October 31, 2004
Spencer Finch at Postmasters
Artforum.com has posted my brief review of Spencer Finch's new exhibition at Postmasters. I'm in LA at the moment, but will archive the write-up on BrianSholis.com when I return to New York. In the meantime, here's the text:
Spencer Finch has pursued the boundaries of perception doggedly and imaginatively for the better part of a decade, and his longstanding interest in transposition (often involving installations in which he recreates the qualities of natural light found at a culturally or historically charged site) is paired in this show with examples of text-to-image translation. Without downplaying his emphasis on bright light and brighter color, Finch predicates several works here on an eclectic group of texts: an excerpt from Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, a passage from Yasunari Kawabata's novel Snow Country, a 16th-century proto-haiku by Arakida Moritake, and a line from an Emily Dickinson poem. He applies Nabokov's synesthetic theory of the alphabet to a section of Heisenberg's tract, representing it in a thirty-six-panel mural-scale rainbow of watercolor dots, each corresponding to a particular letter. Stare for too long and the splotches dilate, approximating the look of the ten watercolors, hung on the opposite wall, that Finch made by copying images of butterflies glimpsed via his peripheral vision. (Nabokov was a lepidopterist as well as a synaesthete.) Finch uses photography only rarely, but the best work in the show is an unassuming series of seven small pictures, taken from the same vantage point seven minutes apart, cataloging a windowpane's shift from transparency (the landscape outside) to reflective opacity (a simple interior) at dusk.
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October 26, 2004
David Wojnarowicz at Roth Horowitz
Artforum.com has posted my brief review of the David Wojnarowicz exhibition at Roth Horowitz. The text is also now archived here at BrianSholis.com.
Like the two slim poetry volumes Rimbaud published by age 20, David Wojnarowicz's “Rimbaud in New York” photos, shot in his early twenties, are a fully realized aesthetic statement. The forty-four small black-and-white photographs in this show (accompanied by a selection of the artist's journals) depict an anonymous young man outfitted with a simple paper mask bearing the visage of Arthur Rimbaud, adrift in a New York no longer extant. Mostly alone, he wanders through derelict buildings, the Meatpacking District, the subway, and other liminal sites. In some ways, the photos, shot during 1978 and 1979 and first exhibited in 1990, could be considered the inverse of Cindy Sherman's “Untitled Film Stills,” 1977-80. Whereas Sherman constructed elaborate scenarios but rarely masked her face—we almost always know it's her—Wojnarowicz fully obscures his protagonist's identity. To this day, we do not know if the artist is the (or is the only) flâneur depicted. Likewise the cinematic, imaginary space Sherman conjured counters the peripheral yet nonetheless very real locations (Hudson River piers, Coney Island) portrayed in Wojnarowicz's pictures. Perhaps inevitably, time has added a filmic sheen to the drugs, sex, and graffiti of the rough-and-tumble 1970s New York seen here. For a fuller understanding of the era as Wojnarowicz saw it, an exhibition of his later works incorporating text is on view at PPOW Gallery in Chelsea through November 13.
This is one of the best shows I've seen this autumn. I recommend making a trip to the Upper East Side this week to see it before it closes.
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October 24, 2004
Joshua Mosley at Donald Young Gallery, Chicago
Artforum.com has posted my brief review of Joshua Mosley's solo exhibition at Donald Young Gallery in Chicago. The piece is archived at BrianSholis.com. Here is the text:
Joshua Mosley's seven-minute video A Vue, 2004, presents the story of Henry, a simple man whose duties as a park ranger largely consist of caring for a small town's 150-foot tall monument to George Washington Carver. The work compresses the intricacies of one of Henry's relationships—a halting pas de deux with Susan, an employee of a local fiber optics company—into a story without a lot of action. Henry polishes the monument, drives to the store, and prepares food at home; when he's with Susan, their suppressed desires are channeled through small talk about the pleasures of their jobs. The benevolently smiling Carver (also seen in another room of the gallery as a 24” bronze sculpture) would approve of their devotion to their work. The cartoonish simplicity of the video—like that of Henry and Susan's relationship—hides a more complex reality: Mosley's process mixes digitally photographed stop-motion puppets, footage of the bronze sculpture, and ink-wash-painted backgrounds. A plaintive score by Abby Schneider adds to the melancholic air. As the video loops, Henry and Susan are doomed to repeat their faltering attempts at communication, and Mosley strikes chords that resonate beyond the narrow confines of his characters' lives.
The artist has an informative website, with clips from the video.
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October 18, 2004
Yinka Shonibare at Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia
Artforum.com has posted my brief review of the Yinka Shonibare exhibition now on view at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. It's archived at BrianSholis.com, and here's the text:
This small survey was judiciously selected: Three works sufficiently outline the boundaries of current Turner Prize nominee Yinka Shonibare's practice, and a fourth piece suggests a way to expand them—a necessary move for an artist who has recently seemed to be on autopilot. For several years Shonibare has used brightly colored and patterned African kinte cloth (originally made in Holland for Indonesians; later printed in England for West African markets) as an inspiration and medium. 100 Years, 2000, comprises one hundred small canvases on which various kinte patterns alternate with crudely painted graphic squiggles reminiscent of the 1940s moment when Surrealism was becoming Abstract Expressionism (and a host of European and American artists had a heightened interest in "primitive" African art). Characters culled from farther back in the history of European painting often populate Shonibare's sculptural tableaux. Pedagogy Boy/Boy, 2003, presents two schoolboys whose period dress is sewn from fabric featuring similar African patterns. For his collaboration with the Workshop, Shonibare printed the images and names of 1970s "Philly Sound" bands (The Intruders, The O'Jays) onto sculptures of a male and female astronaut. Its site-responsive (if not quite -specific) character brings forward by about a century Shonibare's infusion of African (and now African-American) culture into the history of "Western" achievement.
A discussion about the show with a friend summed it up pretty well. A fan of his work, she thought the show was paltry; not tending to like his art, I thought the small size worked to its advantage, eliminating redundancy. In an odd twist on my normal preferences, I tend to prefer Shonibare's non-scultpural, non-narrative works: in this exhibition, my favorite work is Dorian Gray, a suite of twelve photographs wherein the artist reenacts scenes from Oscar Wilde's book. But I digress.
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October 13, 2004
León Ferrari at the Drawing Center
Artforum.com has posted my review of "León Ferrari: Politiscripts" at the Drawing Center. I am in Boston—posting this note from the lobby of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, in fact—and have also archived the text at BrianSholis.com. Here is the review:
This gemlike exhibition brings New Yorkers a small taste of the artistic activity that flourished in Latin and South America at mid-century. León Ferrari, an octogenarian well known in his native Argentina, created this series of "written" drawings between 1962 and 1965. The majority of those included here consist of both self-generated and appropriated handwritten text, often political, torqued toward near-abstraction (but meant to be decoded by those in the know). These small works evoke the nervous intensity of Henri Michaux's mescaline-influenced drawings or Fluxus-affiliated composer Robert Watts's mid-1950s collages. At the same time, they anticipate the enchantingly varied mark-making of Brice Marden's early 1990s ink drawings and hover at the center of a Venn diagram connecting calligraphic writing, musical notation, and Abstract Expressionism. The malleability of Ferrari's line is an apt metaphor for the flexibility necessary to dissidents who must find ways to express themselves under repressive political regimes. But the drawings do not buckle under the weight of their multiple duties—they served admirably as a political instrument in their time, and stand as valuable documentation and as visually compelling artworks in ours.
I really do recommend the show. It's on view until October 23.
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October 11, 2004
Around town, around the world
The Frieze Art Fair looms large over this week’s art world calendar, leaving dealers, collectors, curators, and critics barely enough time to re-pack after their return from the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. The fair opens to the public on Friday, so it’s safe to assume that the best events take place on Wednesday and Thursday. With a degree of cross-institutional synergy that would make any 1990s marketing manager proud, galleries and museums across London have coordinated events with the fair. On Monday Tate Modern hosted the press preview of Bruce Nauman’s “Raw Materials,” the newest in its Unilever-sponsored commissions for the building’s turbine hall; the opening reception is Tuesday night. Also on Tuesday, collectors who do not want to fight crowds for the right to purchase a new Marcel Dzama drawing—whose catalogue raisonné may eventually prove more daunting to compile than Andy Warhol’s—can head to Timothy Taylor, while Stephen Friedman presents drawings by London-based Scottish artist Paul McDevitt.
Going head-to-head with Frieze events, Sadie Coles opens a show of new work by Simon Periton and Modern Art presents the debut UK solo by New York resident Barnaby Furnas. After your mid-week buying spree, relax on Friday evening with the opening reception of “Expander,” a group exhibition presented at the Royal Academy of Arts. When you return to your room at the City Inn Westminster Hotel, don’t be alarmed by the message scrawled on your bathroom mirror, as it may have been put there by Monica Bonvincini, Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, Trisha Donnelly, or Richard Prince. It’s part of “I’ll Be Your Mirror” organized by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, which means that even if it’s uninteresting, it's legal. Click here for a list of official talks and projects sponsored by the fair.
Elsewhere, the Orange County Museum of Art presents its California Biennial to the public beginning Tuesday; on Wednesday, Wade Guyton and Bojan Sarcevic talk with Will Bradley on the occasion of “Real World,” an exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, and Craig Seligman talks about his book Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me at the New School in New York. On Thursday, Washington and New York museums do a swap: the Ana Mendieta exhibition, which premiered at the Whitney, opens at the Hirshhorn, where it was organized by Olga Viso, while the Romare Bearden retrospective organized by the National Gallery opens to the public on Madison Ave. Friday marks the start of “The Artist as Public Intellectual,” a two-day symposium sponsored by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and the Friends of the Secession. It features Roger M. Buergel (the thin-mustached curator of the next Documenta), Rosalyn Deutsche, Thomas Hirschhorn, Silvia Kolbowski, Barbara Kruger, and Mignon Nixon among others.
Tired yet? There are still gallery and exhibition openings to note: Trisha Donnelly at Casey Kaplan in New York on Friday; Hernan Bas at Sandroni Rey and Dave Muller at Blum + Poe in L.A. on Saturday.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
Jennifer Higgie on why we write
In her Editor's Letter at the front of the new Frieze, Jennifer Higgie makes public her internal dialogue about why she writes about art. It contains a concise explanation of my reasons for writing last month about Thomas Scheibitz's new exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar: "I write for the same reason that I read novels or look at art: either to decipher something I don't understand or to be reassured....Looking properly at something and then writing about it, especially to deadline, tends more often than not to be an act of panic tempered with an interest inspired by incomprehension." Schiebitz's last exhibition in New York piqued my interest but didn't entirely convince me. I see so much art that my typical response to this feeling is fairly passive: I file the mental images away for later retrieval. Yet when his new show began to preoccupy my mind similarly, I forced myself to interrogate why. Without a constraint—my deadline—I probably would have deferred thinking thoroughly about his work once again. Instead, I tried to make an assessment as a means of explaining the work and my reaction to myself. To quote Higgie again, anxieties appeared: "...do these words and these objects or gestures ultimately nourish the art work or yourself or the world....Do they avoid being prescriptive....Do they at least try to reveal some of the multitudinous tones that litter the world unacknowledged....Do they make anyone less lonely?" My review, a scant 218 words, may not do any of these things. But Higgie's conclusion, which I second, allows that "Even making a mess of it and repeatedly getting it wrong is preferable—at least it's an assertion of something alive: fallibility." You try not to be fallible in responding to a work of art—like the artist tries not to be fallible during the act of creation—and hope that there is something of merit in the connection sought by the act of writing.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
Overextended artists
The phenomenon of simultaneous solo exhibitions first came to my consciousness in November 2002, when Inka Essenhigh held dual solos in New York at 303 Gallery and in London at Victoria Miro. Of course I’d noticed the trend before, but it mostly concerned photographers exhibiting multiple prints from the same body of work, not unique artworks for each space. Most artists find it difficult to fill one commercial gallery (as evidenced by the hit-or-miss quality of Essenhigh’s New York show), so why would anyone push to make twice the amount of art in the same amount of time? All of this comes to mind again as we head toward John Bock’s Anton Kern Gallery show. At the same time as he plays the role of installation artist in New York, he plays the roles of curator and architect in London (for his first major UK solo show, now on view at the ICA) and the role of filmmaker in Milan (for a project in Milan’s Stazione Centrale sponsored by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi). He is also presenting work at the 54th Carnegie International, which opened this weekend. Is this feat of overextension a new record? Is this the record an artist wants to set? I don’t question an artist’s motive for embarking upon this type of jet-setting hyperproduction. But, like a juggler, the more an artist tries to keep aloft the more likely the chance something falls to the ground. Why risk it? Here's to hoping that Bock's New York "ball" isn't dropped.
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October 8, 2004
New article in Flash Art
My essay "(Re)Making History," on recent artworks by Carol Bove and Andrea Bowers, has now been published under the title "Creative Resistance" in the October issue of Flash Art. Click here to read it online at BrianSholis.com.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
October 6, 2004
Around the web...
In trying to catch up on roughly a week's worth of articles and web updates, I came across the following pair of links worth sharing:
- MaudNewton.com posts an interview with Chris Lehmann, former Deputy Book Editor of The Washington Post and author, this past March, of one of the best articles on The Passion of the Christ. Again, if I was editing The Best American Essays 2005, I'd include this essay.
- Jerry Saltz makes his "Critical Call," which includes short takes on a dozen or so shows. Is this an Artnet-only feature? I can't find it online at the Voice, but I like the format. I'm with him on most of his calls; the only ones I disagree with are Pipolitti Rist, but perhaps I can say more about that in a similar piece. Also on Artnet, my friend Sarah Douglas recently posted her first photo round-up.
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Quick take: Laura Owens in Philadelphia
Give Laura Owens credit for consistency. In what is to my knowledge the first use of embroidery in her art practice, her new medium is treated in the exact same manner she treats paint: The six nearly-identical works on view (a seventh was temporarily down during my visit) deploy a wide range of threads with her signature playfulness of application. Each work depicts a single tree atop a pile of blue and green rocks, surrounded by wispy clouds and falling leaves; nearly every element pulls double duty as representation and as abstract shard of color against the light background. Seven copies of the image, familiar from other recent paintings, were printed onto silk and then hand-embroidered by the artist. There are slight changes from work to work—a spider hangs down from a branch in one, extra flowers crop up at the base of the tree in another, a decorative blue leaf and a woman have been added to a third and fourth—that encourage a playful back-and-forth in the gallery. There is a tension between the variety of sewing techniques (cross-stitching, running thread in multiple directions, etc.) and the monotony of the image's repetition. These works, while not the best I've seen by Owens or the most innovative I've seen at the Fabric Workshop, are nonetheless undeniably and reassuringly hers. (On view through 11/06.)
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October 5, 2004
Around town, around the world
I've imported the data I backed up to my external hard drive and am (almost) fully back in business. This weekend's trip to Chicago was fruitful, but before I talk about that, here's some information from the calendar:
Wednesday brings the opening of LFL's second show of the season, which features LA-based artist Rob Thom (associated with Black Dragon Society) and Justin Liberman, who, if memory serves me correct, just went through the Hunter MFA program. In this week's Village Voice, Jerry Saltz reviewed Phoebe Washburn's second solo, which just came down at the same gallery. Also in New York on Wednesday, Jennifer Pastor's The Perfect Ride, a three-part artwork she has spent many years making, will go on view at the Whitney (the opening reception takes place later in the month) and, at 4:15, Linda Alcoff presents a paper titled "Identity Politics: A Defense" at CUNY's Graduate Center.
Out in LA, Glenn Phillips, a fellow at the Getty Research Institute, presents a selection of Brazilian video art made between 1973-1983. Click here for the Getty's October schedule, which includes more information about the event.
In London, LA-based painter Lari Pittman presents new work at greengrassi and Tate Modern opens "Time Zones: Recent Film and Video," which has a spot-on selection of young artists who are just now receiving their first US museum exposure (Yael Bartana opens a show at MIT List Visual Arts Center next week; Yang Fudong is showing 5 Films at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, Anri Sala is getting some of his first US museum exposure at the Art Institute via James Rondeau's focus exhibition series, etc.). It seems, from afar, that Jessica Morgan, formerly of the ICA Boston, is really hitting her curatorial stride at the museum.
On Thursday in London, the Hayward Gallery opens "Eyes, Lies, & Illusions," which "explores a treasure house of optical wizardry, from magic lanterns, shadow theatre, tricks of perspective and anamorphic images, to kaleidoscopes, flipbooks, zoetrophes and other early forms of animation" and includes contemporary artists. Across town at the Whitechapel, Chris Kraus talks about the LA art scene on the occasion of her new book Video Green. Stateside, Thursday brings the opening of "Plan 9," Steven Parrino's new exhibition at TEAM Gallery and a discussion between Brian Eno and Todd Haynes at CUNY's Graduate Center. Up in Boston, the MIT List Visual Arts Center opens exhibitions by John Coplans, Cerith Wyn Evans (in conjunction with the MFA Boston), and the aforementioned Yael Bartana.