of wet earth and the quiet chirping of crickets, bringing elements of the outdoor trenches to the indoor galleries. Upstairs, one room featured cabaret music and the scent of Guerlain perfume. Was your experience in viewing Dix’s work influenced by these subtle touches?

JR: Unfortunately, I think some of these well-intentioned environmental effects were lost on me. Perhaps they were supposed to fly under the radar? I found Dix's art visceral enough that I didn't need too much prodding to get into the mood. I caught the music upstairs but missed the smell. And the crickets downstairs might have been drowned out by the tail-end of a docent tour.

TAO: I’d especially like to hear if you could recall any specific prints in the 1924 suite of “Der Krieg” (“The War”) etchings. Throughout the cycle of fifty prints, many of the images are exceptionally graphic, violent, or depraved. The images were sourced from Dix’s personal experience as a machine gunner in the trenches of WWI. Was the artist’s personal relationship to his subject palatable in this series? How does it read as an introduction to both the exhibition as well as his later works?

JR: There are images in the series that Dix obviously wanted seared into his viewers' minds -- lumps of messy entrails, soldiers with half of their faces blown off, one particularly macabre sketch of a rotting skull with a tuft of hair still attached. But two subtler prints really stuck with me. One was of a group of soldiers wearing gas masks, and the other depicted a line of soldiers crawling through the trenches carrying something -- pails? extra helmets? -- in their mouths. Both prints showed more or less able-bodied humans ceasing to act and appear like humans. In the latter print, especially, Dix gives the soldiers an animalistic quality: their expressions resemble those of ravenous dogs. These were obviously deeply personal works. Dix's emotions about the war and its dehumanizing effects seem almost unmitigated by careful thought. I get the distinct sense he didn't want there to be a remove between the experience and its representation. I really felt the artist as the more jagged his lines would become, like it was a sign of him editorializing. I saw a lot of that in his more refined work from after the war.

TAO: As a DJ and musician, and coming from a musical background, do you see sounds in Dix’s work? Do you find any elements of his style to be particularly musical?

JR: Some of his paintings, like one of a topless pregnant woman with her head turned away from the viewer, are eerily, disturbingly quiet. But there's a quality to much of Dix's work that reminds me of distortion, as if he fed too much signal onto the canvas and "blew out" his perspective, so to speak. His use of painted texture reminded me of how a guitarist or maybe a noise artist might use aural texture. I'm thinking specifically about his depictions of prostitutes here: their flesh feels almost overdriven. Dix doesn't always make pretty art, but it's visceral and arresting. I've described a lot of my favorite records the same way.

TAO: Lastly, as a DJ, could you recommend a few tracks which might complement a viewing of Otto Dix's work?

JR: The record that immediately springs to mind is the newest 12" by Oni Ayhun, an experimental and quasi-anonymous techno artist rumored to be the Knife's Olof Dreijer. The untitled A-side denies itself every conceivable melodic touch, opting instead for bouncing, unidentifiable percussion and jarring, bomb-like bursts of noise. There's a lot of feeling on this record, but not much warmth/fuzziness. This one pairs best with “Der Krieg."

TAO: Thank you, Jordan! I’ll try and get a copy of that Oni Ayhun before going to see the Dix exhibition again (as it definitely warrants a second visit).

JR: Of course, Lauren. Let's do this again soon.

Jordan Rothlein is a staff writer for www.littlewhiteearbuds.com. His DJ work is compiled at http://jordanllc.wordpress.com/.

Otto Dix at the Neue Galerie

2010-03-29T12:48:00.000-07:00

In the wake of World War I, Germany was a playground of excess, viciousness, and sin. The war wounded mixed with prostitutes, and cabaret girls were household names. Red lips kissed scarred faces, and the music played loud and carelessly. Anything worthwhile happened at night, and artists were on hand to document any seediness, desperation, and violence which showed its face.

Otto Dix (1891-1969) was one of the greatest painters of the twentieth-century, and one of the premier documentarians of Germany’s Weimar period (1918-1933). Along with George Grosz, Dix left behind the greatest visual sourcebook for the depths of humanity struggling to find its identity between the wars.

Though many of Dix’s works are iconic, and held in collections around the world, the artist has never before benefited from a retrospective in North America—until now. “Otto Dix” at the Neue Galerie in New York is the first large solo show of Dix’s work, making his inventive and aggressive prints, drawings, and paintings seem entirely fresh.

The exhibition opens in a small, dark room. Exhibition designer Frederico de Vera designed the space, as well as its scents and sounds: the room has the perfume of wet earth, and crickets softly chirp. Though the scents and sounds can be lost in a crowd, they subtly bring the viewers into the trenches of WWI- where Dix was himself a machine gunner and found inspiration in industrial warfare. The whole room is dedicated to a suite of fifty etchings from 1924 titled “Der Krieg (“The War”). In these prints, Dix graphically describes the brutality and primitiveness of life on the front lines. Faces have been decimated, bones and flesh collide with violent anxiety. Grimness pervades and, viewed as a whole, the series only points to the depravity and grotesque images to come.

In addition to the room of prints, the exhibition showcases many portraits—perhaps the work Dix is best known for. As a founding member of the Neue Sachlichkeit, or so-called New Objectivity with George Grosz, Dix was fascinated with man’s weaknesses and the anxieties of a country about to be stomped by fascism. His characters, both the virtuous and the despicable, are all seen as grotesque through Dix’s Weimar lens. Their skin is pallid, their eyes narrowed or yellowed, with cadaverous faces and hands. In Dix’s work, all of Germany resembles a cast of walking ghosts or human monsters.

Even innocent children can’t escape the artistic vitriol of Dix’s brush. In “Two Children,” a boy and a girl stand in the street. They look at the viewer through the distorted and innocent faces most associated with the portraits of Alice Neel, combined with the studious and typological approach of August Sander.

Dix even subjects himself to a similarly difficult treatment, sometimes exaggerating his seriousness and resolve in his self-portraits. His classic Aryan features, his squinting eyes, high cheekbones, and slicked-back “American” hairstyle seem like only a different version of the grotesqueness he applies to all his subjects, equalizing him with the prostitutes, sailors, war-wounded, and unemployed men he was most often drawn towards.

Unfortunately, most of Dix’s most recognizable works are markedly absent: there’s the pronounced space where his portrait of Sylvia von Harden ought to be. Perhaps this is due to the Neue Galerie’s status as a smaller institution, a fact which most likely complicates securing major international loans. So although this may be the first major retrospective of Dix’s work in North America, I’m not prepared to accept it as the last.

“Otto Dix” continues through Aug. 30 at the Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street; (212) 628-6200, neuegalerie.org.

Za Żelazną Bramą

2010-03-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

Had the modernist visions of Robert Moses and Le Corbusier been fully realized, the urban residential environment might be drastically different today. Instead, many past utopian visions for post-modern apartment life have not fulfilled their initial vision. The incredible cages of towering blocks found in most large cities have led to violence, crime, and acts of aggression in their inhabitants. Mid-century Socialist housing experiments are generally regarded today as dismal failures.

Za Zelazna Brama is one of the largest Socialist housing experiments built in the center of Warsaw, Poland. Constructed between 1965 and 1972, Za Zelazna Brama was based on intensely rational and geometric principles. The entire housing project consists of nineteen apartment blocks, each towering sixteen floors above cramped outdoor plazas, all intended to house about 25,000 people. The blocks contain countless sub-standard apartments, with space originally intended to be allotted on a basis of eleven square meters per person. A husband and wife would be given a modest 22 square meters, while a family with three children would have some more space with a workable 55 square meters.

The complex was once considered a potent symbol of Polish progress and the greatness of Socialist successes, but today Za Zelzana Brama has a different meaning. The blocks now look grey and tired, they even seem isolated, despite being located in the geographical center of the city. Filmmaker Heidrun Holzfeind has made a beautiful and simple film documenting daily life in these blocks as they stand today. Her documentary feature “Behind the Iron Gate” recently premiered at the MoMA in New York. The film contrasts conversations with the tenants with images of their particular individual responses to their modernist apartments and limited space. Given the same limitations of space, how do different people maintain individualized lifestyles or homes?

Za Żelazną Bramą was built on the ruins of “the Small Ghetto,” an area which used to be a center of Jewish life before WWII. The first cycle of inhabitants came from diverse backgrounds: they were famous radio hosts, writers, doctors, laborers. All tenants lived in similarly-styled apartments on identical blocks. The housing estate was at first considered a success—a declarative symbol of Poland’s Socialist identity and as a beacon of technological innovation. But today, the cramped apartments with their windowless kitchens are viewed as substandard, unpleasant, dull, or even dehumanizing.

Holzfeind’s film is kind and patient. She takes great care in interviewing a representative cross-section of tenants: there is a yuppie couple who spent a great deal of money renovating their apartment to update it for the 2000s; there are the Vietnamese girls who are wary of their racist neighbors; there’s the elderly retired couple who fill their small apartment with antique arms and armor in “the Polish style.” Of today's 25,000 inhabitants, many are new to Poland: there are Vietnamese schoolgirls, Israeli émigrés, and other Westerners who have been buying up apartments as an investment, making the project a kind of Warsaw Manhattan.

Holzfeind easily portrays how these cramped, outdated living conditions have different meanings for everyone who lives on the estate. The tenants and shopkeepers talk about the buildings in terms of functionality. The old man who sits at the security desk talks about the attitudes of people who go in and out. The woman selling candy at the kiosk in the lobby reminisces about the television star who used to live in the building. Some occupants talk about racism and the “problem” of the growing Vietnamese and Jewish population in the estate, others complain about noise, filth, the lack of green space. Holzfeind’s conversations are honest, paired well with gritty, unglamorous footage of daily life in the Za Żelazną Bramą blocks. “Behind the Iron Gate” is a particularly smart and respectful documentary, one which showcases the inherent struggle between man and urbanism.

Size Does Matter

2010-03-11T16:48:00.000-08:00

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Harold Koda, Okwui Enwezor, and Shaquille O'Neal. Finally, we can breath a collective sigh of relief and add the 7'1'' Cleveland Cavalier to the list of the world's great curators. Joking aside, it is true that Shaq has successfully curated his first exhibition of contemporary art-- a move which seems only natural for a man who has been named Rookie of the Year, released four rap albums, acted in films, earned his MBA, and works in real estate development for fun. It almost seems as if he had done everything else apart from curating an exhibition in a gallery space.

"Size DOES Matter" is the aptly-named show, which opened at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea in February. After being approached by FLAG founder Glenn Fuhrman and director Stephanie Roach, Shaq selected 66 works out of 200 which were shown to him over dinner after a Cavaliers game. The resulting show is centered on the idea of scale in contemporary art, a relevant topic for a someone who wears a men's size 23 shoe.

In an interview with Linda Yablonsky in New York Magazine, Shaq reveals his art background. He says, "I used to go (to museums) a lot with my kids. Donald Trump is a great friend, and he has four or five Picassos on his plane. And that’s where I would look at them. One time, I was at a museum and tried touching a Picasso. You break it, you buy it, they said. I was told it would cost $2 million. (I've never tried painting) but I’ve met a lot of artists who wanted to paint me. LeRoy Neiman was one. He did it from a photograph. He made 20,000 copies, and we sold them all. Now I’m working with the greatest artist in the world, Peter Max."

It's hard to tell, then, exactly how much "curating" Shaq did for the show-- especially reading that he chose the works from a selection which was presented to him over dinner. In a way, the FLAG Art Foundation did the true curation: they chose the works, they chose Shaq. The curious people who attended the opening, like my friends and I, were expecting a much greater gesture of the basketball star's creativity. The vision of the show, however, was filtered through that of the greater organization.

Many of the artists in "Size DOES Matter" are international stars with big names: Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, Ron Mueck, Maurizio Cattelan. Real blue chip boys and girls. The redeeming quality of the show was its diversity. It is thrilling to walk through Robert Therrien's oversized dining room set in No Title (Table and Six Chairs) and then stop by Maurizio Cattelan's untitled miniature elevators. Ron Mueck's monstrous Big Man is installed downstairs from Delia Brown's tiny Eyes No. 3 and No. 4, two pairs of tiny kitten eyes painted on 1'' x 3'' blocks.

The works in the show are generally humorous or inventive, though the general, arching theme is weak. Scale and its manipulation is not a strong enough link between the works to form a cohesive exhibition, and FLAG relies too heavily on the starlit name of Shaquille O'Neal. "Size DOES Matter" makes for a fun night out, if little more.

Size DOES Matter is on view at the FLAG Art Foundation through May 27, 2010.

Pablo Bronstein at the Met

2010-02-16T17:44:00.000-08:00

Pablo Bronstein manipulates history's elasticity and human forgetfulness in his imaginiative and architectural works. The London-based artist addresses the history and potential futures of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in his current solo show "Pablo Bronstein at the Met," his first in New York. Composed of large ink drawings, small etchings, and precise hypothetical architectural renderings, Bronstein fabricates the history of the physical museum buildings in a concise exhibition.

Bronstein examines art history from the perspective of an educated joker, presupposing ideas of new chronologies and reinventing the history of the largest museum in the Western hemisphere. His abilities as a precise draftsman include a number of varied styles, and this show alludes to everything from Versailles to Michael Graves. Baroque, Postmodernism, and Pre-Columbian pastiche all fits together in an imagined development of the gallery spaces. Slipping into the role of architect and engineer, Bronstein dissects the veneer of the Metropolitan's architecture. In response, museum visitors may spend the rest of their time in the hallowed halls guessing at each room's degree of authenticity.

In questioning the validity of the museum's architectural history, Bronstein undermines the power and funds which were required to build this urban temple to world patrimony. What would it mean if his imagined scenarios were true? If perhaps the Temple of Dendur was brought to the museum by a stampede of ancient Egyptian horses, through a primitive Central Park as imagined by the artist?

In the pen and ink drawing "First and Second Installation of Precolumbian Objects at the Metropolitan Museum" (all works 2009), Bronstein shows two arrangements of small sculptures strangely placed in French-style Rococo galleries, ancient gods mounted on flowery cherub sconces. He disregards practicality and scale, prefering instead to deliver a tounge in cheek gesture at the institution.

The standout works, however, are Bronstein's Six Affordable Neo-Georgian Futures for the Metropolitan Museum. Laid on flat tables under glass, the six computer renderings show potential future plans for a very different Metropolitan. In one plan, the entire museum save for the north and south wings has been destroyed to make way for a park. In another, the basement has been given over to retail space resembling a strip mall. The juxtaposition between myth and reality showcases the tension of such an enormous place as the museum, a place so big that it could easily all be a figment of the artist's imagination.

Pop Architecture: Lord's Cricket Grounds Media Centre

2010-02-12T21:47:00.000-08:00

Most of Future System’s designs look not unlike the pod cities of the Archigram group. Many of their programs look as though at any minute, they may sprout legs and walk away, perhaps even as far away as the next urban landscape.

In 1999, the Future Systems-designed Media Centre at Lord’s Cricket Grounds was unveiled. It soon won the Stirling Prize, as well as the adoration of British cricket fans everywhere. Before winning the commission, Jan Kaplicky, the founder of Future Systems, had often experienced frustration and seldom found his designs come to physical fruition. In the years preceding the construction of the Media Centre, only a handful of his George Jetson designs had been built. But, the Media Centre ushered in a rush of accolades for Kaplicky, rising him to the ranks of international architect celebrity. Perhaps soon enough, halls will ring with the sing-song sound of "Ando, Hadid, Meier...Kaplicky."

The Media Centre, built to accommodate 250 journalists, was Future System’s first public commission and the firm’s most important project to date. The pod-like, orbital design stands above the east side of the pitch at Lord’s. The design called for the use of a single-shell aluminum structure which was prefabricated off-site at a shipyard in twenty-six parts.

The Stirling Prize judges described the Media Centre as “a breath of architectural fresh air. It is its own thing, completely unusual and completely uncompromising…It’s a complete one-off: a wacky solution to a singular problem. It may not be the future, but it certainly works.”

Some would disagree and argue that the Media Centre is indeed the future—certainly the future of cricket’s image if not the future of sporting grounds architecture itself. Many cricket fans see the space-pod Media Centre as the defining image of the headquarters of English cricket. It appears on pub TV screens whenever fans gather to watch major matches, and it is an identifier of the heart of a national game, the ultimate symbol of the ultimate English field for the most dearly English sport.

As one cricket fan writes, “(Lord’s) is a juxtaposition of Victorian and modern architecture- as so many of our towns and cities are- and yet it is so resolutely beautiful. It is eccentrically designed and laid out - the ground slopes from one side to the other and the Media Centre is raised so that the MCC members can still see the plane trees from the pavilion. Either despite or because of its foibles, it has a magic and an aura that is impossible to replicate. There is no finer place to spend time with friends on a warm summer’s day watching the best players play the best game ever invented.”

Markus Schinwald at Yvon Lambert

2010-02-11T15:43:00.000-08:00

Austrian artist Markus Schinwald works with various ideas of prosthetics. In his first solo exhibition at Yvon Lambert, Schinwald built an installation of beams and pillars which serve not only as an artwork itself, but as an armature for other pieces in the exhibition as well. The beams, floating and crossing the white box space, act almost as a prosthetic, assisting the space in a visible external way.

The architectural crutch of Schinwald's beams is paired with a series of paintings which line the walls. The paintings, all portraits he found secondhand and painted over, have been outfitted with ghastly and unidentifiable prosthetics. The painted faces smiling out of dime store frames wear bandages and mechanical parts. Schinwald's additions to the found portraits are seamless, and the works beg the viewer to question which elements were placed there by the artist's hand. Schinwald prompts his viewers to question these works: we ask who these people are, if they were truly ailing, and how they came to find themselves hanging on the walls of Yvon Lambert.

In addition to the paintings, there are wooden sculptures floating freely in the galley. The sculptures resemble parts of Chippendale chairs, repurposed like the portraits. And as easily as Schinwald dehumanizes painted faces by way of added prosthetics, he also humanizes chair parts, making them twist and bend with palpable discomfort.

Schinwald's work generally explores this divide between comfort and discomfort. Floating beams cut apart the natural white box gallery, making visitors feel anxious and confused, and painted portraits express a quiet tension, begging viewers to question how they found themselves in their present state. In his experiments with discomfort, Schinwald induces general unease. Viewers of this small and overwhelming show will undoubtably leave with contrastic feelings of impassivity and anxiety, pleasure and pain.

The Delian Mode

2010-02-09T15:41:00.000-08:00

Before synthesizers and laptop computers, electronic music was a purely analog labor. The first electronic composers of the 1950s and 1960s relied on real sounds committed to physical tape which could then be cut with razors and spliced with sellotape. Tones were fed through oscillators and equalizers, frquencies doctored in order to create new compositions.

The epicenter for this field of experimentation could be found at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, tucked away in room #13 of the Maida Vale studios. Here, an enterprising young woman with dual Cambridge degrees in music and mathematics was creating electronic sound by hand. Delia Derbyshire was one of the greatest pioneers of early electronic music. She adjusted pitches and frequencies with calculating precision, filtering white noise and manipulating quotidian sounds to create iconic electronic soundscapes like the Dr. Who theme, "Happy Birthday," and an abstract, lilting hum of beats and waves called "The Delian Mode."

This eponymous, electronic experiment has recently lent itself as the title for the first film about Derbyshire, a 25-minute documentary by Kara Blake, titled "The Delian Mode." The film, short and loving, profiles Derbyshire and delivers, at last, credit for her pioneering work-- however long overdue.

Blake's film is an experimental profile, an exploration of musical beats by way of filmic ones. Disguised as a traditional documentary profile, "The Delian Mode" reveals itself as a collage of sound, interview, and mystery. The director seems more drawn to Derbyshire's process than to her biography or chronology. The sources of her noises, like lampshades and door knocks, are studied and analyzed, while decade gaps are left unanswered for, as the limits of available technology are explored from multiple angles. The film leaves Derbyshire's darker music and moods unexplained, glazing over haunting works like "Dreams," a sound collage collaboration with Barry Bermange in 1964.

By merely implying Derbyshire's biography, Blake does little to shine light on a figure who has long lingered forgotten by younger generations of electronic musicians. The film only touches on most of Derbyshire's life (she only worked at the workshop in the 1960s and 1970s). She left the BBC after frustration with bureaucrats and limitations, eventually becoming a reclusive alcoholic who died, relatively forgotten, in 2001 at the age of 64. For decades, she seemed to have left music completely, returning in the 1990s to collaborate with Sonic Boom on new electronic music experiments. It was only after her death that 267 unknown tapes of Derbyshire's compositions were discovered in her attic. Unheard for 30 years, the tapes have been transferred to the University of Manchester's School of the Arts. One by one, they are being digitized-- and perhaps Derbyshire will finally earn her deserved recognition.

"The Delian Mode" is a sweet and succinct, despite feeling incomplete. As a documentary, it is appropriately experimental and infectious, her sellotaped analog loops and sliced abstract beats acting both as biography and epitaph.

"The Delian Mode," Canada 2009, 25 Min, Color, English, Directed by Kara Blake

Playing With Pictures

2010-02-09T15:37:00.000-08:00

This is a true wave of the avant-garde: an exhibition of dizzying abstractions of photocollage, compositions made of photographs and watercolors in the guise of the whimsical and imagined. Human heads are pasted onto animal bodies, babies sleep on cribs covered by pen and ink blankets, and dramatic shifts of scale lend some works a feeling of having been imagined by Lewis Carroll. No, this is neither Dada nor Constructivism. Rather, these are the works of aristocratic women who, in the 1860s and 1870s, played with photographs and their conventions.

"Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage" is a lovely and fascinating show of some of the most experimental photographic collages of the Victorian period. These images, made for personal albums rather than personal display, reveal the intelligence and awareness of their makers. Taking inspiration from textual sources as diverse as Punch magazine and Darwin's "Origin of the Species," these private collages reveal the perception of photography in the era of its greatest proliferation. The women who created imagined scenes from photographs, glue and paper knives did not only challenge the physical problems of photography, but also the role of aristocratic women and their societal limitations.

The creative possibilities of being able to physically cut oneself from a photo were endless. One could place people into a scene at night, something which photography could not yet capture. Or, you could create a party scene, gluing in the pictures of all the people you'd like to attend. Don't like the woman next door? Put her head on the body of a duck. Want to flatter the prince? Physically cut away some of his girth before you paste him in your album.

"Playing with Pictures," originally organized by the Art Institute of Chicago before its tenure at the Metropolitan, is the first to thoroughly study the little-known field of early photocollage. The works on show have rarely, if ever, been seen or reproduced. Coming from the US, Europe, and Australia, forty works are physically displayed. A further eleven more albums are accessible in facsimile on computer monitors in the gallery.

The women behind these images were largely self-taught. Photography was relatively new, far too recent an invention to invite widespread experimentation. Rather, the hobby of photocollage spread through the upper classes via private albums and correspondence.

Some collage makers stand out more than others. Georgina Berkeley's album from 1866-1871 is a particular highlight. She liberated her friends and acquaintances from the dull, stoic studio setting of their cartes de visites and placed them instead in beautiful, lush landscapes. In one, a couple walks on a moonlit beach; in another, one woman rides a dodo bird, accompanied by a friend riding on the back of the tortoise (Ms. Berkeley was familiar with topical humor). In one picture, Ms. Berkeley even puts a gentleman's head on the body of a trapeze artist, flying high above the audience of what appears to be the Royal Albert Hall.

These women were not only talented craftspeople, but apt painters as well. Their skills ease their characters into believable scenes, like Lady Filmer's parlor picture, in which she shows herself working on her album with a pot of glue, while friends chat by the fireplace and children play on the carpet. In another untitled scene from Constance Sackville-West, a group of friends are gathered in a park on a lovely summer's day to play a game of newly-popularized croquet.

"Playing with Pictures" is more than cutting and pasting. The makers of these pictures were physically altering their environments and the people in them, almost to radical ends. The exhibition is as much a commentary on the identity of photography and the history of appropriation as it is a study of parlor habits in the Victorian period. These images beg the viewer to consider the authenticity of a photograph, much like the work of Cindy Sherman or Jeff Wall might do today. By physically altering photographs, these women were able to change their personal relationships, as well as their relationships to the greater world outside their homes and families.

"Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage" is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of art through May 9, 2010 in the Howard Gilman Gallery, second floor.

Pop Architecture: The Lee-Chin Crystal

2010-02-09T15:31:00.000-08:00

The centerpiece of the recent Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) remodel is the beautiful Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, designed by Daniel Libeskind and Bregman + Hamann Architects. Out of 50 entries in an international competition, the Libeskind design is a striking Deconstructivist crystalline form. Made of glass and aluminium, the jutting, crystal-shaped atrium houses the new entrance to the ROM, as well as shops and restaurants.

The jutting walls of the Crystal do not touch the nearby heritage buildings except to close a gap between the new form and the existing walls. The jutting, abstract form of the crystal fractures the space between the public streets and the private space of the museum.

Built from five interlocking, supportive prismatic structures, the Crystal looks like a natural crystal formation jutting from the older buildings. There are few right angles to be seen, and the sloping walls create fascinating, innovative interiors. Rooms are flooded with the light of the slashing, angular windows with create pyramidal views to the cityscape outside.

When the Crystal was opened in June, 2007 by Governor General Michaelle Jean, controversy erupted. The public was torn about its angular design. Some viewed the structure as angry and hellish. Others hailed it as a monument. No doubt its already become an icon, for good or bad, and its almost certain that Archigram would hail its futuristic, outer-space sensibilities and manipulation of space through innovation.

Maximilian Toth: "Little Beasts"

2010-02-08T18:58:00.000-08:00

Maximilian Toth uses agression as his medium, painting sketchy scenes of adolescent cruelty on the dusty ground of schoolhouse chalkboard. His figures suggest action and inaction simultaneously: his large works are dominated by images of beatings, ritualistic hazing,and phenomenal violance, all without the presence of conciousness or emotional awareness.

Toth's process suggests speed and furious control, not unlike the characters in his works. In his most recent show at Fredericks & Freiser, titled "Little Beasts," Toth experiments with the simulatenous physicality of both his technique and subject matter. Encompassing five large canvasses and two drawings, "Little Beasts" examines the moment in adolesence when innoncence is totally lost. His scenes are succinct and objective depictions of suburban boys stumbling through the dusty black chalkboard darkness towards some kind of general violence. These boys are newly savage, their lines repeatedly redrawn, emphasizing the constant shifts in their relation to each other and their "newfound strength and agression."

In Breaking a Chair in Three Parts (2009), Toth shows a life-sized scene of a balcony at a raucous high school party. One boy has climbed over the balcony railing, holding the bars tight as he emphatically vomits, his can of Pabst Blue Ribbon still in his right hand. Behind him, three boys mercilessly beat another with baseball bats, some kicking him with their boots. The scene is completed by a teenage couple flirting on the balcony, so self-involved and hopped up on hormones that they notice neither the vomiting nor the beating behind them.

Another standout work is Kill the Carrier (2009), a nefarious, gut-punching gym class scene. A group of boys in matching gym clothes fights over a red rubber ball. The boy jumping towards it, suspended in the air, is about to be punched in the stomach, his t-shirt flying up with his leap. School games which had previously been played without disorder are now the scenes for a murderous vein of violence. The figures are set in space, floating on the dark ground, their dislocation making more the scene even more disjointed and disconcerting.

Toth's works sit uncomfortably close to the liminal edges of youth. In discussing his work with Graham T. Beck of Art in America, Toth speaks fondly of a favorite YouTube video in which a boy shoots light bulbs with a BB gun. He says, "I love that kid (and whoever is supervising him). I love the way he uses the gun. He's a decent shot, and still young enough not to think twice about walking up and slapping the glass with the barrel. Club, gun: no difference...He's just figuring out that he's got this potential. He's not taking out his aggression. He's not angry. He just likes the sound and sight of things breaking. Can you get a better image of a kid saying goodbye to childhood?"

With his thoughtful and insistent visions of aggressive and uncaged youth, Maximilian Toth accesses the most primitive recesses of masculine impulses. These scenes are the wild embodiments of the violent imagination. Painted on chalkboard, they could even be interpreted as lessons, the improvisational plans for dark ritual. Toth's subjects focus on the delicately deviant, the secretly subversive, and the violent acts often committed in plain sight by fifteen year-old boys.

Superflex: Flooded McDonald's

2010-02-08T18:51:00.000-08:00

A McDonald's restaurant is flooded: over the course of twenty minutes, water seeps beneath the door with such power and mass that the whole place eventually floods. The restaurant is empty, and as the waters rise, more detritus and fast-food ephemera rises to the top of the murky, grease trap waters. The surface is covered by an abstract gesticulation of half-eaten hamburgers, limp paper wrappers, bobbing coffee cups, and defeated french fries and packets of ketchup.

"Flooded McDonald's" is a film by Superflex, the three-man Danish filmmaking collective of Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen. In the film, a life-sized replica of a MCdonald's restaurant is slowly flooded, completely void of customers or staff. Tables are lifted away, electric lights short-circuit, and a plastic Ronald McDonald goes for a lazy swim. Eventually the restaurant is completely submerged, recalling the apocalyptic climax of our greatest fears about waste and global warming.

"Flooded McDonald's" is nothing if not haunting. Occassionally, the camera goes underwater, giving us the nightmarish view of perhaps the one-day Great Barrier Reef. If things continue as they are, this will be our snorkling vacations: swimming through discarded plastic chairs, unopened packets of barbeque sauce, and buzzing flourescent lights. The water rises, first to the legs of the tables, then to the top of the trash cans. A warning on yellow plastic uselessly floats by: "CAUTION, WET FLOOR." And the floating plastic clown waves and twirls, slopping in the french fries and half-chewed McNuggets. Lights dim as they short-circuit, one by one. Finally, the logo neon golden arches flicker and pop, and the whole room goes dark.

The restaurant, convincingly authentic, was created from scratch by a team of talented set designers, without the permission of the McDonald's corporation. Over the course of two weeks, the set was costructed in a swimming pool in a Bangkok film studio, before 80,000 liters of water were pumped in and the results were filmed over the course of two days. The resulting work is, more than anything, a disaster film. Superflex begs the viewer to question the probability of this scene, and after very little consideration, it seems entirely plausible. It is more than likely that the rising tide of global warming will claim the very monuments which created it.

At first sight, the entire exercize looks so authentic, that only its very filmic nature gives it away as an artistic inquiry. Slow panning shots and handheld close-ups are almost a clue for the viewer, letting us know (with relief) that this is not authentic disaster footage. Despite the horror and apocalyptic nature of "Flooded McDonald's," there are moments of humor and irony as well. When Ronald McDonald topples, it brings to mind the news footage of Saddam Hussein's statue being violently pulled to the ground.

"Flooded McDonald's" is a deceptively simple film. Though the concept is succint enough, ("We'll film a flooding restaurant"), the product is complex and troubling. This is not a simple study in construction, cause, effect, and camera work. Rather, Superflex understands the inherent grusomeness of the scene. The things we need (food, comfort, reliability) may be the same things that ultimately destroy us. This is filmic, lilting agitprop, but it doesn't judge. Perhaps the greatest strength of "Flooded McDonald's" is its humaneness. Superflex is plenty aware of both the comedy and tragedy that their scene evokes. They construct a corrective Doomsday, one which would perhaps wash away the faults of capitalism and its byproducts, leaving us with the empty shells of former monuments to waste and idleness.

SUPERFLEX: Flooded McDonald's is on view at Peter Blum in Chelsea through March 22, 2010.

Pop Architecture: The London Mayor's Building

2010-02-06T06:32:00.000-08:00

When the previous city hall was dissolved by Thatcher in 1986 (and subsequently turned into a hotel and aquarium), a void was left on the physical landscape of London politics. When London acquired a mayor once again in 1999, it needed a new center for the city government. That year, Norman Foster’s design for the new City Hall was unveiled, inviting comparisons to Lubetkin’s 1930s Penguin Pool design for the London Zoo.

With its cycling ramps (perfect for sliding aquatic birds) and glass, bulbous exterior (which some likened to the shape of a fencing mask or a giant eye), the new City Hall soon gained admiration from Londoners. Foster’s phenomenon which quickly broke the spell cast on architecture in Britain in 1984 when Prince Charles described a proposed extension to the National Gallery as “a monstrous carbuncle.” In 1999, with the help of the new City Hall proposal, a new era in London architecture was celebrated. Soon the capital city, which had long suffered as the grounds for glamourless royalty and faded replica Georgian buildings, became the birthplace of City Hall, the Tate Modern, and the Gherkin.

Now, years later, Londoners still come in large numbers to see Norman Foster’s modified sphere, a striking experiment in ramps and glass. The interior ramp (or penguin slide, if you will) measures 1,604-feet long, and coils through ten stories to a public viewing gallery at the top.

Foster’s design is nothing if not intentionally iconic. Its form is pure pop—a distorted glass bulb, its interior viewed equally well from the exterior. Yes, there are the standard metaphors for transparency in local government (another reason for the visitors’ gallery above the debating chamber). But the wildly-shaped glass is also striking, a lasting icon even when removed from its purpose-driven metaphors.

The distorted glass bulb also appeals to the Archigram futuristic, technocratic ideal. As more modern structures like City Hall blossom on the banks of the Thames, the futurist visions of Peter Cook and Michael Webb become ever more tangible.

Pop Architecture: Beeld en Geluid

2010-02-03T20:24:00.000-08:00

The Beeld end Geluid Building, Hilversum, Netherlands. Designed by Neutelings Riedijk Architects with façade design by Jaap Drupsteen.

Dutch architects Willem Jan Neutelings and Michiel Riedijk draw on a wide variety of influence in their work. Their firm, Neutlings Riedijk Architects, draws from a wide variety of sources, ranging from primitive step pyramids to comic book illustration to the wildly bright silkscreen prints of Andy Warhol.

The firm’s design for the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision is destined to elevate their international status. The center is an amalgamation of popular media and design, a celebration of visual, glittering surfaces and serious marketing images. On a site in the leafy Amsterdam suburbs, the Institute (commonly known as Beeld en Geluid), opened in 2006, and is now home to the Dutch national broadcast archives. Housed in a glowing, rainbow-tinted glass shell, the center is a mesmerizing sight. With a facade designed by artist Jaap Drupsteen, the building not only physically houses popular culture, but celebrates it on its exterior as well.

The outside panels are imprinted with iconic images from Dutch television, famous stop-frames of the justice minister on a bicycle, heroic soccer players scoring a goal, and beauty queens smiling directly at the camera. The images, taken from archived television footage, were baked into bright glass for the building facade. The images are barely clear from certain angles, from some distances, they fade completely into the colored glass. The overall effect is both a beautiful and alarming commentary on the pervasiveness of the media: it’s there, woven into the fiber of the walls, even if we can’t see it. The blur of images also serve to communicate the daily arsenal of images we see in the newspapers, Internet, and movies, though here in glass they are frozen and harmless.

How witty of Neutelings and Riedijk to build a temple to images within walls made of images, with culture utilized as a shorthand for culture, with a distinct awareness of the great potential for the meta-narrative in contemporary architecture.

Pop Architecture: The De Young

2010-02-01T18:35:00.000-08:00

If its possible for a surface alone to be a popular icon, then the dimpled copper-paneled walls of the new DeYoung Museum in San Francisco must be one of the most beautiful and striking. Rising beside the Japanese Tea Gardens and over the jaw-dropping California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, a languid copper box stretches out, punctuated by a wobbly tower and surrounded by a sprawling, modern sculpture garden. One side of the roof stretches beyond the parameters, resembling a common driveway carport, and a prison-style watchtower erupts from the structure, allowing visitors 360 degree views of 'The City by the Bay.'

The museum, which opened its new building in 2005, is now one of the most thoughtful and iconic treasures of the Bay Area. Designed by Swiss architects Pierre de Meuron and Jacques Herzog, the DeYoung is a witty and surprising project. With all of the imagination of Archigram but with a calm, languid popular image, the personality of the project matches its mellow West coast home in the park, basking in the fog and scents of eucalyptus.

The most striking element is by far the lower portion of the museum, a series of iconic dimpled coppered panels which have come to define the new DeYoung. Each panel has as many as 210 individual circular stamps, ranging in size and shape from bright, deep dimples to shallow recesses, and no two panels are alike. Some become thin, perforated screens that stretch across concealed windows, while others are thick like defensive walls. The panels are elegant from a distance, and fascinating up close. Some dimples look like tree knots, others look as though someone had stopped to carve a penny from the copper surface. In the DeYoung gift shop, visitors “ooh” and “ahh” over copper-fronted bracelets, notebooks and postcards, all resembling the textured exterior. You are encouraged to take a piece of a landmark home with you, making an icon out of the product of an icon.

Like Archigram, de Meuron and Herzog are interested in sensations, not forms. The museum design is intellectual, almost theoretical. The space values experience over image, not unlike Michael Webb’s Suitaloon. Though many Bay Area residents (myself included) are still adjusting to our new local icon, we are also savoring the process of it becoming a symbol. The DeYoung is inventive and smart, and though the novelty will wane with time, our popular romance with its design will only increase as the patina builds on its copper walls.

Pop Architecture: Swiss Re Tower

2010-02-01T18:22:00.000-08:00

In using the term “instant icon” to describe successful popular architecture, the idea of “instant” can be subjective. While Holl’s chapel was quickly photographed and revered for its simple, colorful beauty after its completion, some buildings become icons before they are even finished. The best example of the building as pop imagery before its completion is 30 St Mary Axe, Swiss Re Tower, better known as “The Gherkin.”

In the very initial stages of its construction, the curved skeleton of the Gherkin slowly stretched past the London skyline. Now, six years after its completion, the structure can be seen from far and wide, its blue pickle shape rising above familiar sights like Tower Bridge and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Megan Lane of the BBC writes, “as an instant icon of 21st century Britain, it has all but supplanted the Routemaster bus and Big Ben as shorthand for London on TV, in ads, and on film. In “Love Actually,” it reared above Liam Neeson as his on-screen son told of a schoolyard crush during a stroll along the South Bank.” Though still a relatively young building, the Gherkin has already become a visual cue for the capital, something erected in the popular consciousness as a shortcut to the city of London.

The tall, spiraling building was designed by Pritzker Prize-winner Lord Norman Foster and Ken Shuttleworth, and constructed between 2001 and 2004. It has already won the Stirling Prize of the Royal Institute of British Architects-- it was the first time the prize had ever been awarded unanimously.

But in spite of its critical acclaim, no one expected the Gherkin to become a popular icon quite so quickly. Even Foster is still surprised by the structure. He told the BBC, “We did all the modeling, all the computer simulations to explore how it would look and how it would sit in the City. Yet I love that I still get unexpected views of it from all over London, and unexpected reflections of other buildings in its walls.”

Pop Architecture: St. Ignatius Chapel

2010-01-30T16:25:00.000-08:00

Modern interpretations os pop style have the potential to flourish equally in the architecture of the sacred and the secular. One of the most beautiful contemporary churches in the United States has already become an instant icon—not only in its physical manifestation, but also in photographs. Images of the Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle have a subdued modern quality themselves, aside from the stark beauty of the chapel itself.

Designed by Steven Holl, the Chapel of St. Ignatius at Seattle University was conceived as “seven bottles of light in a stone box.” Each stream of light corresponds to different symbolic colors and physical spaces within the small chapel.

During the day, each part of the chapel glows with different colored lights, some not unlike the bright colors and tempered glow of the neon sculptures of Dan Flavin. The light bounces off color fields which are painted on suspended panels, creating a halo effect of light on the interior walls. At night, the same lights reflect outward, creating a colorful beacon towards urban Seattle.

Holl’s design won an award from the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the scale model of St. Ignatius has been added to the permanent collection of the MOMA in New York.

The chapel, a strictly Modernist product, favors its industrial materials to the common representational elements found in most churches. Architect Duncan McRoberts writes, “It abandons all religious architectonic dialectics which have endured the ebb and flow of custom and use, or that touch the deepest layers of history—the domain of memory. To a passerby, it appears to be nothing more than a nominal box with light scoops that, in the past, illuminated tables of fabricators, technicians, objects d’art, seamstresses, or even disco dancers.” Though McRoberts’ summation is intended as a treatise of St. Ignatius’ failure as a spiritual space, it also reads as praise for the church’s success as pop architecture.a

Pop Architecture: Federation Square

2010-01-28T19:35:00.000-08:00

Pop architecture can be found in most of the world’s urban environments, so long as there are architects working under the auspices of technological and iconic awareness. A striking and unique pop structure can now be found in Melbourne, Australia— Federation Square, a program designed by London-based architects Peter Davidson and Don Bates, in association with Melbourne-based firm Bates Smart.

In 1997, the Victorian government held an international design competition to establish “one of the great civic, cultural, and commercial spaces” in time for the 2001 Federation Anniversary celebrations. The Davidson/ Bates program was selected as the winner from more than 170 entries. The site of Federation Square incorporates the square, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, television studios, cafes, restaurants, and an amphitheater.

The winning scheme is an instant icon. With a façade made of fractals, the building experiments with new technological innovations in surface geometry. Though the many buildings of the square serve diverse purposes, the fractal theme unites them, making a cohesive program.

The “grid” of fractals on the building surfaces turns in a pinwheel motion, interrupting what looks like a rational scheme from a distance. Though industrial production created the fractals, they do not have the feeling of mass-production, as they are realized through the use of different materials and the shapes of the fractals change with the buildings’ orientation.

Though the entire Federation Square scheme is original, one element above all others has become an instant icon. The atrium, a covered public space, serves as a mediating environment between the outdoor plaza and the indoor galleries. The Labarchitecture program describes the atrium’s exterior, “the open galvanised structural frames of the atrium evolved from the same triangular geometry as that of the facades, but developed as a folded three-dimensional system glazed both inside and out.”

Writer and curator Andrew MacKenzie wonderfully describes the atrium’s appeal. “The ground-breaking way in which the architects have translated the radical geometry of the triangular façade into a complex self-supporting double glazing for the central atrium, an enormous enclosed public space divided into north and south. A staggeringly complex bit of engineering given its incalculable non-orthogonal, almost chaotic structure. Yet the massive volume of the north atrium cantilevers out over the public areas without a care in the world. One of those gravity defying, look-no-hands moments of contemporary architecture.”

Like Archigram, Davidson and Bates have a relatively young practice whose approach openly privileges experimentation. Completed in October, 2002, Federation Square made itself an instant Australian icon, a program very much in the same vein as the Archigram imagination with an equal disregard for the implausible.

Pop Architecture: T5

2010-01-28T19:22:00.001-08:00

(Please excuse the long absence. Since I began working at the largest museum in the Western hemisphere, time has consumed itself in front of me. Allow me to get back into it by way of a series on pop architecture. These essays will have their roots in some work I did in my last year as an undergraduate in a survey of modern architecture).

Popular architecture can be equally endearing and notorious. Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is six parts one, a half-dozen of the other. It’s become an instant icon both through its restless media profile as well as its beautiful design and intelligent intentions. The Richard Rogers Partnership won the design competition for the terminal in 1998, setting off one of the UK’s most notorious and trying building projects. In spite of the endless construction, the building is very much ingrained in the popular imagination as something beautiful and ambitious. It, like any pop image, has become an icon (though a not-nearly-finished icon at that.)

The Guardian’s architecture critic, Jonathan Glancey, writes “T5 exists in a design airstream thousands of feet above that of the rest of the sprawling and much-derided Heathrow estate, and put its cluttered and neglected precursor, the once revelatory Foster-designed terminal at London Stanstead airport, in the shade. Passengers step into one of the most breathtaking man-made spaces in modern Britain. Entering the huge check-in hall, you can see not just up to the heights of a mighty, white steel-truss roof, interspersed with generous bands of fretted glass, but from one end of the new, light-filled five-storey building to the other.”

The interior of the terminal is an Archigram dream. Steel trees support the roof trusses, and the space is flooded with endless light for the entire length of the terminal, which runs a quarter-mile long. Floors are made with bright marble, and there’s a bit of pop indulgence in the restrained color scheme: grey, white, and Yves Klein blue.

But the real pop/ Futurist workings run below the terminal itself. A transit system beneath T5 quickly zips passengers to satellite terminals, while beneath an adjacent transparent roof wait six train platforms. Also included in the technocratic transport scheme is a concrete ramp which will eventually move electrically-powered people-mover pods (an Archigram favorite).

And the icing on the pop-future cake? Glancey writes, “Even if we stop flying altogether, though, T5 itself could be reused. Every last bit of airport equipment, all the shops, restaurants, lounges, baggage-handling areas, customs posts, passport controls, the lot, could be lifted out of the building, leaving the stunning, land-bound, quarter-mile steel and glass silver machine standing, gleaming and ready for a new and, possibly, more responsible use.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jan/11/architecture.transport

Olaf Breuning: Small Brain, Big Stomach

2009-11-27T12:48:00.000-08:00

Swiss artist Olaf Breuning is a product of his generation. Combining whimsy and invention with uncivil references to art history, his work is simultaneously tangible and imagined, ironic and sincere. This kind of ruthless innocence dominates "Small Brain, Big Stomach," a solo show of his works currently on view at Metro Pictures in New York.

Drawing heavily from a post-modern reaction to the general impetus of violence/ sexuality/ loneliness, Breuning comically exploits the humor of oversimplifying such heavy themes. The irreconcilable difference between his gut-wrenching subjects and their innocent forms recalls the drawings of David Shrigley, who so brilliantly evokes feelings of pain or sorrow in scratchy lines.

The wall drawings and simple wooden sculptures which dominate "Small Brain, Big Stomach" are all based on a series of drawings he made while in a self-imposed isolation travelling alone aboard the Queen Mary II. Though they speak to "the simple questions one could have about life," the large scale, imposing colors, and rough materials make the works far more complicated than their childlike source material. The wall drawings are immense, as overwhelming as they are funny. Similar to the large-scale humorous installations of Stefan Sagmeister, the viewer's initial reaction is a giggle or laugh-- until the content makes itself clear. The images are incredibly faithful to the sketches, and Breuning's pencil scratchings make themselves known despite their scale and high production value.

Breuning's sculptures are essentially three-dimensional drawings, bringing to mind the sculptural writings and physical codes of David Smith. Like the drawings, forms are realized in black, and lines float in space as if they were sitting listlessly on the page. The directness of these works is best summed up by a work like "Me, Me, Me, You and Me": an outline of a human head contains the very honest depiction of our true thoughts, the word "me" is written a dozen times, only matched by a single "you."

In "Generation After Generation After Generation," the words "Generation" and "After" are repeated, endlessly, one after the other, in chunky wooden letters. When spelled out in words and formed into sculpture, lineage and family history takes on a physical weight-- despite any specificity or reference to distinct forbears. "Focus, Focus, Focus" is another word sculpture, the word "focus" appearing repeatedly in different places, making it nearly impossible to concentrate on one word in particular.

Breuning's work is consistently interesting and provocative, and "Small Brain, Big Stomach" is equally engaging and amusing. Its accessibility is matched by humor, invention, and an enviable lack of pretension. This is a child's world come alive, their deepest questions and most curious scribbles translated to an adult scale in a white box space.

Olaf Breuning: Small Brain, Big Stomach is on view at Metro Pictures through December 5, 2009. 519 W. 24th St.

Le Loup - "Family"

2009-10-30T12:33:00.001-07:00

(Cross-posted from The 405: thefourohfive.com)

Artist: Le Loup

Album: Family

Label: Hardly Art

Release Date: September 21, 2009

Website: http://www.leloupmusic.net/

There are significant sounds of autumn: subtle changes in the sky make the underfoot hum of the pavement whisper in warmcool breezes. Finding the perfect record for grey days and new mittens is precious, measured by breadth and depth. “Family,” the sophomore release from Baltimore-based Le Loup, was lovingly crafted in dusty and pastoral sessions in North Carolina. Floorboards creak under the joyous rapture of folk influences while heavy layering of sounds wraps the listener in a grandmother’s quilt.

“Family” is a fitting title for an album which announces the band’s now fuller, post-Craigslist lineup. Frontman Sam Simkoff needed musicians to help him tour as a live act, and after finding collaborators online, Le Loup is now a full and sublime group. Where electronic interjections and dazzle marked their first album, Le Loup has now settled comfortably into a chanting, direct, hold-you-closer-no-really-I-mean-it-much-closer sound.

Simkoff’s vocals carry “Family” along the meandering way from furry/fury-filled breaths to the chantings of a spiritual healer. His yearning voice is punctuated throughout by symbiotic handclaps, clement drums, and the tender exclamations and provocations which best befit the act of running into the sea fully-dressed, your heirloom watch still fastened around your wrist.

The lush “Beach Town” begins with a hoot, the sound of seagulls overhead. Tribal drums introduce themselves, though slowly succumb to the whispering haunt of Simkoff’s voice. Bongos float in and out, as if held by fickle kite strings. A bass line sneaks in, rising from a low tide to meet a guitar, and together they cluster beneath Simkoff’s lilting howl.

“Grow” begins with a delicate tickle of ivory, which then succumbs to a chanting which resembles an Animal Collective-directed church choir. The early pop-flavored drums recall “Be My Baby,” accompanied by a dulcet guitar which provokes comparisons to the sound of 1960s surf movies or the Buddy Holly “Apartment Tapes.”

“Morning Song” recalls folk and American roots music, with warbling voices and a euphonious banjo. And the creepier “Family” begins with the sounds of howling dogs, passing trains, and rustling, dry bones. Quiet, closed-eyes chanting devolves into a handclap-bursting ode to mothers, brothers, and sisters.

“Forgive Me” sounds like a fertile run on the pavement in bare feet, the concrete still damp from last night’s rain. And the unassuming “Sherpa” takes its time, waiting nearly two full minutes to exclaim itself. The song emerges from still quiet, a small tapping, and perhaps the lull of a wooden rocking chair. A clock ticks louder, mechanical sounds pulse through plaster walls, until finally, at 1:50, a jubilant family song erupts from the musty darkness. The family hums in and out of a rapturous ode to the ocean and togetherness, “I GIVE TO MY SISTERS AND BROTHERS! I GIVE TO MY SISTERS AND BROTHERS!” and again they retreat into the darkness of an autumn cottage.

Le Loup does not hide behind its influences, proudly acknowledging their admiration of their comrades Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes, and Grizzly Bear. And though there are similarities to be drawn between them all, Le Loup stands out on its haunches as a particularly compelling group. Their effortless collages of sound, the bare joy of the instrumentation, and the sweet howl of their lyrics makes a sound which is full, spacious, and clear. Quiet warnings melt under opiate guitars, anodyne chants, and soporific banjos. Nature is exalted, family a stimulant. Full and empty moments chase each other throughout “Family,” resulting in a record which sounds like running after sunlight through the waning hour of dusk.

Allan McCollum at the New York Public Library

2009-10-13T12:03:00.000-07:00

A Conversation with Allan McCollum and Josiah McElheny, Organized by Art21 and the New York Public Library, October 6, 2009.

"How do artists use systems? Why do we accept some systems while rebelling against others? Who owns images? How do artists invent new grammars and logics in today's supercharged, information-based society?" -Art21

Allan McCollum uses methods borrowed from mass-production and assembly lines in creating individual artworks which provoke questions of uniqueness, value, and the visible hand of the artist. His works, endless numbers of small objects displayed programmatically, are deceptive in their nature: it is nearly impossible to imagine that each work in a vast series has been made (laboriously) by hand. With an inclination towards shape, subtlety, and planning algorithms, McCollum’s art is as much mechanical and scientific as it is sublime and overwhelming.

With the help of assistants, paleontologists, meteorologists, woodworkers, and countless others, McCollum has shaped a body of work which returns repeatedly to the idea of surrogates, stand-ins, and copies. A white-walled gallery takes on the form of a study center or research laboratory when filled with his drawings, paintings, and sculptures.

Last week, McCollum discussed his work at the New York Public Library, in association with Art21. The artist is one of the subjects of the new season of the PBS documentary series about contemporary artists and their work. He concluded his presentation with a conversation with artist Josiah McElheny, who was featured in Art21’s third season.

Again and again, McCollum returned to the question "How do we think about what an art object is?" His work seems as dependent on this conceptual consideration as it is on materials and process.

The Surrogate Paintings are perhaps one of McCollum’s most recognizable series. Begun in 1978, each Surrogate is made from wood and board and shaped like a framed work of art. However, unlike a traditional painting, the flat plane and its frame are indivisible: linked as a solid body. Plaster Surrogates, begun in 1982, was a series which stemmed from the first group of Surrogate Paintings. Rubber molds were made of select works in the previous series, and then solid works (resembling paintings) were cast in plaster. These “constructed paintings” satisfy all the definitions of what a painting is while contradicting the same standards.

Another recognizable McCollum series is his “Individual Works,” which he began in 1987. To produce the “Individual Works,” he collected small shapes and plastic pieces which he found in dime stores, on sidewalks, markets, and hardware stores. These objects included “bottle-caps, jar-lids, drawer-pulls, salt-shakers, flashlights, measuring spoons, cosmetics containers, yogurt cups, earrings, push-buttons, candy-molds, garden-hose connectors, paper-weights, shade-pulls, Chinese tea-cups, cat toys, pencil sharpeners, etc.” From these disparate shapes, McCollum created a system by which an infinite number of unique shapes could be produced, combined to create new shapes, and painted with a glossy enamel more befitting machine-made objects. The “Individual Works” are usually made into sets of 10,000, and displayed in an incredible spread which begs disbelief of their manual manufacture.

McCollum has created countless other iconic series, though my favorite (especially in light of his episode of Art21) is the Shapes from Maine project. Begun in 2005, the Shapes from Maine were begun after McCollum’s earlier Shapes Project, which sought to create an infinite number of unique shapes—one for every person on the planet. Using an algorithm and designs which could create over 31,000,000,000 Shapes, McCollum has made 214,000,000 individual forms so far. These shapes form the source material for a number of his recent experiments, including Shapes from Maine.

Shapes from Maine was undertaken in collaboration with craftsmen McCollum found on the internet. He was particularly drawn to artisans who work out of their homes and sell their own work online. Communicating exclusively by phone and e-mail, he selected four small crafts workshops to create hundreds of custom, hand-made shapes which were derived from his design algorithm. Copper cookie cutters, wooden ornaments, rubber stamps, and hand-cut silhouettes were all made to McCollum’s specifications.

The Shapes from Maine project in particular wrestles with the divide between handmade objects and mass production. Do we value these objects less, despite their craftsmanship, due to their quantity? Objects that are alike are often deemed less interesting than objects which are unique, as are objects which are made by a group as opposed to an individual. Shapes from Maine was designed by McCollum to rely on a group of artists to create an incredibly large body of objects and then ask us the question “Does our quantity limit our value?”

Questions about quantity and value are extremely relevant today. With globalization, widespread capitalism, and the endangered idea of craftsmanship, what does it mean when individuals imitate mechanized processes in their creative endeavors? What is the value of "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction?" In his treatise of the same name, Walter Benjamin argues that an object's importance is not dictated by its physical characteristics, but rather the idea of its exhibition, limited quantity, or its provenance. Of all artists whose work should be read in the context of Benjamin's ideas, McCollum's is the most provocative and convincing.

Watch Allan McCollum in the Art21 Season 5 episode Systems, premiering on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). The episode will also feature artists John Baldessari, Kimsooja, and Julie Mehretu.

Baldessari and Rauschenberg Prints in San Francisco

2009-09-21T13:32:00.000-07:00

Rauschenberg and Baldessari Prints at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

(Image: "Booster," 1967, Robert Rauschenberg, Color lithograph and screenprint, 72 x 36 inches, published by G.E.L., Los Angeles)

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, comprised of the Legion of Honor and the de Young museum, are simultaneously exhibiting the prints of pop artists John Baldessari and Robert Rauschenberg, respectively. Though the concurrent displays are not intended to serve as a dialogue between the two institutions, there are undeniable exchanges between both exhibitions.

“John Baldessari: A Print Retrospective,” at the Legion of Honor, is a methodical and chronological exploration of the artist’s development as a printmaker from 1970 to today. On view are 125 works spanning forty years of experimentation with diverse methods of image-making, including photoetching, photo-offset lithography, and photogravure.

One of the more prominent themes in Baldessari’s works is a fascination with detritus and anonymity. Though his early prints drew on the artist’s personal photographs, he eventually turned to found imagery, movie stills, and altered posters. This fascination with found material most clearly culminated in the 1994 series “Table Lamp and Its Shadow,” in which Baldessari used photographs of table lamps he found in hotel rooms in creating a series of printed objects which are only saved from anonymity by his usual bright colors.

In 2004, Baldessari began another large series of works based on a found image/ object. He approached the Mixografia workshop in Los Angeles (the same workshop which produced the “Table Lamp” series) with a found image of two men standing in front of Stonehenge. A six-part print was made from the single Xeroxed photograph, using different colors to obscure both the faces of the men and the monument itself.

Generally, Baldessari’s work is complex, despite its reliance on simplifying images to blocks of color and layer. He creates impersonal prints from impersonal objects and events, removing himself further and further from the subject with each printer’s proof. This absence of the artist is extremely antithetical to the deeply personal prints of Robert Rauschenberg, simultaneously on display at the de Young.

“Remembering Rauschenberg: The Artist’s Prints” is a concise exhibition of many of Rauschenberg’s innovative print series, made in collaboration with fine art presses around the world. He began making prints in the 1962 at Universal Limited Art Editions in West Islip, Long Island, and his relationship with the medium developed throughout the course of his career.

The exhibition includes many innovative and experimental works including “Breakthrough II” (1965), which was printed on a broken lithographic stone, and “Booster” (1967), a six-foot high x-ray of the artist’s body. Rauschenberg repeatedly draws inspiration from incredibly personal source material, in stark contrast to the found movie stills which comprise Baldessari’s prints.

The “Bellini” series, which Rauschenberg began in 1986, draws on images collected by the artist on his world travels. The prints take their name from the artist Giovanni Bellini (c. 1459-1516), whose small paintings in the Accademia, Venice, provided source material for Rauschenberg’s larger photogravures. The Bellini images are overlapped by Rauschenberg’s own photographs of urban life, and the entire series is painted with his own brushstrokes in gorgeous, jewel box colors.

The previously mentioned "Booster" is one of the artist's key prints, and the touchstone of the de Young exhibition. For his collaboration with Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, Rasuchenberg wanted to produce the largest hand-pulled print ever made on a lithographic press. He succeeded with the personal, life-sized x-ray work. The production of "Booster" expanded the limits for scale and size in contemporary printmaking, making way for even larger works which Rauschenberg would produce with Gemini in the following years.

Though both Baldessari and Rauschenberg could be termed Pop printmakers and worked with some of the same printing workshops, their processes and subject matter are incredibly different. Whereas Baldessari’s images are loud, impersonal, bright, and basic, Rauschenberg’s prints are quiet, more technically innovative, and more heavily reliant on the artist’s personal experience.

The differences between both artists and their printmaking methods could not be better explored than in a direct comparison of both Fine Arts Museums exhibitions. See Baldessari’s blocked-out faces at the Legion of Honor, then consider Rauschenberg’s bare bones at the de Young— there is a lot about printmaking that you can learn in one afternoon in San Francisco.

"John Baldessari: A Print Retrospective from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation" is on view at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, until November 8, 2009.

"Remembering Rauschenberg: The Artist's Prints" is on view at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, until October 4, 2009.

Jason "Hey, Wait"

2009-08-30T23:25:00.000-07:00

(Sorry, Marissa.)

There are some stories which can only be told in pictures-- this is why art persists. There are other stories which require more: a subject so heavy might also need words, pages, and decisive and divisive squares which frame more information than can be summed by one canvas.

Recent graphic novels have actively elevated the genre from its roots as a Bazooka Joe/Batman offshoot to a new type of thinking about art. The past ten years has seen an unprecedented boom in published works in which storytelling is at the visual center, and the symbiosis of words and pictures puts together so many things which are often left apart.

There are a few artists which have been particularly synonymous with the popularization of graphic novels: Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Norweigian artist Jason.

Jason (John Arne Sæterøy) has been making graphic novels for a few decades now, though his works have only recently been published in English for the first time. His best-known book, "Hey, Wait" is characterized by the artist's minimalism. Like Ware, Jason is able to draw silence. His books read like silent films, his pages are monochromatic and narrated only by punctuated bursts. One can scan the pages without a clear feeling for any dialogue. The human form is also absent, replaced instead by abstract, anthropomorphic creatures like rabbit-dog-teenagers.

Divided in two parts, "Hey, Wait" is an unflinching story of the difference that those words could have made upon a lifetime. They serve as a line drawn between childhood and the present. Two teenage friends, Jon and Bjorn, are enjoying an idyllic summer marked by reading comics, peeking through windows, and playing pranks. When they decide to form a club, a single moment in their initiation changes everything.

The words "Hey, Wait" were said too late, and the story unfolds as a mourning for lives wasted. Characters become the versions of themselves that they detest, and imagination slows to a dull throb. With a minimalistic and conscious hand, Jason creates a dramatic and poignant story which thoughtfully seeks to break your heart.

A beautiful third printing of "Hey, Wait" was published by Fantagraphics Books in 2008. Click here for details.

Next New: Green

2009-08-24T14:55:00.000-07:00

Artists have always found inspiration in nature. From the sweeping landscapes of Claude Lorrain (c. 1600-1682) to the monumental land art of Robert Smithson (1938-1973), the physical world has consistently maintained its supremacy as a subject for the visual arts.

But what role does nature have in art today? We are living in the clutches of a global crisis: sea levels are rising, glaciers retreating, our summers are colder, and our winters are warmer. During the persistent debate about the environment, nature’s value as an artistic subject has been a neglected topic. Fortunately, “Next New: Green” at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art is an exhibition about the subject of climate change and its identity as a modern visual subject.

In a kind of creative Kyoto Protocol, the ICA has brought together nine emerging artists who use the vocabulary of the environmental crisis in their work. Recurring exhibition themes include apocalyptic visions, floating cities, inhumane landscapes, and technologies which cruelly mimic the natural world. Artists featured in “Next New: Green” include Colette Campbell Jones, Michelle Blade, Rebecca Rothfus, Michael J. Ryan, Misako Inaoka, Vanessa Marsh, Carson Murdach, Sandra Ono, and Ryan Pierce.

Michelle Blade’s painting “Untitled (We Found God on a Cruise Ship),” 2007 is a serene, if slightly frightening, vision of an epiphanic scene. A blinding burst of light dominates the horizon as the bow of a ship plows through Arctic ice. The light and the ship are fragmented, and the people who gather along the edge of the deck seem endangered. There is the irreconcilable force of nature (the ice) threatening man and his machine, under the supreme watch of a god-like being. Though the scene is quiet, perhaps the onlookers are hushed, the idea of the painting is confrontational and booming: How should we define our relationship with nature? Via exploration and exploitation or through our personal experience of the sublime?

Rebecca Rothfus’ “Tower Series” exactly portrays a world already lost to industry. Her quiet, exact paintings of space dominated by antennae and telephone wires resemble photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher set against flat spaces in the colors of petit-fours. Towers are rendered in precise pencil on matte gouache, giving architectural elements a fragility similar to things found in nature. The simplicity of the scenes is almost threatening in their innocuousness, with the natural world apathetically accepting the things made by man.

Another exceptional work is “Dead Space,” an installation by Michael J. Ryan. Using consumer materials like shopping bags, fishing line, and electronics, Ryan has constructed a living, breathing mechanism—a life support for no one, a machine which does nothing. There is a resonant redundancy in a piece made from plastics which resembles something which could live forever, independently. Controlled by a timer, the machine breaths in and out, inflating and deflating the plastic bags like lungs. Perhaps in a future world, a world after nature, the only living things will be those made from indestructible materials like plastic shopping bags. Maybe our visions of a future dominated by robots and machines were wrong: it’s far more likely that the shopping bags will outlive us all. Though the contraption could be an innocent tool which simply circulates air, it could easily have far more sinister connotations. If we continue to abuse our natural resources and use and disuse plastic bags, perhaps the natural world might someday resemble Ryan’s most unnatural installation.

Viewed as a central idea, the exhibition describes nature: both its mystery and the threat of its absence. Art needs to address the environmental crisis in the same way that other industries have done, and the ICA has done a brilliant job in highlighting the potential framework for this new debate. Though art has traditionally emphasized the beauty of nature, it is now time for art to speak to its fragility and vulnerability in the 21st century.

Next New: Green is on view at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art until September 20, 2009.

Wallworks at YBCA

2009-08-19T19:29:00.001-07:00

(Image: Leslie Shows at "Wallworks," courtesy of FecalFace)

Sometimes a space best functions when left to speak for itself. In a museum, an empty room, a perfect window, or floating staircase can be art objects like the paintings hung on the wall. In "Wallworks," the summer exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, new visual arts director Betti-Sue Hertz has commissioned eight artists to create works which physically scale the walls of the space.

Designed by architect Fumihiko Maki, the YBCA is rational, minimalist, functional, and acutely aware of its public spaces. Humanist modernism characterizes both the upstairs and downstairs galleries, made of diverse materials like glass, metal, and stone. Like Renzo Piano, Maki also uses light more as a building material than a byproduct of his design and he was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1993, the same year that the YBCA's doors opened.

Hertz found inspiration in Maki's design, making the bold decision to let the building be the centerpiece of her first project. Generally, the YBCA is not an ideal exhibition space: on the ground floor, there is a major gallery and a small white box space. Upstairs, shows are often mounted on the walkway around the foyer, sweeping around to a smaller gallery which more resembles a black box theatre. The sleek architecture is the only unifying theme throughout the different spaces.

Using the more literal aspects of the YBCA building, eight artists each create their visions using Maki's design as the starting point. Entering the show through the foyer, one must first walk through a work by Nigerian/Philadelphia artist Odili Donald Odita. Odita's geometric, sweeping paintings seem to mix the brightly-hued colors of Nigeria with the radiant shapes and pathways suggested by something more transcendental. His consideration of pattern speaks to consciousness: both the consciousness of shape as well as of the act of painting itself.

Tillman Kaiser's installation is more humorous and ready to announce an awareness of Western art history. With references to Futurism and Constructivism, the Austrian artist brings ideas of art's past to his scenes of sci-fi urban futures. Makoto Aida's mural combines imagery from manga, video, and Japanese pop culture to create low-brow high-art. Facing Aida's mural in the main gallery is a work by Israeli artist Yehudit Sasportas. Her enormous landscape, figured precisely in black and white, recalls the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and the disorienting skies of JMW Turner. Dark colors and sweeping views make Maki's open, bright space seem threatening and cold.

In a smaller gallery downstairs are works by Amanda Ross-Ho and Leslie Shows. Both Ho's and Shows' pieces are more reliant on textiles and craft, and their pairing seemed intentional and effective. Ho's work recalls lace making, the history of objects, and the displacement of material: she often cuts holes, blacks out objects, and marks domestic things in black and white. Shows uses textiles to more ethereal ends, recalling the movements of wind, land mass, and waves of energy and color. Her high wall of white flags could be interpreted literally-- as a resounding surrender-- or metaphorically, joined together by their colors, slowly melting down the gallery walls.

Upstairs, beautiful and provocative works by Edgar Arceneaux and Chris Finley wrestle for attention with the physical gallery space, and visitors are encouraged to define the divide between Maki's art and those of the commission. Overall, "Wallworks" is a brave experiment in exploring the symbiosis between art and space, and , like biological creatures engaged in this type of relationship, both stand to benefit from mutualism and shared consideration.

"Wallworks" is on view at the YBCA until October 25, 2009

Moki at Jack Fischer Gallery

2009-08-16T17:32:00.000-07:00

Obese women with the heads of watchful owls, orange-eyed lemurs operating a mill, beluga whales being hand fed by mothers and children.

German painter Moki creates vivid images of invented worlds, worlds in which the unnatural becomes the real, and the imagined becomes the standard. Her paintings depict lonely, well-loved hiding places, figured in the colors of the physical world. Landscapes have an unblemished quality, and figures are serenely aware of being watched.

"Bunker Underground" is Moki's first American solo show, currently on view at the Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco, a gallery which specializes in "outsider, folk, contemporary, naive, visionary, self-taught, and intuitive" art. And the setting is ideal, as Moki is above all else visionary and intuitive. Her paintings pit a confrontational type of super-realist naturalism against contemporary comics, modern portraiture, and fiendish imaginings.

Many of Moki's works in "Bunker Underground" rely on the logic of fantasies. Realism volleys with disbelief and human subjects are alone in personal dream landscapes, while fantastic animals challenge their status as imaginary things. People physically hold the worlds around them, and cartoons try to burrow themselves deep into their hyper realistic surroundings, perhaps with the intention of becoming real themselves. Moki creates new places, places so remote that the imaginary is made tangible, the ancient made new, and the mysterious is familiar.

"Bunker Underground" by Moki is on view at Jack Fischer Gallery until September 19, 2009. 49 Geary Street, Suite 418, San Francisco, CA 94108. www.jackfischergallery.com

The Recession and the Return to Craft

2009-08-14T22:13:00.000-07:00

The number of ways the recession has altered our lives are countless. Surprising byproducts of general terribleness have been the popularization of bushy beards, the dip in shark attacks, and a resurgence of old-fashioned crafts.

Embroidery, knitting, and crochet made incredible leaps a few years ago, putting yarn shops and needlework patterns in every suburban downtown. Since the recession, other crafts have made surprising returns, including macrame, quilting, even quilling (I'd be happy to give you a demonstration.)

Yesterday I was scanning a few embroideries I've made (like this bluebird here) and I remembered a book I had written about on this blog a few months ago: "Craft in Dialogue: Six Views on a Practice in Change," edited by Love Jonsson. After picking it up again for a glance through the passages I underlined, I realize the debate about craft and its significance is made even more pressing now, during the recession. Though the book was published in 2005, the ideas about the reclamation of handcrafts is far more relevant since the contemporary crash. How could I have overlooked the recession in my first reading?

Jonsson writes, "The revival of crafts has been a much talked about topic during recent years, concurrently with the issue of our need of concrete things - in contrast to virtual phenomena that seem elusive and unforeseeable. Mindful of contemporary practices in crafts however, this explanation often appears simplified. Crafts cannot be considered merely a counter movement against the new, since they, too, are a part of it - crafts themselves are one of the areas in which the contemporary is exposed and discussed." (p.7)

For so long, I have struggled to reconcile my personal interest in the practice of crafts with my academic training as a scholar of art and style. But Jonsson's book, paired with a mindful consideration of the work of artists like Michael Raedecker, Ghada Amer, and Grayson Perry, clearly shows that craft and art are no longer divided, like nations segregated by their common language. In the current climate, art is craft, craft is art, and together, we are all striving to create and defend a visual culture built on relevance, permanence, and concrete things. A return to craft is a way to insulate the visual arts from further calamity-- by relying more heavily on the substantial: the macrame, the thrown pots, perhaps we are better protecting what potential artistic output we may have left to get us through these difficult times.

Elizabeth Peyton: Live Forever

2009-08-12T16:06:00.000-07:00

Some kids dream of playing baseball: they stay out late on hazy dusk high school home plates, swinging an imagined bat at space and stars. Others would like to drive race cars, though they only sheepishly speed up their Corollas when they know nobody is watching.

Sometimes I think about becoming a curator: I imagine white spaces dedicated like vacuous monuments to my visions. Occasionally I will see a work which immediately becomes a part of my vocabulary of pretend: this sculpture would work with that painting, her colors would look deeper and richer next to his photographs.

When I finally saw Elizabeth Peyton's show Live Forever at the Whitechapel Gallery in London a few weeks ago, her works provoked another curatorial inner vision. Her portraits, often small, richly-hued reminders of pop stars and doe-eyed men, would better suit a teenage girl's bedroom than a stark white space. Her intensely personal adoration of Kurt Cobain and Sid Vicious is spoken in words of pink, green, and blue, canvasses so small you want to hold them close, kiss their uniformly rosy unfortunate lips.

Though many critics write off Peyton's pictures as high-art fandom, I like to view them as something more than Tiger Beat covers on canvas. Their scale, paired with the artist's adoration of handsome fallen heroes, brings to mind something closer to an Ex-voto. An Ex-voto is a painting given as an offering to the saints with gratitude after the fulfillment of a vow. Usually, they are left at a church altar or pilgrimage site with a message giving thanks to God or the saints for performing a miracle, and the paintings are signed with the date of the fulfillment of a vow. Peyton's images, though lacking a literal religious context, almost seem like Ex-votos of an artist giving thanks at the altar for the receipt of cultural gifts. Thank you for Sid Vicious in the dim light with his cigarette, thank you for the wild abandon of Kurt Cobain on stage in drag.

Peyton's images of doomed youth are not unlike a parade of saints-- these are the cursed, the beautiful, many died younger than Jesus (to take the name of another New Museum-curated show). They are vulnerable, seemingly aware of their fates as they stare down at their candy-coloured laps. Though her portraits of the dead mingle with her visions of the living, Peyton's work is generally glazed over with the haze of memory. It feels as though she is always painting through the barrier which divides the truth from the improved perception of heartfelt teenage girls or religious followers.

Peyton's paintings are more than their reputation. Her portraits exceed their source material of photographs in NME and Rolling Stone. The fanaticism, the kind eye-- these are religious documents from the contemporary church of culture.

Resuming Transmission: The Berardo Collection

2009-08-05T08:19:00.000-07:00

It's been some time since I've written. The past month has seen my graduation from the Courtauld Institute MA program, a road trip through Portugal, and my return to California. It will be near impossible to describe all the last exhibitions I saw between London and Lisbon, but I will try to share the most interesting highlights.

For years now I have heard about the cultural banquet that is Lisbon, and it seems that the rumors were all true. Between the design shops in the Bairro Alto and the vibrant graffiti in the backstreets, the entire city buzzes with art and color. The best venue of all, though, was the Museu Colecção Berardo at the Berardo Museum – Exhibition Centre of Centro Cultural de Belém. The museum's namesake, José Berardo, is perhaps the Charles Saatchi of Portugal-- with a collection to match. The sleek, new, minimalist building houses works by Picasso, Flavin, Duchamp, Holzer, LeWitt, Serra, Calder, Acconci, Boltanski, and others, with sections devoted to movements like Hyper-realism, Dada, and Purism.

The Berardo also features temporary exhibitions alongside its stellar permanent collection. During my visit, temporary exhibitions included: Dan Flavin na Colecção Panza; Arriscar o Real; and Photo Espana 2009 Lisboa.

Arriscar o Real, or Risk the Real, is an insightful exploration of the developing figure in 20th c. art. The question of the relevance of figurative works is asked in three parts:
1. The problem of "real" space.
2. The figure in performance.
3. The figure in all states.

To explore ideas of authentic space, the curators brought together Minimalist works which are stripped of any figurative qualities. When the viewer is fully engaged in the questions of created versus "real" spaces, how do they perceive the figure? Is a figure absolute if only implied by its absence? Along with Minimalism, performance has also changed the construction of the figure. When action, gesture, and the body are physically engaged in creating a work, how much of the work is simply composed of the materiality of the body? Lastly, the exhibition asks, "What are the possibilites of representing the subject in an era in which our private and collective bodies are constructed from a bottomless pit of images, infinite reflections of other reproductions?"

Photo Espana 2009 Lisboa is another highlight of the Berardo's summer exhibitions. Showcasing the works of Cristobal Hara and Mabel Palacin, the show draws from some of the greatest contemporary Spanish photographic talents. Hara's images are particularly rich: surreal documentary images of quotidian life in rural Spanish villages. His photographs are less invested with journalistic integrity than by the potent language of camera magics. One hundred photographs are featured as a retrospective of the photographer's work since the 1970s.

The first few photographs show scenes of abandoned, dusty streets. They resemble stage set debris more than the dusty mainways of rural Spain. Human presence is quiet and accidental in these images: sometimes a limb or disused clothing. Place names stand for titles, and the quiet of the photographs is echoed in these names.

Hara gives what spectators want: carnage, destitution, bloodshed, religious rites. But carnage is shown with civility, bloodshed is seen as a blessed event. Humor and resepct mark these works as the photographer's signature, a cruel joke with metaphoric and documentary intentions.

Museu Colecção Berardo at the Berardo Museum – Exhibition Centre of Centro Cultural de Belém. Praça do Império, Belem, Tram 15 from Lisbon. http://www.museuberardo.com

Dushi: Florentijn Hofman

2009-06-25T09:27:00.000-07:00

Scale has long been manipulated in every direction by artists who want to confront us with new ways of percieving our environment. Size is something which can be easily altered to a minor degree and result in a major reaction. For example, Robert Therrien’s No Title (Table and Four Chairs), currently on view at Tate Modern, is an incredible example of scale as art. Therrien constructs a casual monument from a kitchen table realized on an epic scale. The table is about five meters tall, and the best way through the room is to walk underneath the furniture. We wonder what may be on the unreachable table top above, though the only way to get up there would be to scramble up one of the slick, glossy chair legs like a climber on a mountain face.

When I was thinking about scale following my visit to see Therrien's dining table, I found wonderful photos of a recent exhibition of works by Florentijn Hofman at Galerie West in the Hague. Her exhibition, titled "Dushi," brings together more than a dozen works which resemble stuffed children's toys on a perversely grand scale.

It is one thing to play with a stuffed monkey toy, but how would you address the same object if its scale were foreboding, perhaps even physically threatening? The artist says this "change of scale completely changes their function and feeling." See pictures of the installation here.

"Dushi: Works by Florentijn Hofman" is on view at Galerie West in the Hague until July 4th.

Sven Augustijnen at Tate Modern

2009-06-22T12:47:00.000-07:00

Sometimes we struggle to find the right words. There’s an itch on the tongue, maybe you wave your hands in the air, trying to physically pull the language out. Sometimes I catch myself gesticulating in front of my computer, hands furiously grappling with the thin air dividing me from a multi-syllabic outburst.

Imagine living in a constant state of trying to find the right words. For those who suffer from aphasia, that can sometimes be the case. Aphasia is a disorder which limits the ability to process language. Sometimes it comes about as the result of a stroke or severe brain damage, and for those who suffer, there are varied degrees of loss of comprehension and speech.

Some aphasia sufferers may have more difficulty speaking, others may be less able to write. There are endless permutations of the disorder’s symptoms. And for those who love words and quick-shot discussions, the effects of aphasia are more nightmarish and saddening than perhaps most other impediments.

Currently on view at the Tate Modern is a group show titled Stutter. The artists in the exhibition all work on themes of language, miscommunication, and linguistic re-appropriation. Artists include Anna Barham, Dominique Petitgand, Michael Riedel, Will Stuart, and Michelangelo Pistoletto. One work stood out above the rest, though: a film installation by Belgian filmmaker Sven Augustijnen.

Johan (2001) and François (2003) are both documentary films, each recorded during an aphasia patient’s appointment with a speech therapist. Both patients are affected by the same disorder, though to diverse ends. Viewed together in sequence, the two films create an unsurmountable tension between spoken language and that which is impossible to articulate, forever gestating on the tips of these men’s tongues.

Johan is young, sweet, with kind blue eyes. He speaks very slowly and carefully, paying methodical attention to what limited vocabulary he has at his disposal. When asked to describe a recent holiday in France, he thinks for a long pause. He says he went cycling. When the speech therapist asks what else he did while on holiday, Johan looks up again and says, as if for the first time, “Cycling.” Again and again, he is unable to find more words to describe a week at the seaside. Then, the therapist shows him a series of photographs in which something isn’t quite right: a girl dances in work boots, a boy sits in the tub fully dressed. When shown a photograph of a boy trying to play an LP record in a cassette player, Johan remains totally silent. “What’s wrong with the picture?” he’s asked. It takes nearly a dozen tries for him to find the right words to say. The tension is thick, and the viewer feels deeply for Johan, whispering the right words under their breath like a prayer in the darkened gallery space.

In contrast to Johan, François is a quick, babbling talker, and his mouth seems to move faster than the camera can possibly record in real time. He rambles excitedly, using the words he still has, happy to joke and tell long personal stories to the therapist. She is hardly granted enough time to speak in which to administer a cringe-inducing examination. After about ten minutes of excited chit-chat, François is finally asked to name things like buildings, school supplies, and types of sport. Only when he is confronted with these specific tasks do we realize just how much he is unable to say. Though he disguises his aphasia with excited talk about the day’s headlines, when asked “What is a building where sick people go?” he looks dumbfounded. The incessant banter was actually salvaged from a very limited vocabulary.

Both films stage a tension, pitting silence and nervous banter against unease. Although both men are afflicted with the same disorder, it has diversely shaped their character and their reactions to their limitations. The difference in both François and Johan’s behavior changes how the viewer perceives their condition. Sometimes we root for them, sometimes we want to quietly beg them to slow down or speed up. More than anything, the tension we feel in watching these men struggle is a result of our inability to comprehend the inability to truly speak.

The aphasia films of Sven Augustijnen are being screened as a part of Stutter at Tate Modern until August 16, 2009.

Stefan and Franciszka Themerson

2009-06-18T14:06:00.000-07:00

Stefan and Franciszka Themerson were the leading couple of the Polish avant-garde in the pre-war period. They were leaders of a new experimental cinema with roots in Soviet Constructivism. The Themersons, like their Constructivist counterparts in the Soviet Union, embraced film as a pure and rational aesthetic medium. Cinema, like the greater Constructivist movement, endeared itself to mass media and the new ideas of photography, design, and montage.

The Themersons, even as a young teenage couple, made the first Polish abstract films.
They made five short films in Warsaw before the second World War: Pharmacy, Europa, Moment musical, Short circuit, and The Adventure of a Good Citizen, the latter being the only surviving film of the five. During the war, Stefan and Franciszka were separated, and they communicated through an exchange of drawings, letters, and artistic ideas. When they were reunited in London, they made two more films: Calling Mr Smith (1943 ): a short anti-war film exposing the desecration of Polish culture under the Nazi regime and The Eye and the Ear (1944-45): a visual interpretation of four songs by the modern Polish composer Szymanowski.

Three of these films, The Adventure of a Good Citizen, Calling Mr. Smith, and The Eye and The Ear are currently being screened in the Lightbox film space at Tate Britain. It is a rare opportunity to see the few remaining films of the early Polish avant-garde.

I especially liked Calling Mr. Smith (I was lucky to find it online, which you can see below). The film is an urgent and passionate plea to the British public, begging them to understand the cultural warfare of the Nazi program in Poland. Unlike other war films which focused on the human loss and political warfare, the Themersons speak to the fragmentation and alienation of traditional Polish culture, learning, and arts. Photographs, fragments, and collaged images of cultural heritage are followed by blasts of coloured light and the drifting melodies of Chopin, a Pole whose compositions were banned by the Third Reich. Bach and Szymanowski also play, contrasting with the rallying call of a soft-spoken British woman's voice, heard over Hitler's infamous Horst Wessel Lied soldiers' anthem.

I know very little about the Themersons, though now I would be keen to see more from their archives. They seem like a wildly fascinating pair and it would be brilliant to see more of their work on display in major spaces like Tate Britain.

Lightbox: Stefan and Franciszka Themerson is on view at Tate Britain until June 28, 2009.

Tony Swain at Tate Britain

2009-06-18T13:33:00.000-07:00

Tony Swain changes the news. He transforms broadsheets and headlines into the physical starting place for expansive, imaginative landscapes and Claudian vistas. Pasted together, multiple sheets of newsprint become hazy, glorious dreamscapes. Swain collages newspaper in layers, cutting out text, combining printed pictures from fragmented evening edition remains.

In a new commission for the Art Now space at Tate Britain, Swain has created pastoral scenes of the imagination. And it's fitting to find his works in the same institution as Constable and Turner. Swain's gorgeous, full paintings are deeply rooted in landscape-- doubtlessly one of the most British painting traditions.

Collage has long lingered on the outskirts of acceptable painting, ever since Picasso and Braque began their experimentation with collage and painting in 1907. Nevertheless, Swain asserts the relevance of collage in contemporary art by pilfering his visuals from current headlines. The centrepiece for the exhibition, "Dream Re-enactment Society" (2009) is an idyllic scene. From across the room, all you can see clearly is the deep cerulean horizon line, stone cottages on the hilltops, and laundry hung out to dry. It is only upon closer inspection that one notices that the main images in the painting have been lifted from newspapers, and perhaps the roots of the images are not so idyllic after all. The stone cottages may have been sourced from a story about conflict in Ireland, the hazy mist may have been a result of a car bomb. The disconnected, disrupted use of collage and painting not only undermine the viewer's initial perception of the scene, they also provoke the outdated notions of historical landscape painting.

Tony Swain: Temperature is Here Too is on view in the Tate Britain ART NOW space until August 16, 2009.

BP Portrait Award 2009

2009-06-18T13:04:00.000-07:00

Today marked the first day of one of the most popular annual exhibitions in London. The BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery is the most prestigious competition for international portrait painters. The work displayed in each year's exhibition mark the diverse trends and attitudes towards one of the most traditional and highly-regarded types of painting.

Of the nearly 2,000 paintings which were submitted to the 30th annual competition, 56 were selected for display in the National Portrait Gallery. Though the featured artists come from all over the world and have had varied levels of training, a few themes ran throughout the whole display: photorealism and the provocation of traditional portraiture.

First prize was taken by Peter Monkman for his painting Changeling 2, a haunting portrait of his adolescent daughter on the cusp of adulthood. Michael Gaskell won second prize for his portrait of his son Tom, painstakingly undertaken in photorealistic egg tempera.

Though the prize-winning portraits were worthy of recognition, I was more drawn to other works in the Portrait Prize show. Matt Batt's naive painting of his sister, Debs, is gorgeous in its disarming simplicity. He painted the portrait from sketches taken from a single sitting, and the immediacy of his subject matter is palpable in his bright colours and bold brushwork. I also loved Jayne Cooper's portrait of her daughter, Madeleine. Her young daughter sits in a contorted position on a wooden chair in the dim glow of dawn or dusk. She wears a headband from a Halloween party from the night before, but the accessory doesn't suit her simple outfit of a white t-shirt and cotton panties. The streaking shadows across her face, combined with her mature pose, make her seem far older.

Clara Drummond's portrait of her friend Iris has the appeal of an old movie star or a sad photograph from a broadsheet. She has classical looks and a beauty typical of portraiture through history. Natalie Holland's portrait Agnes shows a little girl in a red hooded sweatshirt, mischievously smirking at the painter while gathering handfuls of her long, blonde hair. In her clothes she resembles a character from a classic fairytale, while her demeanor tells another story. Peter Holt's portrait of his son Tom is more evocative of an icon painting than a family portrait.

All these works are similar in that the sitter, though perhaps unknown to us, is significant to the artist. This importance is palpable in every work, whether realistic or abstract. Some images are eerie, others unsettling, and there are expressions of joy and pictures of loss. However, all the works share a dedication to representational painting, and the BP Portrait Prize is invaluable for maintaining a place for figurative portraiture in the world of contemporary art.

The BP Portrait Award 2009 is at the National Portrait Gallery from today until September 20, 2009. Admission free.

POOR. OLD. TIRED. HORSE.

2009-06-17T12:26:00.001-07:00

Visual poetry is a delicate thing. Making tangible the intangible, trying its best to physically emote the fragility of a spoken cadence. The Concrete Poetry movement of the 1960s ushered in a wave of artists who found inspiration in the balanced task of typography and prose. Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Anna Barham, Matthew Brannon, Henri Chopin, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alasdair Gray, Philip Guston, David Hockney, Karl Holmqvist have all incorporated text-based art into their practice, with varied and provocative results.

The summer exhibition at the ICA, "Poor. Old. Tired. Horse." takes its title from a journal of the same name founded by Ian Hamilton Finlay. P.O.T.H. explored the limits of visible language, and Finlay's concrete poems had roots in symbolism, Soviet Constructivism, graphic design, and Cubism. He made words from forms, and language from shape. In one example from the ICA show, Finlay even created a poem from a grid marked with symbols with a correlating key. As a poet-artist, Finlay was not satiated with the succinct devious word-and-image experiment. He infused visual poems with color, materiality, and substance. He painted poems on tortoise shells, he constructed poems as sculptures in forests. He didn't stop at the boundaries of language and meaning, maintaining that "stupidity reduces language to words."

In an impressive survey of Finlay’s work as well as those of other concrete poets, the ICA promotes works which may be less familiar in a medium rarely exhibited as the central theme of a major summer show.

Exhibited artists include Liliane Lijn, who made “poem machines” in the late 1960s by writing poems on motorized, turning cones. Her kinetic sculptures celebrate both the momentum of speed and language. Her “visions of sound” are hypnotic, the meaning of the poems altered by the endless, infinite turning of the mechanism. Ferdinand Kriwet, who makes plaques of poems which resemble official civic signage, is shown in the same room. His “text signs” use a circular motif reminiscent of both common street signs and religious talismans. Both Lijn and Kriwet use circular motions and forms to transform language from brief poetry into endless mandalas.

Alasdair Gray’s images are reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley and William Blake, interpreting the visual element of poetry in a more literal way. Philip Guston is also featured, his work displayed like oversized comic strips. His “Poem-Pictures” experiment with written text and shape parallel to his unique drawings.

Other interesting works include typographical experiments by Vito Acconci and Carl Andre; Christopher Knowles' "typings" from the 1970s and 1980s; Hockney's illustrations for Thirteen Poems From C.P. Cavafy; and Matthew Brannon's deceptively simple text experiments.

The graphic potential of language is not lost on any of these artists, unlike the disregard most often assigned to written words. These artists, bridging the roots of Concrete Poetry in the 1960s to contemporary experimentation, all recognize both the visual and poetic possibilities of text as art. The works in P.O.T.H. are beautiful, strange, and challenging, and there is enough material here to challenge anyone with a poetic or aesthetic inclination.

Michael Raedecker: Line-up

2009-06-16T12:51:00.000-07:00

Following a perfect day in Highgate with Amanda yesterday, some sky opened broadly. Recent days have been a bit anhedonic, and though I feared I may still be in my dull rut when I went to the Camden Arts Centre today, I was pleasantly surprised. It may have been the nice company, it may have been the perfect London summer day (which feels more like a perfect San Francisco spring day), but I found the current exhibition thrilling. "Michael Raedecker: Line-up" is a masterful, hypnotic survey of new works by the Dutch, London-based painter.

Raedecker's work is the most exciting I've seen in weeks: his canvases hover on the periphery of painting and mixed media, using found imagery and thread to create atmospheric scenes of otherwise familiar places and objects. Steely greys, chalky whites, and vague charcoals make for endless, ambiguous works in undefined perimeters. He flirts obsessively with the possibilities of line and the ambitiousness of a pierced canvas. Paintings are filled with holes: most are small and filled with thread, while others are left vacant with want.

It's interesting to consider as well the medium of embroidery. Embroidery is, for the most part, a feminine art. Very few women embroider anymore, and even fewer experiment with embroidery and painting. Ghada Amer and Orly Cogan both work with needle and thread as high art, and I have been particularly inspired by Amer in my art. Last summer, after seeing her show at the Brooklyn, I was moved to begin experimenting with embroidering painted canvases as well. But how many men embroider? And how many men then transpose the skill onto a painted work? I couldn't stop thinking about Raedecker's skill and his finesse with the thread. He accomplishes things with embroidery which I couldn't even have imagined, and I can't help but wonder if this is not due to his gender. For example, his series of epic, Piranesi-like architectural scenes. Never have I seen feminist artists like Amer or Cogan use embroidery in an architectural way. Raedecker is brilliant in his combination of what are each classified as traditionally feminine and masculine arts.

There is also something to be said for Raedecker's palette. How he exposes so much texture, colour, and depth from a field of greys is nothing short of impressive. He transposes onto these embroidered, grey fields the genre motifs of still-life painting, architectural studies, and fetishistic domestic scenes. In the exhibition notes from the Centre it says, "Before starting each painting, Raedecker questions its legitimacy today. Why this motif? What is the current relevance of the genre? The diversity of the images in the paintings shows his fascination with the possibilities and limitations of the medium. He treats their heritage with both nostalgia and suspicion."

Raedecker uses secondhand images from books and magazines to create a world of quiet domestic spaces in the muted colours of grey and textures of thread. Here's a scene of a wedding cake on a counter, there's a breakfast table. Grey colours evoke a sense of memory and the act of remembering, as though perhaps we can just make out the shapes of things, but not quite what their colours were. In show (2008), undershirts and bedsheets hang out to dry on a clothesline. Everything is grey-white, not quite honest to life, but evocative of a memory. The linens are spotless and clean, like an idealised version of what must have been. The further dimension of the thread used to make images of linen only bolsters the surreal remembering of the scene through a whitewashed haze.

Michael Raedecker: Line-up is on view at the Camden Arts Centre until June 28, 2009.

David Claerbout at Hauser & Wirth

2009-05-29T09:33:00.000-07:00

Belgian artist David Claerbout has been making video installations since the mid 1990s. His work is still, quiet, and generally unsettling in its methodical pace. In a solo show at Hauser & Wirth, Piccadilly, London, Claerbout’s videos are allotted the appropriate spaces in which to make their slow, slight movements.

Riverside (2007-2008) is a dual-channel installation which fills the main gallery space on the ground floor. A man and a woman move separately within each screen, consumed by their thoughts and personal trouble. Through the unifying landscape and soundtrack of a babbling brook, the viewer eventually comes to realize that the characters are exploring the same quiet valley, though they are separated by time. In one scene, the man (a cyclist) enters a country farmhouse. He is injured and needs help. Though he hears voices coming from the house, he finds that when he enters, it was only a radio. Upon hearing a knock at the door, he flees. Simultaneously, on the next screen, we see the woman knock at the same door. Though the two do not interact, we can’t help but wonder if it was her knock that sent him running.

Upstairs, time stands still in The American Room (1st movement) (2009). This is a single-channel installation projected in the elegant, wood-panelled gallery space. In Claerbout’s film, a group of people who look like D.C. politicians sit, ready to listen to a singer give an intimate concert in what looks like a government building. The women wear pearls and suits, and men wear ties and American flag pins. The scene is suspended, and the singer never actually sings. Instead, the camera slowly pans around the room, stopping intermittently to carefully examine the audience who are rendered immobile by the pause.

Downstairs, the basement is the setting for the third film, Sunrise (2009). To enter the gallery space, one must walk down a narrow set of stairs and enter the damp basement. A gallery sitter with a flashlight leads you to the film. It is so dark, and something about the space seems surreal, even a bit sinister. It’s the perfect setting for Sunrise, though. The film follows a maid as she does her work in a modernist villa at dawn. Her deliberate movements and methodical timing ensure that this is her daily routine. She takes out the garbage in near darkness, prepares the morning coffee, and leaves- perhaps without ever being seen. As she leaves the villa, she cycles back home through the countryside, the darkness finally slain by bright morning sunlight. The final effect of the bright sun is disorienting and lovely, so authentic in the darkness of a basement.

David Claerbout’s videos are on view at Hauser & Wirth, Piccadilly, London, until August 1, 2009

Recent Hockney Acquisition at the NPG

2009-05-29T09:12:00.001-07:00

The National Portrait Gallery in London is constantly expanding their collection. Through recent public appeals, the NPG has acquired portraits of Lady Dacre, Barbara Villiers, John Donne, and Sir Richard Arkwright. Now, David Hockney has been added to that illustrious list.

The NPG recently bought Self-portrait with Charlie by David Hockney (2005), an incredible, colourful, and telling recent portrait. The funds were collected through a pioneering Gift Aid scheme. This means that the painting was paid for by tax concessions on tickets. The program put Gift Aid receipts into a ring-fenced purchasing fund, and, after collecting £149,000 the Hockney work is the first in Britain to be paid for by these means.

The painting was done in Hockney’s Los Angeles studio as part of a series of spontaneous portraits of friends who visited. No sketches were made, and the portrait is a result of a live improvisation. Charlie Scheips, Hockney’s friend and curator, sits behind him on a rust-coloured bench. He looks small and serious, his legs dangling off the edge of the seat, unable to touch the floor. Hockney, in contrast, looks tall, commanding, big and sure. While his friend sits small behind him, Hockney takes decisive action, painting the portrait with a firm hand.

The Gift Aid scheme sounds like a brilliant program, and I would like to find out if such methods have been piloted in the United States. There hasn’t been a mention as far as I know in any recent AAM news, but I think I’ll hit the archives.

Francis Alÿs: Fabiola

2009-05-29T08:48:00.000-07:00

The best art is egalitarian in nature. Work which declares its meaning and invites a personal reading will always be more interesting than that which has selective relevance and makes particular reference. Francis Alÿs’ Fabiola is one such egalitarian work.

After making its highly-praised rounds at the Hispanic Society in New York and the LACMA, Fabiola is now on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London. I had only ever seen photographs of Alÿs’ monumental collection, and to see it in person was a completely different experience.

Fabiola is a collection of works all bearing the same profile image of a young woman in a crimson cloak, facing left. This is the countenance of St. Fabiola, a 4th century Christian saint who seems to have been tremendously popular in the nineteenth century. The portraits all derive their iconography from a single painting, a now-lost, nineteenth-century work by the academic painter Jean-Jacques Henner.

Alÿs found the portraits over a fifteen-year period in flea markets and antique shops, and their varying mediums include oil paint, embroidery, porcelain, class, and rice and beans. The salon-style arrangement of the installation invites all viewers to look for and find differences between the seemingly-identical works.

When I first walked into the gallery, I was so overwhelmed by the sight of the hundreds of similar portraits that I asked for help. I asked the gallery guard to show me her favourite, and she kindly obliged. She led me into the second room and pointed enthusiastically to one portrait made in a kind of imitation stained glass with foil. ‘That’s my favourite today,’ she said. ‘It will probably be different tomorrow.’

In some images, Fabiola is a blonde—in others, a brunette. Sometimes it seems like she is wearing makeup, other times she looks a bit homely. In her review of the collection at the Hispanic Society in New York, Roberta Smith wrote, ‘Given so many similar works, the eye tends to start sorting and sifting, picking out the ones that appeal. Those I fixed on often turned out to be, upon closer examination, embroideries. They look more substantial, as do the few portraits rendered in mosaic, rice and beans, or on reverse glass.’

The many artists who painted Fabiola vary in skill. Some are clearly gifted, while others seem to be beginning students, unsure how to handle their materials. The constant theme which resonates in the display is that everybody can make art, and art is made for everybody. After considering the problems of originality and invention, the viewer is left with greater respect for what others may regard as lowly kitsch, and the Fabiola installation is a shrine to the anonymous, not the renowned.

Francis Alÿs: Fabiola is at the National Portrait Gallery until September 20, 2009.

Adrian Ghenie: Darkness for an Hour

2009-05-29T07:47:00.000-07:00

In his first solo show in Britain, young Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie presents a body of work which fill the vast space of the new Haunch of Venison galleries. The title of the exhibition, ‘Darkness for an Hour’ refers to energy protests and the resulting Earth Hour on March 30, 2009, during which lights were switched off in buildings all over the world.

Despite the title, Ghenie’s series of paintings is not anchored in ecology or environmental politics. Rather, the artist seems endlessly fascinated with the familiar imagery of the 20th century, with both Hollywood and Dada acting as recurring themes.

Ghenie’s technique implies the process of remembering, and his figurative works are obscured by a thin veil of abstraction, perhaps standing in for temporal distance. He clearly paints from the combined sources of authentic memory and pictorial evidence, resulting in paintings which are obviously memories of shared historical experience.

Marcel Duchamp is perhaps the most constant theme in this series, evident in two portraits and two paintings of his corpse at his funeral, the moment which declared ‘Dada is dead.’ Ghenie paints Duchamp furiously in a way which declares remembrance: the compulsive rethinking and re-evaluation of a scene long after its expiration. Ghenie’s technique is so gloriously dark, so heavenly beautiful, that it almost defies articulate description. All things are tangible in his swift handling of paint: memory, loss, a deep cultural mourning.

The new Haunch of Venison gallery in the former Museum of Man is perhaps a difficult space in which to launch a solo show for an emerging artist. The walls are enormous, the rooms expansive. The entire building is so infused with grandness, that the empty space could potentially seem more potent than the art. Fortunately, Ghenie’s brilliant works rise to the challenge of the white box spaces, surpassing perhaps even the most liberal imagining of their potential.

Adrian Gheni: Darkness for an Hour is at Haunch of Venison, London, until July 25, 2009

Matthew Darbyshire: Funhouse

2009-05-29T07:20:00.000-07:00

In a new installation at the Hayward Gallery, Matthew Darbyshire asks the question: ‘Are we desensitised by the generally appealing design of contemporary culture?’

Funhouse, on view in the Gallery’s Project Space, is a dizzying and colourful indictment of bland marketing in bright colours. In an interview with Hayward curator Tom Morton, Darbyshire says, ‘The classic funhouse…it seems to be disappearing- for health and safety reasons of course. Its replacement is alive and kicking, though, in various public buildings such as schools and ‘learning academies,’ community centres and so-called ‘urban centres,’ libraries and ‘idea stores’ (no joke, they have begun re-naming British libraries ‘idea stores’), universities and former polytechnics, hospitals and ‘walk-in centres for health and care,’ as well as shopping malls and arts venues across the UK. Apparently, you used to get chased around funhouses by clowns with paddles. Maybe there’s an artist-as-facilitator analogy to be made there and if so, maybe they could be wearing the nu-rave Footlocker outfit that’s hanging in the show and echoed the NHS ‘Time for Health’ motifs decorating the entranceway.'

The exhibit spills into the Hayward foyer, and bright colours and shapes fill the stairwell. Entering the gallery, innocuous pop music blasts loudly. Shop mannequins in bright athletic wear stand on a pedestal beneath a makeshift skateboard ramp. National Health Service posters line the walls, and an inflatable bubble (easily mistaken for a fun house) reveals itself to be a makeshift classroom.

These incongruous objects and environments are all united by their innocuous design in the same bright, cheery colours one finds everywhere from a classroom, to a hospital, to a retail outlet.

Darbyshire’s installation is a not-so-subtle critique of this homoginisation, a design system under which all is made safe, a kind of physical clip-art composed of our blanket liberal values.

Matthew Darbyshire: Funhouse, May 20 – 12 July, The Hayward Project Space

Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture

2009-05-29T06:46:00.000-07:00

Today marked the opening day for the Saatchi Gallery’s third exhibition in its gorgeous new gallery on Duke of York Square. In the autumn, the Saatchi hosted new art from China, and the spring saw an incredible genre-defying exhibition of new art from the Middle East. For the gallery’s blockbuster summer show, Sir Charles turned his eyes back towards the west. “Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture” is an incredible, diverse, and colourful testament to contemporary art without radical politics.

The artists involved in the exhibition all seem to respond to the very same vein of abstraction that was pioneered by their American forebears. The gallery walls are lined with reinterpretations of the themes invented by Abstract Expressionists like Pollock and Motherwell. While looking at the works in the show, countless demands are simultaneously made on the viewer. Of course, there is the constant question of, ‘But is it art?’ while sub-sets of questions are forged by one’s initial response.

More than anything else, ‘Abstract America’ begs a reconsideration of the importance of abstraction. Is abstract painting relevant? Or is it now merely an element of greater abstract multi-media works? Also, how have the limits of abstraction expanded since the Ab-Ex group? Can abstraction be rooted in figurative visions? Can abstraction even be solely implied?

The ‘Abstract America’ artists read like a roster of young, visionary, and uncompromising talents: Agathe Snow, Sterling Ruby, Aaron Young, Patrick Hill, Kristin Baker, Mark Bradford, Jonas Wood, Paul Lee, Matt Johnson, Elizabeth Neel, Rachel Harrison, Carter, Mark Grotjahn, Francesca DiMattio, Ryan Johnson, Guerra de la Paz, Eric and Heather ChanSchatz, Baker Overstreet, Gedi Sibony, Peter Coffin, Jedediah Ceasar, Amanda Ross-Ho, Kirsten Stoltmann, Tom Burr, Stephen G. Rhodes, John Bauer, Chris Martin, Amy Sillman, Jacob Hashimoto, Dan Walsh, Bart Exposito, and Joe Bradley. Perhaps the group will go on to form a kind of shining diamond American YBA stable for Sir Charles.

One work which stood out particularly well as a response to the Abstract Expressionists was Aaron Young’s Greeting Card 10a, 2007. It takes its title from a piece by Pollock of the same name, no doubt implying who he’d like to be compared to. To create the work, Young laid plywood panels on his studio floor which were painted with red, yellow, and orange paint, with a wet layer of jet black on top. Twelve motorcycles were brought into the studio to drive over the wet, black panels, their tires revealing the bright colours underneath in an abstract pattern. Young uses a methodical process to create spontaneous work, resulting in merely superficial similarities to the work’s namesake.

The boldest, most humble works in the show are two canvasses by Jonas Wood. Wood is a quickly-rising Los Angeles figurative painter whose scenes echo the bright colours of 1960s illustration, the shapes of Stuart Davis, and the sleepy Americana of Edward Hopper. Untitled (M.V. Landscape), 2008 was my favourite work in the whole exhibition. Wood translates the warm, colourful landscape of a bright, small town into a flattened, two-dimensional fantasy set piece. Every house is pulled to the foreground, favouring a burst of architectures over a realistic depiction of space.

Elizabeth Neel’s paintings The Humpndump (2008) and Good vs. Evil (2009) are coy criticisms of abstract painting. The granddaughter of landmark American painter Alice Neel, you can almost see Alice’s distinctive lines in Elizabeth’s work. Her colours are reminiscent of Cecily Brown, her lines like Alice Neel’s and Cy Twombly. The most remarkable thing about these works is their frenzy. It feels as though as soon as she thinks of an idea, she furiously paints so as not to forget. This kind of immediacy and urgency was a recurring theme in the show, evident in other works by Kristin Baker, Carter, and Mark Grotjahn (more in his painting Untitled (Face) 2007 than in his Butterfly works).

Other noteworthy pieces include Francesca diMattio’s hypnotic five-panel painting Tunnel (2007), a sprawling, imaginary, architectural tableau; Chris Martin’s Motherwell-esque obsessively repetitive canvasses; and Baker Overstreet’s intensely colourful naïve and geometric paintings, also reminiscent of the works of Stuart Davis. Overstreet’s Flattering Turtleneck (2006) is exceptionally casual, bright, and deceptively engaging in its simplicity.

Star New York painter Amy Sillman rounds out the diverse, colourful show. Her fragmented, kaleidoscopic, and animated paintings are deceptively agitated and aggressive. They echo passivity and ferociousness simultaneously, disguising their rawness behind a polite veil of polished pastels. Her 2005 painting My Pirate takes a tall ship as its subject, mixing hardly recognizable forms with a cheeky nod to Abstraction, present and past.

Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture, Saatchi Gallery, London SW3 (020-7811 3070; www.saatchigallery.co.uk) 29 May to 13 September

The Function of the Studio

2009-05-20T12:35:00.000-07:00

Tonight the Courtauld Institute of Art hosted a panel titled "The Function of the Studio: Four Artists in Conversation" with artists Shezad Dawood, Gautier Deblonde, Antony Gormley and Andrew Grassie.

From the program for the evening, as advertised by the Institute: 'In 1971 the French artist Daniel Buren published an essay titled ‘The Function of the Studio’ in which he expounded his “distrust” of the studio and its “simultaneously idealising and ossifying function”. As a manifesto for his own critical practice, Buren’s essay proposed the “extinction” of the studio, paving the way for what has since been called a ‘post-studio’ era. Despite this, however, artists today still choose to work from studios, whether they be isolated work spaces or entrepreneurial offices. And many, in keeping with a long art historical tradition, continue to make the artist’s studio the subject of their work. This discussion will bring together Shezad Dawood, Gautier Deblonde, Antony Gormley and Andrew Grassie – four internationally-acclaimed artists working in a variety of media – to ask ‘What is the function, and significance, of the studio for artists working today?'

The speakers were all interesting, and each had a very different relationship to and perception of the studio space and its role in artistic practice.

Gormley, perhaps the best-known of the artists on the panel, began the discussion with his thoughts on his personal work space. He said, "The studio is a very old concept. I think of the studio I work in as an industrial space for creative work. It's a very movable feast. When I think of what I do, it's impossible not to say "we," the studio (with his eight assistants) is a much larger organism." Though he has a custom-built studio, Gormley still insists that "it's the work that makes the work. The work also gives directives to those who work with me. Grounds for experimentation."

"The studio is a space of transformation, a place for memory," continued Gormley. "With the work making new demands it could no longer negotiate an old steam laundry in Peckham." Gormley's new studio suits his work better. "It's a context for creative community, it radically changed my ability to work-- it had proved its potency with the most important elements: silence, space, and light."

Gormley is very much connected to his studio space and sees it as the cradle of his production process. Though some claim we live in a post-studio era, Gormley could not create works of the same mass or scale without such a dedicated work space.

Photographer Gautier Deblonde followed Gormley and spoke about his series of photographs he makes of artists' studios. He spoke about trying to find visible evidence of an artistic process in a tangible space. It was interesting to hear how he photographs: he waits to be left alone in the studio, without the artist present. There he tries to capture both the artist and their process in their absence. One interesting case study was a comparison of two of Deblonde's photographs: he simultaneously showed a photograph he took of Gerhard Richter's studio and a photograph he took of Paula Rego's studio. Richter refused to let Deblonde photograph works in progress, and what we see is a clean, slick, white box space with finished canvasses hung in an orderly row across the walls. There is no sign of process or personality. Rego's studio, on the other hand, is full, messy, and lively. Set pieces and fabric mannequins take up most of the room, brushes, paints and ladders litter the floor. While Richter seems reluctant to communicate a relationship with the studio (perhaps as a post-studio artist?), Rego is evident in her studio-- perhaps even more than in her paintings.

Painter Andrew Grassie has a much more complicated relationship with the studio space. As an artist who meticulously paints photorealistic "portraits" of studio spaces, he is most interested in the studio's potential for self-reflexivity. He said, "At art college, you are given a studio, left in a white room, and told to get on with it. These studios are a mix of public and private, a white space without any external parameters." Grassie's work is a reflection of and reaction to such white spaces, as he paints hyper-realistic quiet spaces without external references. For Grassie, the studio is more a subject than a place. He finds that painting such works freed him from "the responsibility of invention."

I was less interested in Shezad Dawood's idea of the studio: Dawood is more itinerant, less reliant on space. He constantly "creates spaces," though often they are not tangible. In describing his film "Feature," in which he brought together a real-life underground gay cowboy subculture with a group of born-again Christian wild West re-enactors, Dawood says this was a creation of a kind of studio space. "I like to create a space where things can happen," Dawood said. "That's my kind of studio." As a truly post-studio artist, more than the other speakers on the panel, Dawood spoke to the restlessness of a restrictive studio. He is less interested in having a creative locus, and more invested in a "struggle for value and meaning."

The term "studio" only came into common usage in the early nineteenth-century. Before then, artists had workrooms, workshops, ateliers. Is "studio" still a valid term? Or are the terms "places of performance" or "place of display" more accurate in the twenty-first century? I'd like to read more on the subject, and this fantastic panel inspired a new string of questions.

Seriousness and Idiocy

2009-05-18T14:20:00.000-07:00

Today I was reading the new issue of Art Review and I came across an article which I found to be pretty provocative. It was a feature about idiocy in contemporary art by Chris Sharp ("The Idiots," Issue 32, May 2009, p.83). He writes, "Seriousness is gauged by how cavalier their disregard for any real discourse might be: the less this work seems to care, the more seriously we are supposed to take it. And what could be more disengaged than manufactured idiocy?"

Sharp describes a phenomenon of inartistic, uninspired, and downright stupid works coming out of New York at the moment. Do I agree that works by Josh Smith, Matt Johnson, or Dan Colen are male-dominated "retard art"? (Sharp's words, not mine). Also, is it fair to say that intentional idiocy is purely a contemporary phenomenon?

Sharp claims that art which lacks intelligent presence is a form of passivity. That perhaps we are too eager to accept and intellectually challenge simple work. I would like to disagree. For example, Sharp criticizes Colen's 2006 spray-painting Rama Lama Ding Dong (in the Saatchi collection, of course). He says, "Dan Colen’s spraypaint paintings, which consist of enamel spraypaint and moulding paste on a piece of wood, wielded the added bonus – or demerit, depending on how you look at it – of revolutionary punk pretensions, possibly seeking to incite a pseudo-retard riot."

Personally, I like Rama Lama Ding Dong. Colen takes a medium that we see every day (spraypaint) and he alters its personality. At first glance, the canvas looks like quotidian graffiti, something you'd see scrawled just anywhere. But when you look again, you see that there's a kind of wink from the artist, that the words are sweet and a little bit funny. It's a game of word association the artist plays between the viewer and the surface of the work.

Surely there is more to be said of Colen's work, it did not develop in a vacuum. His background must be taken into consideration: he was born in the late 70s, so as a developing artist he would have been exposed to the rise of street art in a critical context. He grew up amongst a generation of artists to whom Basquiat and Keith Haring looked like the establishment. It's inevitable that his paintings would embody a kind of devious and charming "roughness" that has been encouraged in recent years.

Carlo McCormick put it well in his review of the 2006 Whitney Biennial when he wrote, "Dan's wild and unexpected in that classic pee in the punchbowl kind of way. I don't know why he gets away with the shit he does, but I know a lot of people who think he's cute, so perhaps that helps. What matters more is that he does great art that doesn't look like art at all."

Sure, Colen is untamed and a bit cheeky. But to try and pin the new title of "retard art" on him and his contemporaries is unfair. Sorry, Sharp-- but I don't think that Colen or any of the New York-set are trying to "incite a pseudo-retard riot." Immediacy and roughness are symptomatic of the century thus far, no need for name-calling.

Vi gick till Stockholm

2009-05-15T12:27:00.000-07:00

(left: one of my photos of the sunset over Stockholm's Central Station.)

We went to Stockholm. There is so much to say but the right words don't fit to describe such a place. Never have I loved a city so much-- a tangible love that sits between the hips, rides up into your gut, and associates itself with memories of lucid dreams.

I could write as I usually would-- descriptions of the Moderna Museet, Drottningholm Palace, The Hallwyll manor. But places won't suffice in outlining the complete art of the city. We slept on a boat docked on Södermalm. We visited design stores and gawked at the perfection of the shop windows on Götgatan. We ate in candlelit restaurants and woke up to see the city hall through ship windows over hot cups of berry teas.

It wouldn't fit to write about one exhibit in particular just yet-- it's too fresh. I'm too consumed by longing and schemes for the creation of the next chapter in my life as an American so far away from America.

Perhaps tomorrow things will be clearer, but tonight I will nurse the seasick photographs of the kinds of perfect sunsets that fall over endless Maytime Swedish twilights. The sun never seems to fade, like the unrelenting good of the place.

The Photographic Object

2009-05-09T09:24:00.000-07:00

The photograph as an object may sometimes feel obsolete. Very seldom do we now print our pictures, preferring to e-mail them or make them into video slideshows and send the link to friends.

In what seems like an urgent moment for the salvation of the photographic object, The Photographer's Gallery has organized an incredible small exhibition called, well, "The Photographic Object." Featuring works by artists like Gerhard Richter, Wolfgang Tillmans, Andy Warhol and Walead Beshty, "The Photographic Object" focuses on artists who manipulate the medium of photography in its forms as a tangible product. These artists manipulate surface quality, physical planes of color, and texture of photo paper-- all in sight of the photo lab.

Standout works include the series "Secondhand Portraits" by Maurizio Anzeri-- an experiment in changing the surface of antique portrait photographs with geometric shapes and lines in string. Wolfgang Tillmans' series "Lighter" is also wonderful: he has printed flat planes of color on photo paper, colors in brilliant Pantone shades of blues and pinks. The papers hang on the wall, folded and creased, corners and edges askew. Tillmans questions what constitutes a photograph: can a photograph be a color? Can a photograph be sculptural? Though I've seen the "Lighter" works redproduced in books and reviews, they evade definition on a flat surface-- seeing them in person is intrinsic to their purpose.

My favorite works of all, though, were Gerhard Richter's "Overpainted Photographs." Richter has often wavered between the realms of photography and painting, creating a trademark style which blends both media. In his "Overpainted Photographs", Richter creates an incredible tension between the texture of paint and seemingly traditional tourist photos of Italy. He has painted abstract forms over standard tavel photographs, adding a sense of speed and velocity to otherwise still images of quiet places like the Arno in Florence or a canal scene in Venice. He adds texture which is often absent from the photograph-- especially in digital form.

"The Photographic Object" is on view at the Photographer's Gallery until June 13, 2009.

Kate MccGwire

2009-05-07T08:25:00.000-07:00

I first saw Kate MccGwire's sculpture in a show of gothic-inspired art at Sotheby's. Her sculpture in the show was titled "Rile," a twisting, endlessly turning form covered in what looked like pigeon feathers. It was fascinating-- and a little off-putting.

In an interview with Don't Panic, MccGwire explains why she uses pigeon feathers. She says, "I am currently using pigeon feathers as they come from a bird that is generally reviled - regarded as vermin and referred to as ‘rats with wings’. I started to collect pigeon feathers that moulted from the birds in a shed next to my studio – I realised that they were actually very beautiful."

Her sculptures and installations are surreal, ethereal, and unlike anything I've seen before. Her feathered works skirt around the current trend of taxidermy in art, preferring instead to make a new form out of animal materials which is, in no way, related to the shapes of animals.

It's difficult to say more about MccGwire's art. I think I'll put this away and think about her work some more. In the meantime, check out her portfolio here.

Snozzcumbers and Frobscottle

2009-05-07T07:41:00.000-07:00

Roald Dahl's books are endlessly magical. Many of us have probably re-read them so many times that Charlie Bucket and Mathilda Wormwood feel like old friends. Dahl's descriptions are so vivid, they evade standard language. He created new worlds and new words to describe them-- and the illustrations provided by Quentin Blake made the stories feel even more wondrous.

Dahl's extraordinary stories, such as The Witches, Mathilda, and James and the Giant Peach, are a must-read for children, brought fantastically to life by Blake's scribbling pen. In a wonderful new exhibition at the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green called "Snozzcumbers and Frobscottle: The Wonderful World of Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake," visitors are invited to see Blake's drawings up close. It is absolutely surreal to stand in front of the original drawings which have shaped millions of imaginations around the world.

You can see Blake's initial drawings of Mathilda, The BFG, even Charlie Bucket's grandparents all lined up in their big bed. Looking at the drawings done by Blake's hand, I got chills thinking of how these scribbled sketches have become ingrained in the greater imagination. I still feel a bit scared when I think of Dahl's description of the Grand High Witch in The Witches, and here she is, her image as it was first made by Blake himself.

Children's book illustration is always a wonderful thing, but there really is something extra special about Blake's work. It's the dripping watercolor, the scribbling pen. His lines are decisive, but not controlled. He makes fast lines, with the consideration of an artist moving at a far slower pace. The overall effect of his drawings is wild and magical-- just like Dahl's books.

Snozzcumbers and Frobscottle! The Wonderful World of Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake is on view at the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green until September 6, 2009.

Sylvia von Harden, 1926

2009-05-07T06:52:00.000-07:00

On Sunday evening, before we left the Pompidou Center, there was one thing left to do. I needed to see Otto Dix's Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden from 1926-- my very favorite painting.

Eli was a good sport as we went up and down the stairs, looking to find if the portrait was on display (sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't). Fortunately, a Frenchman who looked like my father was able to tell us "It's in room five."

I hadn't seen Sylvia von Harden up close since I was eighteen, but I think about her constantly. There's something about this painting that radically shaped my idea of art's ability. Before I saw von Harden, I used to believe that portraits were truth. Not only were they truth, but they were beautiful truths. Masters like Ingres and Van Dyck seemed to be at the whim of beautiful women, to commit their evanescene to tangible canvasses. My love of art is almost divided into two periods: the first period in which I believed art to be objective truth, and then a second period in which I really learned that all art is the creation of an artist's subjective understanding.

When I first saw Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden, I was about fourteen. I was flipping through a book in the Los Altos library, and there she was. She was nearly repulsive: androgynous and seemingly cruel. Dix has made a mockery of her, robbing her of her femininity and her charm. She wears a shapeless plaid dress, her breasts lost to the checkered pattern. An opaque stocking falls down her right leg, though she doesn't seem to mind. Smoking oversized cigarettes with her large hands, she seems unattached and disinterested in the process of painting her portrait.

When Dix first decided to paint Von Harden, he exclaimed "I must paint you! I simply must! You are representative of an entire epoch!" And so she came to symbolize the New Objectivity and the Berlin of the 1920s. She embodies metropolitan society, the emancipated Weimar Republic female intellectual. (1) Ugliness is allowed-- in searching for a sentiment of beauty in the picture, we become even more engaged with it.

This is my 200th post (!) which I really can't believe. And though I'm still trying to figure out what my intentions are in keeping this visual arts diary, I do know that it's nice to celebrate a milsetone with an old favorite.

(1) Michalski, Sergiusz, New objectivity: painting, graphic art and photography in Weimar Germany 1919-1933. Cologne: Taschen, 2003, p. 53

Calder's Circus

2009-05-07T06:23:00.000-07:00

If I had to choose one artwork which I felt best personified my feelings about art, it would have to be Calder's circus. Alexander Calder's fantastic moving sculptural showcase best exemplifies the values of my rallying cry: innovation and whimsy without pretension.

Beginning in the late 1920s, Calder would invite friends and acquaintances to watch him perform a full circus show with moving set pieces and figurines he built himself. Guests would munch on peanuts in posh sitting rooms, watching Calder on the floor while he made wire lions, toy sword-throwers, even tightrope walkers and performing bears all come to life through sounds and movement.

The circus acted as a kind of experimental test lab in which Calder tested ideas about moving mechanisms and spatial abstraction. It's incredible to watch film of Calder performing: he recreates all the sound, the color, and the excitement of a real circus on a minute scale.

I first saw Calder's circus when I was fifteen: Mr. Wangsness put on a video tape in my high school art history class. I don't think I had ever seen anything like it. Then, at the end of senior year, I finally saw it in person. Aquired by the Whitney Museum in the 1980s, the circus has been on permanent display there ever since. My mom and I were in New York for accepted students weekend at Sarah Lawrence. Between seeing both Calder's circus and my college campus for the first time in one weekend, I was appropriately overwhelmed.

When I got out to New York, I became a member of the Whitney. I made fortnightly trips to the museum, where I would always visit the circus. And even after viewing it countless times, I always saw something new in it. Sometimes I would notice the detail of a mechanism which moved the dancing lady's hips, sometimes the stiching on the lion's face would stand out. Always accompanied by a video of Calder's performance, the circus never lost its appeal.

This past weekend, I was in Paris. There were so many things to see, but most important was a Calder show at the Pompidou. I was pleased as punch to be with Eli and Tim, who had never seen the circus before. And though I was watching the film again for the umpteenth time, I had never seen it before in a room full of French toddlers, 'oohing' and 'aahing.' And to see the circus again for the first time through my friends, well, it was another magical moment.

My relationship with Calder's circus has been a constant through my growing intimacy with art and aesthetic ideas. It was a part of my first art history lesson, it was a constant all through college-- a friend I saw on Saturdays. And to see it again, in Paris, with Tim while we play at being grown-ups was wonderful. Calder's circus, too me, symbolizes everything good that art is capable of.

Alexander Calder: Les Annees Parisiennes, 1926-1933 is on view at the Pompidou Center, Paris until July 20, 2009.

Tom Friedman at Galerie B.C Beaubourg, Paris

2009-05-04T11:42:00.000-07:00

Tom Friedman is my favorite kind of artist: his work is intelligent, whimsical, inventive, and unpretentious. Everything I love about art is summed up by those four tenets. Friedman's sculptures are immediate, humorous, and accessible to all viewers. Though his work is difficult to classify, I predict he will come to define many facets of early millennial sculpture.

Friedman finds his materials in dime stores, candy shops, and supermarkets. Using these simple materials, he painstakingly crafts new experiences from common objects. He provokes us with sculptures that falsely represent normalcy, only to coax us into small spaces and corners in which we have intimate experiences with his work.

Walking down the Rue Rembuteau in Paris on Saturday, we stumbled across the Galerie B.C. Beaubourg, which was presenting Friedman's first French solo exhibition. Playfully post-minimalist, Friedman's works were refreshing and intimate-- especially in the chaos of Paris on a Saturday afternoon.

The small sculptures, like tiny painted bead eyes peering from the walls, beg you to question your familiarity with objects, while the large-scale works provoke feelings of unease and discomfort.

It was lucky to stumble across the gallery, it was perhaps the kind of surprise that Friedman himself would have organized.

http://www.bernardceysson.com/accueil-paris.php

Musée Jacquemart-André

2009-05-04T11:24:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, I took the train to Paris. There's something surreal about truncated vacations. With only a few days, I really hoped to see a few favorite things.

I met Eli at the station, and he was a really good sport about seeing these few magical places with me. One of the best things in Paris, by far, is the perfect Musée Jacquemart-André on Boulevard Haussmans. The former private home of Édouard André, the museum holds his incredible art collection and a beautiful tea room. Tim took me there for the first time a couple years ago, and I had never seen anything so lovely in Paris-- the world capital of good things (according to some).

Édouard André's art collection is unlike anything outside of the Uffizi. There are countless Italian Renaissance works, and lovely French Rococo paintings and tapestries. Marble staircases and gold chandeliers all look as though they were in use up until the minute Édouard and his wife left. And it looks like they left in a hurry-- everything is untouched, in place, still and quiet.

I could spend days here, walking through the rooms lined with paintings by Rembrandt, Vigee Le Brun, Reynolds, Botticelli, Mantegna, Fragonard, Chardin and Boucher. Days and days of looking at treasure, all punctuated with visits to the cafe to drink pots of lush vanilla tea.

Thank you, Tim. You gave me one of the best places.

Closely Watched Trains

2009-05-04T10:29:00.000-07:00

Last week, Ana told me about a screening of "Closely Watched Trains" at the Working Men's Club in Bethnal Green. It sounded like fun, and I hadn't seen a Czech film before.

The Working Men's Club was really great, a perfect place to watch a movie. The air was a bit musty, and all the seats were filled with pretty serious film lovers. It was almost as if they transposed the regular crowd at Anthology Film Archives onto a small-town community center multi-purpose room-- if only I could imagine them screening New Wave movies at the old LAYC hall or American Legion.

The film was wonderful. Winner of the 1967 Oscar for best foreign film, "Closely Watched Trains" (Ostře sledované vlaky) tells the story of a teenage boy, starting his first job at a small train depot in Czechoslovakia towards the end of the second World War. Acting as apprentice to a lascivious dispatcher, Milos comes to learn about love, sex, and frustration with the help of his superiors and his girlfriend-- a young conductor named Máša. Eventually, Milos takes action, almost oblivious to the war around him.

In many ways, "Closely Watched Trains" reminded me of one of my favorite films-- Ermanno Olmi's 1961 masterpiece, "Il Posto." Sometimes called the last Neorealist film, "Il Posto" also tells the story of a teenage boy learning about the world and its frustrations while at the helm of his first proper job.

Menzel's Milos and Olmi's Domenico share first loves, knowing glances, a growing understanding of the power structure. When we see these kinds of overlaps in international film, we realize what a universal art it is. How natural filmmaking must be for us if we use it all to a similar end.

"Closely Watched Trains" and "Il Posto" would make for a great double feature: it would be an evening of young men, fumbling through the more decisive moments of the twentieth century, all while figuring out how to talk to girls.