May 28, 2004
Review of Helen Mirra at Peter Freeman Gallery
Here is a review of Helen Mirra's "Hewn Third," her recent solo exhibition at Peter Freeman, Inc. It is to be published in the forthcoming issue of Untitled magazine, a British quarterly.
Over the last five years, Chicago-based artist Helen Mirra has established herself as one of the foremost practitioners of what Benjamin Buchloch once called dense minimalism. Her art is in synch with the formal qualities of 1960s Minimalist forebears yet inverts the ‘muteness’ of those artists’ works – with their resolute push of meaning outward onto the environment and viewer – by her use of materials and processes which load each of her objects with internal value. Mirra imbues her forms with notions of handicraft and labor, landscape, the body, and language; what results are restrained, formally elegant, and highly allusive fabric sculptures, drawings, text works, and films. They reward extended deliberation by acting as a prism through which to comprehend abstract concepts and disparate inferences. Sky-wreck (2001) is a telling example: it is an unfolded polyhedral form, with 110 triangular patches of fabric laid on the floor, each richly hand-dyed with indigo ink. The work folds together references to Dr. Bonner (inventor of the eponymous soap) and Paul Celan, R. Buckminster Fuller’s dymaxion maps and geodesic domes, and Carl Andre’s sculpture Mons Veneris (1975). Occasionally the complexity (or obscurity) of her allusion is too tough a nut to crack, as in the abstruse philosophical references – here rendered in two languages as disjointed concrete poetry – of her recent typewriter ink-on-cotton works, but for the most part Mirra ably weds form and content. Her spare works are suffused with but not weighted down by their symbolic meaning.
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Article on Harrell Fletcher
Here is the text of a short article on Portland-based artist Harrell Fletcher that will be published in the July-September issue of Flash Art.
Continue reading "Article on Harrell Fletcher"Harrell Fletcher is quick to point out that he is not a collaborator. His recent projects, which have involved senior citizens’ groups, other artists, new mothers and their babies, friends, church choirs, and meditation classes, are less the result of an intentional reaching out to specific partners than a byproduct of the artist’s everyday engagement with the outside world. Everyone is a potential accomplice when you go looking for what you find beautiful. When you find it, it’s natural that you’ll want to share.
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May 27, 2004
Lines I wish I wrote, #1
My Los Angeles-based colleague and art nerd reading group partner Michael Ned Holte writes, in a review of a young artist's video show at Black Dragon Society: "The monitors are mounted on a skeletal wooden cube and face inward, outward, or upward, creating a complex spatial and temporal arrangement. The individual channels reveal Haskard's obsessions with tubes, funnels, food, and liquids—all chosen with an eye for intense color—and evoke bodily processes of eating, shitting, and everything in between. Mining this territory, Haskard frequently employs vertiginous footage shot by a video camera strapped to his head. The hide-and-seek juxtaposition of images induces a delirious primal confusion between interior and exterior: Attempting to digest the whole installation would be as preposterous as climbing into one's own asshole."
("Lines" idea borrowed from TMFTML.)
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Mark Flood at American Fine Arts
An Artforum.com review of the Mark Flood exhibition on view through this Saturday at American Fine Arts. The link dies in two months, so here's the full text:
At American Fine Arts, Texas-based artist Mark Flood presents collages made in the 1980s and paintings made over the last two years. The collages, tucked away in the back room, are made from multiple copies of mid-'80s promotional posters the artist stockpiled while working at a record shop. Each celebrity is comically reconfigured, often with a grossly enlarged head; one featuring Michael Jackson is uncannily prescient of that star’s later surgical transformations. The large paintings in the main space play a more serious game. Each work, executed in a handful of sharp, contrasting colors, presents the indexical mark of a ripped piece of lace—laid down on the canvas, painted over, then removed—atop a more or less monochrome background. Up close, one can see flowers and other motifs emerge from the patterning; step away, and the irregularly shaped splashes of color are nearly abstract. That the “representational” parts of each painting are simultaneously direct traces of an existing object and once-removed depictions of something else makes the act of deciphering them delightfully complex.
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May 21, 2004
Aeronaut Mik at The Project
An Artforum.com review of the Aeronout Mik exhibition at The Project. The link dies in two months, so here's the full text:
Dutch artist Aernout Mik is a prodigious maker of video installations who, having been celebrated on the European museum circuit for several years, is presenting his New York solo debut at the Project. Parallel Corner, 2003, the only work in the show, is a silent four-channel video loop that debuted last autumn at the Istanbul Biennial. The cameras pan smoothly yet restlessly, as if on surveillance duty, across two scenes that bleed together. (Staged simultaneously in a warehouse, they were cleverly filmed to allow people near-seamless movement across screens.) In one, dozens of cameramen and reporters jostle for position before an older man and his younger attaché. In the other, children play among decrepit cars, oblivious to the other scene. The projections span two six-foot-high walls joined at a slightly oblique angle whose placement, close to the room's entrance, seems slightly aggressive, suggesting the street barricades of social protest. Are the events we're seeing wholly fictional? Are the two scenes related by more than physical proximity? Mik's calculated nonstance itself raises other, larger questions: Is such ambiguity necessarily productive? Whether you think so or not, Parallel Corner is surely seductive.
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May 20, 2004
Introductory essay for "Noctambule"
(Written for an exhibition my current employers are organizing.)
Noctambule presents a select group of eight young American artists—including several who are participating in the 2004 Whitney Biennial or have previously exhibited together—at the Fondation Dosne-Bibliotheque Thiers, an exceptional Parisian hôtel particulier. The exhibition marks both the first time that some of them have exhibited in Europe and that the New York gallery D’Amelio Terras has organized an exhibition of this scale in Paris.
Despite practices that are formally and materially quite distinct, the artists—David Altmejd, Matthew Brannon, Amy Globus, Matt Greene, Hanna Liden, Chloe Piene, Banks Violette, and Michael Wetzel—are connected by an inquiry into the eerie, uncanny, dark, and unknown. Although some have been grouped under the rubric of the “Modern Gothic,” these artists focus not only on Gothic’s contemporary subcultural connotations but also on its fin-de-siecle suggestions of decay, Victorian decadence, Romantic idealism and otherworldliness. The title Noctambule, a French word for that which comes alive at night, pays homage to the artists’ interest in transformation, be it bodily, social, or material.
The past century was marked by a dispersal of the Gothic genre and by its viral infiltration—largely via movies and music—into the wider cultural landscape. B-movie and horror cinema picked up where literature left off in the last half of the 19th century; now this new generation of artists conflates the two to outline how the horrific can be seen at the edges of contemporary culture (or corrupting it from within.) This attitude is manifested in Gothic iconographies and in attempts to create counternarratives in the shadow of economic excesses, the promises of technology, and other recent Western cultural utopias. Anxiety over the limits and boundaries of this progress inevitably leads to diverse investigations into the supernatural, natural forces, imaginative delusions, religious and human evil, social transgression, and spiritual corruption; all that does not fit into “proper” modern society.
Noctambule is an exhibition of ravishing surfaces and the awful and threatening worlds that they sometimes only barely cover. The artworks render visual the imagined sites of transformation and objects of traditional Gothic writing, including werewolves, occult ritual, the eerie depths of the forest, libidinous desire, and decaying bodies, updating the references to include the mobs at rock concerts and the stars around which they gather, science fiction cinema, and teenage killing sprees. The building’s ornate rooms, with herringbone wood floors, crystal chandeliers, and velvet-draped walls, are anchored by sculptures with an equally exquisite sense of materiality. Glitter, crystals, and shiny enamel as black as the night sky are all wrought by hand, and a sense of handicraft also suffuses the paintings, drawings, and tapestries on view. These artists inquiries into contemporary culture—with its emphases on technological production, scientific advance, and the diffusion of democratic principles—unveil a dark current running just beneath the surface.
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May 12, 2004
Amy Cutler at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects
An Artforum.com review of Amy Cutler's second solo exhibition at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects. The link dies in two months, so here's the full text:
Amy Cutler's second solo at Leslie Tonkonow includes three prints and a dozen gouache-on-paper examples of her fantasy figuration, in which dour-faced women, often dressed in brightly colored and intricately patterned clothes, are set adrift in ambiguous narratives and large expanses of white space. In one etching, three matrons have birdhouses for heads; in Progeny, 2003, two pallid figures, facing each other and holding hands, give birth (through their mouths) to miniature, fully formed adults. There is a melancholic undercurrent to Cutler's bizarre scenarios that separates these illustrations from, say, Marcel Dzama's cartoonishness—the majority of the "women's work" she depicts seems somehow rehabilitative, as if her wise-beyond-their-years protagonists were righting others' wrongs. Six more of Cutler's works are on view in the Whitney Biennial: Be sure to move the visitors in line for Yayoi Kusama's installation out of the way to get a good look.
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Joseph Brodsky on measuring up
Brodsky uses the decision to write in English as an opportunity to examine his relationship to Auden:
"My sole purpose then, as it is now, was to find myself in closer proximity to the man whom I considered the greatest mind of the twentieth century: Wystan Hugh Auden.
I was, of course, perfectly aware of the futility of my undertaking, not so much because I was born in Russia and into its language (which I am never to abandon--and I hope vice versa) as because of this poet's intelligence, which in my view has no equal. I was aware of the futility of this effort, moreover, because Auden had been dead four years then. Yet to my mind, writing in English was the best way to get near him, to work on his terms, to be judged, if not by his code of conscience, then by whatever it is in the English language that made this code of conscience possible.
These words, the very structure of these sentences, all show anyone who has read a single stanza or a single paragraph of Auden's how I fail. To me, though, a failure by his standards is preferable to a success by others'. Besides, I knew from the outset that I was bound to fail; whether this sort of sobriety was my own or has been borrowed from his writing, I can no longer tell. All I hope for while writing in his tongue is that I won't lower his level of mental operation, his plane of regard. This is as much as one can do for a better man: to continue in his vein; this, I think, is what civilizations are all about."
(From an essay collected in Less Than One)
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May 6, 2004
Rodney Graham at 303 Gallery
An Artforum.com review of the Rodney Graham exhibition now at 303 Gallery. The link dies in two months, so here's the full text:
Rodney Graham has nudged himself out of his seamless-loop groove and returned to New York to show a film with a definite beginning and end. The establishing shot is a head-on view of a typewriter case; the cover promptly disappears, followed by lengthy, loving close-ups of a pristine 1930s Rheinmetall that call to mind Albert Renger-Patzsch's industrial fetishizations. But Graham is in an elegiac mood, and synthetic snow soon starts to descend from above, until the machine is entirely buried. (The first few flakes on the keys call to mind the brightly burning granules of Coruscating Cinnamon, 1996, a film seen in his last New York solo.) The film itself is projected by an outsize '50s Cinemeccanica whose click-clack whir provides the missing sound track; breaking out of tight formal constraints, the work resonates with an exceptionally affecting wistfulness.
The beauty of a good editor: 1) this review is about twenty percent shorter than my submitted draft yet makes all of my points, and 2) it reminds me not to get too cocky about my writing, as it can always be improved.
Special bonus: a review of a Rodney Graham show published in Flash Art sometime last year, perhaps September.
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May 3, 2004
Holub on playing the role of artist
Here's something written by Czech poet Miroslav Holub that mirrors how I frequently feel:
"I have stated repeatedly that a person is an artist only when he is actually creating his little piece of work, his small artistic performance. The rest of the time, as a rule he only pretends to be an artist, or displays certain associated artistic characteristics such as restlessness, hypochondria, sloppy dress, unbridled temperament, clumsiness, and sentimentality."
(Quote and associated link originally found via Golden Rule Jones.)