John Reed

12th Street: Who is Your Audience? 

12th Street is running a series on this.  I contributed an equation, which tracks who one's audience is through the drafting process …

Audience Equations for Myself (and/or anyone who is interested (in terms of a something intended for publication)):

Draft 0: Taking notes, not sure what it is, experimenting, etc.

Audience = self. (No rules, no boundaries, no structure, no worries. Not all projects have this draft; if you can, begin at “draft 1″)

Draft 1: A draft is defined as a whole unto itself: it can be read through and it more or less makes sense; a writer usually gets about five of these before the project loses focus.

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"Congratulations to Klemens & Alban Gasser on completing their PADI Open Water  certification.  Excellent job guys well done. Safe diving!"

Klemens Gasser “Antigone Things”

This is a press release.  Klemens told me he didn't think he'd get press.  He said he thought this was the press.  Sort of, he said that.  He showed me some canvases that are going to be in the show, and then he showed me some canvases that aren't going to be in the show.  For context, he showed me the ones that aren't going to be in the show.  For context: the ones that aren't going to be in the show are raw canvases with drying paint pressed through to the other side of the canvas.  Not all the paint, but a big enough glob of it to run down the back.  The paintings were weirdly erotic.  They're about what we don't see, i.e., what's under the clothes under the table.  The new canvases—uh, to get all press release about it, seven of them—are raw canvas, each one with a single page glued to the back.  The glue and paper on the back of the canvas distorts the front of the canvas.  A raised impression of the page on the back of the canvas shows on the front of the canvas.  The works will hang on the sheetrocked walls of a large cargo container hauled by a truck.  The moving gallery will be placed in front of the Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert Gallery, which was recently flooded.  Klemens told me he has not had much to do with being a gallery dealer for five years.  He's also been making movies and writing, and one of his films and a novella of his will also be in the show.  He wrote his own press release, which to my eye looked just fine—press releases for art exhibitions are supposed to be impenetrable.  But he wanted something else.  My impression was that he wanted someone to make sense of it all, which is typical of a press release, but that he also want something that was not a press release.  

The show, "Antigone Things," is art about this: why do we buy, make and show art?  Klemens has heard far too much of the following: "I want to explore light in my paintings"; "I want to explore space in my paintings"; "I want to educate so-and-so about so-and-so through my installations"; "I want to satirize so-and-so by acting like such-and-such is not a satire"; etc.  In his canvases, Klemens puts forth two reasons to buy, make, show art: masturbation, meditation.  The pages he pastes to the back of his canvases have one-page "stories" that are either meditative or masturbatory (the works are titled accordingly).  The irony, of course: from the front, the two acts look exactly the same, and the (to get snobby for the press release) "object correlative" engenders the dual presence of onanism and om-ism.

Reasons to show the "novel" (which Klemens noted was of course a presumptuous term, given the length of the work, 80 pages): to get a publisher, and/or to find a venue for something that probably shouldn't be published.  All too common, the former and the latter, but the latter rational is rich in pathos—it is the fall of the artist, the ultimate lesson, which is failure (no matter the recognition, no matter the technical achievement).  In the present artworld, it is very often the knowledge of failure that justifies a fabrication—whether bad novel or blank canvas—as art.

Last item on the checklist, a movie, which I haven't seen.  I couldn't exactly follow why I couldn't see it.  My notes say there's lip synching and it can be vulgar, that someone was begging to survive.  Wait, Klemens describes the movie in the press release, and I think Klemens’ press release is part of the show—or rather, that it should be.  So, I'm signing off, but here's the press release (uh, to keep in formation, here's the "artist statement").  Oh, wait, before that, I should say who I am, right?  Lately I've been trying to sign everything with an X.  OK, John Reed signs off and Klemens Gasser offers his "artist statement":

Klemens Gasser “Antigone Things”

The show consists mainly of paintings plus a stacked novel and a video.

All paintings are raw, unprimed canvases of various sizes, rectangular or square and from 2 series: Meditation Paintings and Masturbation paintings. Looking at these paintings does not evoke a sense of beautiful sleek minimal work but a strong feeling of left there, abandonment, isolation.

The titles that go with them are important, but not presented anywhere except on a plastic sleeved check list on the gallery desk and referenced in this press release. These tiles are long, unpleasantly long, from 5 lines to one and a half pages. The titles themselves tell the backstories for masturbations, embarrassingly disclosed by the artist, manifesting an activity not usually deemed glorious. In a similar way the extensive meditation painting titles are a record of thoughts that bubbled up during vipassana meditation, a technique that concentrates on watching the breath with appearing thoughts left there un-judged to return to the breath. The recorded thoughts and sensual impressions are irrelevant, one as good or as bad as the other, Einstein’s thinking the same as anybody else’s in this case the artist’s. With the tender appendix of the title to these paintings they gain a new universal and existential dimension which explores the senselessness of life and its activities. A desolate, paradox rat tale like the unpainted paintings themselves.

The simply bound novel “Less”, presented stacked on a plywood shelf with attached post it inviting to take one is an attempt for distribution of an outcry, a shamefully desperate love story that refuses itself to narration, the structure of language, well spoken English, common sense, losing its thread and slipping into pornography at any bend.

In the video “Antigone Things” three women of various ages are tucked underneath a table, lip-syncing the script that they previously read. Gasser’s view on Antigone is unfriendly and he sees in her not the modern heroine that challenges the law of state but a presumptuous spoiled girl that begs for her life and would give and do anything for one more breath, like many of us.

This is Klemens Gasser’s first solo show. He lives and works in New York. 

Intro:

Klemens Gasser and Tanja Grunert  is pleased to open their new project space GASSER GRUNERT ³ located in a CC Courier 20’ cube rental truck in front of the gallery at 524 West 19th Street with the first solo show of Klemens Gasser. The exhibition will open on Tuesday, November 13th from 6 PM to 8 PM and last until Saturday the 17th. Telephone 646 944 6197, tanja@gassergrunert.net, www.gassergrunert.net.

the Believer: Peter Neumeyer, Edward Gorey, and their collected correspondence, in Floating Worlds

Looked at the correspondence of Peter Neumeyer and Edward Gorey, Floating Worlds, for the Believer: http://www.believermag.com/issues/201205/?read=review_neumeyer  (Incidentally, I also talked to Peter for Art in America.)

We are perhaps as well situated as we’ve ever been to solve the curiously tempting and elusive riddle of Edward Gorey. His illustrative style and design sensibility—a precious iteration of befuddlement and Gothicism—presage twenty-first-century trends in the comic arts, East and West. Of course, the very framing of such riddles—this artist over that artist, this presumed history over that untold history—is a suspect business, and Gorey disdained explanatory self-aggrandizements.

Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer is a trove of correspondence between Gorey and Neumeyer, a Harvard professor of children’s literature with whom Gorey collaborated on a few curio books that were brought out by a textbook publisher. In a gloriously realized edition, the correspondence—postcards, letters, even envelopes—is rich with insight into the aesthetic underpinnings of Gorey, an artist notoriously close-lipped as to his creative ideology. Indeed, the “aesthetic maunderings” of Floating Worlds not only render the most complete portrait of Gorey available but also give readers something very much like an algebraic formula of his sensibility. We are presented with a Gorey who is compelled to justify, however indirectly, his creative rationale.

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the Rumpus and Critical Mass: Jonathan Lethem’s "The Ecstasy of Influence"

Each day leading up to the March 8 announcement of the 2011 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass is highlighting our thirty finalists. In a first, the NBCC is partnering with other websites to promote our finalists as well in the categories of Criticism and Poetry. Our Criticism finalists will appear on The Rumpus, our Poetry finalists will appear March 7 at O, the Oprah Magazine website. Here is #24 in our series, NBCC board member John Reed on Criticism finalist Jonathan Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence," at The Rumpus.

http://therumpus.net/2012/03/the-ecstasy-of-influence/#more-99160

http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/john-reed-on-jonathan-lethems-the-ecstasy-of-influence

In "The Ecstasy of Influence," Jonathan Lethem skips through culture—fine arts to music to literature to the personal and collective context of it all.  Lethem carries his enthusiasm with elegant but disobedient prose—plenty of adverbs and metaphors—and the self-awareness of an author who is "firmly in the doubting-nonfiction-is-exactly-possible camp."  Lethem's authorial consciousness argues that at least a few artists do know what they're doing—that art isn't always smoke, mirrors and magic.  Lethem's collection—criticism, nonfiction and memoir—is an extension of this position, and in itself an exemplification of the role of creativity and creative consumption in our contemporary catastrophe. ...

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Art in America: MetaMaus

Took a look at MetaMaus for Art in America:

Pantheon's MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic is a kind of "making of" Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical comic memoir, Maus. The 300-page full-color hardback and companion DVD abound with source materials—interviews with the author, photographs, letters, art—presented in parallel with a conversation between editor Hillary Chute and Spiegelman. The title transcends footnote: MetaMaus is a work of criticism in itself, providing not only notes on process and sources, but considering the entirety of a family, and the thinking of influences of an artist now and at the time the work was created.

The two volumes of Maus (Pantheon, 1986 and 1992) realized and revised a conceit Spiegelman had been publishing since 1972 ...

continued:

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/books/metamaus/

the Daily Beast: To Be Young Was Very Heaven

"Punk, Springsteen, Patti Smith, and the legends that made New York music."

Looked at Will Hermes' Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever (Faber & Faber, 2011) for the Daily Beast:

A kid washes in from Jersey. He's weird-looking, with a not very urbane, sentimental aesthetic; he's backed by a neighborhood bar band. He drives home to Jersey after his gigs. There's another girl, also from Jersey, who moans her poetry to music, and thinks most mainstream music is full of shit. There's a maniac who rents Yankee Stadium, not knowing how to fill the seats. There's a Lower East Side bar, specializing in country and blues. There's a guy with some home stereo equipment, trying to carve out a living as a DJ. It's 2012, and they're all doomed. 

Or is it 1973? 

continued:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/28/must-read-books-by-will-hermes-lydia-millet-and-stuart-nadler.html

the Rumpus: "Who Is Ana Mendieta?"

The Feminist Press has put together an extraordinary graphic biography in Who is Ana Mendieta? (June 2011) by Christine Redfern and Caro Varon.  The work intersects with the larger subject of the social revolution that did or didn't happen in the 60s and 70s.  Questions regarding Mendieta, her art, women's art, all art, politics and social change come crashing together in the elegant edition, which launches FP's Blind Spot Series,  The series, in the words of FP, will invoke “the spirit of revolutions past.”

Here's the piece I wrote for the Rumpus:

http://therumpus.net/2011/07/who-is-ana-mendieta/

Here's the book at FP:

http://www.feministpress.org/books/christine-redfern/who-ana-mendieta

Brooklyn Rail: Davis Schneiderman

A short piece this month’s Brooklyn Rail on Davis Schneiderman’s Blank (Jaded Ibis, 2011):

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/06/books/fiction-review-by-john-reed

Here it is in text:

Xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxx Blank, xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx xxxx, xxx xx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xx xxxxxx xx xxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxx. Davis Schneiderman xx xxxxx xxxxxx, xxxx xxxxxxx performances xxxxxxx xxx xxxxxxx mime xx xxxxxxx xx xx and xxxxxxxxx. Xxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xx "qua book or qua gesture" xx xxxxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xx xxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxx. Xxxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx "pyrographic images" by Susan White xxx xxxxxxxx, xxxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxx xx xxx xxxxxxx.

Xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxx context.  The Tree of Codes, xxxxxxxxxx xx xxxxxxxxxx xx xxxxxx xx xxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxx. Xxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xx xxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xx Paul D Miller aka DJ Spooky.

Xx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxxxx, xxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxx xx xxxxxxx xx xx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx. Xxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx argument of "structure follows content," which is at times the distinction of a literary book (as opposed to "content follows structure," which tends to xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx, xxxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxx xx xxx xxxxxxx. Xx xxxx  xxxxx xxxxxx, xxxx xxxxxxx.

Xxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xx political argument xx xxxxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xx xxxxxx a frenzy of avoidance. Xxxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxtitles, xxxxxxxx, xxxxx xxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx.

Xxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xx forensic pathology,xx xxxxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xx xxxxxx xxxxxxxx. Xxxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxx the lesserxxxxxxxx, xxxx xx xxxxx xxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxx xx xxx xxxxx

31 Books in 31 Days: "The Best of It"

Each day leading up to the March 10 announcement of the 2010 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty-one finalists (to read other entries in the series, click here). Today, NBCC board member John Reed discusses poetry finalist Kay Ryan's The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove/Atlantic).

In The Best of It, Kay Ryan, with her clockwork precision, has selected 200-plus poems from four of her five published volumes, and included twenty-three new poems.

Ryan's welcoming intelligence is hallmark of a Poet Laureate; her trim lines and halts pull at readers with kinship and sagacity. Ryan's associations evidence the diversity of a true original: J.D. McClatchy cites Erik Satie miniatures, Joseph Cornell boxes, the intensity of Emily Dickenson, the buoyancy of Robert Frost, and a living philosophy in keeping with that of Marianne Moore and May Swenson; Publisher's Weekly cites Wallace Stevens, A.R. Ammons, William Bronk, and contemporary haiku "cut with a dash of Groucho Marks"; Sarah Fay, for the Paris Review, draws parallels to Philip Larken and Ripley's Believe It or Not. While Ryan's terse humor and two sentence poems have led critics to associate her work with "compression," Ryan rejects the category—and perhaps she has more rightly earned the honorific of "iconoclast.

Ryan's use of Spartan structure and internal rhyme ("recombinant" is Ryan's term) beg formal analysis, yet Ryan's emphasis is on the turning point—the peripeteia in a balance of emotion, logic, and aesthic.  Ryan floats her lines at even keel, we bob along as if in the bay, and then she tips the boat, not with a tidal wave, but a sudden lunge.

"Stations" [from the section New Poems]:

As the
veldt dries,
the great cats
range farther
to drink,
their paths
looping past
this or that
ex-oasis.
However long
the water's
been gone,
no places
are missed;
despite thirst,
every once-
deep pool
is rehearsed.
It's strange
the way our
route can't be
straightened;
how some
cruel faith
keeps the
stations.

The Best of It is a distillate of a distillation, part selected works, but more a refinement of its own. Poetic form, blues variation, DJ remix—the art of invention and reinvention is the art of living itself, or at least the better part of it:

"The Best of It"  [from the section and 2005 volume The Niagra River]:

However carved up
or pared down we get,
we keep on making
the best of it as though
it doesn’t matter that
our acre’s down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we’d rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us. 

Popmatters and Bomb Magazine: "Drawings from the Gulag"

Looked at Danzig Baldaev’s  Drawings from the Gulag for Popmatters:

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/136608-drawing-on-flesh-danzig-baldaevs-drawings-from-the-gulag/

Also, wrote a diff piece, same book, for Bomb Magazine:

http://bombsite.com/articles/4932

This didn’t happen because I’m a cad, by the way.  I originally wrote a piece for a magazine which decided not to run it (based on a not-very-good review of the book in the London Telegraph).  In looking for a new home for the piece, which took a while, there were a couple of people reaching out, in a this-is-too-late for anything to happen kind of way, which unexpectedly resulted in two separate pieces.  

Art in America: Charles Burns

Charles Burns just put out the first installment of his new project, X’ed Out.  Checked it out for Art in America:

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/news/2010-12-06/charles-burns-xed-out/

Wall Street Journal: "Jacobs Beach"

Looked at Kevin Mitchell’s investigation of boxing and the mafia for the Wall Street Journal: 

http://topics.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704156304576003490074916416.html

Los Angeles Times: "Smilin' Ed!"

David Ulin is evidently a big fan as well.  Enjoyed meeting Kim Deitch and exchanging emails with him for this piece in Los Angeles Times: 

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-kim-deitch-20100620,0,1937422.story

Art in America: Malcolm McLaren

A few months ago, went to a talk by the late Malcolm McLaren at the New York Public Library:

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/the-scene/2010-02-05/malcolm-mclaren-fantom/

Art in America: Michael Kupperman

Looked at the first volume of Michael Kupperman’s Tales Designed to Thrizzle for Art in America: 

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/author/john-reed/

Artforum: Jason Rhoades

One of three reviews I plan to talk about at the NBCC’s 9/11 Revise and Recant event: 

http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/save_the_date_nbcc_at_lit_crawl_new_york_september_11_6_pm/

Review: http://artforum.com/archive/id=5470

Art in America: "Do the Math"

John Sims put together an elaborate installation at Bowery Poetry Club.  Went over to check it out for Art in America: 

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/the-scene/2010-03-25/adrian-piper-john-sims-mark-strand-bowery/

Critical Mass: "Adventures in eReading"

As posted on Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors.  

http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/30_books_in_30_days_perfecting_sound_forever_an_aural_history_of_recorded_m/

I had lunch yesterday with a book editor from one of the corporate behemoths; the conversation now is giddy with dread and anticipation, prospects and portents dire.  Talk turned to what she called, “a rush to the backlist,” which is something I’ve been hearing about for a few years.  It makes sense for publishers to review their lists and emphasize their properties, especially those with some copyright left (let’s say fifty years).  What’s surprising to me is the discussion of the public domain, an area of publication better suited to small presses.  Imprints from the larger publishers that publish heavily in the public domain, whatever the sales numbers, will erode their identities, which is all they have of value.  Small presses will always have an advantage on the public domain books; they can give more time to the translation and the package, and produce a book that, despite the original publication date of the title, still has a “new discovery”’ vibe.  

The e-book, with all its bells and whistles, is soon to come—not just pages that flip, but the integration of a full platform computer.  The real revolution will soon follow: a whole different kind of content.  What we’re about to see isn’t just a book anymore, it’s something else, a new art form.  We probably have a good sense of the first generation—a sort of cross between a website and a textbook—but the second generation remains indistinct.  For the public domain titles, the e-book means a lot of free reading; it also means that the backlist, the “Great Work” included, will be operating in antiquated technologies. Through retrofit, such a work will seem partial, sort of like watching a black and white show on a color tv.  Long term, not where a major press wants to position itself.

31 Books in 30 Days: "Perfecting Sound Forever"

Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member John Reed discusses criticism finalist Greg Milner's Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (Faber & Faber). 

Greg Milner, as he approaches the maturation of recording in the twentieth century, guides us with thorough research and resolve, and a casual elegance.
 

Perfecting Sound Forever takes a comprehensive look at the relatively young art of music recording. Beginning with Thomas Edison, and moving through generations of audio technologists versus audio purists (clinging to one outmoded process after another), Milner tracks the surprisingly constructed notion “good sound.” Recorded music is not, as we presume, natural, it is hyper natural, more real, more vibrant, more distinct in its components—more than any live auditory experience could ever be. That music can be a studio experience—made better, made cleaner, made perfect—is an argument ever-sieged, and ever-victorious. As a culture, we have come to assume the notion of “perfect sound,” and Milner deconstructs the critical history of how we listen to recordings. That music is not “real sound,” that it is an education of what sounds right, and a long evolution of sound-science, is uncontroversial, but nonetheless surprising, and broadly impactful in a critical reading of contemporary culture. And the effect of recording technology is not just an altered perception of the listener; the psychology of the recording process has found its way into the music itself. Milner details a contemporary music that is as much the result of the recording process as the subject of it. As handled by Milner, what could be an esoteric and ancillary subject finds grounding in fundamental questions of what it is to hear, and what it is to experience music.

Los Angeles Times: "A.D."

Took a look at Josh Neufeld’s “A.D” for the Los Angeles Times:  

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-josh-neufeld23-2009aug23,0,7875948.story

Art in America: "Infinite Patience"

Haunch of Venison, New York: James Drake; Kunié Sugiura; Stanley Whitney

A version of this review appeared in Art in America.

Infinite Patience draws together three artists who have been developing their approaches and iconographies since the 1970s.  What unites the artists—James Drake, Kunie Sugiura and Stanley Whitney—is a "not-quite" sensibility, a willingness to resist categorization.  In the 1970s, that would have been a more pronounced problem than it is today; figuration and abstraction were still seemingly at war, while pop art and photography made their own encampments.  Kunie Suguira, in work dating from 1969 to the present, fuses photography and painting—showing prescience for today's multi-platform, multi-media approach.  In five of the eleven works shown (the canvases range from 37 x 28 to 60 x 84) Seguira pairs a panel of single-color acrylic with a panel of photo-emulsion or ink-jet. The result is eerily contiguous with design elements that all of us interact with online, everyday.  That the juxtaposition was once unexpected or difficult is itself hard to fathom.  Seguira's subject matter, couples in coitus and cityscapes, also summon images that have become, through repeated web exposure, a part of our thinking—and Seguira's foresight is unmistakable.   

Stanley Whitney's oil-on-linen abstractions are more interactive than the quintessential abstraction of, let's say, Barnett Newman.  Whitney's works are "something."  Whether in the smaller paintings, 12 x 12, or the larger paintings, 96 x 70, one feels the presence of American crafts—quilting and Native American basket weaving—as well as musical influences.  The grids, loosely graphed but painstakingly imperfect, bring to mind the discordant repetitions of Thelonious Monk.  Whitney, like Suguira, divined our visual future long-before any of us could imagine it—one screen, one box after another.  Regarding Whitney's long-standing latticework, one has the sense not so much of Whitney coming to the world, but the world coming to him.  

James Drake, showing works on paper from 1996 to 2008, brings a political element to figure-drawing that is at odds with rendering as a "traditional" form.  Drake's representations of "Beto Jaurez gets High" and "Fat Boy" investigate a pathos that is contemporary and utterly divested of historical reverence.  Except to say they are not small, the works have no set scale—the largest work is huge at 114 x 80.15—and no set methodology.  While most of the works are charcoal/graphite drawings, with riffs of canvas, tape and photocopying, two of the works, "Chandelier" and "Scorpion with Insects," are paper cutouts.  Always, Drake is pushing aside the viewer's attempt to attach some comforting pretension to the work.  In the single sculpture of the curation—nickel-plated steel tongues stick out from the wall—Drake scorns the effort.

Debora Warner: "Tomaniac"

Catalogue essay for "An Empty Space"

Essay also titled "Stranger Fruit"

Akira Ikeda Gallery

http://akiraikedagallery.com/pe_aes_warner.htm

Available in script format upon request.

EXT.  NIGHT.  

Close on: tomato plant, two tomatoes hang side by side.  A distinctive thread encircles the tomatoes—as if they’re skins are stitched.  

Wider shot: tomato garden on plantation.  South Carolina: 1840s.  

In the vines.  White limbs, and black.  Plants rustle.  The limbs: entangled in sex.  

CUT TO:

EXT.  DAY.  

Sniffing hounds.  Horses.  A manhunt.  

EXT.  NIGHT.  

A lynch mob, quiet.  

Close: the naked back of a black man.  A white man’s arm swings upward.  A whip?

No, a scythe.  Makes two deep cuts under the shoulder blades.  

Close, on a white man’s lips.  Southern accent.  

VOICE

Strange fruit, or stranger fruit?

CUT TO:

SAME.  

White hands, digging into the incisions; the back of the man writhes in agony.  

CUT TO:

SAME.  

Close on: the lungs, pulled out of the incisions.  As the victim takes a sudden breath, the lungs inflate to taut bloody orbs, which resemble ... 

MATCH CUT TO:

EXT.  CLOSE UP: TWO TOMATOES HANGING SIDE BY SIDE.  

EXT.  THE SAME TOMATO GARDEN, 170 YEARS LATER.  

Two young men, two young women (one blonde, one brunette) sit around a fire pit.  

Susie, the brunette:

SUSIE

That never happened.  

The storyteller. 

TREVOR

It did.  Read it in the archives.  

INT.  LAB.  MORNING.  

The four arrive for work.  They don white coats.  Agricultural research.  Susie and Trevor, foreground.  Trevor attends to a DNA model on a giant screen—rendered overnight.  

TREVOR

Are you sure these are heirloom tomatoes?

SUSIE

Yeah, absolutely.  Those are the tomatoes they were growing here in 1847.  I have seed samples and a journal entry—

TREVOR

Oh, so you have been in the archives?  So you know about the tomaniac?  

SUSIE

(a little scared)

Shut up.  

TREVOR

Two disappearances in 1971, and again in 77 and 79.

SUSIE

Shut up!

Trevor, turning his attention back to the giant screen, points out his findings.  

TREVOR

So, what you see here: that’s very unusual.  It looks like a sequence of DNA from, well, from a primate.  

SUSIE

Like a human?

TREVOR

Maybe.  

Jose, sipping his Fiji Artesian Water, has made a surprising discovery at the microscope.  He calls over Susie, Trevor, and Alice, the second woman and fourth researcher.  

JOSE

Hey, look at this.  

Alice, Trevor and Susie take turns at the microscope.  Small organisms wriggle.  

ALICE

So?

JOSE

These guys have a lifespan of about four hours.  Yesterday, I put them in a petri dish with a sample from our tomatoes—it’s been they’re only food source.  And they’ve been alive for almost a day.  

ALICE

We’ve discovered the fountain of youth.

JOSE

Yeah, for amoebas.  We still have a lot of work to do.

EXT.  THE BEAUTIFUL OLD PLANTATION.  DAY.

Susie and Trevor, on the edge of the tomato garden.  Trevor’s been hacking at the vines with the scythe.  They’re taking a break: sitting, talking.  Mid-conversation.  

TREVOR

Can you imagine?  The benefits to humanity?

SUSIE

Yeah, but what are we saving?  Everything’s so shallow.  

TREVOR

We’re a young species: give us time.  

SUSIE

What about me and you?  When do I get to know you on the inside?

TREVOR

Give us time.  

Susie storms off.  

Trevor, in his peripheral vision, catches sight of one of the distinctive heirloom tomatoes—a giant one—hanging from an old oak tree.  

Trevor chases after Susie, grabs her by the hand.  

Susie turns.

SUSIE

I’m sorry, I’m a little psycho.

TREVOR

Psycho chicks rock.

CUT TO:

SAME.  

Susie and Trevor are back at the tree: nothing there.  

TREVOR

I’ve been looking at so many tomatoes, they’re burned on my cornea.  

Trevor looks over to a second tree, smaller: a Wisteria.  Under the tree, old bottles litter the ground; a few hang from the branches.  

TREVOR (CONT’D)

What’s that?

SUSIE

It’s a bottle tree.  The slaves used to hang bottles from that tree, to keep the souls of the dead.  

INT.  THE OLD PLANTATION HOUSE.  NIGHT.  

Alice tiptoes down the hall, and slips into Jose’s room.  She unbuttons her nightshirt, steps out of it, and sidles up to Jose, under the covers.  

JOSE

Do you think they know?

ALICE

It’s only a matter of time before they pair off.  It’s nature at work.  

JOSE

Is that all?

Alice, coy, ducks under the covers.  

Jose is enjoying himself—maybe too much to avoid a too-soon happy ending.

JOSE (CONT’D)

Wait, stop.

Alice doesn’t stop.  Jose orgasms with Alice under the covers.

Alice pops out, spits into an empty glass sitting by the table.

She grins, her chin dribbling ...

ALICE

I’m a little bee, gathering pollen.

Then, through the window, Jose sees a childlike figure outside.  

JOSE

Wait, who was that?

ALICE

What?

JOSE

There’s someone outside.  

CUT TO:

EXT.  OUTSIDE THE WINDOW TO JOSE’S ROOM.  

Jose, having investigated, treads back to the house.  Alice is at the door.  

JOSE

There’s nothing there.  

Alice takes his hand, to head back in.  

JOSE (CONT’D)

Hold on, I gotta pee.  I don’t wanna wake those guys.  

Alice turns into the house.  Jose walks over to the bottle tree, the Wisteria, and starts peeing.  

Jose doesn’t notice that a new bottle—a Fiji Artersian Water bottle—hangs from the branches.  

As Jose finishes up, he sees, on the nearby oak tree, a giant, hanging tomato.  He investigates.  

The tomato, dried out, is the size of a beachball, with the distinctive threads that seemingly bind it together.  

Jose hears a noise.  He turns to see ...  

A scythe, lifted in the air.  

It comes down.  

Sound effect: a scythe breaking into a skull.  

INT.  KITCHEN OF PLANTATION HOUSE.  EARLY MORNING.  

Alice, Susie and Trevor, in the kitchen, discuss Jose’s disappearance.  

ALICE

I don’t know where he went.  We were ...  together, and he went outside, and he never came back.  

INT.  A FEW MOMENTS LATER.  

Trevor, on the phone.  

PHONE CALL WITH:

INT.  SMALL TOWN SHERIFF’S OFFICE.  SAME.  

An older woman, the sheriff, on the phone.  

SHERIFF

Maybe he’s playing a little joke.  

The sheriff listens for a moment.  

SHERIFF (CONT’D)

We don’t go out that far.  

BACK TO:

INT.  KITCHEN OF PLANTATION HOUSE.  SAME.  

Trevor is still holding the handset to the phone when the line goes dead.  

Trevor hangs up.  

Beat.  

Trevor looks to Susie and Alice, who also stand, unsure.  

The phone rings.  

Trevor picks up.  

PHONE CALL WITH:

Close, on a white man’s lips.  

VOICE

Is Susie there?

BACK TO:

INT.  KITCHEN OF PLANTATION HOUSE.  

Trevor hands the phone to Susie, who takes it, puzzled.  She listens ...  

Then, she hangs up.  

SUSIE

They said they found Jose—that he’s over in Morgansville.  Met a few girls who were wandering around, drinking.  

Close on Alice: she feels hurt, betrayed.

TREVOR

I don’t believe it.  

SUSIE

That’s what he said.  

INT.  LAB.  

Susie and Trevor back at work.  Trevor whispers to Susie.  

TREVOR

How’d they know your name?  I thought you said you’d never been here before.  

SUSIE

It’s a small town.  I came up here with a boyfriend, white-water rafting, I didn’t want you to think ...  

TREVOR

Forget it.  

The phone rings.  Trevor picks up, listens.  Hangs up.  Enter Alice.  

TREVOR (CONT’D)

I just got a really weird call.  It was Jose—or, it sounded like him, sort of.  He said he met some people.  

Alice, dejected.  Susie rushes to her side, sympathetic.  

As if in confirmation of the police story—Jose and the girls and Morgansville—Trevor remarks:

TREVOR (CONT’D)

He sounded all hungover.  

Alice and Susie both give Trevor a dirty look: he’s guilty by association.

Susie comforts Alice.

SUSIE

I’m sorry Alice.  Some men just can’t stay.  

INT.  WORKSHED.  DAY.

The three sit around a rough table, and discuss their scientific investigation.  The scythe hangs on the wall in the background.

ALICE

What does it matter if the plants have been contaminated with hybrids?

SUSIE

Well, some of the tomatoes grown here—in the last forty years or so, are not only hybrids, but genetically modified.  And we don’t know what kind of alterations have resulted from the chemical fertilizers and pesticides— 

Trevor, straight-faced, pulls a handful of baby rats out from under the table.  The girls shriek in disgust.  

TREVOR

These little fellas have been fed on the crop of tomatoes we have—and whether or not it’s a compromised sample I’d suggest we proceed.  Because they’re seven weeks old—and this ... 

Trevor produces his second hand; he holds a full-grown rat by the tail.

TREVOR (CONT’D)

is what a seven-week old rat should look like!

The girls grimace.

ALICE

Men really know how to ruin everything.

SUSIE

Yeah, it’s too bad they’re so useful.

INT.  PLANTATION HOUSE BASEMENT.  

Susie and Trevor, in the “archives.”

SUSIE

Don’t make a mess of everything.  This stuff is important.

TREVOR

Don’t nag me.

Susie pulls a newspaper article from a file.

SUSIE

The police deny that there were ever any disappearances out here; they have explanations. 

She shows the article to Trevor.  He glances at it, and then shows her his finds.

TREVOR

Did you see this?

Trevor has opened an old scrapbook onto a page commemorating the “Stranger Fruit” lynching.  A postcard.  The tortured/murdered man is in the background.  The lynch mob is gathered together for the photo.  

SUSIE

Yeah, I saw it.  

TREVOR

Look at that woman.  She’s pregnant.  Really pregnant.  

An enormously pregnant woman stands in front.  

TREVOR (CONT’D)

And look at this.  

Trevor has two more pictures to show Susie.  The first is a mid-nineteenth century family portrait: a woman and her young child.  The second is a newspaper article, with a large picture of a local child who won blue ribbon for her tomato.  The title of the article: “State Fair 1938, and the Winners Are!” 

TREVOR (CONT’D)

Don’t these two girls look alike?

SUSIE

They’re probably related.  

TREVOR

I think it’s the same kid ...  

Trevor produces two more pictures of the girl: more prizewinner shots from magazines and newspapers.  Close, we see that it is the same child.  

TREVOR (CONT’D)

These are from 1935 and 1940.  She doesn’t look any different.  

Susie studies the photos.  

TREVOR (CONT’D)

And look at this one.  

Trevor produces a shot from a 1970s Look Magazine: a girl in her late teens, strongly resembling the younger girl, holds a large tomato.  The article is titled: “Deadly Nightshades, the natural psychedelics.”

TREVOR (CONT’D)

That could explain some of the strange things that have happened here, the disappearances.  People got all drugged out.

SUSIE

She looks like she’s seventeen.  

TREVOR

Yeah, but it’s thirty-five years later.  

Enter Alice.  She resembles the girl in the photos, but she’s blonde and the girl is brunette: not quite a match.  

ALICE

So I guess you figured out by now that it’s my family’s farm.  

Trevor flips to the next page in the scrapbook: a picture of the blonde girl with a second blonde girl.  They wear similar dresses; each holds a tomato. 

Alice approaches, gathers up the photos.  

ALICE (CONT’D)

They’re my cousins.  And there’s a curse and a lot of stupid superstition.  But that doesn’t change why we’re here.  God has planted a gift for humanity—and he’s trusting us to sow it.  

INT.  LAB.  EARLY MORNING. 

Trevor has been up all night, working.  He writes, double checks his findings.

Enter Susie.

TREVOR

I got it!  Come over here, check this out.

Visual walk-through of the lab specimens, and computer renderings.

TREVOR (CONT’D)

Tomatoes, as you know, have no gender.

SUSIE

Well, they’re hermaphrodites; I think it’s sexy.

Scientific visual.

TREVOR

Right, there’s a stamen, the male part of the flower, and a pistil, the female part of the flower ...  But on our plants, the stamen is non-functioning.  So there’s got to be another plant, a male plant.  Otherwise there’d be no pollination—

SUSIE

And no more of our tomatoes.  

TREVOR

Right.  The problem is finding our male counterpart—we’ve had so much in the way of site contamination.  There have been so many hybrids and bio-engineered tomatoes, and so many chemicals—the fertilizers and pesticides—that we’re looking at thousands of genetic varieties of tomatoes.  So it’s been very difficult to identify the male plant ...

Trevor leads Susie to the computer screen.

TREVOR (CONT’D)

But I think I’ve got it.  The genetic sequence is rendering.  We can compare it to the female plant when we have it.

INT.  PLANTATION HOUSE DINING ROOM.  EVENING.  

Susie, Trevor, Alice.  Each holding a Bartles & Jaymes Wine Cooler.

SUSIE

To the breakthrough!

TREVOR

And immortality.

Bottles clink.  They drink.

ALICE

Do you think we’ll get a prize?

INT.  TREVOR’S BEDROOM.  NIGHT.

Trevor, lying in bed.  No shirt—just his 501 Button Fly Levis.  

Susie comes out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel.

TREVOR

I thought—

SUSIE

Well, we’re out of aspirin, and I only know of one other way to cure a headache.

She gets into bed, goes down on him.

INT.  PLANTATION HOUSE HALLWAY.  EARLY MORNING.  

Trevor hurries down the hall.  

TREVOR

Alice?

He opens the door to Alice’s room.  

Blankets and sheets rumpled, but nobody in the bed.  

EXT.  PLANTATION HOUSE.  

Trevor stands at the door, then runs out, calls for Alice.  

TREVOR  

Alice!  Alice!  Alice!

Susie staggers up to Trevor, weeping, sobbing, hysterical.  

SUSIE

The bottle tree!

Trevor races to the Wisteria.  He finds, on the ground, Alice’s nightshirt.  He picks it up, examines it: stiff with dried blood. 

TREVOR

The buttons are torn off.  

Over his head, beside the Fiji Water bottle, he sees a second new bottle: an emptied Bartles & Jaymes Wine Cooler.  

SUSIE

I’m calling the sheriff.  I never should have brought you here.  Oh my God, it’s all my fault.  

Susie takes a step, then turns back.

SUSIE (CONT’D)

I love you.  

Trevor has no time to respond; Susie runs back to the house.  

She turns a corner, and is out of sight.  

Susie screams.  Trevor is close behind, but when he catches up, there’s no sign of her. 

Just a drop of blood.  

INT.  PLANTATION HOUSE.  SAME.

Trevor bounds into the house, fumbles for his cell phone, calls 911.  

PHONE CALL WITH:

INT.  SMALL TOWN SHERIFF’S OFFICE.  

The sheriff, on the phone.  

SHERIFF

We’re on our way.  Susie already called.  

INT.  PLANTATION HOUSE.  SAME.

Trevor, in the house.  

TREVOR

Susie?  Susie?  It’s just me.  The police are coming. 

INT.  LAB.  SAME. 

Trevor runs through the lab, calling for Susie, and stops suddenly at the computer rendering of the male tomato DNA.  A double helix.  He registers a moment of shock.

INT./EXT.  PLANTATION HOUSE.  SAME.  

Trevor dashes out, with his new found knowledge.  

INT.  WORKSHED.  SAME.

Trevor heads for the wall, to grab the scythe.  But it’s gone.

He sees the car keys on the work table—and grabs them.

EXT.  PLANTATION HOUSE.  SAME.

Back out of the shed, Trevor runs straight for the car.  But then, he hears weeping.  Coming from the tomato garden.  

Should he go?  He struggles with his fear, overcomes it ...

and approaches.  

Susie sits, cowering, and covered in blood.  A thick trail of bones and blood.  

TREVOR

(breathless)

It’s Alice.  It must be her.  She’s doing all this because ...  

Trevor calms down enough to explain.

TREVOR (CONT’D)

The computer rendered the sample.  The male counterpart of the tomatoes: sperm.  Human DNA.  They’re mating with us.  And she’s ... helping.

Susie is too catatonic to reply.  She stares at two tomatoes, growing side by side on the vine.

SUSIE

Do they always grow in pairs?

Trevor covers her with his coat, takes up a big rock, and follows the trail of blood and gore to a pile of freshly scraped bones—nestled into the tomato vines.  And just a little deeper, deeper into the vines, he sees the giant tomato.  

He nears ...  

The tomato has buttons: the buttons from Alice’s nightshirt.  As if mesmerized, Trevor reaches for it, unfastens the buttons.  Doesn’t see anything through the aperture.  Opens it wider.  Not yet.  Wider.  He sticks his head close.  His scream: terror.  He turns to run.  

Susie is there, a killer.  

The scythe drops.  

CUT TO:

EXT.  LATER.  

POV, SUSIE.  

Over at the tomato patch, the sheriff and her men dig, bury the evidence.  The sheriff is the pregnant woman from the lynching photo, aged to sixty; the men, also aged, are the lynching party.  

Alice, now brunette, is the girl in the old photos.  Her clothing covered in blood, she stands arm and arm with the matronly sheriff.

ALICE

Mama, do you think we’ll get a Nobel?

Susie, at the old oak tree, turns back to her work.  

A fresh pile of bloody bones on the ground.  Two of the giant tomatoes hang from a branch.  

She rotates one of the tomatoes.  Buttons.  From Trevor’s 501 Button Fly Levis.  

She unfastens the buttons, spreads the flap, presses her head inwards.  And there, on the interior, we see Trevor’s boneless face.  His entire body has been boned, turned inside out, and stitched together to resemble a tomato.

We hear the sucking and slurping of Susie’s head moving deeper into the sack of the “tomato.”  We watch as her POV moves closer and closer to Trevor’s face; her POV darkens to a rust black.  

The sound of a kiss.  

FADE TO BLACK.  

Brooklyn Rail: Elka Krajewska

Elka Krajewska BOUND: a projected walkthrough by Elka Krajewska, light score by Anthony McCall, sound score by Bunita Marcus.

Lehman Maupin Gallery, April 12, 2008

As published in the Brooklyn Rail: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/05/artseen/krajewska

In the American experience, scale is all. A big land to conquer. Big dreams to tear out of the world. Big egos, big defeats, big victories. Beyond the American spectrum, scale will more often flitter beyond the spotlight; a thought, an instinct, a budget. Within America, the inclination is to weigh scale—the big novel, the huge public-works installation—as the very soul of the endeavor.

Through this perspective, Americans measure themselves, their arts. We enlarge popular personalities to the scale of the universe: stars. In balance, we harbor our personal insecurities; we fear we are little more than cells, shuffling over a planet, which is itself hardly more than a pixel.

Elka Krajewska’s Bound, a walk through performance at Lehman Maupin Gallery on April 12, led a surging mass of viewers through a meditation on the very big and very small. Krajewska pressed through the hall, toe-tapping button lights on and off, and projecting a bead of light on the walls, ceiling, and crowd. The circle of light—like that produced by a magnifying glass—expanded and jumped with the fits and flurries of a handheld camera. But the beam was also intensely patient, and mesmerized the watchers. In a semi-hypnotic state, viewers followed Krajewska—herself moving trancelike—in a winding and doubling-back exploration of the light sources. Buttons on the walls flickered on and off with the press of Krajewska’s cheek, hip, chin.

A score by Bunita Marcus ommed quietly in the recesses. The music, created by striking and stroking chords inside a grand piano, gave the impression of the sounds inside one’s body—or in a hushed engine room, generating, working, but in a zen-like mum.

The ongoing nature of Bound accentuates this sense of perpetual engine and perpetual movement. The moment of the light snapping on, or off, is bound to an instant, but that instant of consciousness is no more than a single point. Krajewska—now working on a diagrammatic set of drawings elaborating on the performance, as well as a video—has no intention of giving us a proper beginning or ending. The collaborative side of the project—with Marcus’s composition and a “light score” by Anthony McCall—sets Krajewska as a cell in another body, with its own lifecycle.

The origins of Bound are equally evolutionary; the piece previewed at the Orchard Gallery in 2007, and in turn was a response to a fragment of a 1989 film by Karin Schneider and Nicolas Guagnini, which in turn incorporated a recorded demonstration of Hand Dialog, an interactive work by Clark and Hélio Oiticica from 1966. Hand Dialog, an elastic Möbius strip, endlessly joins by the wrist two moving hands. In keeping with the solitary/solidary juxtaposition in Bound, the sited demonstration of Hand Dialog employs only one user, while the assumption (“dialog” not “monologue”) would be that Hand Dialog was originally intended to join two different people.

Krajewska’s hands, crossed and bound in video equipment throughout the performance, bring this contemporary trope to the forefront. We are more solitary than ever—alone at our computer screens. But we are also, increasingly, part of an entirety: everyone is tracked and on the grid, and we interact, through email/web/social sites, with anyone we want, whenever.

There, perhaps, is the great horror and promise of our moment. We are becoming something larger. And we are posed with the question: shall we also become larger in spirit.

Brooklyn Rail: Judith Vivell

Judith Vivell

Hoorn-Ashby Gallery November 8 – 26, 2007

As published in the Brooklyn Rail: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/12/artseen/judith-vivell

Where John James Audubon looked into the avian eyes of faraway migrations and lands unknown, Judith Vivell looks into the eyes of birds looking back. As of 2007, the cartographies of their homelands and chromosomes are drawn; their wild lives are cuffed by anklets with microchips, and their mystery has been thoroughly dissected. The future science of birds, of birdwatchers, is a diminishing frontier, as is the natural home of the flighted population. Vivell's subjects stand not so much on the threshold of vast wildlands, as they stare out onto a burgeoning frontier of suburban sprawl. Their eyes no longer retain the enigma of the natural world—a boundless expanse beyond the outposts of human civilization—but a fear, a resignation to the end of Green earth. Contrary to naturalist illustration, Vivell's birds look out at us—standing in the gallery with our cell phones in our hands—and they are afraid. They know that the worlds behind them are shrinking and flat, and they are deadpan returning the gaze of their predators, their executioners—and they are waiting.

The twenty-one oil-on-linen paintings of Vivell's The Bird Series bring to mind Ann Craven's floral and fauna bird portraits; but the wide brush strokes, multiples and repetitions, and pop culture references of Craven's work are absent from Vivell's lexicon. Brushmarks and underpainting—invisible to digital reproduction—point Vivell to the industrialism of early and mid-twentieth century illustration—The Sunday Post, The Hardy Boys—with the result that the paintings strike the viewer more as paintings about the subject of naturalism, than paintings with the subject of naturalism. Duncan Hannah, with his end of empire rehashes of 50s boy's adventure drawings, might be invoked. "Kitsch" is not the concern; rather, it is an address of Empire/Superpower romanticism. Without sentiment, the paintings lay bare the sentimental.

For an oeuvre that often takes the exactitude of Albrecht Durer as assumption, Vivell (whose daughter, a writer, Cassandra Neyenesch, contributes to the Rail's Art section) is remarkably unconcerned with every last feather. The attitude is all there—pride, majesty, despite the inevitable fall. Portraiture, regardless of its own evolutions, continually evidences itself as a capturing of a time period's outlook—from posture to politics. Vivell's birds, while a variety of identifiable species, are first and foremost contemporaries of one another. Durer's birds are also haughty—but the haughtiness that Vivell catalogues is more defiant, more desperate. With the wild kingdom in a state of global chaos—elephants and baboons on a global tear—it is difficult to maintain that interspecies discontent is unreal, that it is a form of human anthropomorphizing.

In New York City, one hundred and fifty years ago, there was a bird called the Passenger Pigeon. It was the most populous pigeon in all of North America, probably the world. When flocks flew overhead, the sky would blacken—for hours, for days. The last Passenger Pigeon died alone in a zoo in 1914. Today, in 2007, New York City is seriously considering a law that would make feeding the pigeons illegal. To know animals is to apprehend that they understand far more than we give them credit for; that is of course the tragedy, that they know too much, that we know too little. To tag Vivell as an environmentalist painter is reductive, but one cannot come at the avian subject—as viewer, as painter—without acknowledging our own predilections to darken the sky … maybe for much longer than hours or days.

New York Arts: Holly Lynton

A version of this essay was published in New York Arts Magazine. 

The big story is this: 

• You have a desire, whether it is something you should have or something you shouldn't.  

• You chase your desire, but to attain it, you must overcome who you are; you must either grow past your limitations, or find out what your true limitations are.

• When you have overcome—preferably a sin or fault—you are redeemed.

Nowadays, the assumption is, that's narrative.  In fact, it is a western construct, and usually a Christian one.  That stories have beginnings, middles and ends—that stories have sin, redemption, salvation—has very little to do with the stories that we encounter in life.  The epic, winding stories of mythology, the pure suffering of the classical stage: while these narratives are drawn on to bolster the credibility of the contemporary model, they are not indicative of the stories we tell today.  Even in "hard news," one is pressed to find a story that doesn't start with a conflict, and end with a ray of hope.   

In Holly Lynton's series of photographs, "Solid Ground," the narratives are the solitary moments in our lives when we "mark time."  There are instants that are complete, narratives in themselves, when we are suddenly aware of our wholeness, and the transience of wholeness.  That is the epic of living: these moments strung together, hung over the hours like beads from a Christmas tree.  

Dog prints on a rust colored carpet, a child fleeing through the leaves, or drinking from a sprinkler.  A visual story is rich.  Mark, 2005: the grain of the carpet, the inherent timbre of the dog's steps. Supernal, 2004: the wet leaves adhering to wet skin, the lilt of a leg bearing a child's weight.  Plim, 2005: the dimpled knee, the distant dandelion.  

Through the nineteenth century, the English-speaking world abounded with "illustrated newspapers."  Illiterate readers, or marginally literate ones, gleaned complex stories through illustrations.  For all of our cultural visual acumen, we have lost the ability to read stories in images.  To a viewer of Renaissance painting, the story was implicit.  Today, the presumption is that the image will serve a written story; the Pixar movie is a visualization of the word, and has no weight beyond it.  I.e.: the swimming turtle is sad and confused.  

Lynton's assertion: photography, despite all the encroachment of computer graphics and digital film, remains the primary medium of visual storytelling.  In "Solid Ground," the density of theme, of setting, of emotion, is the stuff of great sagas.  Emotional realization—like the end page of a novel—is a fostering of contemplation, even study.  As we drift through the void, wondering where our shining knights and happy endings are hiding, it is that instant in the backyard, with the light dappled on a man's back (Mansuetude, 2004), that brings clarity to our every anxious question.

Milica Tomic

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc. 

“Reading Capital & Container”

In a global ecosystem that is fed by the constant repetition of a select few images, Tomic reconstructs the images, the life, as seen when stripped of the lustre provided, maintained, by global corporations.  Tomic shows us the unseen, not only in the sense of what is denied to us visually, but what is denied intellectually and spiritually.

Tomic’s Reading Capital (2005) is a realization of Sergej Eisenstein’s concept of a screen adaptation of Karl Marx’s Capital. Tomic persuaded respected 'Capitalists' from San Antonio, Texas to recite passages excerpted from the work. The 'intellectual montage' is intended to generate a mental image arising from the filmed representation that reveals the antagonistic contradictions in society and the 'laws' of capitalism as the dominant logic in life.

This logic extends to the governing and flow of goods in CONTAINER (2005). The container signifies not only the transport of goods, but of people—Mexicans being shipped into the USA illegally, or the bodies of murder victims freighted for disposal, as in the Serbian war, or prisoners of war denied the rights protected under the Geneva Convention. CONTAINER (2005) reconstructs a crime, a massacre overseen by American soldiers in Afghanistan.  Economy has reduced people to the status of goods and, they are treated as such. They are used-up and then disposed of. 

Hanne Darboven

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc. 

“Evolution Leibniz” 

It has been said that the difference between the human and the animal is language; it has been said that the difference is shame; it has been said that the difference is the use of tools.  But it is the experience of time that separates humanity from all the other living species.  Language, shame, even the use of tools, all of these things evolve within the environment of our temporal experience, which allows for planning, for communication based on realities that aren’t necessarily at hand, and, of course, regret.  It is this essential time, as an overarching milieu, that Hanne Darboven iterates in “Evolution Leibniz.”  And it is through the basic human traits, our shame, our language, our use of tools, that she constructs a philosophy of life, of history.

Originally shown in 1986 at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover (and published simultaneously) this seminal work takes as its outward inspiration the 350th anniversary of the death of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.  The 444 page volume is constituted by 222 framed double-pages.  A second piece, “Dostojeweski” (1990) will accompany the work in the second viewing gallery.

With her use of abstracted language (a wavy cursive) and numerical description (“2=1,2;1+1=1,2” seals each image of “Evolution Leibniz”), Darboven fosters an epic impression of memory that is personal, collective and historical.  The repeated image of “Evolution Leibniz,” a toy-like model representing a toilet and a figure working a hammer and anvil, encompass a pathos, not only of the mundanity of days and more days, but of a primary awe in our taken-for-granted technologies and mental outlook.  While much has been written of Darboven and the relationship of her work to history and twentieth century philosophy, the projects themselves incorporate a plastic transience, and slide into the future with facility.  The computer age, a new scientific era that incorporates chaos and a multiplicity of realities—as these theories develop into philosophies and philosophies of art, Darboven’s creations will persist in their cogency: an eternal immediacy, which for all its complexity, for all its abstraction, is the most fundamental, most animal awareness.        

Pitch Magazine: Melissa Dadourian 

A version of this review appeared in Pitch Magazine

Works by Melissa Dadourian 

New Center for Contemporary Art, Louisville, Kentucky, 2006

A strand of DNA.  A  spider’s web.  The stitches across a wound.  The perception of life is fleshy, heavy, but it is the gossamer thread that knots us to our bodies.  Nature itself, reduced to the rudiments of raw data, is the wavy line: the rings of a tree, the stratums of sedimentary rock, the concentric swirls of topographical and satellite maps.  

In the work of Melissa Dadourian, the line maps sexual/cultural identity.  Outlining 60s and 70s pictorials from Playboy Magazines, Dadourian fashions iconological fossils.  The line is raised, suggesting a physical body long since passed into an ephemeral state; the colors are primarily two-tonal, taking on a layering effect and the period hues of the pictorials.  Liberated from their own eras, the images are reasserted, reassigned.  Dadourian’s subject is not one of exploitation, but of transgression; any patriarchal architecture is supplanted by a more intrinsic expression of the female divine.  They are not playmates, but in Dadourian’s term “playgirls,” representing an emancipation from social constraints, and history itself.

To pull a thread from the fabric of history, of culture, is to undo the intricate weave of the best, the worst, that humanity has realized.  As demonstrated by the delicate lines of Dadourian’s forms, we are a graceful species; in counterpoint, the Playboy images that provide the source material for Dadourian’s figures are essentially unreal—posed, airbrushed, unlikely.  And the viewer (as well, the reader of Playboy Magazine) is in stark contrast to the fantasy.  We are our own combinations of hair, flab and pain: far from the paradigm Venuses that grace the pages of the glossy magazine.  And yet, that’s what sex is.  It is fantasy, and flesh.  A pristine haute cuisine, enjoyed by the diner because it is undercooked.  

In Dadourian’s sweeping exhibition at Louisville’s New Center for Contemporary Art, a collection of fifteen paintings intertwine discourses personal and public, at-large, and at home.  “Nest,” a tangle of blazing yellow on Robin Hood green, suggests chaos theory, or a biological structure under super magnification.  From largest to smallest, the sense is of conflict, but also interconnectivity, and the resulting electricity.  Not only atoms, not only human beings, not only culture thrives on a threshold of friction.  The painted image too, as Dadourian’s images directly iterate, is native to contrast, and unexpected relationships.  Dadourian’s color palette, and combination of imagery is her own, and without the feeling of any imposed dogma.  Dadourian’s curiosity with the fat man in his toolshed thumbing through his porn magazine in 1974, makes for a juxtaposition of sharp delineation, as well as a curious perfection.  A total balance of disparity.

This is Dadourian’s line.  In the composition of “Eva,” we find more evidence of Dadourian’s intended equilibrium.  Dadourian’s figure stares out, Zen-like, inviting the viewer to participate in a naturalistic rendering of space.  But the space is patently flat, and no aspect of the tableau is “realistic”—not the Disney birds, not the knotted tree, not the bulging flowers.  In fact, a bird, holding Dadourian’s line in its beak, threatens to unravel the figure—and the life-giving essence of the tree is entirely missing: no leaves.  And still, the image touches some part of us that is pulsing, alive.  Perhaps the painting moves that part of our psyche that is learned; it reflects our nurture, socialization.  Perhaps the image touches an innate attraction to uncertainty—the sexual charge of risk.  The appeal of Dadourian’s choreography is that it twirls coyly on the threshold of multiple oppositions.

For most, the expectation is that the artist will reject pop culture, political culture, the way of life that everyone else values.  For those in certain circles within the arts, this idea has become so pandemic, so toxic, that the inclination is to embrace everything: every tabloid alien, and celebrity make-over.  Media is no more immune to these prejudices, and the result on the arts is catastrophic.  Much of the challenge of artists working today is in avoiding these over-simplifications, while at the same time avoiding overly complicating the creation, and the creative process.

Beyond Dadourian’s rigorous thinking, her method is primarily one of restraint.  The outline, anathema to instructors of Drawing 101, is Dadourian’s most apparent technique.  Her monochromatic shapes defy color theory and notions of abstract space and geometry.  Despite the sexiness of the images, Dadourian has done nothing overt to make the images sexy.  Dadourian’s stripped down machine accentuates the decisions she does make, and the arch of the back, the arch of a line, the slight variation in a nearly monochromatic background, are charged with significance.

Ideas of parenthood, motherhood, are strangely absent from contemporary discussions of art.  Exceptions arise, of course (Mary Kelly, recent drawings by Michelle Segre) but for a part of human life that is so central, the subject goes surprisingly unconsidered.  Dadourian’s feminine form regards us across a chasm of not just sexuality, but conception.  Dadourian, recently a mother herself, conveys a completeness to her seducers.  Her “playgirls” are not in need of sex.  They are not wanton or lustful; they are sexual.  The implication is one of conception: that glow of a woman even in her first trimester.  Taken as a whole, Dadourian’s “Nests” and portraits are distinctly expecting.  The zygot of Dadourian’s whirls, the womb-like drapery that renders her models modest.  To the male imagination, the figures are recast to a more natural call; to the female, they are a glance across the barrier of motherhood, a look back, or a look forward.  None of which is to say that Dadourian doesn’t retain the starkness, the emptiness, of porn.  To seek a vision of sexual promiscuity, predation, or total personal independence, is to find it.

With feline agility, Dadourian pitches her ball of wool—unspinning mores, and appetites.  Dadourian’s quiet insistence burns into the memory of her viewers.  Neon in the dim auspice of our nervous system. 

Petra Singh

No two children are alike.  Why should their stuffed animals be any different?

When Petra Singh accidentally shrank a fine cashmere sweater in the wash, she marveled at the precious, tight weave.  And artist, Petra put herself to work, fashioning her first stuffed elephant.  Since that momentous arrival, Petra has sculpted animals of all shapes and sizes, always of the finest "pre-shrunk" wools, always with creativity, fun and the individuality of the creation foremost.  Like children, each of Petra's creatures is cut from its own cloth, totally original, totally one of a kind.

Brooklyn Rail: Spacificity

“What a Great Space You Have…”

Luxe Gallery June 24 – July 29

As published in the Brooklyn Rail: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006/07/artseen/spacificity

One can be anywhere in the world, in Havana, in the American Southwest, and come up with the realization, the impossible realization, that “I’ve been here before.”

After many minutes of struggle—how could that be true?—the reality trickles to the surface. The space is familiar, but not because of a previous visit; it is familiar through a movie, a television show, an advertising campaign.

We travel far and wide, searching for sanctums. We dedicate ourselves to peaceful bedrooms, lively living rooms—all in pursuit of a satisfying individual life. But nowhere are we alone.

“What a Great Space You Have…” a show carefully curated by Marc Glöde, examines the end of individuated space, with works by six contemporary artists, as well as the artist team of Aziz & Cucher, and the artist collectives Discoteca Flaming Star and Dominique. Upon entry into the gallery, above the door, a video installation, “Great Space,” follows a series of hands opening a series of doorknobs, and passes through a series of doors. An audio voice accompanies, “What a great space you have.” The work, created by the artist collective/band Dominique, suggests a consciousness shaped by surveillance cameras—that we cannot enter a room, go to a place that is unseen. In compliment, a five-minute digital piece, by the artist team of Anthony Aziz & Sammy Cucher, extends a short hallway into a long one—a gray on gray corridor as suggestive of classical antiquity as corporate oblivion. More unsettling than the media interior, the source material used to collage together the ersatz space is comprised of photographic and video imagery of human skin. The interior has literally become exterior, and vice versa.

Two mixed-media installations by Nicole Cohen project contemporary Americans (of the relatively hip variety) onto advertisements from vintage interior design magazines. The subjects interact with mod furnishings—sit, wander, chat—the ghosts of their own consumerism. The ease with which the figures integrate with the ads is disquieting; the serenity of surrendering to style. A grouping of prints by Bettina Allamoda, “Memorabilia Pattern,” explores pop culture and high culture, and the intersection between. A Jackson Pollock is put into service as a room divider, while images of Clement Greenberg’s living room and Frank Sinatra’s music room exemplify spaces that are neither private nor public—rooms that are simultaneously elegant and crass: culture exemplified, and culture denied.

Installations by Albrecht Schaefer work to inhabit the possibilities of this new multi-space. In “Noguchi split” (#5 and 6), Schaefer unravels the staple Noguchi lampshade to reveal new potentials for design. Karen Kimmel, taking on the traditional Japanese form of Ikebana flower arrangement, brings the aesthetics of nature in harmony to mall America. With artificial flowers, set to delicate effect on stages of artificial wood, Kimmel perfects a still life of disquieting immortality. We look forward to a future not of biology, but of injected resins—and we find it beautiful.

Igor Mischiyev, in “Eileen Gray,” reproduces, on sofa fabric, an interior created by designer and architect Eileen Gray. By removing the sofa fabric from a design context, Mischiyev personalizes an impersonal architectural element; in the use of the Eileen Gray interior, he makes public an element that was meant to remain in a private home. Works by the collective Discoteca Flaming Star draw any visitor into a direct interface with the question of what space is common and what is reserved. A found rug, painted over, as if in dirt, declares in stenciled script: “And doubts and exaggeratioandamnesia.” A second rug makes two statements: “And the lost remnants / memory destroys.” The only way to read the statements is to stand directly on the carpet, disrupting a viewer’s assumption that the art must not be touched, and creating a wrinkle in the space of the gallery. To stand on the rug, is one still in the gallery? Or has one entered a space more specific to the artists who created it?

Anchoring “What A Great Space You Have,” is a reexamination of Ellen Harvey’s seminal “New York Beautification Project.” From 1999-2001, forty small oval Hudson River School-style landscape paintings took up residence alongside graffiti in public spaces throughout New York City. The works brought into question whether it was the graffiti, or the graffiti culture and aesthetic that the establishment found objectionable. Perhaps, the works seemed to suggest, public spaces were indeed the right place for artistic expression. By moving Harvey’s project back into the gallery, the discourse on public art extends itself to a more rarified venue, but one that nevertheless assumes that place and price validate creativity.

Marc Glöde’s thoughtful summer meditation on space runs counter to the typical summer showroom of most galleries. Arrive, meander, pay attention; you’re not where you think you are.

Benjamin Cottam

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc. 

Benjamin Cottam, in his first New York solo show, inverted the common art-crit assumption that all art has some essential relationship to death and/or nostalgia. In contrast to classical portraiture, rather than capture moments or images in time, Cottam’s paintings—at first glance black monoliths—sever presumed sentimentality.  Cottam’s oils gain more from the future than the past; it is by studied looking that the forms of Cottam’s works take shape.  Only gradually are foregrounds, on the cusp of perception, realized/invented by the viewer.  While Cottam’s glazes seem significant of a scrim representing the dark end that awaits us, they are in fact barriers to the temptation of assumption, and ultimately, death itself.

In Cottam’s second New York show, a group of ten portraits span Cottam’s contemporaries: friends, supporters, other artists.  The current moment is largely defined by a movement to put forth the creative person first, to ignore the work and its content; it is a ramification of a society resigned to the death of creative culture.  But where many artists dwell on the apparencies of persona—the fashionista clothing, the mock urbanity—Cottam has stripped his figures of any facile cues.  Cottam divests his subjects (including himself, in a self-portrait) of the expectation that persona/identity functions to cast us in life roles as tired as the characters of the latest Broadway Revival.

A series of 18 drawings, silverpoint on paper, sketch the inebriated states of Pete Doherty (The Libertines, Babyshambles) during the course of his public-eye melt down.  The dime-size images shrink the person—absent media/pop grandeur—to a mere smudge of life.  These postage-stamp scaled images suggest not only what it means to be reduced to symbol, but how the individual, in the present attitude of what art is, becomes reduced to commodity.  Even Rock ‘N Roll, with its age-old cycles (such as Doherty’s punk revival, revival), has become a shadowy ghost of itself.  Our fascination with figures such as Doherty implicates us in the larger cultural zombification, which is fundamental to Cottam’s commission: not only the horror, but the allure of spiritual death.

Peter Stauss

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc. 

"Peter Stauss’s imagery escapes a concrete narrative, weaving social and art-historical references with depictions of disenfranchised, self-mutilating hippies.  The overall feeling of these paintings is nothing short of apocalyptic."  —Andrew Marsh, Flash Art, 10/04

As much as we fear the end, it beckons us.  In America, The End Times have become big business.  A predominantly Christian nation, we interpret the confusion of rapidly changing lives, and an uncertain future, in biblical Armageddon.  The final book of the New Testament, The Revelation, is made the stuff of popular novels, television shows, movies.  Some see a prophetic nature to these works, but most of the Nation, given a more ecumenical, even Gnostic interaction with religion, are intrigued by these forays as explorations of the unknowable.

The Book of Revelation has a narrative, seemingly, but no linear telling to reveal it.  In Peter Stauss works—electric with the end of knowable culture, of knowable experience, of knowable art—the narrative content is analogously discontinuous.  His canvases tempt us with familiar images, some might call them archetypes—saints, soldiers, revolutionaries, heroes, villains, burnouts.  But these characters, in contradiction to what is expected of characters, power no plot, no intrigue about the nature of humanity.  They are whirling, disassociated from each other or anything else.  The colors are vivid, slashing.  His sense of paint is vibrant with technology.  Our contemporary cataclysm is portrayed with the brash hues and compositional anarchy of a mall whipped into a tornado.  

Of course, the end appeals not only to our fear, but to an inherent expectation of heaven, nirvana, happiness (depending on one’s outlook).  The self-destruction that we manifest, that Stauss captures with startling alacrity, is driven by our own illusion of paradise.  Perhaps, in this hyper-density of stories, we can find some perfection.  The perfect void of a solar system smashed by a black hole.  But just as likely, Stauss puts forth that our efforts towards a divine existence have created … this.  That we’re as close to heaven as we’re going to get.  That we have witnessed, in the words of the New Testament, tomorrow.

Will Ryman, redux redux

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc. 

The theatricality of Ryman’s sculptures (constructed of papier-mâché, PVC piping and acrylic paint, the figures take on puppet-like personas) is no accident.  Ryman, who spent ten years as a playwright, brings narrative and drama to his sculptural tableaus.  Very much like actors in stage sets, or characters in plays, Ryman’s figures are caught, as if forever, in sympathetic and vulnerable moments.  In Ryman’s “Untitled #14,” a pouting anthropoid, as if tall with dejection, takes a moment to contemplate life, and the floor. Ryman’s theatricality is saccharine in its empathy; the situations that his minions endure are as absurd as they are tragic.  Our contemporary plight is all too silly, and all too real. 

One often hears the “art imitates life,” formulation, and, perhaps equally often, one hears the converse, that “life imitates art.”  Certainly, this contemporary moment, creatively, is fostered as much by farce as by experience.  On the one hand, it has become unsatisfying to say that art is a purely reflective of experience, when it seem quite evident that art functions as far more than a mirror—whether we’re talking about a Hollywood movie or a hyper-text poem.  On the other hand, the notion that we are solely the function of pop culture is equally reductive. 

Like theater, the process of living, and art, is rife with expectation and easy assumptions.  By directly engaging the sentiment, the ready-made emotion, Ryman addresses not only the superficiality, but the underlying identity of the human façade.

Ryman demonstrates a total control of his material and subject matter in this rigorous performance.  Capitalizing on his theatrical and directorial expertise, Ryman has produced a lush and stinging moment of sculptural theater.   

Will Ryman, redux

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc. 

In his second solo show at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert Gallery, Will Ryman takes on our expectations—at first, confronting us with the ultimate in superficiality, and then contextualizing the experience with an elucidation of the underlying processes.  

Upon entering the gallery, the south room is filled with a life-scale tableau of Ryman’s puppet-like sculptures (constructed of papier-mâché, PVC piping and acrylic paint).  The maudlin figures consist of a man walking his dog, a “Couple in Love,” a beggar, and a homeless person (perhaps), sitting on the floor screaming.  They are painted brightly, and surround a newsstand filled with candy (sweet tasting poison) and media (more sweet tasting poison).  Amidst Ryman’s handcrafted Mounds bars, we see newspapers and magazines, announcing “War,” and crucial investigations such as  “50 ways to be a better girlfriend,” and “50 most beautiful New Yorkers”.  The scene is one of uncompromised surface—the magazine gloss of the acrylic paint lays stress to the thinness of this existence.  Ryman deftly captures the horror, the comfort, of surfing through life on a wave of the banal.  The supersaturation of color, candy, pop-culture, and tabloid journalism, makes it easy to meander, half-awake, through life.  We borrow from the ready-made clichés of living; there are easy ways to think of love, of domesticity and of poverty.  Ryman neatly demonstrates how appealing it all is.

As one moves into the north room, however, the trajectory of the show shifts.  Thirty figures, all untitled, ranging in size from diminutive to enormous, are presented without color, in the gray tones of their papier-mâché insides.  The anthropoids are singing, or screaming, and Ryman sets up the disturbing duality that, beneath our superficiality, we are just as likely to find another level of superficiality as to find a deeper consciousness.

Bart Domburg

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc. 

What is it to stand inside and look at the sky through a window?  What is it to look at the windows from the outside, and see the sky as merely a reflection in the panes of glass?

In his third solo show at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert , Bart Domburg re-sees the sky through the grid of the human paradigm.  In eight paintings depicting Berlin’s cityscape windows, Domburg confronts the beauty and horror of the new landscape.  Domburg’s literal viewpoint, that of a pedestrian standing on the street, signifies a common experience of seeing the world, the sky, reflected in the valley-like windows of the avenues.  We teeter on the brink of a natural and unnatural world that is representative of an inner landscape as well as an outer one.  In the street, or behind the windows of an office building—we look at Domburg’s window paintings and wonder where we find ourselves.  It is this same opposition of public and private spaces that manifests in our daily, contemporary lives.  Our needs, our indulgences—we find ourselves in a constant struggle to identify what is us versus what is them, what is real versus what is manufactured, what is endemic versus what is intrinsic. 

Since 2003, Domburg has built upon his landscape paintings, which were focused on subjects of historical, religious and personal significance, to include horizonal paintings of a seemingly endless expanse, and window still-lifes that encompass an intellectual and emotional equivalent of a recurring series of reflections—a symbolic infinity mirror.  

That Domburg’s oil-on-canvas works are ultra-real representations of East Berlin buildings serves to accentuate the abstraction of everyday life.  East Berlin, exceptionally, embodies a shift to a human life that is fundamentally based on abstract thinking.  The grid of the windows are not only emblematic of architecture, but of accepted societal constructs—from government and money to media and movies.  The actual sky in Domburg’s windows become indistinct, unknown in their neatly spliced frames.  The abstraction is an embrace of multiplicity—of painting style, of space, of history, of culture, of individual experience.

With precision, and a simplicity built on a multifaceted intelligence, Domburg imparts a quiet confidence to viewers of his work, an understanding that is perhaps articulated, perhaps wordless—but is, regardless, riveting, reverent, and revelatory.

TimeOut New York: Ron Gorchov

“Paintings”

Vito Schnabel Gallery

250 Hudson Street at Dominick Street 

May 9 - June 25, 2005

A version of this review appeared in TimeOut New York

Ron Gorchov’s paintings may be easily described as: two abstracted parallel forms on concave stretcher.  The marks, a handspan apart, are both humane and aloof.  The shapes themselves may inspire talk of eyes, of electrical sockets, of animal nostrils, of yin/yang symbols—and here we find the essential strength of the work, which maintains an insistent presence, dignity, all while embracing and defying facile description.

The twelve works in the show range from giant (“Entrance,” 180 x 246 inches) to diminutive (“Labyrinth,” 24 x 34 inches).  The works, as well, span almost four decades—from 1968 to 2005.  It is remarkable how faithful Gorchov has remained to his original vision; the colors and composition of a work completed in 1976, take “Spice of Life” for example, maintain an uncanny fraternity with works completed this year, such as “Somba.”  The assumption that the next show is always bigger, a new step, is entirely absent from the history of the work, which stands through fads and movements with tacit assurance.  

As of 2005, Gorchov’s abstractions return to our attention with a curious immediacy.  Years of a more accepting paradigm has altered the art world; distinctions between pop and representation and abstraction have virtually eroded—probably, for the best.  And yet, the loss of those barriers has created an increasingly apparent void of commitment.  To see one of Gorchov’s first shaped canvases (Untitled, 1968) is to come up against a barrier in abstraction that is startlingly present.  Gorchov’s shaped canvases, which took on a gentler, more hand-hewn feel than the earlier examples, fulfill and justify his images with seamless inscrutability.  While many artists have worked on shaped stretchers over the years, none have matched Gorchov’s delicacy and balance.  The paintings, which command so much authority, are feather light. 

Shown to grand effect in a raw space that itself mimics a previous, longed for era, Ron Gorchov’s paintings enter 2005 limber and nimble. 

Elizabeth Neel

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc. 

In her first New York solo show, Elizabeth Neel brings a force, an aggression, to a series of oil-on-canvas works.  The paintings, based on imagery culled from the Internet, is boldly dismissive of distinctions between abstraction and representation.  Landscape and figure grow out of abstraction, and at the same time, decay into abstraction—an abstraction that represents not so much the geometry of forms as the insanity of perceiving.  In this new millennia of painting, Neel has distilled a methodology as fully cognizant of digital imagery and the position of the cinematic camera, as it is of the course of art history.  “Every painting I make is a reference to every painting made before,” says Neel.

In the early twentieth century, the idea that art could be something other than framed pictures of fleshy women or green panoramas or biblical tableaus, was beyond the customary understanding of what art could be.  It would be insanity to find a toilet, or a coat rack, and call it art.  Towards the middle of the century, the notion that art could be found on the cartoon page seemed equally preposterous, similarly, pop culture would make its surprising contribution.  The next trash heap is often where we find the future—where insanity collides with creativity.  Following in this trajectory, Neel forages on the Internet, which represents, to most, an artless amalgam of stuff.

“I paint from a landfill scattered and layered with the fragments of our culture,” says Neel.  “Here are splintered trees and the essays of Frederick Jackson Turner, piles of clothes and the paintings of Eugène Delacroix, The Sci-Fi Channel and CNN.  I search the Internet, salvaging remnants in this confounded place, finding paradigms in pieces, and strange, reincarnated creatures.”

The assumption that figuration was outmoded was widely held for many years—a notion that Neel challenges with the ambiguity of her own relationship to the categories of abstraction and representation.  The work, while straddling the two camps, is also completely its own, and explosively inclusive.  Her deft brushwork and acumen embody a historical perspective, as well as a historic presence.

Artforum: Francis Palazzolo

03.05.09-04.09.05 The Proposition, New York

When the gods—or media corporations—are angry, you’re probably doing something right. Francis Palazzolo’s current exhibition at The Proposition publicized itself through an image appropriated from the New Line holiday film Elf. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=8704

Vitamin PH: Tim Davis

A version of this essay appeared in Vitamin PH: New Perspectives in Photography (Phaidon, 2006).

A rumour about the landscape of New York City: the major avenues recreate the topography of the South West—the deep canyons, the stone walls of russet, ginger, grey. As the story goes, the exploration of the America West was contemporaneous with the rising buildings of the city—the architects and the populace recreated the Western dream of a vast frontier. Just around the next corner, at the end of Broadway, there is freedom.

Now, the West is a grid of highways, underground cables, dams.... The latest frontier, the internet, has also succumbed to civilization; monthly bills are collected. Where painters of the Hudson River school captured the notion of an American promised land, and Ansel Adams looked at a majestic, if endangered, national identity, Tim Davis is the cartographer of the American corpse. This is the United States that Robert Crumb backdrops with a crisscrossing of telephone poles, fuse boxes, and an inexhaustible array of urban warts. 

But death is beautiful. Whether it is Caravaggio giving us his Judith and Holophernes, Matthew Brady on a Civil War battlefield, or Cindy Sherman posing the slayed hand of a murder victim, the human impulse is not only to flinch in horror, but to revere. We cannot escape our predator/scavenger nature—we revel in death. 

Tim Davis, with cruel precision, documents the beauty of our dying environment. Searchlights (from the series “Illiluminations” [2005]) captures an intersection of slushy snow, post-war houses, trees, and a myriad of overhead cables. Box Props (from the same series) portrays the forlorn visage of a ragged computer with a psychedelic screen graphic. In his series, “My Life in Politics” (2004), Davis extended his argument to the arena of politics, with such evidence as Oval “Office”. We live in a lifeless world, engineered[? Or powered?] by a lifeless democracy. We prefer the coffin; it’s neater.

With inclusive acuity, Davis examines the terrain—physical and psychological—that we have manifested. The sultry colours and surfaces of “Illiluminations” are indicative of the cultural seductions that take place, even if we don’t understand them. Why would we be enticed by a huge toy tiger (White Tiger [2005])? Why are the melted light bulbs so irresistible (Bad bulbs [2005])? In this artificial garden of our own creation—shopping malls and potato chip bags—we are perfectly blind to our stewardship, to the fact that we are the gardeners. With Empire State Building Flashes (2005) Davis neatly illustrates our insensible relationship to our manufactured ecosystem. From the top of the Empire State Building, the flashes of tourist cameras go off, illuminating nothing. We look, and document, and end up seeing nothing. 

It is apropos, in this moment of so many figurative deaths—the death of literature, the death of art—that Davis should choose to see the grandeur of our voluntary euthanasia. In the lore of vampires and zombies, the temptation of death is one of eternal life. To give up who you are, your “soul,” is the only prerequisite to immortality. As humanity brinks on this transition, Davis looks through the eyes of our possible (inevitable?) future; even the undead see beauty. 

Gay City: Robert Barry

“The Word Is Concept"

Robert Barry’s innovations can’t easily be articulated, but still hold sway.

As published in Gay City:

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2005/01/20/gay_city_news_archives/past%20issues/17002068.txt

In the beginning, as the Apostle John would have it, was the word.

Twelve of Robert Barry’s “Drawings from the Seventies” are currently on view at Gasser & Grunert Gallery. The works, spare letterset and letterset and pen on vellum, engage the debate over the primacy of concept in art. In some sense, of course, that battle has been fought and forgotten—conceptual art has become intrinsic to the discussion of painting, sculpture and performance. Yet the clarity of Barry’s words on paper, words on grids, lays out the assertion with a sparser recourse to intellect and technique.

To look on the battle over art through the previous century—the struggle to commandeer creativity from clichés and from the political atavism of universality and timelessness—is to witness, ultimately, a losing effort.

Concept was once an intrusive demand, but it has now become no more than an element of the tried-and-true, tired-and-trite. In the course of several years in the art world, one will doubtlessly encounter dozens of meat sweaters, cow carcasses, blood-soaked performances, orgies, manufactured advertisements for ersatz products and more of that ilk. Meanwhile, the maudlin sculptures of wide-eyed figures continue to linger. And all of that art, despite stated philosophical mutinies, will strive to “resonate.” The works will be intended to “stir your soul,” just, as any fourth-grade teacher in 1905 would have told you, they should.

Recreating the revolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s in art as a mere typed word on a page is impossible—and to this time, the perishability that implies is the impact of Barry’s drawings. The work, as per his original intention, is defined largely by what it isn’t––that is, material––or can’t be––that is, contemporary.

The present day is stumbling upon its own clarities, and the free-for-all of the art scene has eroded many antiquated pretensions—but a willingness is spelled out in the still words of Barry, in the earliest work in the Gasser & Grunert hanging, (1970, Untitled):

IT CAN BE INFLUENTIAL

IT IS OPEN TO NEW POSSIBILITIES

ANY PART OF IT MAY CEASE TO EXIST AND NEVER RETURN

IT CANNOT BE COMPLETELY ISOLATED

SOME OF IT CAN NEVER BE KNOWN

SOME OF IT IS COMMON KNOWLEDGE

Gay City: Sebastian Gross Ossa

“Manifest Destiny’s Insouciant Babes”

Pin-ups, high-velocity ammo, gun-metal gray: Pax Americana’s muscle.

As published in Gay City:

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2004/12/23/gay_city_news_archives/past%20issues/17006441.txt

or

http://204.2.109.187/gcn_352/manifestdestinyinsouciant.html

We bring guns & ammo, tits & ass. Why worry? Fat Americans. Fat cops. Buxom beauties in tiny bikinis bearing first aid.

In his third body of work since a transition from sci-fi abstractions, Sebastian Gross Ossa brings obsession to a finely articulated sense of shape and color. The high energy of Ossa’s abstract work has been channeled into his current project—canvases rich with not only irony, but also a sincere awe at the might of Americana culture, however insipid.

Ossa, originally from Chile, brings an outsider’s sense of bedazzlement to the American dream girl, with a series 25 works, 23 of which bear titles such as “Stacy loves the USA,” “Ashley loves the USA,” “Patty loves the USA” and “Linda loves the USA.” While very much in keeping with World War II pin-ups, Ossa’s girls are more bimbo than girl-next-door, and where Alberto Vargas would have achieved something mischievous, Ossa realizes something lascivious.

Ossa’s bodies are perfect, and repeated with assembly line conformity. The majority of the works in this show are sized in ready-made 24 x 18 canvases, much smaller than any previous scale he has employed. The works implicate not only an automaton army of “exotic models,” but all of those who carry these fantasy women within. Which, of course, most people do. The desire to possess the painting as well as the dream girl is intrinsically a part of Ossa’s palette.

Americans are betrayed by our own patriotism, our own sado-fascism. The plump bottoms, the ample bosoms—ah, the bounties of war. Ossa’s guns are lovely and leggy, his helicopters, shiny. There is no mystery as to the appeal of Imperialism in Ossa’s vision. We are seduced despite our disdain.

They smile at us—all just the same. Us and them. They have no regard for our happiness, or theirs, and hold out the promise of only explosive climax. Bang. That’s an anti-aircraft gun, baby.

Gay City: Nicky Nodjoumi

“Private Agenda”

Mike Weiss Gallery

520 W. 24 St.

Tue.-Sat. 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Through Nov. 24

212-691-6899

As published in Gay City:

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2004/11/18/gay_city_news_archives/past%20issues/17006347.txt

or

http://204.2.109.187/gcn_347/returningcapncrunch.html

"Returning Cap’n Crunch to Politics"

The political right of this nation sees popular culture as being in the hands of the left. They also see popular culture as shallow and ineptly managed. And they are largely correct, as the left is well aware.

For the last 40 years, pop art, kitsch art and other forms have lambasted society’s material extravagance as so devoid of redemptive character as to be a fascinating study of pure evil. What geniuses, these artists, to bring life to Captain Crunch. (Thank you Will Cotton—I mean it).

On the other hand, political art has taken a long, slovenly turn into the silly, the amateurish and the laughably reductive. All the potential humor and, in political parlance, nuance of the “artiste” is squandered on sophomoric equations of blood on maps and so-and-so is Hitler.

Here we find the challenge facing the left, in creative culture and in political culture—to reconnect with an identity that is essentially witty and seductive (that’s why these are the culture people in the first place), while at the same time letting the warmongering zealots have it.

It is no surprise that Chelsea would find expertise in this delicate matter in Nicky Nodjoumi, who was branded an anti-revolutionary by the Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. In the name of a better Iran, 150 paintings by Nodjoumi were taken from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Iran and destroyed. The works, according to Khomeini’s regime, were anti-Islamic and pro-American.

Nodjoumi’s large oil-on-canvas paintings are the fine art extrapolation of political cartoons—more riveting, more esoteric, more primal, more intricate. In 17 works currently on exhibition at Mike Weiss Gallery, the politicians jog, with their cocks hanging out; the diplomats meet on hillsides, bearing enormous burdens of olive branches and distended hearts. Nodjoumi’s works will give you as much wit as you give them attention, and yet the revelations they offer are not terminal; there is no skulking answer, just an infinitely more appealing view of life. Why of course, a white guy in a suit, running along, clutching a long stick and a small octopus—now that’s a political race.

Artforum: Josh Dorman

10.21.04-11.27.04 CUE Art Foundation, New York

That there is often an essential sentimentality to creative endeavors—a reconnecting with memories, with the past—is a fact long made manifest by Josh Dorman’s paintings. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=7914

Artforum: Jimmy Raskin

10.14.04-11.13.04 Foundation 20 21, New York

In the early '90s, Jimmy Raskin exploded onto the New York scene, drawing a crowd of 350 art world insiders to his inaugural performance at Cooper Union’s Great Hall. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=7884

Artforum: Lydia Dona

10.08.04-11.06.04 Michael Steinberg Fine Art, New York

In ten medium and large-scale works in acrylic, oil, and sign paint, Lydia Dona bares the inner machinations of her own paintings. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=7782

Artforum: Orly Genger

09.09.04-10.09.04 Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York

In recent years, the distinction between figuration and abstraction has yielded. In the years before that, the divisions between Pop and everything else saw near-total erosion. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=7709

TimeOut New York: Wolfgang Staehle

A version of this review appeared in TimeOut New York

Postmasters Gallery

September 10 – October 16    

459 West 19 Street

NY NY 10011

Wolfgang Staehle’s current show at Postmasters Gallery consists of two large-scale, one small, live digital projections.  “Midtown,” “Eastpoint,” “Niagra,” and a one-hour video, “Niagra,” re-envision the frame, in painting and technology.  Staehle’s “canvas,” in real-time, presents shifting digital stills in a panoramic scale and lush palette—and orient on New York, literally, as a window onto the nation, and by extension, everywhere else.

The notion of realism in contemporary art was tainted, for decades, by the sentimentality implied by the milieu.  Now, works in the equally loose categories of abstraction, or even pop, may also exude an outdatedness—resulting in a collapse of these distinctions.  Since 9/11, the artificiality of these categories has been particularly transparent—who could take serious the pretense necessary to maintain such barriers?  

Staehle, with his September 2001 live transmissions of three landscapes—from Berlin, the medieval monastery of Camburg, and lower Manhattan—became quintessential of this unfolding of genres, and history.  During the course of Staehle’s ’01 show, it was not only the skyline of NYC that was in turmoil.  In politics and art, the old paradigms (however long they had in fact been obsolete) were now apparently obsolete.  Staehle, born in Stuttgart, had reinvigorated Andy Warhol’s eight-hour 1964 film “Empire,” as well as the idea that there was a frontier—the frontier of Albert Bierstadt and Jackson Pollack.  In Staehle’s present show, 2004, the work has been crystalline in its impact—the world is out there now.  Without a laughable romanticism, it is possible to see the landscape again.  For better or worse, we are no longer trapped in the past.  There is some future, however unknown, however mysterious.  And not just for Americans.

Gay City: SVA Retrospective

Beginning Here: 101 Ways

Curated by Jerry Saltz

Visual Arts Gallery

601 West 26 Street Suite 1502

(212) 592 2145

Through October 16

A version of this review was published in Gay City: 

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2004/09/16/gay_city_news_archives/past%20issues/17006109.txt

Jerry Saltz probably has a lot of apologies to make.  Not even one hundred and one artists was enough to represent all those who have passed through the doors of the School of Visual Arts—and the overall impact the school has had.  Certainly, half a page will be nowhere near enough to cover the volume of work in Saltz’s curatorial effort, which spans recent work by artists who attended SVA, for the most part, in the last twenty-five years.  Due to Saltz’s smooth curation, there’s not a weak work in the lot—and, almost lamentably, not even a jarring moment.

While other art schools often have a style of their own, SVA, now only a few blocks from Chelsea and the center of the New York art world, has allowed its students to be fed as much by the time they were in as by a dogmatic aesthetic.  A late seventies and early eighties graffiti style is represented by artists such as Tim Rollins and Keith Haring (who was posthumously awarded his MFA in 2000) and an East Villagey aesthetic is engendered by a burly 1979 work by Kenny Scharf, “Hydrogen is God” (acrylic on found object).  Still, the illustrative/trade school nature of SVA is readily discernable in the prurient ink-on-paper renderings of Yuko Shimizu, and the architectural distortions of Robert Lazzarini’s sketched objects.  Barnaby Furnas, with his space age watercolors—part abstraction, part early twentieth century illustration—fits into the assertion with equal facility, as does Doug Wada and his trompe l’oeil fire hydrant and orange cone.  Even Sol LeWitt (whose 1953 study of illustration at SVA predates the other hundred artists in the show—is Lewitt number 101?) with his on-site editions and a mode of installation that transcends the participation of the artist, speaks to an industrial world where art is manufactured.

While the sculptural inclusion is light, Saltz has no trouble pointing up a pop alacrity of under-drawing in photography, digital media, film and painting.  Wolfgang Staehle’s “Berlin Pan” demonstrates a high degree of mental draftsmanship in an apparently candid, mechanically mediated DVD city-scape.  Frank Holliday’s acrylic-oil-marker-on-canvas “Barcelona” is a tough, effortless mandate of color as color and composition as composition; it is the lack of analogs (red=angst, splattered paint=freedom, etc,) that has allowed for the recent explosion of the painted surface.  Not too long ago a discussion of illustration and abstraction would have been almost impossible; today that discussion is an assumption of a larger integration of pop, abstraction and figuration. 

A strong curatorial presence provides Beginnings with the scope of a museum retrospective—yes, SVA is creeping up on 60.    

Ena Swansea

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc. 

The strip-malls.  The torn-up forests.  Where does the shadow of Empire fall?  We can see it here in America, at the crosses of telephone poles and cellular towers—and we can see it all over the world, in the Asian sweatshops of Western Corporations, in the street urchins of South America.  Ena Swansea, native to North Carolina, is no stranger to this shadow.  America’s South has a history that lends itself to a deeper understanding of cultural and economic confrontation, and defeat.  At the end of the twenty-first century, Swansea was appropriately obsessed with the shadow, investigating the subject literally and abstractly in large-scale oil paintings.

"If the leafy, stem-like forms in her paintings were a degree or two less definite, we would call Swansea an abstractionist.  If these forms were a touch more referential, she would count without question as a realist….  The major precedent for composition attenuated to the point of dissolution is Claude Monet’s series of mural-sized Water Lillies.  Swansea obviously knows those paintings well.  Moreover, she understands what Jackson Pollock was up to when, with his dripped and poured images, he broke through the boundaries of traditional composition."  —Carter Ratcliff

Employing a unique process of a graphite ground, Swansea achieves a surface that is alternately luminous and dusky, and antagonistic to the division of abstraction and figuration which, prior to the political and global shift of the War on Terror, etc., had atavistically lingered in the art world.  Within the latest  socio-political paradigm, however, that distinction, especially in New York, has fallen away.  New York, from the moment of the dust cloud that enveloped the city, has entered the shadow, and pretensions that New Yorkers once lived by—in art and fashion, for example—have become distinctly unpalatable.  Through the ten mostly epic-sized paintings of “Situation,” Swansea has also entered the shadow of the New World Order.  There is a distinct seriousness, a rent in the pop-culture fabric of fabulosity.  In Dinner, one of Swansea’s figures has shed his shirt, unable to withstand even that simplest cultural definition.  All of the figures in the work are somewhat indistinct, especially as juxtaposed to the objects on the table, which they surround.  We are participants at a banquet—each utterly alone, and but murky phantoms to one another.  Swansea takes on multiple aspects of the contemporary world: the gasoline and coal burning horsepower of Car and Train, the pedestrian nature of evil in Devil.  The artist asserts a range of implications that remain true not only to her process of fabrication (equate her extraordinary graphite ground with coal, and then equate the coal with oil), but of her place in the history of painting.  In an interview with Barry Schwabsky, Swansea explains: 

"The old model of the abstract expressionists, Pollock in particular, ruins everything for figure painting.  Once abstraction was a western frontier, wild and unexplored.  It had limits that could not be seen.  A century later things have frozen up and now the limits tend to block the view of the possibilities.  The shadow paintings try to find one way of remembering the possibilities, of a glimpse at the unfamiliar, grafted onto a simple-minded armature—a lily shadow or something like it.  The figure paintings go out into that more internally mysterious spot….people."

Gay City: Andy Goldsworthy

"Stone Houses"

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

A version of this review was published in Gay City ("Building Blocks Meet the Sky: the Met’s annual roof garden installation incorporates nature"):

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2004/08/19/gay_city_news_archives/past%20issues/17005966.txt

They all say, “Have you been up to the roof garden at the MET?  Oh, you should go.  So and so and I went just the other night.  It’s open late you know.  There’s free music.  And a bar.”

All true, but they warn you not.  You will endure pastel tee-shirts of every hue, whole families and extended families winding down their day in NYC, the next best thing to Great Adventure.

True, as well, the city welcomes people from all over—and yes, even tourists.  And you went to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, right?  And that made you feel like you were in a Fassbinder movie for weeks.  

So, yes, brave the jam-packed elevator, brave the busloads of tourists, brave, worst of all, the thought that someone might think you’re a tourist yourself—brave it all to go see the Andy Goldsworthy installation of white cedar split-rail domes housing ovoid granite stones stacked in towers.

Goldsworthy, born in Chesire, England, is known for creating work of and in the natural landscape.  In the Cantor Roof Garden’s first site-specific sculptural installation, Goldsworthy has echoed not only the architecture of the city and the museum, and the trees and limestone of Central Park (itself an echo of the wild Manhattan), but has contextualized the misfortune of being right.  Goldsworthy, along with Bill Viola and other artists, have brought a Zen-like equanimity to sculpture.  In the wake of the brutal constructions of, for example, a Richard Serra, the revolution, though quiet, was inevitable.  Now, of course, the revolution is all but won, and the aesthetic has not only taken over the Metropolitan’s Roof Garden but ABC carpets.  (Michael Phelan, a successor to Goldsworthy, targets his sculpture at the zenifiaction of the American Mall.)  There is a creepy significance to Goldsworthy’s placement of his stone towers inside his wooden houses.  The analogue is to the treatment of art inside the museum, and the viewer is drawn to the old homily: “Those in glass houses shall throw no stones.” 

To Manhattanites, the sense that the vista of our city is the vista of the world is more politically and historically true than ever.  We are not exactly Americans, not exactly Europeans.  We are the black sheep of the first world, and the target of the third world, and we are adored by all.  And, we’re here—sometimes on our roof garden—ineluctably attuned to the question of who will toss the next stone, and who it’s gonna hit.        

Artforum: Dirk Westphal

07.08.04-08.07.04 Mixed Greens, New York

Dirk Westphal’s C-print panels of tropical fish are sheathed in acrylic, as if to suggest the tanks in which his subjects were photographed. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=7262

Artforum: "Band of Abstraction"

07.01.04-08.14.04 van brunt projects, New York

The cramped character of the New York City apartment, in addition to that of contemporary world politics, brings an acuity to the reduced scale of the nearly fifty works presented in Joe Fyfe’s summer curatorial project. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=7222

Gay City and TimeOut New York: Rose Bond

“Gates of Light”

Versions of this review appeared in Gay City News and TimeOut New York

Eldridge Street Synagogue 

The Synagogue tells its story.  The stained glass windows are illuminated by an animation that flickers with the passage of years, and the aspirations of generations of immigrants.  Rose Bond’s outdoor media installation at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, “Gates of Light,” tells the story of a New York Street, and a New York neighborhood, but more broadly, it tells the New York story: the great joy, the great sorrow, is that everything changes.  Every fifty years—taking as markers the economic crisis of the 1850s, the 1890s, the 1930s, the 1970s—the city has rebirthed itself, reincarnating into forms unrecognizable to past generations.  For city dwellers, that is the tragedy—not just the lost favorite restaurant, but the sense of identity that roots in a home, a place of origin, that remains largely the same.  But, for city dwellers, it is also the boon of New York: that we may change, and accept change, and remain plastic to tomorrow.

In 1887, when the Eldridge Street Synagogue was erected, Manhattan’s Lower East Side was, growingly, a Jewish enclave in the city.  Supplanting the German and Irish immigrants who were previous to the neighborhood, the Jews were the latest population to have made the city a part of their dreams.  Today, the neighborhood is stocked by a generation of Chinese, though now, in a reversal of decades, even Chinatown is shrinking.  Bond’s twelve-minute film, installed as if through the stained glass of the synagogue, captures this ongoing emotional history of the city.  To stand in the street and look up at one of the evening screenings, is to be guided in a moment of reflection.  The prayer is that of a nation: we have all come here in search of our futures.

The Eldridge Street Synagogue, itself a national monument, welcomes the opportunity to speak to us.  Bond sagely allows history to paint its own portrait, and her installation is a memory that, no matter how the city changes, will stay with the New York that you carry in yourself.      

Gay City: Leemour Pelli

“From the Heart”

A version of this review appeared in Gay City News ("Convenient Definitions Distrusted: Using non-individuated repetition to challenge patriarchal hierarchies"): http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2004/07/15/gay_city_news_archives/past%20issues/17005812.txt

Annina Nosei

“From the heart.”  “From the gut.”  These are the clichés of artistic diminishment.  Our culture struggles against conservative atavism; the notions that there is no forward momentum in creative enterprises.  The great works are made; the great artists have died.  The smallness of the assumption that a creative project should endeavor solely to the end of “emotional resonance” reflects not only the outdated philosophy of musty out-of-the-way Universities, but the positioning of art as a trite, impoverished substitute for experience.

It’s often the case that a show is too easily ascribed to purely emotive intentions, and it would be a disservice to Leemour Pelli’s current show at Annina Nosei not to acknowledge the archness in her choice of titles “From the Heart,” or the deep ambivalence and political distrust inherent in her apparently romantic tableaus.

The medium size oil paintings depict, for the most part, hazy, repeated images of couples embraced—embraced perhaps in the midst of a Waltz, or in the midst of love.  With such titles as “Time for Love,” “First Love,” Pelli teases at the pleasing Hollywood agendas.  But Pelli, whose renderings, as well as her use of repetition, demonstrate her fully conscious of film, realizes these romances with a well-articulated sense of dread.  There is no individuation to any of Pelli’s figures, and their waltz, over and over again, is a direct address of the expectations of formulaic love, and the resulting failure that such expectations bring about.

Pelli’s tie-in to present-day politics is equally chilling; the show, in hues of red, white and blue, brings to mind not only the model of family as perpetrated upon populations by religious minorities, but all the models of family that are excluded by the narrowly construed.  Whether it is a question of equal rights for women in Saudi Arabia, or gay marriage in America, Pelli recognizes the fairytale romance as emblematic of our devolutionary tendencies.  Spooky and unapologetically hopeless, Pelli’s Cupid is armed by Haliburtan.           

Paper Sky Magazine: Miranda Lichtenstein

“An Empty City of the Future: Cyberjaya, Malaysia”

A version of this article appeared in Paper Sky Magazine

Haunted houses and construction sites. Children visit with faithful adherence to an unknown past, and unknown future.

Malaysia, with an archeological record reaching back 40,000 years, and a history rife with racial conflict, is a quintessential haunted house. With a population approximately 60% Malay, 25% Chinese, and 10% Indian or Pakistani, the struggle of religion against religion is threefold: Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism. It is a land of ancestors, and offended Gods. 

From the American consciousness, take by way of example the 80s horror film “Poltergeist,” about a sacrilegious housing complex hastily constructed on ancient Native American burial grounds. The underlying pathos of the horror flick violence is that the strip mall homogeneity of the modern world will level differing traditions and obliterate the history of the land.

The city of Cyberjaya, being constructed in west Malaysia, asserts the new century’s suburban solution with manic enthusiasm. Pamphlets articulate an eerie government blueprint:

"A city where man, nature and technology live together in harmony. That is the premise which Cyberjaya is built on – a city featuring a unique blend of lush tropical eco-friendly environment with the latest technology in IT infrastructure and facilities. Cyberjaya will set the standard for modern-day living within a stress free environment."

And why shouldn’t Malaysia deliver?  They are the proud owners of the world’s tallest building, and a new airport with its own simulated rain forest. They possess the seemingly boundless ambition and energy that is part and parcel to a burgeoning post-colonial Asian economy. Upwardly mobile Malaysians who have benefited the most from the country’s rapid development of trade and industry are eager to move into private housing complexes where they can forget about the legions of poor who have largely been left behind. The residents of Cyberjaya will enjoy amenities such as kayaking, fishing and rollerblading, in addition to the manifold technological conveniences of a new digital age. And yet, the deep-pocketed Westerners the government hoped to attract don’t seem to be coming, and the building progress is excruciatingly slow. Cyberjaya is beginning to look like a future city for a future that isn’t quite gonna happen. It is not only that its technological infrastructure may be outdated well before the planned 2011 opening date, but that new earthly realities may turn out to be unforgiving of Malaysia’s cyber-utopianism.

There is an enormous appeal to the modernist nirvana of Cyberjaya’s bungalows and swimming pools, but it is not borne of the project’s ultimate completion. It is, in fact, the specter of its failure – a world that won’t be. In some alternate universe, perhaps, Cyberjaya will thrive as anticipated: a stream of 170,000 people flowing effortlessly from leisure to profit. But the vision, to any but Malaysian Prime Ministers and farmers who have gone in only a few years from palm-oil harvesters to cyber-city builders, looks a lot like an impractical attempt to build the Asian El Dorado.   

Photographer Miranda Lichtenstein visited Cyberjaya in August of 2001, and returned two years later to find that little had changed. The “Multi Media Super Corridor,” she discovered, had remained stubbornly vague – bridges incomplete, apartment complexes well lit but uninhabited.

In a series of photographs first exhibited in 2002 at the Elizabeth Dee Gallery, Lichtenstein provides an eerie travel log of the Cyberjaya journey. The half-dug cliff, the road to nowhere, the elaborate garden without garden-goers, her work manifests the striking frivolities and strange accomplishments of a technology driven culture.   

Lichtenstein’s photographs capture an instant of the Malaysian experience, but also of a global one. In a very short period of time, we have gone from agrarian to industrial hi-tech. One day, we are eking out a livelihood from palm tree jungles, the next we are building massive economies based on the fantastical possibilities of new communications technology. The end result, in Malaysia at least, is a city without people, a bus station without buses, a train stop where no train ever stops.

We are children again, faced with the prospect of an adulthood beyond our comprehension. Cyberjaya: it is the science fiction film of our lives. We’ve passed the opening credits. And there’s the Voice Over (from official promotional material):

"Cyberjaya, Malaysia’s premier intelligent garden city, is designed to provide the physical and virtual space needed for its residents to work, stay and play in a relaxed atmosphere. It is also set to become a Global IT city fulfilling the vision of providng residents a top quality urban environment. Backed by leading-edge infrastructure and a world-class IT network, Cyberjaya is a name to watch in the next millennium." 

Gay City and TimeOut New York: Michelle Segre

Versions of this review appeared in Gay City News and TimeOut New York

Michelle Segre

Derek Eller Gallery

A vortex of similitude.  In the eight medium size works of ink and gouache on paper, at the artist’s first show with Derek Eller Gallery, Michelle Segre merges the biomorphic and architectural.  Segre’s lines render congruous blocks of cells and blocks of cement.  Faces will emerge, as will castles—all with an equal weight of importance.  Assumption of perspective and proportion are intentionally tortured by Segre.  Bugs outsize castles.  Looming eyeballs give the impression of immensity.  All at once, Segre’s style is futuristic fantasy and scientific illustration.  The works, with their old-fashioned precision, turrets, and suggestions of novel inner organs, harken to an indeterminate past and/or future.  Always, to Segre, with her swirling currents of ink, there is an allusion which is as indicative of the physicist’s Big Bang as of the zealot’s Apocalypse.

Segre’s alchemic mix of science and science fiction is bound together by a sense of awe.  Echoing this is Segre’s technique, which is itself awesome.  There is a mystical incomprehensibility to the minutiae and complexity of Segre’s drawings.  That every ink line is permanent—no erasing, no turning back—creates an inherent momentum in the work. Segre, pressing forward without the latitude for error, forces the viewer to entrust themself utterly to her custody—despite the disturbing notion that she wants to be no more than an astoundingly accomplished doodler.  Segre, by this dichotomy, allows no sense of safety in looking at her work—she will not pretend to reteach mundane philosophies.  The work will not lend itself easily to discussions of surrealism, or abstraction, or figuration, etc..  And neither will it facilitate political ponderings.

A child doodling enters a meditative state—and this is what Segre captures, in an infinitely more detailed and adult incarnation.  Segre opens the window onto the imponderable—laughable, grotesque, and continuously churning.     

Gay City and TimeOut New York: Hillary Harkness

Versions of this review appeared in Gay City News and TimeOut New York.

"Sailing Forth from Lesbos: Hilary Harkness’ women lay down the rivet guns to spray some real ack-ack":

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2004/06/17/gay_city_news_archives/past%20issues/17005683.txt

Mary Boone’s Chelsea Gallery.  The expectation is big paintings.  In the current exhibition of new works, Hilary Harkness takes license to show three, and only three, relatively small paintings.  Why three?  Why small?

The paintings depict allegorical scenes—cross sections of lodges and ships peopled by lanky Caucasian pin-up girls.  The women, clad in sailor suits and blue-color undergarments tailored to runway specifications, are active in their worlds, working on the deck of a battle ship (“Crossing the Equator”), or indulging in the S&M escapades of an officer’s retreat (“Matterhorn”).  The figures, evoking fashion illustrations of the 1940s, are psychologically in step with the World War 2 settings.  And, as America rededicates itself to a Cold War outlook (terrorists=communists), the works maintain their political analogs in the present moment.  Harkness’s characters are pretty women because that’s how the America of World War 2 saw itself, and that’s how we see ourselves today.  America the beautiful.  The quaint, prurient interactions are indicative of global nation squabbling, as comprehended by a nation insistent upon a relation to the world that is simultaneously introverted and myopic.  Taking as evidence the limited scope of contemporary media—we can only see ourselves as glamorous fantasies of who we should be, and we can’t see other people at all.

Though no doubt an oversimplification, Harkness, with her WW2 iconography, invites the idea that her three works refer to the onset of World War 3.  And the diminutive scale of the paintings in relation to the gallery ideates the impression that her crystallized narratives are extracted from a vast swill of uncomprehended history.

The appeal of the Harkness war girls is in itself a mini allegory of the artist’s kinder, gentler WW2 (3) America.  The reality of what the girls are doing, whether they are torturing each other or aiming the anti-aircraft guns, is made captivating through a stylish presentation, which is itself precision targeted.  These little ladies sell cigarettes and war, and they’re still around, and we’re still buying.  

Gay City and TimeOut New York: Jonathan Meese

Versions of this review appeared in Gay City News and TimeOut New York

“Super Hero Narratives: Depicting the progeny of villains to disprove art’s mythology.”

As published in Gay City:

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2004/05/20/gay_city_news_archives/past%20issues/17005550.txt

Oil on canvas.  Large and medium size paintings.  The color is energized, yet more akin to the brown and yellow hues of old prints, or comic books, than the lurid candy-shell tones of much contemporary painting.  Jonathan Meese, in “Dr No’s Son,” continues his painterly deployment of his various narrative.  Meese has previously engaged his paintings with historical subjects: Nero, Imhotep, Caligula, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler.  In his present exhibition, Meese includes references to Echnaton, the Egyptian Pharoah who first introduced Monotheism, and El Dorado, the lost city of gold.  To Meese, history is presented as “straight from the tube,” like much of the paint in his works.  History signifies not so much any independent reality as the mythology of nations and ruling powers.  Similarly, Meese’s thematic examination of Dr. No (nemesis of James Bond) establishes a concept of canned mythology.  Meese’s super villain aesthetic places his work outside the assumptions and lessons of Pop Culture, as engineered by giant corporations.  Meese’s narrative is more concerned with the anger of Dr. No and his soldiers, than with the smooth antics of Bond.

The third exposition that runs through Meese’s gnarled storyboards relates to the artist’s personal, and creative positioning.  Just as History presents a false narrative, and Culture presents a false narrative, so too does Art present a false narrative.  Meese, who creeps into his own compositions by way of collaged photographs, is unwilling to seriously engage in notions of individual “greatness,” a notion at the very crux of the historical and cultural inanities that Meese satirizes.  He is pictured, in a comic-book-like catalogue of the show, as the quintessential art world egoist: camera at worm’s eye view, artist with prerequisite mask in hand.  A super villain?  A tragic mastermind of dastardly plots that will surely be thwarted, reduced to comedy?  Why certainly.      

Brooklyn Rail: Dallam-Dougou

Dallam-Dougou’s New Destiny (Jumbie Records)

As published in the Brooklyn Rail: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2004/06/music/new-destiny

In 2003, Raul Rothblatt, a Brooklyn-based composer active in musical theater, Hungarian folk, and world music, made a pilgrimage to see the Sosso Bala, an eight-hundred-year-old xylophone that once belonged to Sundiata, the greatest emperor in West African history. Part musician, part cultural ambassador, Rothblatt, along with Guinean Abou Sylla and five other Westerners, traveled to eastern Guinea, not far from Mali, to pay homage to this holy grail of a xylophone.

The result was the formation of the band Dallam-Dougou: dallam meaning "melody" in Hungarian, and dougou meaning "land" in numerous West African languages. With wit and vibrancy and the occasional tumult, Rothblatt, the group’s founder and primary composer, has brought the entirety of his classical, jazz, and Hungarian training to the chronicle, demonstrating how music can bring solidarity to people from vastly different cultures. The nine tracks on the group’s debut release explore genres ranging from a Moroccan/Susu invitation to party ("Oy Yoy Yoy") to a Gypsy/Turkish/West African dance tune ("Mahala a la Mandingo"), to Bach’s Cello Suite #1, recast with the addition of a West African flute. Rothblatt’s melodies are buttery and rhythmic. The sense of the live performance remains paramount in all of Rothblatt’s recordings, and listeners will revel in his soufflés of musical experience. The title track, "New Destiny," features the highly regarded vocalist Malian Abdoulaye Diabate, who, in traditional manner—exquisite yet pounding—recounts and improvises upon the experience of a Western band of musicians in Africa.

Throughout, Rothblatt pays homage to the West African master musicians known as Griot. (Diabate and Sylla are both Griots.) Much like Europe’s Goliards, Griots are musicians, poets, and historians of the Mande peoples, who extend from Senegal to Niger. For eight centuries in the town of Niagassola, the Kouyate family—Griots descending from the personal praise-singer of emperor Sundiata—have preserved and performed on the venerable Sossa Bala xylophone. (A portion of the proceeds of New Destiny go to the Kouyate family and to Niagassola, which has only three water pumps for several hundred people.)

Jumbie Records, which produced and launched New Destiny, was founded by Rothblatt along with composers David Rogers and Mark Stone. The label is dedicated to creative new music based in world traditions, and to the power of music as a global force for positive change. "World music used to be only about distinct local traditions," says Rogers, "but today it is evolving into a musical melting pot. Jumbie Records is committed to supporting musicians who are innovating and combining the world’s musical traditions in meaningful new ways."

Rothblatt, who himself plays instruments as varied as the cello, bass, Javanese gender (a type of xylophone), Transylvanian utogardon (percussive cello), and African nenyeru (one-stringed fiddle), adds, "I have these guys from very different backgrounds, and there’s a lot of conflict. It’s not utopia right off, but the freeness, the looseness that we need to bring to the whole shebang is what makes for good music. You can hear it."

Artforum: Jon Kessler

04.24.04-06.05.04 Deitch Projects, New York

A surveillance camera zooms in on a Cabbage Patch Kid. Another camera swings over modernist office decor; a third enters a latex vagina; a fourth surveys a ghostly New York City. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=6882

Will Ryman

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc. 

The gallery.  Exhibition space itself has largely become the contextualization of art.  This is not just to say there are requisite architectural delineations of white walls without moldings, but to say that the intellectual and commercial capital of a gallery bears directly on the impact of the work it shows.

Will Ryman, in two successive acts of guerilla galleryship (2003, 2004), created an installation for his installation.  His sculptural anthropoids, in the midst of their various doings (engaged in simple, but significant situations), populated a theatrical pseudo-gallery, fashioned by the artist from his Bowery loft.  Ryman’s work, rather than bear the brunt of a disassociation with its exhibition space (i.e. this is the work, this is where the work is), inhabits a theatre of its own.  In Ryman’s first New York solo show, which largely recreates the second of the Bowery installations, the viewer will literally walk on stage with the sculptural actors—who range in size from a towering 138 inches (“Big Guy”), to a diminutive 13 inches (“Little Guy”), and range in physical aspect from emotive and fetal, to emotive and genitalial.

The theatricality of Ryman’s sculptures (constructed of papier-mâché, PVC piping and acrylic paint, the figures take on puppet-like personas) is no accident.  Ryman, who spent ten years as a playwright, brings narrative and drama to his sculptural tableaus.  Very much like actors in stage sets, or characters in plays, Ryman’s figures are caught, as if forever, in sympathetic and vulnerable moments.  One figure hugs another in “Embrace.”  A dog-ish thing sits, as if stunned, while its master stares at the viewer in “Boy walking his Dog.”  A couple contemplates their pregnancy in “The Bedroom.”  Nevertheless, Ryman’s theatricality remains saccharine in its empathy, as the situations that his minions endure are as absurd as they are tragic.  In “The Pit,” 91 of his creatures face the Twilight Zone conundrum of enclosure in an open box.  In “The Cage,” keeping with Ryman’s participatory theater, it is the imprisoned viewer who finds him/herself the star of a sideshow spectacle.  Our contemporary plight is all too silly, and all too real.  Sad, those canvas sneakers.  Sad, that wire hair.

Artforum: Alfred DeCredico

04.03.04-05.01.04 Mike Weiss Gallery, New York

No, it’s not just another moil of paint, condoms, fishing lures, and animal carcasses. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=6667

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.

"What would happen if spatial and temporal existence were to lose their structures by being divorced from time with space invading being?"

Mieke Bal poses the question in her in-depth examination of Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s seminal work, The House.  First exhibited as the signature work of Documenta XI (2002), The House has been included in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, K21 Dusseldorf, and is currently on exhibit at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.  Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker led his overview of Documenta XI with a discussion of Ahtila’s work:

"I kept returning to a marvelous video installation—a digital short story, essentially—by the Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila.  'The House' is about a pleasant young woman going quietly mad one nightless summer at an old seaside cottage in a forest. ..."  

Ultimately, Schjeldahl concludes, the protagonist of The House arrives at “a place where time and space, and cause and effect, are confounded.”  The impressive cinematography and rich subject matter of The House are redolent with numerous interpretations, and Michael Kimmelman, of the New York Times, praises Ahtila’s achievement, which “defies logic and synopsis.”

In Ahtila’s fourth show at Gasser & Grunert, The House makes its first New York appearance.  This significant work is recontextualized by four additional sculptures by Ahtila.  The four small buildings, or houses, constructed in the style of architectural models, represent psychological potentialities, in which the viewer is invited to participate.  The works are haunting advances on Ahtila’s methodology and deliberation, and signify a critical implication of Ahtila’s vision.  The Plexi House is constructed of plexi, hardboard, and paint; The Shade House, mdf, plywood, and aluminum alloy; The Pool House, aluminum, acrylic sheet, insect net, water; The Tent House, mdf, canvas, ceramic tiles, sand.  Ahtila’s architectural materials, in spite of an apparent architectural reserve, take on a highly individuated presence, and viewers will look on the structures as possible manifestations of human psychologies: even, perhaps, of their own.  In The Tent House, the viewer is invited to raise his/her head into the structure, to become, in tandem, a mind at work, and a mind perceived.  For those unfamiliar with Ahtila, the present exhibition will make an excellent introduction to a meticulous, luminous intelligence; for those who are acquainted with the artist, Ahtila’s sculptural variations will enlarge the implications of a project already fiercely broad in its interpretation.  

Gay City and TimeOut New York: Carl Ostendarp

Versions of this review appeared in Gay City News and TimeOut New York

"Swishes that Pack a Punch": 

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2004/04/15/gay_city_news_archives/past%20issues/17005379.txt

Elizabeth Dee

Nobody can fill up nothing like Carl Ostendarp.  A lightening-like red conniption in the lower left hand corner, and a whole wash of a pinkish/orangish red (106 x 140 inches of it) is there.  To say what it is that’s there is the challenge, as Ostendarp’s canvases are more apt to cry out what they aren’t.  Uncool.  Cool.  Articulate.  Inarticulate.  Pretty.  Ugly.  Refined.  Coarse.  Placid.  Anxious.  Complicated.  Simple.  

In Ostendarp’s ninth New York solo show, and his second solo show at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, three tremendous canvases, scaled to Joan Miró’s “Mural Paintings” of 1962, are simultaneously affable—conducive to a discourse with a viewer—and defiant of conclusive explanation.  In a ground of “radical emptiness,” which is a term coined by Ostendarp, a blob or form or squiggle or tuft will take on a character as significant of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art as of Dr. Seuss and comic books.  In previous works, Ostendarp has noodled with question marks, which hover like the question marks stitched onto the spandex of supervillain, the Riddler (via Batman).  Indeed, there is a lack of spatiality, fullness, or even flatness to Ostendarp’s grounds akin to that of fabric pulled over flesh. 

Ostendarp’s fourth painting in the front room is sized to a smaller, fourth work by Miró—the only other painting known to have been completed by Miró in 1962.  Titling the piece, “Horoscope,” Ostendarp, with due gravity, as well as a Colorform-esque sense of playfulness, plops a greenish yellow star, heart and moon onto a suffusion of grayish lavender.  The painting is directly related to Miró’s “Constellations” of the 1940s, as are Ostendarp’s six paintings in the rear gallery, which take up the proportions of a 1968 series by Miró.  Mistakenly, abstract painting is often considered apolitical, but Ostendarp’s ethereal escapism, much like Miró’s, speaks to a time of growing paranoia, and enforced naiveté.  The impact of the War on Terror, much like that of the Cold War, makes for a crater of conspicuous absence on the cultural front.  

Ostendarp, whose first solo show was in 1989, offers more than a spate of Pop Abstraction in recent years, and for those who make that trip to Chelsea, this show should be top of the itinerary. 

TimeOut New York: Gideon Bok

A version of this review appeared in TimeOut New York

Plane Space

Despite his pedigree (an MFA from Yale in Studio Arts, a 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship, several years in Brooklyn), Gideon Bok’s first New York solo show leaves viewers asking, “You’re not from around here, are you?”  A group of fifteen paintings—oil on linen, ranging from 22x14 inches to 79x55 inches—make up the exhibition.  Through evolving depictions of, for the most part, his own Northampton studio, Bok works as a temporal scribe—capturing the flows and eddies of time.  In Untitled, 2001-4, different window panels take up distinct seasons of multiple years.  Tables and chairs move—shadow-like—over transparencies of days, weeks, months, years.  While the subject of time is in no ways strange to present-moment New York painters, the shock and charm of Bok’s work is that the paintings feel so un-New York.  And it’s not just that Bok’s tree branches are real, as opposed to imaginary, it’s that—and it may come as a surprise to some that this is possible—he has connected to the world not in terms of an urbane artworld, but in terms of something, somewhere else.

Certainly, Bok is capable of assertive color, as in the cerulean blue of Last Light of Day—and his compositional skills are wide-ranging and authoritative.  Perhaps most important, Bok avoids the prevalent New York artist pitfalls—the wearisome paranoia and fashion-show cool.  With an affable resolve, Bok has set off for elsewhere.

Artforum: Nicole Eisenman

03.12.04-04.10.04 Leo Koenig Inc. | 545 W 23, New York

Four sullen teens, hoodlum wannabes, traipse through the woods of their glum, if bucolic, country town.  ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=6532

Gay City and TimeOut New York: "Drawing Out of The Void"

Versions of this review appeared in Gay City News and TimeOut New York

"The Past Illuminates A Promising Present: Vestry Arts juxtaposes DiBennedetto, Schoolwerth with Bellmer and Tchelitchew":

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2004/03/18/gay_city_news_archives/past%20issues/17005270.txt

Hans Bellmer, Pavel Tchelitchew, Steve DiBenedetto, Pieter Schoolwerth

Vestry Arts Inc.

Notions of greatness excite and revolt serious and not-so-serious artists everywhere.  But as one gets closer to the nexus of greatness—a pig’s litter of critics, artists, dealers and collectors who get their chance to decide—one realizes how silly the appellation is.  Very often, the difference between great and not-quite great is a weird stew of happenstance and momentum.  Still, the hypothesis is continually posited, “There’s no great art now; it just ain’t what it used to be.”

In the inaugural show at Vestry Arts, Miguel Abreu, properly disregarding such atavism, has grouped drawings by contemporary artists Steve DiBennedetto and Pieter Schoolwerth with Hans Bellmer (1902-75) and Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957).  DiBennedetto and Schoolwerth are an unlikely match; DiBennedetto known for his gloopy and colorful abstract excesses, Schoolwerth for his tightly conceived and rendered madhouse realism.  Bellmer and Tchelitchew, notwithstanding that they may be a better coupling in historical retrospect, represent equally distinct iconographies—Bellmer with his surrealist foundation and heteroerotic photography, Tchelitchew with a view of “internal landscape” specifically set apart from surrealism, and an often homoerotic subject matter.

Yet the drawings of these various artists relate—most immediately in terms of a shared positioning to political history (the onset of the Cold War vis-à-vis the onset of the War on Terror), as well as to the occult, or psychedelic.  Moving through the works, and the century, the intention of Bellmer and Tchelitchew to literally dissect society as represented by the fetishized body is followed up DiBennedetto’s and Schoolwerth’s investigations of a culture in which the body itself is no longer the object of the fetish, rather, the culture is the source of arousal. 

DiBennedetto and Schoolworth, whose bodies of works are but preliminarily known in comparison to Bellmer and Tchelitchew, not only gain from the company, but from being afforded the larger context.  An familiarization with Schoolwerth’s drawings, and his broad and fuzzy engagement of popular culture, enhances the solidity of his intentionally slick and impenetrable oil tableaus; while the dictatorial control of DiBennedetto’s colored pencils similarly benefits the looser compositions of his canvases.  So, as for art being less than it was—you get what you put into it.  Go see the show. 

Artforum: Joseph Nechvatal

02.21.04-03.27.04 Universal Concepts Unlimited, New York

The process of decay is also the process of life: Dust we are, unto dust we return, and so on. Here, Joseph Nechvatal's eight paintings—“computer robotic–assisted acrylic on canvas”—overwhelm the main gallery with their luxuriant sense of theoretical and psychological decomposition.  ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=6455

Artforum: Yoshihiro Suda

02.21.04-04.03.04 D'Amelio Terras, New York

With their deft placement high above eye level, Yoshihiro Suda’s diminutive wooden flowers (one to each room) engender a surprisingly broad range of reaction. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=6454

Brooklyn Rail: Christopher Hitchens

The Anti-Matter of George Orwell

Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters (Basic Books, 2002)

As published in the Brooklyn Rail: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2003/04/books/the-anti-matter-of-george-orwell

George Orwell matters because he not only coined the term "Cold War," but because he’s been the champion of Cold War propaganda since 1947.

Of course, despite his title, Christopher Hitchens won’t tell you that. Indeed, he makes no effort to address the question of Why Orwell Matters. More in keeping with his trajectory is the United Kingdom title, Orwell’s Victory, the imperialist boast of which Hitchens was right to suspect might not play too well in the United States.

For that matter, Orwell’s Victory probably wouldn’t have played too well with Orwell himself. To quote Benedict Nicolson in1953, Orwell "was always rounding on his own side on the eve of victory, calmly pointing out that the glorious advance was only another sort of retreat: a retreat, as he would put it, from the truth."

Certainly, Mister Hitchens can be compelling. Orwell’s weirdly immature relationship to sexuality is a featured argument of Hitchens’s text, and despite Orwell’s apparently Catholic notion of human babies (that there weren’t enough), his disdain for not just abortion but birth control, and the thinness of his estimation of women, Hitchens’s contention that Orwell may have had unresolved sexual-orientation issues makes Orwell all the more human. Hitchens also makes a helpful excursion into Orwell’s curious cluelessness as to America and American Culture. Hitchens, however, proves susceptible to this fault, with the argument that American literature began with Mark Twain. The assertion, borrowed from Ernest Hemingway, was never "uncontroversial," as Hitchens casually remarks, but intentionally perverse, and grossly exclusionary. Suffice it to say, without belaboring the insanity of the position, most of literate America would cite Washington Irving’s 1809 burlesque, The History of New York, as the start of American letters.

Of course, if any of this is why Orwell matters, he doesn’t. One has the suspicion that, aside from the occasional gaffe, Hitchens’s personal/political history of Orwell is more or less correct— and yet, to read about Orwell and the metric system, or about the hotly contested question of who hit whom with a walking stick seventy years ago, is to wonder why one isn’t doing the dishes. At such times, it feels like the predominant strategy of the Orwell defense is to bore everyone into submission.

Even Hitchens’s thesis— that Orwell "got right" the three most important issues of the twentieth century, Stalinism, imperialism, and fascism— feels weirdly outmoded. Maybe, to look singularly at the first half of the twentieth century, one could argue that those issues fill out the top three spots. But to look at the second half of the twentieth century, the win, place and show would be something more along the lines of race, religion and representation. And, looking back on the century as a whole, the most important issues would have to be food and fuel, and maybe, retrospectively, water.

For someone who speaks so beautifully, Hitchens mounts an argument for Orwell that is often shimmeringly lackluster. As Hitchens rattles off that Orwell "had dirt under his fingernails, and an understanding of the rhythms of nature," one can only groan. Most of the prose exhibits a peaty fluidity, but argument to argument, the entirety devolves. Because the majority of us, unlike Hitchens and Orwell, have not and will never be Communists, the political infighting of the Communist Party is not only toilsome and outdated, but evasive of Orwell’s perpetual-war contribution to present day dilemmas. Hitchens fails to engage the central issue— the millions of classroom copies of Animal Farm and 1984, and the impact that has had, does have, and will have, on any child who wishes to exhibit a healthy contrarian point of view.

To exhibit a revolutionary impulse, in American public schools, is to be met with brays of, "Four legs good, two legs bad."

But Hitchens, for all his talk of nuanced debate, is not concerned with such niceties. In his latest incarnation (Pinko Tory), Hitchens plays to perpetual war paranoia, tips patriotism to nationalism, and is ever on the hunt for the lowest common denominator. It is his moment of "America: like it or lump it." Dissent is unpatriotic. Even for those asking not if but how we should enter the fray, the answer is a raspy, "This is what we’re up against. Bin Ladenists." You will not hear it from Hitchens’s lips that, judging by Orwell’s stance on World War II, Orwell might have been a peacenik himself.

Hitchens’s case for Orwell is— trust the good father. First there was Alexander the Great, then there was George Orwell. They mean for the best, and will lead us to better days. No matter that America won Orwell’s "Cold War" due to a better economic model, and not the Animal Farm model of perpetual war, and the resulting arms race. No matter that in a Communist system it’s cheaper to manufacture arms, and that, very possibly, we won the Cold War despite the arms race.

For all his protestations, Hitchens is the Grand Poohbah of the cult of Orwell, and, in that capacity, it is his purview to protect Orwell from such rationality. Hitchens’s preference would be that Orwell be relegated to the past: "The disputes and debates and combats in which George Orwell took part are receding into history." This, while erasing some history, such as the unmentionable fact that Animal Farm was based on Russian Historian Nikolai Kostomorav’s story, "The Animal Riot," and, by current standards, would have faced charges of copyright infringement. In this day and age, to read "Shooting an Elephant," or The Road to Wigan Pier, is to be offended, and yet Hitchens insists, "it has lately proved possible to reprint every single letter, book review and essay composed by Orwell without exposing him to any embarrassment."

Yeah, if you ignore the parts you don’t like. Hitchens objects that Orwell’s detractors are guilty of taking Orwell’s works, acts and statements out of historical context. But, isn’t surviving historical context the challenge of literature? None of the 11 year-olds reading Animal Farm are reading it in historical context. Orwell is presently utilized to maintain an eternal enemy on the horizon. Furthermore, the questioning of Orwell is not newfangled. Prior to the publication of Animal Farm, T.S. Eliot assessed that Orwell’s pigs, in comparison to the other farm animals, were too intelligent, and thus that age-old we’re-better-than-you justification of the ruling class, and that Orwell’s allegory presented an argument so negative so as to discourage political engagement— all of which was exactly correct, and in context.

Demonstrating a consistent lack of aptitude for "the power of facing," Hitchens just dismisses the work of anyone he disagrees with. Salmon Rushdie, Edward Said, Martin Amis, etcetera— all wrong, foolish or deceitful. Hitchens’s rule is, if it’s minor, concede it, if it’s major, say it’s minor. In his hiccup of a chapter discussing the most disputed issue of the Orwell legacy, Hitchens pooh-poohs the list of 135 names that Orwell wrote up in the capacity of an informer for the "Information Research Department" (of the British Secret Service). To Hitchens, Orwell didn’t mean any harm, and probably didn’t do any harm, and the 35 names not yet released by the British government don’t indicate an obscuring of something untoward, such as a "blacklist," but rather, the "inanity of British officialdom." Of the list that has been released, Orwell’s bluntly racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic asides are similarly submitted to Hitchens’s power of sidestepping. (Throughout Orwell’s Victory, the arguments often feel so extraneous that one cannot help but suppose all the quotes in the book might be sustained, as is, to support a wholly oppositional argument.)

To Hitchens, Orwell cannot be held culpable for the list. He is, at worst, a victim of circumstance. Says Hitchens: "Sometimes his [Orwell’s] upbringing or his innate pessimism triumphed over his conscious efforts." And while Orwell "analyzed the temptation among intellectuals to adapt themselves to power," no such thought ever occurred to Orwell. In spite of the fact that Orwell numbered "sheer egoism" as number 1 on another of his lists, "Why I Write," Orwell is unfailingly without mercenary intent. While Orwell wrote that "There is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics,’" by Hitchens’s estimation, there was never any politicking in Orwell’s decision making. (Thank heaven he flip-flopped on Hitler, anyway.) And, while Orwell "could feel the onset of the permanent war economy, and he already knew the use to which permanent war propaganda could be put," he was unconscious of the use to which his list would be put. Though a master of propaganda, he just didn’t know that they’d be using Animal Farm for that. Really.

When cornered, Hitchens always returns to the Great Man argument. This kind of thing: he was always trying, and that makes you great, and ultimately worthy of forgiveness. Orwell himself disdained the Great Writer formulation, and one needn’t go far to guess that, confronted by such Sainthood, Orwell would be inclined to point back at Hitchens. Writers, Orwell observed, "tell you a great deal about [themselves], while talking about someone else." That noted, we might find Orwell’s objection to his own canonization in his 1949 critique of Gandhi:

One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claims about himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded as a simple politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!

Faint praise, indeed. But still, if this is what Hitchens is hoping his critics will think of him (much as he writes, "Orwell kept his corner of the Cold War fairly clean"), Hitchens will leave no such air of odorlessness. Regardless of whether or not Orwell did make, or would have made, or would have recanted a turn to the right, Orwell, to Hitchens, is little more than self-justification. As much as Hitchens models himself on Orwell, one can’t dispel a notion that Orwell probably wouldn’t have liked Hitchens, either. Employing Orwell to bludgeon dissent, Christopher Hitchens has firmly positioned himself among the legions of "smelly little orthodoxies" that Orwell considered "a pox on the twentieth century."

Artforum and Gay City: Marlene McCarty

01.17.04-02.21.04 Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

John Keats composed the gnomic, oft-cited phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty;” in her first show with Brent Sikkema, Marlene McCarty sustains her attack on presumptions about these famous twin poles, particularly as they apply to the American teenage girl. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=6318

Another version of this review appeared in Gay City News:

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2004/02/19/gay_city_news_archives/past%20issues/17005106.txt

As published in Gay City News:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” that is all

Ye need to know on earth and all ye need to know.

In his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats neatly synthesized what probably remains to this day the most often-cited cultural inanity. And what is the result of the formulation? There are two–– the reduction of people to ornaments, and a justification for ignoring anything unseemly or unbeautiful as untrue.

In her first show with Brent Sikkema, “Marlene Olive—June 21, 1975. 33 Hibiscus Court, Marin County, California,” Marlene McCarty, via six large-scale murals, sustains her attack on presumptions of truth. America’s teen girl is the ultimate victim and perpetrator of the cult of beauty, and McCarty has long dedicated herself to the embodiment of this dichotomy, in the form of the American teen murderess. In a culture that adheres to the principle that beauty is tantamount to good, young girls, as paradigms of beauty, often make for a painful and tempting incursion of reality—which is that good and evil are entirely independent of our own vanities and fulfillments. What we want isn’t necessarily true. It’s a lesson learned many times from young girls–– Lizzy Borden, Joan of Arc, Amy Fischer, the girls of the Salem Witch trials.

McCarty’s latest works—graphite and ballpoint on paper—are culled from media images of Marlene Olive, a 16-year-old who, with her boyfriend, killed her mother and father in 1975. McCarty’s larger-than-life drawings depict the teen couple and Marlene’s parents, Naomi and Jim, in casual 70s family-style stills.

Under the fashion-template clothing of the period, however, another untold reality looms as visible: the genitalia of the teens and Naomi and Jim Olive imply the more complex truth of human existence—a truth that McCarty evidences as perhaps not ugly, but definitely not beautiful.

McCarty, with a consciously unpleasant line, catches us up in that long stare—at breasts, vaginas, penises—and we are forced to accommodate the fact that truth and beauty don’t really have all that much to do with the subject of our gaze.

TimeOut New York: Barnaby Furnas

A version of this review appeared in TimeOut New York

"Works on Paper."

Marianne Boesky

Guns blazing, Barnaby Furnas returns for his second solo show at Marianne Boesky with 36 works on paper that offer a spectacle of guts, glory and the occasional orgy.

In colors archetypal of today's print media, Furnas obsesses (and rightfully so) on issues of political paranoia, personal excess and the seemingly resolute, national impulse to self-destruction. Shady operatives lurk in the tall reeds; they twirl their guns.  In the works, bacchanals play out on a stage representing the world; with all the blood and flesh, the depiction is part orgy, part bloodbath. Other works depict battle extravaganzas of Homeric Proportions. In aptly title works, soldiers, and others, are “Blown To Bits.” Themes of vanity and violence are consistently present in the show; to Furnass, a rock concert is as much a blood cult as anything else.

With the present global situation-terrorism, rampant Religiousity—equations of violence and ecstasy become particularly compelling. Furnas’s ecstasy, which can be sexual or fanatical, is paired with blood-splattering violence: a corollary which is, as they say, right on target. But Furnas's false prophets are not bunkered deep in deserts. They are rock stars and U.S. politicians. Honest Abe, the most lauded of all U.S. presidents, earns the ire of Furnas's brush. As Furnas portrays Lincoln worshipped by faceless masses, the ominous scene begs the question: And what about the Civil War? Was all that bloodshed really necessary? Perhaps, suggests Furnas, that is a part of the American psyche: the will to unnecessary war. Lincoln, in the second to last work in the show, shoots off his own head.

Bomb Magazine: Josephine Meckseper

A version of this profile appeared in Bomb Magazine

The candidate’s qualifications were these: she had two grandfathers in the SS, an uncle who was a radical leftist and a member of the West German communist party, and an aunt who at 16 became involved with the ill-fated Baader Meinhof group. She also had a graduate degree from the California Institute of the Arts and a radical impulse as strong as her disillusionment.

Josephine Meckseper’s 1998 poster campaign for a U.S. Senate seat did not get her elected, although winning votes was never in the cards, or on the agenda.  In 2003, Meckseper, a native of Germany, continues her subversion of political thinking—replacing it with creative thinking—in three one-person shows: in New York, at the Elizabeth Dee Gallery (April/May);  in Frankfurt, at the Kunstverein (May/June);  and in Nuremberg, at the Kunsthalle (December/January). 

Meckseper’s work, notably in her recent series of photographs—some candid, some staged—trace not only the history of contemporary protest, but the canning of counterculture.  In a series of paint-and-glitter canvases based on preparatory police maps of protest areas in Berlin (areas that had been set aside for the anti-Bush demonstration concurrent with his May 2002 visit), Meckseper reduces protestor factions to the fashions that unite them—denim, army parkas, or Palestinian scarves.  Meckseper’s disturbing images target political polemics of the left and the right, in government and in culture.  To Meckseper, the revolution is not to put politics first, or art first, but for art to assume the functional role, where dysfunctional political division now dominates.  A broad range of production—from aestheticized glitter pornography to video documentation to her tabloid art magazine FAT—lays siege to any narrow, controlled vision of art.

In a contemporary drift of presupposition, Meckseper brings openness and direction via an artistic manifesto ever engaged, ever challenging, and ever expanding.     

Gay City: Jane Benson

"Disguising Patriotism with Desert Hues: A not-so-subtly entitled exhibit jabs at Dubya’s saber rattling."

Roebling Hall

As published in Gay City News:

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2004/01/15/gay_city_news_archives/past%20issues/17004939.txt

Ahhh, the Soho sales. Go and buy, buy, buy. But if you’re looking to feel a little guilty about it, make a stop at Satellite, the Manhattan space of the Brooklyn gallery Roebling Hall. Appropriate in a space that represents Soho’s lost textile-industry, Jane Benson’s “Underbush” draws out the relationship among consumerism, fashion, and war.

So ubiquitous is the fashionability of camouflage patterns in our culture, it blinds one to the militarization that it suggests. Andy Warhol’s series of camouflage abstract paintings, so foreboding and prescient in their day, now take on a wholly naïve character. Jane Benson, obscuring the glitz of holiday foil garlands with camouflage-colored spray paint, emphasizes a shift from fashion as ornamentation to fashion as not-so-secret weapon.

The U.S. takeover of the world, for better or worse, will ultimately be achieved by cultural infiltration. This fact is not lost on the current administration, and they’ve made the policy clear: as a citizen, the best thing you can do to support America in a time of trouble is buy stuff.

Benson’s once metallic garlands festoon the ceiling of the gallery in mimicry of the camouflage canopies utilized in military operations. The second piece in the show, “Camouflage Suit,” a mocked-up outfit with strips of fabric, brings a sense of the individual’s participation in all this, complementing the exhibition’s overarching theme of umbrage toward the military.

Still, the title “Underbush” sells short the subject matter. It’s difficult to entirely blame George Bush for the relationship between fashion and war, especially in the context of lower Manhattan, where the predecessor to the textile industry was the munitions industry. Indeed, it is entirely possible that the gallery where the work is on view had a previous life not only as a textile warehouse or sweatshop, but as a guns or ammo factory.

TimeOut: John McCracken

A version of this review appeared in TimeOut New York

“New Sculpture”

David Zwirner

Looking at Minimalist sculpture today is to brave reassessment of the work as comatose and antiseptic.  In the context of a slightly crazy cosmology, John McCracken brings life and spit to an evolving iconography.

McCracken, presently recognized as an early contributor to Minimalism, furthers his West Coast orientation of the aesthetic in his third exhibition with David Zwirner.  The now New Mexico-based sculptor overcomes tired design elements with a dedication more to strangeness than perfection.  Taking up the “columns” and “planks” central to his sculptural vernacular, McCracken also overcomes outmoded clichés of universality with a thematic foundation of present-moment extraterrestrialism and pop parapsychology.

McCracken himself executes the highly exact resin-on-wood process that results in imposing, reflective blocks suggestive of solid color.  It is as if pure color were the material—an intention that McCracken has iterated.  McCracken’s “columns” stand upright: mysterious obelisks.  The artist’s “planks” lean between floor and wall, indicating relationships between different times and dimensions.

It is no accident that McCracken’s horizontal monoliths often take on an anthropomorphic quality, or convey themselves as beings that are, per McCracken, of alien origin.  This of course is a primary addition of McCracken’s West Coast outlook.  Minimalism, as a cultural phenomenon, has outgrown its own reductivism, and McCracken, with his weirdo fantasies, has recognized the Hollywoodization of the milieu.  Hans Solo, frozen into a block of liquid carbonite (The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi) is the quintessential example of Minimalism’s development in the popular consciousness.  Minimalism, whether in regard to a futurist world or an alien technology, has become redolent of, as McCracken puts it, not merely “a simple nothing,” but “a simple something.”     

Gay City and TimeOut: Stephen Ellis at Von Lintel Gallery, New York

Versions of this review appeared in Gay City News and TimeOut New York

"The Primary Force in Politics: Stephen Ellis articulates an argument that challenges commonplace cultural expectations":

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2003/12/18/gay_city_news_archives/past%20issues/17004875.txt

Jeremiah, of the 24^th book of the Old Testament—a seer who railed against  sinners, priests, false prophets, kings and generals, and was claimed by some to be a previous incarnation of Jesus Christ.  And why has Stephen Ellis titled his current show of abstract paintings “Jeremiads”?  What could Jeremiah have to do with contemporary art, in 2003?  

The notion that art is without politics is itself a political stance.  The fact that our culture is so thoroughly inculcated to the idea is a victory of an atavistic, backwards view.  Creative thinking has been largely relegated to party tricks and crocodile tears (Jeremiah himself is mistakenly  associated with the Book of Lamentation, and weeping) .  In truth, art, as the origin of language, is the most primary element of politics, and historically demonstrates itself to be just that, whether in the form of a new, insurgent written language invented b y the ancient Hebrews, or an album by Public Enemy.  

Here, we find the powerfully articulated (gesticulated?) argument of Steve Ellis.  Bold, lush colors, very much of a present-day milieu, hold themselves at the brink of this impact between abstraction and pictogram, abstraction and language.  Always, like Ellis, people are struggling for modes of expression that reach beyond the language of their leaders—and this is the essence of political evolution.  The state of the world now, with the link between the promise land of America and the promise land of the Middle East, only points up the enduring need for people to relate in manners beyond the strictures of reticent  rhetorics. 

It is a difficult time for artists—the narrowness of their cultural license to participate, their limitation of the resources available to them—and Ellis is unassailable in his assertion that creative thinking, whatever that thought process ultimately puts forth, is a social activism.  Electric blue expanses,  color palettes of vibrating intensity—all seems to compete directly with our commonplace cultural expectations, in particular with that of another holiday season.  And why not, Ellis asks,  why not, this winter solstice, forgo the crèche, and hang the work of a contemporary artist, instead?

Brooklyn Rail: Lutz Kleveman

A Game of Risk

As published in the Brooklyn Rail: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2004/01/books/off-the-shelves-jan

The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia

Lutz Kleveman

Grove Atlantic, 2003

What’s the next hotspot? Where will it be? A remote country in the Middle East? In Central Asia? What war will drive the journalists of the world to uncover the story? Will it be the diamond mines in Africa? Will it be simple starvation, somewhere else? Where will suffering suddenly erupt, disturbing the placid waters of the New World Order?

Perhaps the silliest of assumptions in the present-day media is the notion of “the story.” There is the idea that unhappiness and conflict represents a sort of brushfire in the landscape of the world—one that the world’s firemen, whether they be U.N. peacekeepers, or U.S. troops, or television pundits, will rush in with their trusty hoses to quell. But the fact is, there is a troubled reality to most of the globe, and, as Lutz Kleveman points out in The New Great Game, the angry young men of Al Qaeda make up only a fraction of the rage that threatens all of us.

Oil, yes. Kleveman maps out an introduction to the impact of U.S. and international strategies on Central Asia. The area, known in the last century as “the black hole of the Earth,” is an increasingly vital interest to those nations which make up the four percent of the global population but that consume twenty-five percent of global energy. Massive untapped oil reserves in the area of the Caspian Sea make the region a constant focus of international coercion and interference. Kleveman projects that “by 2015 the Caspian region could reach a share of five to eight percent of the world market.” The final result of this apparent wealth in oil is a bevy of damaged states in the area of the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Kleveman, touring the region, documents nations that range in aspect from the oppressive legacy of Stalin in Georgia, to the often surreal megalomania of the Turkmenistan president, Saparmurat Niyazov. In a creepily entertaining chapter called “Stalin’s Disneyland: Turkmenistan,” he describes the small nation in detail:

Appointed life-long dictator by a rubber-stamp parliament, Niyazov is convinced of his own divinity, and has reinvented his country as a gigantic theme park, with the only theme being himself. Almost every street corner in the capital has multiple portraits of the sixty-year-old stocky man with a soft and somewhat simple face. On some he looks like Burt Reynolds, on others like a genetic blend of Leonid Brezhnev and the German politician Franz-Joseph Strauss. All public buildings were decorated with banners proclaiming the state slogan Halk, Watan, Turkmenbashi (‘One People, One Fatherland, One Leader’).

Kleveman brings lucid witness to these incomprehensible realities. Flowing easily from the big picture to the small, The New Great Game dimensionalizes peoples and crises that have often exceeded the reach of popular consciousness.

Brooklyn Rail: Joseph Coulson

The Rail Recommends…

As published in the Brooklyn Rail: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2004/01/books/off-the-shelves-reviewed-by-bookstaff

John Reed (Editor-at-large): I’ve been reading The Vanishing Moon, a novel by Joseph Coulson (Archipelago Books). It chronicles the American family with enormous intensity. His sense of history is vast, his sense of detail fine, Coulson is the ferryman to that America just beyond tragic and wondrous. Nelly Reifler’s collection of stories, See Through (Simon & Schuster), is as dark and delightful as chocolate truffles. You’ll enjoy them, and feel guilty for it. And, she’s a Brooklyn native. And I recommend Natural Trouble, a collection of poems by Scott Hightower (Fordham Press). Tough-minded and elegant, Hightower is a singular balance of poetic tradition and poetic revolution. Hightower, in his second book, effortlessly demonstrates a compassion and wisdom that commands the attention of his readers.

Artforum: "Urban Baroque"

11.16.03-12.21.03 Plane Space, New York

Guest curator Lisa Ivorian Gray has brought together installation, photographs, sculpture, and paintings in this group show exploring the intersection of nature and the urban environment. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=5873

Gay City News: Jonathan Freeman and Michael Phelan

A version of this review appeared in Gay City News.

"Manifest Destiny: Jonah Freeman, Michael Phelan examine the ersatz American frontier"

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2003/11/13/gay_city_news_archives/past%20issues/17004720.txt

Big dreams and a vast wilderness.

But where has America gone?  Jonah Freeman and Michael Phelan, in a collaborative show at John Connelly Presents, explore the new American frontier of mall design.

When the wilderness is gone, the two artists suggest, there remains only the ersatz wilderness that we create from our own fantasies.  The densely packed installation—with its fake stone linoleum floor, stuffed penguins, and rotisserie chicken—encapsulates the new American gathering place (a limited edition print, produced in tandem with the show, is entitled, “The Gathering”).  In a new world where there is no natural presence, we recreate nature in our public places—whether through fountains, or bronze casts of Native Americans, or, as is the case here, stuffed penguins.  Freeman and Phelan make us acutely aware of the yearning and absurdity of our ecologic taxidermy. 

The reordering of the environment based on logical precepts—such as, it’s easier to move linoleum rolls impressed with stone shapes than actual stones—is a primary concern of the artists.  There is an arch irony to the mirrored installation (with rotisserie chicken) that is the centerpiece of the show.  The sculpture, which shares a title with Shel Silverstein’s, “The Giving Tree,” implies that we see the world only in terms of our reflections—our own needs, our own vanities.  In a video installation, a seemingly mesmerized groundhog chirps in monotone, while faced by the hypnotic and ceaseless flashing of a strobe light.  Painted panels, a mural, and a color-lit linoleum wall produce a similar sense of disorientation in the viewer.  Throughout the installation, the drive to subvert a natural state of awareness—think Las Vegas, or Disney World—encroaches on the viewer’s consciousness.  We are, iterate the artists, under the constant bombardment of our own self-delusion.

Disco, morgue, mall—Phelan and Freeman creepily combine the emotional states of these and other public spaces.  Perhaps more disturbing, the Chelsea cool of the show brings a certain seductiveness to the cooption of the natural environment.  Not too different than the restaurant around the corner.      

Artforum: Miranda Lichtenstein

10.11.03-11.08.03 Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York

Everyone is familiar with Monet’s Garden in Giverny, having seen the artist’s depictions of it or even visited the site itself, which has been meticulously maintained. Less well-known is the replica of the garden in Kitagawa Village, Japan ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=5723

Artforum and Gay City: Hiroshi Sugimoto

09.20.03-11.01.03 Sonnabend Gallery, New York

In this exhibition of black-and-white photographs, Hiroshi Sugimoto defamiliarizes canonical works of modern architecture. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=5639

Another version of this review appeared in Gay City News:

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2003/10/17/gay_city_news_archives/past%20issues/17004578.txt

As published in Gay City News:

"Stripping Context to Find Meaning: Funerals for iconic structures revere their lives"

Sometimes the art. Sometimes the buildings.

In his aptly titled photographic exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery in Chelsea, Hiroshi Sugimoto explores life in our world community by revealing architectural monuments as objects divorced from their presumed social relevance. A blurred lens and odd camera angles reduce such icons as the Eiffel Tower and the Brooklyn Bridge to relics of a world mysterious and misunderstood. Through this distancing perspective, Sugimoto suggests that our comprehension of our own Earth is illusory; in fact, by being within the moment, our perspective is as shadowy and incomplete as if we were in another time, looking back.

Sugimoto’s black and white images, however, are not merely indicative of an inability to know ourselves. Rather, the lushness of Sugimoto’s black and white (subtle reds and greens abound) suggests the complexity of fine wine; to be tasted and known, but only for an instant.

As much as Sugimoto renders architectural statements like the Guggenheim Bilbao into world wonders that defy present-day architectural contextualization, so too does he forbid himself any participation in present-day notions of art. His lens gives the impression that it is both considered and entirely happenstance. The photos are themselves “great” monuments, but also just snapshots. The lack of human beings in the works emphasizes not only the differences of architecture across time and tradition, but an ineluctable sameness. Buildings, like people, all stand under the same sky, in the same wind.

No woes, no joys, no politics: Sugimoto’s ever-present reverence is for the life within the building, indeed within the body. Sugimoto’s photographs represent a kind of funeral for each of the buildings they capture, and by this outlook, we can appreciate our own buildings, and cultures, and lives, in a way that usually eludes us.

A young woman I knew once asked an old country doctor what it means to die. And he answered, “It means you lived.”

Artforum: Ingrid Calame

10.04.03-11.01.03 James Cohan Gallery, New York

Ingrid Calame’s abstractions derive from her tracings of stains on the pavements of Los Angeles and New York. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=5638

Gay City: Ilppo Pohjola

"Amorphous Questions of Emotion: Lush fantasy colors and the daily war absent in mainstream cinema."

As published in Gay City News:

http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2003/09/19/gay_city_news_archives/past%20issues/17003769.txt

Transgendered individuals battle to be accepted by the mainstream. So do experimental filmmakers.

Ilppo Pohjola s(ill-Poe poy-Yo-la) addresses assumptions of the “subversive” in his pseudo-documentary, P(l)ain Truth, that chronicles a transgender sex change. The Finnish artist and filmmaker, whose films have been widely screened at festivals and group shows around the world, makes his debut American solo exhibition at Klemens Gasser & Tanya Grunert, a Chelsea gallery with a strong film and video program.

In P(l)ain Truth (1993), Pohjola fuses the mainstream cinema language of over-simplification, with the experimental film language of symbolic meaning. Based on a true story, Pohjola names the form “Symbolic Documentary” as the film does not investigate the facts, but rather, addresses the more ambitious and amorphous question of emotion. The film is charged with stylized renderings of the sexualized body, as well as the clinical text of the medical establishment, which becomes literally written into the flesh of the “patient.”

A soundtrack by Glenn Branca adds an eerie undertone to Pohjola’s reconstruction—both physical and mental—of an individual’s sexual identity.

Pohjola’s Routemaster (1999), which screens in the larger room of Gasser & Grunert, juxtaposes black-and-white race cars as well as races with tinted images of human cadavers that have been employed as crash-test dummies. Pohjola’s technique is part mechanic, part medical examiner, in both ways reducing everything to pieces. Three versions, with three different musical scores, evidence the interchangeability of his artistic concerns, and, by extension, all concerns.

With visual emphases gleaned from structuralist film and minimalist art, Pohjola’s employs repetition, variation, and quick cuts to produce a paradoxical slowness, as if representing the movement of life in a strobe light. In our own ever-racing culture, Pohjola affirms that we are the crash-test corpses, riding shotgun, awaiting spiritual deaths that are as assembly-line as they are inevitable.

Pohjola’s films give a glimpse into what’s missing in mainstream cinema––the lush colors of fantasy, and the daily war that provides us all, depending on our moods, with victory or defeat. Themes of sex and death, evoked by Pohjola’s bold sensibility, generate a saturated and lasting impression.

Artforum: Jason Rhoades

09.12.03-10.25.03 David Zwirner | 525 & 533 West 19th Street, New York

In the beginning was the word. Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World depicts a woman’s vagina as the source of all things, but for Jason Rhoades, the origin of the world is not the vagina but the many words that name it. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=5470

Artnet: American Spirituality

American Spirituality

"Half Air," July 8-Aug. 29, 2003, at Marianne Boesky Gallery, 535 West 22 Street, New York, N.Y. 10011

With an exhibition titled "Half Air," the temptation is to talk about spiritualism. Spirituality in art has of late been so overwhelmed by Eastern ascendancy and Stonehenge incantations that it's hard not to chime in with some down-home American flaky-isms. "Half Air," however, is not about anything so constricted as organized theisms. The show invokes an awe more fundamental -- one that precurses religious dogma.

Seven small oils on canvas by the reclusive visionary artist Forest Bess (1911-77), spanning an eight-year period, form the backbone of the show, which also includes works by Glenn Branca, James Bishop, Charlemagne Palestine, Jack Smith and a double film projection by Ken Kobland and the Wooster Group. The curators -- Clay Hapaz, Elisabeth Ivers and Jay Sanders -- have gone in for a curatorial cross-pollinating of artistic eras, mixing work from as early as 1949 (Bess) to as late as 1993 (Bishop). In a sweltering August quarto, "Half Air" pursues themes of death, sexual identity, prayer and ceremony.

The pioneering Lower East Side film artist Jack Smith (1932-89) has had a certain presence in Chelsea this summer, with one of his trademark costumes on display in a group show at Matthew Marks Gallery as well as sculptures and photographs here. Smith's sculptures -- faded Polaroids attached to white-painted wooden cubes, arranged casually like a kid's blocks -- though dated ca. 1962, have an emerging presence, and prophetic wisdom. These artifacts make a stark introduction to "Half Air's" meditation on mortality -- faded, cracking photos hold forth on ephemeral memory, while rough wood evokes, by way of tree rings, the pattern of the living thing bisected.

Belied by their abstracted serenity, Forest Bess' simple, runic paintings can be harrowing. Their staying power in the memory is remarkable, and indicative of their own concern with, if not the hereafter, the after. The pictures can imply heaven or hell, or simply the mystical nature of decay.

continued at: http://www.artnet.com/magazine/reviews/reed/reed8-12-03.asp

Artforum: "Women on Painting"

07.10.03-08.16.03 Cornell Dewitt Gallery, New York

Encompassing six decades and a divergent group of eight painters, “Women On Painting”—with surprisingly few artworks and a small amount of space—demonstrates not only the flexibility of painting but an increasing flexibility in the ways one can look at a painting. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=5195

Artforum: Rachel Harrison, Hirsch Perlman, Dieter Roth, Jack Smith, Rebecca Warren

07.09.03-08.15.03 Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

This untitled group show falls into step with a summertime trend, shunning conventional art-historical chronologies by grouping works that span generations. ...

continued at: http://artforum.com/archive/id=5194

Artnet: Ian Dawson

Plastic Fantastic

Ian Dawson, "Tilt Trucks and Free Fliers," June 26-Aug. 8, 2003, at James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26th Street, New York, N.Y. 10001

It's the tilt trucks first. Twenty-four large dumpster-like bins block out the front room at James Cohan Gallery. Contorted by heat and jammed together with a force that suggests the formation of a young planet, the bins are further distressed by melted protuberances which appear in a measured randomness.

The emptiness of these joined bodies immediately brings to mind environmental themes of humanity's waste. The multiplicity of the tilt trucks asserts, as well, the ongoing and repeated nature of the output of the present age. Beyond the specificity of green environmentalism, Ian Dawson's works also address the biological form. The melted elongations that extend from Dawson's plastic bodies suggest a porcupine-esque protection, and the inherent vulnerability therein. Dawson's melded bins are reminiscent of a protean multi-celled animal -- thriving in the soup of contemporary existence. Moreover, with the candy colors of the bins, Dawson points to our own intake -- and our breeding of this sort of plastic amoeba to indulge our guilty if unhealthy pleasures. Burns on the skin of Dawson's protuberances supply wincingly credible evidence of toxicity, and formulate the question, "As life becomes plastic, what happens to us?"

continued at: http://www.artnet.com/magazine/reviews/reed/reed7-22-03.asp

Susan Sontag “Regarding the Pain of Others”

Ok, Cassius and I were tossing some old stuff this morning (1/20/13), and we came across a review I wrote in the 2003 June/July issue of the Brooklyn Rail.  The review isn't on the internet, whether because it just never got there, or because it's kind of negative, I don't know.  I'm hesitant to look at it myself—I was in a whiny mood that year—but I'm posting it anyway (I don't know if this was the final version) …  

In a media environment where all images are apportioned to partisan arguments—unreasonable and unthinking—Susan Sontag’s mission to resume a more considered meditation on photography is a noble one.  Chapter 7 of Regarding the Pain of Others, which briefly addresses her 1977 work, On Photography, is compelling reason to buy the book.  Sontag’s recall on photographic history is staggering (although at times she provides more history than insight), and her give and take on the question of War photography is a stand against over-simplification.  Sontag rejects the assumed arguments—that photographic documentation of tragedy/atrocity mobilizes conscience and change, or, conversely, that photographic documentation of tragedy/atrocity numbs the conscience, and undermines change.

Even at her most convincing, however, Sontag’s own arguments are often disappointingly partial.  Sontag never draws a clear distinction between media and photography, and throughout the work, her assessments waver in ever-shifting focus.  While the effects of the image in a media polarity can be easily discerned—more ordnance in the perpetual war between the bellicose and the callow—Sontag’s model for the cause of that polarity remains fuzzy.  Sontag’s distinction of the non-believability of “beauty” and “pathos,” as opposed to the apparent trustworthiness of “ugliness” and “horror,” might have provided another valuable exploration in these pages—as the removal of art from society is primary to a culture receptive to only the pre-supposed idea.  

Sontag’s decision not to include the photographs that she discusses is a similarly provocative, if undelineated decision.  The immediate conclusion one extracts is that Sontag has more faith in the word than the photograph to evade spectacle.  Still, one cannot help but wonder if the decision has something to do with “taste” (a code word, to Sontag, for censorship) or, more interestingly, copyright, a subject which, as heavily as it figures in any conversation about photography today, goes largely unengaged by Sontag.

Much as she would remove political divisiveness from the image, Sontag makes some effort to avoid divisive politics.  Still, the one-sidedness of defending a New York gallery exhibition of lynching photographs and postcards from the 1890s to the 1930s, while denigrating the Holocaust Museum, demonstrates the nature of her own double-standard—in terms of the justification of one race’s suffering over that of another, as well as the willingness to witness the horror of a people who don’t look like her.  All of which, of course, is what she’s complaining the other side is guilty of.  (Sontag is wrong to claim there are no United States Museums dedicated to the history of the slavery—there are several.  I would join her, however, in a call to create a National Museum of Slavery, were one not already under construction in Fredericksburg, Virginia.)  Sontag’s claim that “Europe today . . . has claimed the right to opt out of war-making,” is similarly narrow.  Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the French, German and Russian position on U.S. involvement in the Middle East, Europe’s decision to “opt out of war-making,” sadly but truly, has as much to do with personal profit as moral fortitude.  The only thing that it seems “Europe” can be counted on to opt out of is taking responsibility for a historical pre-eminence of anti-Semitism and colonialism—the origins, by the way, of the mess we’re in.

In her final conclusion—which to the credit of Regarding the Pain of Others, is not borne out by previous chapters—Sontag asserts that we cannot understand the pain of others.  (As if anyone can fully “understand” anything about anyone else.)  Not only does the idea promote the very silly notions that only people in far away countries suffer, and that only people in the First World can know happiness, but the apathy that results from helplessness.  Sontag, in this, has failed to resist the mechanics of the media machine—this is her own over-simplification to sell books, and this is her own over-simplification that will make people mutter and give up.  

Artnet: Duncan Hannah

Gentleman and Dissembler

Duncan Hannah, "New Work," Nov. 7-Dec. 21, 2002, at James Graham & Sons, 1014 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y., and "Nudes," Nov. 7-Dec. 21, 2002, at JG Contemporary, 505 West 28 Street, New York, N.Y.

At first glance, the wistful pictures of Duncan Hannah, an art veteran of 20 plus years, feel distinctly out of place -- even at James Graham & Sons on the Upper East Side -- in a contemporary moment when politics have made sentimentality particularly distasteful. And yet, while the works are smooth and gentlemanly, on further examination they are snappish and cunning, and as grainy and earthbound as the sand Hannah mixes into his pigments. Hannah's meditation on colonialism and conformity couldn't be more at the core of today's political question -- how should/does the Western economic model relate to that part of the world that is yet unconverted?

Indeed, Hannah's world is so very small that, in it, one can literally see the curvature of the globe.

Hannah's nostalgic patina is so convincing that his "realism" is often the subject of casual misinterpretation. His paintings have been described as "charming" and "romantic" and, as one critic stated, "the quality of his yearning seems real enough." Nonetheless, even the most docile of viewers will realize that Hannah's primary concern is not the past itself, but a relation to the past, in terms of how the past has brought about the present, yes, but also in terms of how the present recreates the past. Hannah is not so much living in the past, alone, as with all of us. His assertion is one of continuity. Yes, he describes himself as being "out of time," but is quick to add, "we all are."

Hannah, by way of a somewhat Hopperish composition and cinematographic rigidity (we never feel, in Hannah's canvases, that we have been shown more than a single frame), has occasioned some to grant him an atavistic princeliness -- in Hannah, they argued, they had found a new dauphin of realism. But Hannah's paintings are not really representational. His work, based on illustrations and photographs culled from the 20th century (mostly '30s to '50s), has no existing source material. No figures. No landscape. Nothing that Hannah paints is still there. The young woman is now old. The telephone booths have changed. Hannah, as is particularly significant in our own mock representative democracy, is a mock representational painter, and not painting any actual images, but, rather, the concept of images.

To apply over-simplification to the 18 paintings of Hannah's "New Work," the grand theme would be colonialism. In fact, the first five paintings in Hannah's presentation deal directly with England's dominance of the seas. All ships are depicted with the same misty-eyed longing, but the non-distinction between the cruise ship and the battleship is immediately unsettling, as is the rapid disclosure that none of these ships sails without foreboding. Whether the nearly beached vessel of A Cautionary Tale, or the sinking behemoth of The Wreck of Morro Castle, one quickly realizes that, as Hannah phrases it, "We've gone too near the shoals."

continued at: http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/reed/reed12-20-02.asp

Artnet: Michel Majerus

Space Invaders

Michel Majerus, "Leuchtland," Sept. 15-Oct. 19, 2002, at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 536 West 22nd Street, New York, N.Y. 10011

Upon entering Michel Majerus' Leuchtland (in English, "Lightland," or, perhaps, "Luminousland") at Friedrich Petzel, one is immediately confronted by a large acrylic and silkscreen work that replicates the somewhat malevolent invasion force of the Space Invaders videogame. Majerus -- himself a bit of an invader in his first U.S. solo show -- sets the tone for an analysis of singularity versus multiplicity by reminding us that not even these invaders are originals. They too are inherently derivative -- indeed, one realizes by the title, Space Invaders 2, that the space invaders represented herein are not even a part of the initial invasion force (arcade game), but the subsequent follow-up invasion force (arcade game).

In simultaneous critique and homage, Majerus asserts that inspiration is not merely the isolated act of the individual -- nor is it a striving for genius. It is, rather, evolutionary, and motivated ulteriorly -- an argument advanced in the second work in the show, an abstraction of happenstance accumulation, Splash Bombs 2.

Next, Your Bad Taste depicts the orange head of another space invader/monster, who is an embodiment not only of yellow "corn" (maybe real, maybe plastic), but of the creature that is literally molded by outwardness (economy, culture, etc.).

Pathfinder, which follows, furthers the reach and self-folding of Majerus's presentation. King Kong straddles the Twin Towers on a 1976 magazine cover -- although the medium, inkjet on vinyl banner, is distinctly contemporary. The wide array of mediums and brush marks that Majerus employs is evidence of the broadness he draws upon, as well as a confession of his own bias and decision-making process in reconstituting that broadness. Bravo, a fifth enormous work, reproduces a variety of cable television advertisements by way of "chemically bonded vinyl banner on Phenolic honeycomb bonded panel."

Not to leave "art" out of Majerus's equation, Pressure Groups 1, Pressure Groups 2 and Pressure Groups 3 seamlessly include the stylistic tendencies of, for example, Frank Stella or Ellsworth Kelly. But, resistant to the convention of a painter's personal "touch," Majerus's anonymous canvases intentionally subvert specifications of style or maker -- and offer an alternative to individualistic heroics.

Following Tex-Mex (the single painting in the show that is uncompelling, both in its Jasper Johns reference and its expository cultural commentary), Majerus returns to his video game theme. Space Invaders 1 is placed, floor-plan-wise, post Space Invaders 2, and serves as an acknowledgement of the past, and a pointer to memory. (A viewer literally discovers the installation prequel by turning around.) Meticulous with his deceptive randomness, No style No points, by wide, whipping brush marks, indicates a perception shaped by candy colors and semi-intentionality.

continued at: http://www.artnet.com/magazine/reviews/reed/reed10-10-02.asp

Persona Diary: Pia Dehne

A version of this essay was published in the catalogue (Pia Dehne), “I’m So Happy I Could Die.” 

Several years ago I woke in the middle of the night with an insight into the book of Ecclesiastes.  In the King James Version, the repeated refrain is, "Vanity of vanity, all is vanity."  Various other translations employ the word "frailty."  Ecclesiastes is a short, dark book of the Bible that is, though poetic, fairly direct.  This chorus of "vanity of vanities" always troubled me as being a little out of place, and maybe a little wrong.  And the translation of "frailty" was no better.  So, this word was one of those things that I was often mulling over, and, in the night, I woke up thinking that the right word, the mot juste, was "pretense."  

Pretense of pretense, all is pretense.

What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.

The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Is there any thing whereof it may be said, see this is new?  It hath been already of old time, which was before us.   

As for the rest of Ecclesiastes, the contemporariness had never come forth as powerfully as it might have, but with the word "pretense," suddenly, it did.  Here was the post, post-modern discovery-that the solution of self-aggrandizement, in a world where "everything has been done," is itself insipid, and certainly no act of heroism.  In the current environment, the critique of "artist as hero" as an extolling of notions that are themselves outdated and rote is particularly relevant.  The existential scream is a seemingly inexhaustible source of bad artists and crashing bores.

Pia Dehne's drawing series, I'm so happy I could die, takes the analysis of this elated desponding to a level of scientific precision.  In a uniform presentation of sketches (pencil and graphite on paper, 23 inch x 30 1/2), Dehne documents the simultaneity  of self-annihilation and self-promotion that is emblematic of the twenty-first century pursuit of self-fulfillment.  Fake ZZ Tops exemplifies that striving for happiness in social milieus that are intrinsically depressing.  Thumbs up.  Let the good times roll. 

This past year in New York saw a good deal of those rolling good times.  After the events of last September, and the onset of the Globalization Blues, the Sam Adams and Vermouth was flowing.  The period demands narrative explanations-in terms of the present moment, and the century that lead up to that moment.  Dehne's visual diary, based on snapshots of, for the most part, evenings out, captures this narrative, not just with a photojournalistic methodology, but with the more illuminative pencil line of Dehne's day sketches (one a day.)  The drawings convey relations and nuances beyond the capacity of the still frame-both in the gray space and gray imaginings of the figures and grounds (Mihan & Marc), as well as in the psychology of itinerant moments (Nicole & Eurae).  

Perhaps the most consistent element of Dehne's candids is their repeated insistence, albeit blasé, that there is nothing candid about them.  Dehne's figures, such as those represented in Muscha & Gudrian, are always posing.  On her tour, often of the New York City Artworld, Dehne's becomes an expose of an environment not entirely public, and not entirely private-and the personas that inhabit this world, likewise, sustain a continual conflict between what is interior and what is exterior.  However simplistic, assumptions of inner passions driving extroverted creativity are often foremost in interactions in these arenas, and Dehne identifies them unsentimentally.  Ironically enough, both in creative culture and pop culture, the dream is to create a persona, a total pretense, that connotes an individual's core intensity.  This is the dream of self obfuscation-that the outward world will be so intrigued by this mystery, or this lack of self, that the person behind the void will be investigated, discovered, and deemed, not just worthy, but, preferably, bedazzling.  Dehne, however, is willing to take a good long look at those wide eyes and torn t-shirts, in order to find, well, wide eyes and torn t-shirts.

Dehne's subjects are aware of the camera, and of her, "the artist."  Their sad eyes look to say-yes, I'm captured again, and you know me all too well, and you know me not at all.  But besides this head-on controversion, Colin & Frank and Phillipe & ...? also put forth another argument-that of the subject looking away, suffering either the disease of nostalgia or anticipation (Matt & Brian, Sprague & Seth, and Jo & Brad).  In the case of Nicole & Eunae, the attitude of the primary model is one of total self-absorbtion. 

Indeed, more often than not, Dehne's figures can only interact through a veil of anger and/or suspicion.  Colin & Kimbra and Daw, K.A., & Fat Boy evidence this kind of pretense.  The figure, K.A., employs a spit curl as a self-conscious smirk at personal identity-and public persona.  The Mohawk and cigarette of Josef & Nancy functions similarly, as does the middle finger of S.S..  Contrariness, drunken assertion, and drunken postulating serve as alternative divides, in Anself & Susanne, and Kari & Nanci.  In Rayen & Marc the figures are literally bisected by the concept of-the drink in hand.  This idea is furthered in Berlin, by the self obliterating, faceless drinker, Ben.  Really, nobody in Dehne's series ever seems to be with anyone else.  Rather, Dehne's figures are separate in the same space, and if you are not confronted by the barrier of the spit-curl, the middle finger, or the Mohawk, even the lover sleeping in your lap (Ela & Scott) can only touch you across an expanse of alcohol.

Alcohol, to Dehne, plays a major role-in part as a defense against intimacy, in part as a facilitator of intimacy.  An entire table of empty bottles and plastic cups underlines this importance in Corner of Canal.  With her figures often hidden behind their own beer bottles or martini glasses (Haim & Gwen), alcohol is the predominant tool wielded in the two-sided  process of self loss and self advertisement.  To Dehne, even a dog (Pug), in this analogy of the world as desert, presents himself with a parched, if not drunken appeal, as if to assent-sure, you just keep my dog-bowl wet, you can drive me this way.  Rayon, Bitty, Aron, Michelle pour their social solution directly down the throat of one fuck-you finger toter.  Dan & Konlai and Thommas, Eric & Adrian find acceptance via drunken antics.  In keeping with this psychology, the only  peace attained by Dehne's subjects is that of drunken collapse-and the total elimination of self depicted in Matt & Brian, and Jerry.

For those who don't care to go out art hopping or drinking, Dehne's alternatives are few-and no more appealing.  As for other pursuits/lifestyles, Dehne can only shruggingly suggest, for men (Sprague & Rett), guns, binoculars, and baseball hats, and, for woman (Rachel & Cornia), plants, fabrics, and sewing machines.  Furthermore, Dehne's isolated figures reiterate that not even in these comraderly activities can one find empathy-only an accompaniment of solitude.  All we/she can do is look on, as Isabelle plays cat's cradle.  

Dehne, nevertheless, always relates  her subjects with enormous tenderness-even when they are outwardly at their most superficial and absurd (Lisa & Brooke).  In a demonstration of her own role as the observer, Dehne's Tico & Onga gently lays bare the vulnerability of her model, and the yearning manifested by an unremitting, unadvancing, quest for escape.  Isabelle & Sprague, affectionately feeding each other over a warm stove, is Dehne's reminder that we must, despite everything, never lose sight of our own animal innocence.

On initial viewing, Pia Dehne's series of drawings, I'm so happy I could die, seems to be a showman's spiel-an introduction of the beautiful people.  Friends as celebrities.  This, however, is not the impetus of Dehne's work, nor the progressive significance that viewers of the work will find-for the luster of Dehne's good-looking people has more to do with interior illusion than external reality.  Dehne's is a testament to contemporary purgatory.  Lovingly, and unsparingly, she documents this turn of the century with, beyond censure or applause, the understanding of an animal behaviorist, and the eye of a naturalist.  The nights are cool and long-and Dehne is out there, waiting to catch you on your nocturnal round.  The camera will flash, and you will grin, or grimace, and betray your knowledge of all too little, and all too much.

Brooklyn Rail: Paul's Ostiary

Paul's Ostiary

As published in the Brooklyn Rail: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2002/10/books/pauls-ostiary

The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster (Henry Holt, Fall 2002) 

David Zimmer’s family is killed in a plane crash. The loss of his wife and two sons sends him into a downward spiral of pills, alcohol and depression. He battles the life he had, until there is nothing to go back to. Suicide invites him. And then, watching an old silent film on television, he laughs.

And thus begins the second phase of Paul Auster’s tenth novel, The Book of Illusions. Zimmer, researching the lost comic who has caused in him this precious bubbling of momentary life, embarks upon a biography, the publication of which not only uncoils the mystery of Hector Mann (the lost silent comedian), but Zimmer’s grief, and the unmagical world that comes with despondency.

Zimmer’s fixed days are absorbed in the process of translating the melancholy François-Auguste-René Chatteaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe (“Memoirs from Beyond the Grave,” or, as Zimmer would have it, “Memoirs of a Dead Man”). Carapaced by the shell of an “ugly” modernist condominium, Zimmer has found his physical and psychological tomb. But with a letter of summons from the long disappeared Hector Mann, Zimmer is sparked by the possibility that maybe there is something beyond memory— maybe more could come from a man who’d been, whether by his own will or tragic circumstance, forgotten.

Auster, a master not only of prose, but of narratives ingenious and original, teases us with the onset of film-noir/thriller elements that creep into Zimmer’s life. By this Hollywoodness— the dames with little guns, the big chunks of money as if fallen from the sky— we are challenged to question our narrator’s reliability, at which time he defends himself vehemently. Reasonable, yes, but unreasonably adamant. He doth protest too much— just like a guilty liar. Just like a drunk who says he’s not quite a drunk— and doesn’t ever quit drinking. He wholly believes the highly dubitable players in the Hector Mann mystery, all the while dismissing their reasons to lie, and never once discussing his own reasons to tend to gullibility. And yet, we are aware of Zimmer’s partiality to believe— though it has not been couched as a cautionary to the reader, but, rather, as the very catharsis of his story. “We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.” Everything, he says, bears out the tale of Hector Mann as it’s been laid out for him— but really, there’s nothing there. A notebook, a forty minute film, a ranch, and a few people. And the rest is just unexplained mystery— with a story fit onto it. The one tantalizing clue, the gun that ends up in Zimmer’s possession, is never even considered— clearly, a conscious omission by Auster, who goes so far as to tantalize us further with the slugs that Zimmer fires into the ground. Presumably, these slugs might be matched to the bullet found in the skeleton of the Hollywood gossip columnist Mann was supposed to have buried—though, of course, even if it wasn’t the gun that killed the columnist, it wouldn’t have proved anything, which is exactly the narrative subversion that is Auster’s intention.

Is the narrative just a con-game played out by an old couple in New Mexico? Zimmer never really sees the crucial confirmations— the bodies, the burning of the evidence. Is it just Zimmer’s own fantasy? How could anyone— even a private investigator investigating Zimmer— possibly know about a conversation with a random doctor on a random trip to New York? What about doctor/patient privilege? Auster lays the architecture to what may be no more than a postmortem fantasy. With rapt attention, we pursue the plot, the mystery, but Auster occasionally squeezes our hand, to remind us it’s all unsure.

So, if all is unsure— what is The Book of Illusions about?

The Book of the Dead is an 8th century Tibetan sacred Buddhist text recited by a lama or lamas to a dead or dying person. The reading/ceremony prepares one for the interval between death and reincarnation. Auster, by his title, rejects death as anything but an illusion. The afterlife is not even passingly addressed in The Book of Illusions. To Auster, the only consideration of death is a consideration of life— and, as illusory as life may be, it is only in life that one can experience rebirth. Life, time and love, these are the things that, ultimately, we all lose— and that we lose all at once. And while it may appear that it is the deceased who suffer these losses, for Auster, it is the bereaved— and the only reincarnation of consequence is that of surviving these inevitable losses, and the inevitably of surviving them alone.

Nobody can possibly understand the losses of Hector Mann, David Zimmer, or any one of us. Everything is fallible— reconstructed from memory. In case of point, David Zimmer’s lost wife and children are pure memory— we as readers never even meet them, but just pine for them as and when he pines for them. As much as Hector Mann’s and David Zimmer’s lives are symbolic of our own “passages,” we are, finally, unable to communicate to anyone else what we have, and will leave behind.

Auster’s goal is to make us feel loss over something that never existed— in the form of Hector Mann’s twelve lost movies. Movie-making— the art form which probably encompasses the most people, the most easily— is selected in order that we readers might, together, share a metaphor of loss. The silent comedy, in its muteness and its weight as an art that may have seen its heyday, certainly references the novel— but a multiplicity of other arts as well. To Auster, the artistic act is not one of specificity, but a broad examination of the illusory voyage of lives spent wholly alone. To quote David Zimmer’s translation of Chatteaubriand, “everything withers in a day; whoever lives too long dies alive.” And yes, Chatteaubriand’s words are beautiful, and we may forge and recognize beautiful things, but, ultimately, the effort to share our lament is always futile— we are different dogs howling at the moon.

To look beyond beauty, to discover a deeper way to love and live, one must confront the question— if communicating that which makes up our interiors is futile, why bother?

To Auster, the pursuit is the reincarnation. Hope and time are the key ingredients to healing and understanding. To live, to be alive, David Zimmer discovers, is to have hope— to see ahead to the next insight, to expect that “sooner or later a person will come along who accidentally opens the door.”

At a time when grief and the necessity of understanding unfathomably different experiences have taken on urgent significances, Paul Auster’sThe Book of Illusions is a considered epistle on bringing hope to hopelessness. The Book of Illusions will haunt and comfort you— frightening, serene, you will not forget it. For Auster enthusiasts, it’s time to add another book to the stack, and for Auster initiates, it’s time to start one.

Artnet: Ann Craven

Birds & Beasts

Ann Craven, Sept. 4-Oct. 5, 2002, at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc., 524 West 19th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011

At a time when rebellion is the primary form of conformism, and most of us have been shocked so many times that we barely jerk when we are touched by the enlightening intentions of some new cattle prod, Ann Craven's paintings of birds and deer are genuinely disarming. Having indulged ourselves and suffered through every spectacle, most of us, on the Chelsea amble, are prepared for just about any eventuality. Except this. Cute, big-eyed, brightly painted animals.

One may attempt to fit these 17 paintings into the generally approved kitsch category. Other birds have touched down lately -- such as, in stark contrast to Craven's birds, John Newsom's sado-birds. (More related to Craven's subtle anthropomorphism is Michael Joo's current show at Anton Kern, which includes many four-legged coyotes and a single five-legged one.) Cultural sentimentality is always an appealing target, whether it is bulls-eyed in the form of iconographic personas or objects, or pop-culture signifiers. Yet Craven's animals, for all the outward corollaries -- the brightness, the adorableness -- extend no invitation to an interpretation of sentimentality, and, therefore, no juxtaposition of irony.

At the opening of Craven's first show at Gasser & Grunert, one overheard a good deal of painterly debate on Craven's brush strokes. There's a bold variance at work -- from broad, blurring backgrounds to the fine feathers of Craven's canaries. In the bird paintings, Craven's avian figures "pop" from a somewhat diffused background. The technique, besides being dimensional, helps Craven to straddle the dividing line between ornithological study and a Tweety Bird cartoon. The soft focus of the background, as well as being common in National Geographic-type photography, implies the cell process of animation, in which the foreground figure, perpetually mobile, is suspended on a static scenic stage. By either reference, we are reminded that this creature was doing something before it was interrupted, and whether or not that something was enjoyable or tiresome to that creature, they'll likely go back to it when we go away.

There is a suspended reality to Craven's paintings, which is compounded by an inability to understand Craven's subjects -- to look across the expanse that is between them and us. An association is immediately made to childhood -- and the ethereal nature of recall. Like memories, Craven's simple images suggest larger cognitive and emotional roles. Colors, which might at first seem archetypal in their purity, are transformed, such as the case of the backdrops of Craven's yellow canaries, into a purple pink, a red pink, a green pink, a yellow pink and an orange pink. These slight variations create wholly independent environments, and suggest not only the similitudes of experience, but psychologies, by dint of minor differences, of unfathomable separateness.

The one thing all the paintings have in common is the fixed stare of the subject -- be it pied mynah, white-tailed deer or African gray parrot. Across the inter-species divide, they look out, in terror and elation -- the thrill and threat of having made contact. Either you go or I go, say their postures. Always, we are on the brink of departure. In the black eyes of Craven's animals, we are faced with the seeming viability of an empathic exchange, as well as the impossibility of that communion. Such fleeting instances are significant not only of memory, but of dreams and self-reflectivity. There is that moment when we all wonder how "here" we are, and if even that wondering isn't somehow illusory. We are real and absurd -- evolutionary wonders, and cartoons. Infinitely active, and infinitely divorced from the blurred settings behind us.

The canary peering out from Craven's announcement gives the impression of being one of those strangers on the subway -- those ones we wonder about, those ones that trigger our wondering about ourselves. And no, according to Craven, we are not the exotic animals that we fancied we were. We are just parrots, canaries, deer and starlings. World-over and common animals -- animals exported, owned and thoroughly understood.

Even the deer, to some degree, carry with them the idea that they are preserved only for hunting. Indeed, one cannot help but wonder if all of Craven's animals are being viewed through the sight of a gun. The claws of her canaries are woefully inadequate to fend off the threat that we, the looker, engender. The animals that Craven chooses as our totems are those animals that, within the humanity context, are allowed to live.

continued at: http://www.artnet.com/magazine/reviews/reed/reed9-23-02.asp

VH1: Cool An' Speckless

A version of this essay was published in 100 GREATEST ALBUMS, edited by Jacob Hoye (VH1 Books)

London calling to the faraway towns

Now that war is declared—and battle comes down.

—"London Calling"

It was 1983 and we were a scaly lot—wildly pimpled and wildly grinning.  And, by our own standards, mighty good looking, and ready for anything. 

We had been meddling with the other rock that was out there—The Minutemen, X, Fishbone.  And of course, the reggae—Black Uhuru, Burning Spear, Peter Tosh, etceteras.  All of us were Bad Brains adherents—whom we regularly saw at the Ritz on Thirteenth Street.  Yet none of it, exactly, was music that was ours.  We found ourselves on a continuous search for something we hadn’t yet heard, and on some level, the music we listened to was the imprecise answer of limited options.  

What else was there?  The Duran Duran agenda was far too polished for us—and surely, a sound like that was part of the machine we so resented.  We were consciously aware, in the shoulder pads and rolled cuffs of the early eighties, that rock’n roll had become the preferred entry to conformity.  That rebellion had been canned.  (Generations still respond to the Clash as alternative, because rock’n roll has only gotten more sanitary.)  Billy Joel or Bruce Springstein had an aura, to us, of the suburban, as did Heavy Metal.  Music, for a teenager, was as much about style as substance, and whatever we secretly thought of a song, there was no forgiving long hair, or sympathy for New Jersey (Jersyites being the arch faux pas to any of us Manhattanites).  American, white rock’n roll had a distinctly non-urban history.  Early on, those first city crooners, singing about life under the boardwalk, had been co-opted by the rural Elvis, and the L.A. garage band, and eventually, after other incarnations, by the Seattle grunge scene.  Urban life had become singularly ‘black.’  And in fact, many of us listened singularly to Rap (many an identity crisis resulting).  Anyone with a credible sense of reality, however, knew that our urban experience was not then represented in Rap (though Rap, as represented by commercial record producers, is much broader today).  As for Punk—it was just too silly.

When we were first introduced to the Clash (through albums subsequent to London Calling—I think, first, Combat Rock), we found the urban heavy metal that we had been craving.  Not only did the Clash satisfy our anger, but our sense of romanticism about city life—as easily represented in the form of London as New York.  As for the musical elements of the Clash—the punk and reggae—we were well prepped, as we’d been listening to music like that for years.  Here was a thinking man’s Sex Pistols, or a young, white Bad Brains. (Even though The Clash just looked young.)  Finally, without hair-shaking or safety pins, we could relate.

New York, New York, 42nd Street,

Hustlers rustle and pimps pimp the beat.

—"The Right Profile"

Additionally, the Clash’s mocking, if emotive attitude towards life (evidenced in "The Right Profile") extended as far as themselves, and in that, was a perfect counterpoint to the near-universal hypocrisy.  The Clash were not ashamed of the fact that they were mournful, drunk, and a little goofy.  How could that fail to appeal to us?  And yet still, as puny as they were—as puny as we were—the rage felt real. 

Like skyscrapers rising up

Floor by floor, I’m not giving up.

—"I’m Not Down"

Work hard and get ahead—we were overwhelmed not only by our disbelief in the lie, but also by our belief in it.  It was America in the fifties, again—although now with a sense of irony.  (In the eighties, the fifties really was the decade that we were reliving—from the hamburger to the mini-skirt.)  And that fifties awkwardness, and hint of rockabilly that was so intense to the culture (The Stray Cats, The Fine Young Cannibals), it was also there in The Clash, but raw—in songs such as, Brand New Cadillac, Jimmy Jazz, and Wrong ‘em Boyo.  And as for that rebel-without-a-cause, he was also there for us, in songs like Revolution Rock, and Rudie Can’t Fail, where the reggae influence offered not only a critique off all that was absurd, plain and sinister, but a personal solution.  Get rude and reckless.  Look cool and speckless.  Drink brew for breakfast.  ("Rudie Can’t Fail.")

The Clash had honed a response to the angst of the time—represented in songs like "Lost In The Supermarket," and "Working For The Clampdown".  But the real battle, The Clash had realized, was against our own fantasy of rebellion—that mythic rebellion characterized in "The Guns Of Brixton."

When they kick at your front door

How you gonna come?

Like many, I imagine that teenager in me is still waiting—dreaming of the falling door....

The truth, of course, now, as it was then, is that waiting isn’t enough.  And however consciously, we all knew that The Clash was singing to the tragedy and legend of our own failure.  In the songs, "Death or Glory" and "Four Horsemen," every note played, and word sung, speaks directly to this awareness of the con—the fraud we were perpetuating on even ourselves.  And today, with my generation slowly taking the helm—what do we have?  Disco lives on in dance-music and rap so sharp and so smooth—and so without tooth.  And the pre-rock’n roll ballad has returned to the fore in a new rockish format.  And even the littlle rock’n roll that’s left is casually tendered as a form of societal initiation.  The only comfort that we can take in the death of rock’n roll, is that most of us probably died right along with it.  And the Clash made sense of it all.  Basements and streets as dingy as our own optimism.  Handclaps and beats as dragging as our own footsteps through the inevitability of our lives.  And a music of endless defiance, and endless surrender.  

That’s just the beat of time—the beat that must go on

If you been trying for years—then we already heard your song. 

—"Death or Glory"

So the Clash is on the greatest-album list.  In the end they get us all.