June 30, 2004
Mark Handforth essay for "Terminal Five" catalog
Here are the first two paragraphs of my essay about Mark Handforth that will appear in the catalogue accompanying the Terminal Five exhibition:
Mark Handforth possesses the increasingly rare ability to make sculptures that engage the eye, the body, and the mind. With an incisive wit and visual sophistication, the Miami-based artist pairs the handmade with appropriated everyday objects, making subtle alternations and juxtapositions to reference modernist design, Minimalist sculpture, street subcultures, and roadside Americana. To great effect, Handforth plays representation against abstraction, the rough against the refined, and art history against itself. He frequently exhibits multiple works at once, making installations of casual associativeness that, as 2004 Whitney Biennial curator Debra Singer notes, “suggest a constant state of flux—a process of being rearranged, constructed, and dismantled all at once.” This was literally true of earlier works, such as Not from where I’m standing, exhibited at the North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996. That installation comprised a tower of industrial scaffolding that acted as a screen on which an ever-changing array of objects were installed or hung. More recently, that sense of flux occurs in the mind, as the viewer becomes progressively more cognizant of the multiple quotations implanted in each work. However, it is no small feat that, unlike Simon Starling, whose highly conceptual work inevitably requires careful explication, Handforth never loses sight of the value of aesthetic pleasure. He delights in a narrow range of materials—exotic woods, industrially fabricated metals, fluorescent lights covered by colored gels, multicolored candles—that are deployed to very specific effect. The result is an art that, as Singer writes, is “equal parts suburban alienation and modernist transcendence.”
Given Handforth’s consistent engagement with Minimalist sculpture—no matter that only some of his works resemble Minimalist objects—it can be rewarding to examine part of his oeuvre through the dominant lens by which that earlier generation was viewed: phenomenology. A recent Artforum article by art historian James Meyer posits that for many contemporary sculptors a relationship to the spectacularly sized gallery space has replaced a direct engagement with the viewer’s body. At the tail end of a half-century genealogy of this transition, Meyer cites Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses and the sculptors who have filled Tate Modern’s grand Turbine Hall as artists for whom “…an aesthetic of size…has subsumed a Minimalist concept of scale.” Yet Handforth’s art is an exception to this trend, with many of his works splitting the difference between the two poles while falling outside of Meyer’s chronological spectrum. As physical objects, Miami Kiosk (1998) and DiamondBrite (2004) can be placed somewhere between the somatic works of Sol LeWitt, Walter De Maria, and others in Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in 1966 and the oversized sculptures by Tony Smith, Ronald Bladen, and Barnett Newman in Scale as Content at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1967: they’re big enough to seem awkwardly stuffed into the gallery space yet not so large as to fully alienate a viewing body. (In fact, the exact opposite of alienation occasionally happens: one widely circulated picture of Miami Kiosk features children playing on top of it.) It is conceivable that Handforth really performed a David-versus-Goliath showdown with the highway sign—just as fellow Biennial artist Wade Guyton wrestled with Marcel Breuer chairs—to make DiamondBrite, generating its torqued form by hand. Handforth’s objects privilege neither viewer nor gallery space, thereby completing the Minimalist task of making the viewer physically aware not only of the object, but the space in which it resides.
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Jennifer and Kevin McCoy essay for "Terminal Five" catalog
Here are the first two paragraphs of an essay about Brooklyn-based artist duo Jennifer and Kevin McCoy that will appear in the catalogue accompanying the Terminal Five exhibition this winter at...wait for it...JFK Airport's Terminal 5.
From a billboard detergent advertisement to the weather forecast on the morning radio, from the menu at a favorite restaurant to snippets of conversation overheard in line at the DMV, we constantly process, sort, and decide how to store information. Archives are necessarily formed—all the weather forecasts in the past week, for example—and, in real time, we splice bits of them together to form private narratives that give shape to experience. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, collaborators since 1996 and based in Brooklyn, have for the past eight years often used digital technology as a proxy for this process, exploring concepts of narrative, repetition, archiving, the database, and the influence of media in our everyday lives. The technology they deploy—in obsessively edited videos, on websites, in live events, or in sculptural installations—with its underlying code of ones and zeros, is a metaphor for our mental systems of classification. Wisely the McCoys use it as a means rather than an end. Without becoming didactic or losing visual appeal, their art perceptively exposes the strict organization by which we cope with a glut of information.
Soft Rains (2003), exhibited at FACT, Liverpool, Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, and at Postmasters Gallery in New York, treads on our mental library of cinematic images by using digital technology to stitch together hackneyed narratives lifted from countless genre flicks. Seven tabletop sculptures on pedestals of varying height, each a miniature film set made by hand and populated with figures ordered from a German model railroad manufacturer, become settings we have little trouble recognizing: there’s the David Lynch chilller and James Bond thriller, a Fellini classic, a noirish lounge scene, and an artsy indie film featuring a warehouse loft-slash-studio. Our omniscient eye peers down at these lifeless scenes through a phalanx of small video cameras and lights on flexible metal arms, each precisely pointed to a specific part of the (non-)action. An earlier exhibition of some of this work had a working title of “Robot Films,” and indeed the McCoys cede the directorial “Action!” and “Cut!” to a computer, which in real-time feeds the cameras’ motionless views through a program that composes an endlessly reorganizing “film” made of roughly minute-long fragments, each containing six to ten shots. The slivers of would-be narrative, aided by a score partly taken from actual films and partly composed for the work, lose none of their cinematic magic from this concession. Instead, despite presenting the mechanics of creation (the sculptural film sets and their attendant cameras) and the product (the resultant “film”) in the same place, Soft Rains encourages a double suspension of disbelief that leaves the viewer to focus on either the deft craftsmanship of the former or the emotional tug of the latter.
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June 29, 2004
Artur Zmijewski at MIT List Visual Arts Center
Here's an Artforum.com review of Artur Zmijewski's first US exhibition, recently held at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. The review is already in the Artforum online archives, so here's the full text:
The stateside debut of Polish video artist and filmmaker Artur Zmijewski covers the last five years of his practice and stars casts of characters uncommon in contemporary art: the physically handicapped, the aged and infirm, nude soldiers, deaf children. Earlier works stage interactions between multiple people on-screen. In the video An Eye for an Eye, 1998, people missing body parts are paired with healthy partners who effectively "lend" the use of their bodies to complete rudimentary tasks. Out for a Walk, 2000, follows able-bodied men "walking" the bodies of completely paralyzed individuals. None of this is exploitative, as Zmijewski's impassive, respectful lens—each video involves only rudimentary camera work and offers no authorial commentary—triggers an instinctive sympathy in the gallerygoer. More recent works like Our Songbook, 2003, further reduce the distance between subject and viewer. In the video, a group of aged Polish émigrés to Israel, after years of speaking Hebrew almost exclusively, attempt to remember and sing the lyrics to the Polish national anthem. Zmijewski's emphasis on vulnerable bodies and faltering minds is a sharp reminder of the precariousness of the privilege of health.
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June 28, 2004
Kai Althoff at ICA Boston
An Artforum.com review of Kai Althoff's show at the ICA Boston. This show is highly recommended. Here is the full text:
This exhibition-cum-Gesamkunstwerk is a must-see. Replete with fifteen years of the Cologne-based Althoff's disarmingly sincere fragmentary drawings, delicately moody watercolors, sculptural installations, music, videos, and texts—created alone or in collaboration with friends—the show blends themes of male socializing, nostalgia for adolescence, recent German history, and religion into what comes across as an earnest, if slightly fantastical, rendering of everyday life. With an empathic, folksy faux naïveté, Althoff successfully yet somewhat ambiguously identifies with and inhabits an eclectic range of invented and real characters. From a schoolboy coming out of the closet to Francia Gimble Masters (fictional spokesperson for Workshop, Althoff's long-running band) to 1930s-era stage actors to Jürgen Bartsch (a 1960s pedophiliac serial killer), he divulges an ego-deflating sensitivity to disparate human experience that verges on the beatific. In curator Nicholas Baume's words, the artist "seeks to engage the emotional content" of images, and it comes across in the gallery: Althoff is a prism through which the white noise of everyday life is transformed into a dazzling rainbow.
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Christopher Knowles at Gavin Brown's Enterprise
While I was in Paris, Artforum posted my review of Christopher Knowles' exhibition at Gavin Brown's Enterprise. Here's the full text:
One gets the feeling that the doubling and repetition in this show—a not-quite-thorough but well-edited selection of works from the past twenty-five years by this longtime Robert Wilson collaborator—is less conceptual conceit than compulsive necessity. Five differently sized painted renditions of our rainbow-colored terror-alert system hang on one wall, matched in chromatic brilliance by geometric pieces of cut paper arranged on two pedestals on the other side of the room. Obsessively designed typewritten works—often featuring the letter C (as in Christopher) as a decorative element—are the centerpiece of the exhibition and merge perfectionism with the slightly absurd in a way that Carl Andre would admire. Multiple typewritten lists of pop and rock songs from various recent decades? Check. These works have an inner logic that may be hard to replicate but that makes intuitive sense, especially when taken as a whole.
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June 14, 2004
Review of "Big Nothing" at ICA Philadelphia
Artnet has published my review of "The Big Nothing", now on view at the ICA Philadelphia. Formatting issues on that site made my text a little weird (as did the use of my second-to-last draft), so here's the full review as I intend it:
“It’s okay, we’re on fairly solid ground,” Robert Smithson assures Nancy Holt midway through their 1971 film Swamp, presented near the entrance of “The Big Nothing,” an ambitious group exhibition about Seinfeld’s favorite topic now on view at the ICA Philadelphia. Co-curated by Ingrid Schaffner, Bennett Simpson, and Tanya Leighton, the show starts with a bang: a cut-to-the-chase survey of the empty or closed gallery as an artistic gesture, with ephemera documenting Yves Klein’s 1958 Le Vide and Robert Barry’s Closed Gallery (1970) through Gareth James’ wReconstruction (2000) and Santiago Serra’s Spanish pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale. From there, however, like Smithson and Holt wandering more or less blindly through the reeds and tall grass of exurban New Jersey, the show meanders in too many directions at once. Moving through the first-floor galleries, “nothing” is proposed as an apex of spiritual aspiration, in Minimalism, in memorial gesture, in consumer vacuity, and elsewhere.
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June 9, 2004
Group exhibition at Gorney, Bravin, + Lee
An Artforum.com review of the group exhibition currently on view at Gorney, Bravin + Lee. The link dies in two months, so here's the full text:
The dialogue among the works of these four painters and one sculptor—all of whom have significant exhibition histories and many years of abstract work under their belts—is more murmur than shouting match, and, with no readily apparent ideology, no radical mixing of mediums, and no young marquee names, visitors to this show may have trouble discerning a hook. Take your time, though: What reveals itself as the common denominator is sophisticated abstract visual language predicated on harmonious color and compositional balance. Leipzig-based painter Uwe Kowski nestles fragments of words among thinly painted strokes of color that, in Fieber, 2004, seem like an imaginary landscape. Sculptor Mel Kendrick contributes the beautifully delicate Pipe/Hole, 2000, a hollow, upended, and black ink-washed tree trunk with circular excisions, supported by two metal pipes and garlanded in rubber. As in his Untitled (Orange Block), 2004, the play between what's there and what isn't is deftly realized. In keeping with the quiet tone, three examples of Thomas Nozkowski's technically hyper-proficient easel-scale abstractions are devoid of color. But, like the rest of the work in the show, they're no less expressive for their mutedness.