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Art Basel Week 2008
Miami Report
By M. Brendon MacInnis
Bracing for the worst — with regard to the tough economy — the concensus that emerges among dealers and visitors who participated in this year’s (December 2008) “Art Basel Week” suggests that all was not lost after all. While some fairs got cold feet and bowed out beforehand, notably the AIPAD Photography Show, and other fairs that should have canceled didn’t — notably the disasterous Bridge Art Fair, there were nevertheless clear winners. The comeback story of Art Miami certainly tops the list; once all but written off as a casualty the of the tailwinds of the high flying Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami’s second largest and longest running art fair finally stepped up to the plate. First there was the smart decision taken the year before to leave the familiar trappings of the Miami Beach Convention Center for a large, pavilion-like tent in the city’s burgeoning Wynwood Art District, while also abandoning its traditional January schedule to coincide with Art Basel Week in December. Doing so had an immediate impact on the quality of the fair’s exhibitor applicants, with many of the same dealers who apply to participate in ABMB hedging their bets by applying for a booth in Art Miami. That strategy paid off; soon its roster of world class galleries shot up, along with new found high expectations among dealers taking a second look. Then came the one-two punch this year with the instalment of a new director, Nick Korniloff, who dramatically improved the fair’s logistics operations and secured the backing of BlackRock, the nation’s largest asset manager, as the fair’s main sponsor. This made possible a new media lounge curated by Asher Remy Toledo, the BlackRock Art Video | New Media lounge, the largest of its kind among any of the Miami art fairs. Then came Nestlé Nespresso SA; the same people who outfit the Art Basel VIP Lounge in Switzerland, providing the same VIP treatment for Art Miami. Indeed, in terms of attracting top artists, dealers and collectors from around the world, the gap between Art Miami and ABMB is closing.
The other big winner this year is Alexis Hubsman’s Scope-Miami. I remember a few years ago when The Armory Show in New York was making the transition from “alternative fair” status to becoming the main event, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Director, Glenn Lowry, in his keynote remarks declared that the fair had finally joined the big leagues; much the same can now be said of Scope-Miami. Especially with its incorporation of Ethan Cohen’s newly minted Art Asia fair, the sum of the two together is greater than the whole. There is a sense of place — that indefinable building block of culture — when walking through the fair. Things were happening, peoples’ paths were criss-crossing; it was fun and it was serious. And I heard that some dealers sold artworks.
One common misconception about art fairs is that it’s all about selling art. PR operatives send out glowing press releases to magazine editors proclaiming that millions of dollars of art was sold, or that a certain dealer’s booth “sold everything the first day” and so on. Don’t beleave it. A successful art fair is a successful marketing event. Even in good economic times, only a small percentage of galleries make substantial on-site sales; the rest is all talk, good talk. Dealers are happy when they see tangible proof that fair organizers have done their job.
At the bottom end, Bridge-Miami (Wynwood), Michael Workman’s attempt to launch a booth fair in Wynwood provides an example of what happens when the organizers have not done their job. Instead of doing the right thing and cancelling the fair beforehand when a critical mass of quality exhibitors failed to materialize, Mr. Workman accepted payment from anyone who could, as the expression goes, fog up a mirror. Making matters worse, a small handful of reputable dealers; two or perhaps three, were strung along, taking the fair organizers at their word until the last moment only to discover that they had paid art fair prices for what amounted to a stand in a flee market.
On the other hand, there were some pleasant surprizes in Miami. George Billis, a New York art dealer whose Red Dot hotel art fairs have gained a following in recent years, launched a booth fair in one of the pavilion-style tents in Wynwood on a street that looked like “Art Fair Row”— because of all of the other art fairs that had the same idea. Although this was the first booth fair organized by Mr. Billis, it had the look and feel of an established, professional booth art fair. How could that be? It turns out that Mr. Billis had the good sense to hire art fair veteran, Ilana Vardy, as producer. Before taking this job, Ms Vardy served as the Director of Art Miami for several years, gaining crucial experience in the Miami art scene which she clearly put to good use here.
Another nice surprize was to see the extent to which the art fairs in Wynwood cooperate now; more than just a bunch of competing art events taking place in the shadow of ABMB, the term “Art Basel Week” is now a misnomer. Today the number of important galleries exhibiting major art works outside of the ABMB zone of influence in Miami Beach dwarfs Art Basel Miami Beach. Shocking but true; the fair that started the party is more guest than host; more brand than substance. To be sure, ABMB is as good as it ever was. But Miami has grown and changed dramatically while in the ensuing years ABMB, under the stewardship of Samuel Keller, has essentially stood its ground in the secure environs of the Miami Beach Convention Center. Perhaps that’s why Messe Basel, which owns ABMB, replaced Mr. Keller, bringing in a team of new directors this year. According to official statements, Mr. Keller left ABMB to accept an offer to head the Beyeler Foundation in Switzerland.
Among the highlights of ABMB’s ancillary VIP events under its new directorship (Co-Directors Annette Schönholze and Marc Spiegler) was an installation by David Lynch, Diamonds, Gold and Dreams, held in the Cartier Dome pavilion, across from the fair in the Miami Beach Botanical Gardens. The artist/filmmaker who developed a cult following with unconventional films such as the 1986 Blue Velvet and the 1990 television serial drama, Twin Peaks, transformed the interior of the Cartier Dome into a surreal planetarium with diamonds set in the illusion of a night skye.
Elsewhere in Miami Beach the usual assortment of hotel art fairs populated a stretch of Collins Avenue; there were some newcomers and there were some fairs that closed. They look nice from the street, lots of people mingling and having fun, but it’s too much work to go inside. In South Beach, along Ocean Drive, there is a very small artist run fair called Pool Art — participating artists “pool” their resources to pay for the fair — which is held in a boutique hotel that faces the ocean. This is a good fair for dealers because the artists are not represented by galleries; I usually find something I like. The Pool Art Fair is the brainchild of New York based artist entrepreneur Thierry Alet, whose company, Frère Independent, also produces the Digital & Video Art Fair, (DiVA).
The annual art brunch at the Sagamore Hotel, hosted by the ever gracious Marty and Christine “Cricket” Taplin is always wonderful. It seems like the whole art world converges on this unpretentious and charming oasis, just to catch up and perhaps cross a new path. Have I left anything out? Let’s do it gain next year.
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Jan Frank
BLT Gallery
By Joel Simpson
The proliferation of new galleries on the Bowery continues even as many of the once seemingly established galleries in New York have called it quits. Across the street and down the block from the striking achitectual gem of the New Museum, the latest entry among the burgeoning LES gallery scene, the BLT Gallery held its inaugural show featuring the work of Jan Frank. The title of the show, Kissinger and the Ladies, references a photograph of Henry Kissinger in which the bigger-than-life Nixon era protégé graciously poses in front of a painting by the artist, whose political leanings are the stellar opposite of Nixon and company. Frank often combines such normally antithetical currents as abstract expressionism, minimalism, conceptual art, and politically engaged art in the same piece.
The major body of Frank’s work had been devoted to largely abstract explorations of the nude. These are compositions almost entirely of turbulent washes of lines, in which you may think you’re imagining profiles of faces, breasts and buttocks — that your oversexed brain has caused you to fail yet another Rorsarch test — only to realize that, yes, the artist has put them there. If abstraction is presented as a homology of the forms of invisible energy and passion, then Frank seems to be saying that our passions (or his, at least) are to a large extent informed by visual cues supplied by images of the body. Fair enough, and if an artist can find a new way to present this eternal subject matter, bravo!
Last June, however, Frank fell off a ladder and broke both wrists. Though his hand movement was severely impaired, his spirit was undaunted; he embarked on a series of paintings that he could paint with the limited manual dexterity.
Around this time, as it were, the artist came upon the iconic horn-rimmed glasses associated with Henry Kissinger and painted huge canvasses with these glasses as repeating and layered motifs, both horizontal and vertical. Frank was aware that he was returning to the type of relation between repeated object and space that Piet Mondrian had explored in his compositions, starting with his Pier and Ocean paintings of 1914-15, through those titled simply Composition of 1916-17. But whereas Mondrian had used short thick vertical and horizontal lines as a means of defining his space, Frank uses the thick-rimmed Kissinger glasses.
Thus Frank’s space is not just shaped by his objects; it is politicized. Given Kissinger’s past as an operative for Nixon and Ford (who remembers Ford?) and consultant of Bush 43 — noted for domestic spying among other interests — Dr. K’s glasses become icons of a big-brother-like state, whose Argus-eyes are ubiquitous, a frightening warning.
Given Kissinger’s storied, controversial history, Frank manages to offer a modicum of sublimated satisfaction in his visual mockeries. And he gives us one more. Reminding us what a successful ladies man the wonkish Kissinger was during the 1970s when he famously said, “Power is the best aphrodesiac,” Frank also paints his multple glasses motif in various colors across backgrounds of full-color newspaper sex ads. Is the Dr. K peeking in at boudoirs or looking out from them at us?
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Winter Salon
Björn Ressle Fine Art
By Joel Simpson
Björn Ressle’s Winter Salon, held in the dealer’s modest one-room gallery on the second floor of an Upper East Side mansion, boasts some of the most significant conceptual artists of our time, including some famous pioneers of the movement. The show features 46 artists, most of them still living, and most of them were crammed bodily into the gallery space for the show’s six hour opening.
To address the pioneers first, the pieces by Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) , John Cage (1912–1992), and Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), Robert Ryman (b. 1930), and William Anastasi (b. 1933) attest to the pedigree of the overall collection. From Beuys we have three drawings from the series of 100 he compiled in 1974, calling them Codices Madrid, after the recently discovered compendium of the same name by Leonardo Da Vinci, whom he revered. The ensemble was meant to be a repository of quickly sketched ideas for possible future artworks, and they offer insights into Beuys’ thinking. The ones here are hasty but detailed renderings of a flower in a circle with an enigmatic number 3; a nude woman contemplating either a brassiere or small figure holding a set of scales (of justice?); and three superposed skeletons in apparently burial positions, as in an archaeological find. Beuys’ intention isn’t always easy to discern. But once you sort things out, it becomes clear that he had very particular ideas in mind.
Sol LeWitt’s contribution is one tempera painting of an orange and yellow isometric cube in the lower left of a dark blue background. It’s a fine example of the self-effacing artist’s career-long obsession with impersonal geometric objects. He came along at the right time, the beginning of the conceptual art movement in the 1960s, and his work caught on, leading the way. The momentum of this celebrity lasted him all his life (and he was modest and generous about it, to his credit). The idea behind this kind of conceptual art involves a refutation of the modernist tradition that it reproaches for being too Euro-centric (and therefore complicitious with colonialism), too solipsistic, too convinced that its standards were universals. So content is kept to a minimum, radically simplified, with all possible cultural references removed, the bonds to tradition broken. The problem is that a generation or so later, the urgency for the original opposition has vanished; the very tradition it opposed has become that much more a historical curiosity; the concept that underlies it seems ever more strained, and we are left with an intrinsically unchallenging, visually flat image. The little cube in saturated colors, instead of spitting in the eye of five centuries of European and American art, looks like a forlorn orphan from Fischer-Price.
Cage’s two works in the show are consistent with his musical (or anti-musical) output, that included chance-based music. One of them, Abstract 10R/6 consists of outlines of rocks carefully selected before being placed on the paper, I Ching style (one of his lifelong interests), making it a study in aleatory juxtaposition. The result is a series of traces of chance associations of masses, a celebration of contingency, the world-as-we-find-it-to-be, so dear to conceptual artists, whose work aims to serve as a continual antidote to notions of the-world-as-we-imagine-it-to-be (up with induction; down with deduction!). There’s an implicit didacticism here, which perhaps occupies the space vacated by the aesthetic, since beauty (nor feeling) is not part of this discussion.
The contribution of William Anastasi (b. 1933) goes even farther in this direction. His Subway Drawing (2006) consists of the tracings of two pencils, one in each hand, of the movement of a subway he was riding on. On one level this is an invitation to be observant of the meaning of traces of absent things—one thinks of aggregations of overlapping bird tracks on a beach, or shiny slug-trails on a concrete sidewalk, or the sweeping traces of bent wind-blown branches touching the surface of snow. But these tracings would each have an aesthetic component, while Anastasi seems to have deliberately excluded even the narrowest peek at the aesthetic in a work of absolute literality, of zero-degree prosaism. Nevertheless; it works in the same way, once it’s framed on the wall, to deny the viewer any possible aesthetic lift, thus revealing our urge for and expectation of that lift, and all our attendant assumptions of what art should do. So its effect is ascetic rather than aesthetic—or even anesthetic. It doesn’t dull; if we allow it to work, it purifies, though we may have to pass through a stage of frustration first. This is completely within the Duchampian tradition, that started with his defiant Readymades (1913), but Anastasi is even more austere, since he abjures even Duchamp’s wit.
Coming up from Anastasi’s degree-zero conceptual art are a number of pieces that offer a bit more concept to chew on.
Robert Ryman, one of the pioneers of Minimalism, lent the show a piece from his private collection. A comparison to the Anastasi piece, however, shows how far conceptual art has come in purifying itself of any trace of aesthetic elements. Ryman wished to avoid all referentiality. His paintings were about the paint they were painted with, which makes them a kind of abstract sculpture. Much of his work consists only of white rectangles—but they have a definite shape, many have activity around the edges (frames), and in some the paint has darkened with age in certain places. Ryman’s piece in this show is one of his more active. He uses primarily white paint, which does not completely cover the paper, and includes a black mostly obscured rectangle (and one other blotch) as well as his name in pale green and the year 58 and some additional markings in yellow (crayon?). Compared to Anastasi, it’s virtually a landscape!—certainly closer to Abstract Expressionism, full of gestures. When it was was painted, a much more assertive Abstract Expressionism was all the rage, and Minimalism and Conceptualism were the new defiant kids on the block. Today, although the piece remains clearly minimalist, it seems positively loaded with just the kinds of aesthetic cues that Anastasi and the pure Conceptualists eschew.
Minimalist sculptor Carl André (b.1935) contributes two pieces from his concrete poetry collection, BLACKPLANEBLACKPLANEBLACKPLANEBLACK, 1964 and VISA, 1960. One feels almost nostalgic seeing these works that are visual art created with that most constraining and challenging of media, now archaic, the typewriter. Its very limitations add fascination, however. The works, when skillfully done, combine graphic form with verbal signification, and these may either complement or conflict. BLACKPLANEBLACKPLANEBLACKPLANEBLACK can only make the viewer smile as if the typewriter were doing its best to create a black plane, since the words form a space-free rectangle on the page, but the closest it can come is naming one over and over.
Janet Passehl invites her viewers experience the subtleties in the substrates of her work, cloth or paper. There is a tension here that balances on the liminal edge between nothing and something. By fine-tuning one’s perception down to the level of her delicate something, one begins to see much more. Here she contributes 20x13-inch sheets of off-white paper with three very faint lines penciled on each of them at right angles to each other. If you think there is nothing or little there, you need to adjust expectations, turn down the mental chatter and see on a different level. It’s a sensitizing process, contemplative, Zen. Could you do it without her framework? Of course, but she offers the occasion, the setting, the calm, the encouragement, and the assurance that you will see more than you expect.
Compared to Passehl, Melissa Kretschmer’s (still minimalist) pieces are positively dramatic. Always working with geometric regularity, these works on paper feature pale yellow beeswax in broad strokes over layered paper, then she melds the wax with graphite, producing broad brushstroke patterns of beeswax interlaced with graphite, with occasional dark rectangles of graphite. The perceptual byplay here is between flat and layered; black, pale yellow and their melding, and figure/ground, since the broad brushstrokes are as wide as the background spaces. If we learn to look closely and appreciate minimal difference, there is much pleasure in her layering, her thin lines of bushed graphite, the irregular overlap of rectilinearity, and her disciplined black and pale yellow pallette.
Norwegian photographer artist Anne Senstad creates smooth color fields in which dark yellow gradually becomes orange, forest green sweeps subtly into kelly green. The exceptional thing that she has captured is the absence of boundary, the infinite gradualness of her subtle color transitions. Her “something,” the color, is unmistakable; but her “nothing” at a second structural level, is the process of change in her something. You know it’s there by looking at the two extremes; you just can’t tell exactly where it takes place, and this is quite engaging.
Moving up on a continuum of content, George Quasha’s “axial drawings” are engaging abstractions offering a piquant sense of dancing torque produced by dragging and twisting the side of graphite stick. Quasha has made an investigation of the exceptional phenomenon of axially balanced rocks, improbable accommodations with gravity, where highly asymmetrical rocks are carefully and bizarrely balanced upon each other. It’s an example, like Cage’s, of finding spiritual forces in rocks, but Quasha uses those forces to create amazing rock combinations/compositions, which he exhibits (elsewhere) as sculptures. His drawings represent some of these.
Mary Hrbacek’s two charcoal drawings of tree silhouettes are part of her series of anthropomorphic shapes in trees. She first photographs them, then renders in charcoal, that most primitive of media. Her graphic black-on-white silhouettes pit the sinuey sensuality of the tree outlines against the austerity of the hyper-contrasty technique, as if to warn us against overindulging a fallacy. The graphic reduction leaves the figures doubly ambiguous, and this is her achievement: Are they transcriptions of trees that represent human forms? Representations of trees in charcoal? Abstract charcoal markings vaguely evocative of trees? She carries off a delicately balanced form of referential Minimalism.
In contrast, Swedish artist Ragna Berlin’s realistic drawings of hypothetical ovoid, solid objects seduce the viewer with their squeeze-ball softness as they nestle against each other. If not for their yielding surfaces and mysterious inner glow, they might be mistaken for potatoes, a comfort-food connection that underscores the warmth of physical companionship that they convey, one might say, in the abstract.
Now adding poignancy to pure feeling, are the works by Korean born artist Songyi Kim and photographer David Higginbotham. Kim contributes three sketches of herself, each one obscured by the tan stains of scattered spent tea leaves. It’s a strange screen to see a portrait through, but it works. The surface pattern of little tan twists lends mystery to the obscured head in the background that surprises on first glance, then slightly dissipates upon closer inspection, leaving the viewer to marvel at the simplicity of the device and perhaps to wonder why the face, the artist’s, is hiding.
David Higginbotham’s sepia-toned photographs from the 1990s could easily be mistaken for images from the 1930s: Stocking Shoes in a Dish (1997) shows a pair of attractive legs viewed from the rear standing in a bowl, in stockings with classic seams. The food association makes the fetish content humorously explicit, a subtle reminder that the work is recent, since surrealist photographers took themselves more seriously. He continues on this theme in an earlier photograph, Shoes on a Plate (1993) by placing a pair of high-heeled strap shoes on a plate, with a knife and fork. The present order would suggest another course of the meal; perhaps the leftover “bones” after feasting on the legs from the first image? Then in a final image Bathroom (1996) we see (the same?) stockings, leotard and girdle hung out to dry on a shower curtain rod over a nondescript archaic bathtub. The years of creation suggest that Higginbotham explored these themes over time; the present order indicated that he may finally have reached a satisfying insight into his deeper motivations for this long-term interest.
Mark DeMuro’s impassioned enhancements of newspaper photos continue in this line. DeMuro finds photographs in newspapers of political figures he feels strongly about and transforms them into his own political cartoons, complete with balloon statements, using graphite, ink, crayon, oil and pastels. Then he laminates the newspaper, which transforms it into a preserved historical document, the substrate of his statement. His transformations are intended to reveal the “true” intentions of Bush, Cheney and company, and they are not flattering. Cruder in message than your typical political cartoon (Bush utters an inarticulate sound), their charm derives from the authenticity of their photojournalistic origins.
Dove Bradshaw’s two miniature pieces in the show, a series titled Contingency Jets, made of silver, liver of sulfur, and beeswax applied to paper, are compelling abstracts, rich in detail. She utilizes a chemical reaction, a progressive devouring of the silver by the sulphur, leaving a residue of flakey white micro-crystals that form into tiny knobs. The artwork is changing, albeit very slowly, before our eyes, altering its shape, its composition, its texture (does it have an expiration date?) So Bradshaw has framed a slow dynamism, which for now looks like the silhouette of a water bear (tardigrade). It’s an intriguing piece, an innovative concept.
Bradshaw has another set of works in the show which confirm her resolve to add layers of meaning to an already rich surface: two sheets of postage stamps of her own design. One of them, a two-center, depicts Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, the urinal he signed a fictitious name to and claimed as his own art in 1913. The other stamp sheet features a photograph taken by Bradshaw of a woman on whose back is written the names of the elements that make up the human body, with the size of the letters reflecting their relative proportions: carbon, hydrogen, etc. But here she has taken things a step farther in the mischievous spirit of Duchamp; these stamps were used to mail real letters, a form of performance art that is as subtle as it is subversive, managing to fool the USPS, which apparently has threatened her with fines and jail. And for $300 she will send anyone a letter with one of her stamps. This is more personal than a dedication. Her envelope sent to herself with her own return address and a cancelled stamp is framed under glass on the wall. Considering the risk of prosecution she runs every time she mails one of these, it’s a steal.
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Ripped and Torn
Collage and Assemblage Group Show
532 Gallery / Thomas Jaeckel
By Joel Simpson
Freud in his Interpretation of Dreams spoke of “daily residue” as that part of dream content that comes from leftover pieces of images and situations from the previous day’s experience. These pieces insert themselves among the more deeply significant elements of the dream, those that represent the dreamer’s desires and fears. It’s a useful concept in looking at these collages. The artists have assembled their own significant inventories of images, culled from heterogeneous supercollection of printed images we’re daily flooded with. Some may have deep personal significance, some ironic social significance—those with deep social significance are already icons—and some may just be residue, disjointed pieces of the image flow, whose inclusion may appear at this level to be completely contingent on circumstance, but which add immediacy and levity to the assemblage.
Curated by Valery Oisteanu, Jeffrey Cyphers Wright’s collection of collages and assemblages by 24 artists, dubbed Riped and Torn, does not lack for levity. The appeal of collage is in the balance between the unexpectedness and the appropriateness, the justesse of the juxtapositions of images taken out of different contexts. Still, many remain as enigmatic as dreams, their meaning resting on private associations of the artist.
At Home with Janus by Star Black clearly comes right out of the Max Ernst Femme 100 têtes tradition. The cutouts of the naked woman with a figleaf, holding an apple behind her in her right hand and a somewhat forlorn eye at shoulder level in her left, and of the face cut in half, whose lower part is above and upper part below, are distinctly archaic looking, like 19h Century engravings. We seem to be in a bizarre undersea space, with a two-peaked coral tower, a dark shorter towerlike sponge, and flat seaweed fronds growing out of the naked woman’s navel. The background plunges downward into a chasm (or quarry?), while a sundial gnomon, like a protruding shark fin cuts into flattened sun in the top seventh, looking like a slice taken out of a pumpkin, while five various woodpeckers peek out from the side, from behind the sponge and behind the top half of the head. Meaning what?
We can’t be sure, but the composition fascinates nonetheless. There are just enough elements not to overwhelm, and there seems to be a connection between the seaweed-like forms and the coral-like forms. The background is busy, but it has a clear perspective. The sliced face stares at us, as does the extracted eye. It draws us into its world, surely a dream world, and we can assume that it makes perfect sense to the dreamer, though not to us. Dalí’s paintings do no less.
Alan Sheinman’s Mondo Window assembles discreet notes, stickers, and functional small pieces of paper with a fragmentary jigsaw puzzle image of Elvis in the middle. It seems to be a collection of detritus of subpopular culture: friendship stickers (“Missing You,” “I Love You,” “Get Well Soon”), a heart, a “sign here” sticker from a legal document, a plastic bar code sticker, a mini-Currier and Ives, a raffle ticket stub, a dated fortune from a cookie (“a [unreadable] livelihood should be taken seriously”), mini-samples of leopard skin, some old stamps (including a old red 5¢ airmail), and behind the Elvis puzzle a partly occluded sign saying “Stop Forgetting,” and finally fragments of a purple and white radial test pattern, protruding from the top and bottom edges.
The ensemble is clearly much more kitschy than At Home with Janus. It’s upbeat in tone but almost oppressive in its conventionality, as if the creator was struggling to purge these obsessive nothings from his consciousness, and they kept pursuing him until he nailed them down into a collage. So there’s something touching about this work, though it remains enigmatic.
Oisteanu has two works in the show, one, a clever tribute to Marcel Duchamp, offers a tour of the master’s iconography, including his changed gender persona Rrose Selavy and his mustachioed Mona Lisa. Oisteaunu’s other, more personal contribution, Berlin Dream (1974) is an assemblage of found objects occupying a wooden knick-knack or curio case with forty compartments. The absolute banality of this ensemble is a reminder of the detritus that collects at the bottom of all of our desk drawers. It’s an aspect of modern life we all share that we rarely think about, but it’s irreducible: the things we just don’t throw away. They’re just too curious, or too sentimental, or might come in handy, or belong somewhere-else-I-forgot-where: a lock (no key); two rusty keys (doors? locks?) a letter game cube from a lost word game, a tiny almost empty bottle of perfume (“Grand Amour”), a crude miniature black plastic horse, a piece of staghorn coral, a bald sea urchin, a solo scratched pearl earring, the inevitable buttons (spherical), a pink plastic chess knight, a green transparent die, a stamped metal scots terrier, etc.
Sali Taylor contributes one of her most delightful pieces, showing Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz with the breasts of the Cretan Snake Goddess on a yellow brick road, accompanied by ancient Greek figures, the Cycladic statue with a funnel on its head, à la the Tin Man (We’re Not in Kansas Any More), one of the more accessible pieces of the show. Ripped and Torn is nothing if not stimulating and provocative, taking us on a tour of obsessions, fantasies, and discoveries, most of it under an quizzical veil, but all the more interesting for that.
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Apocalyptic Pop
Dorsky Gallery
By Mary Hrbacek
Curated by Kathleen Goncharov, this group show, Apocalyptic Pop, presents works imbued with a sense of foreboding. The issues here range from terrorism, environmental degradation, and economic melt-down to religious extremism. Employing simple outlines used in the creation of cartoon characters or animation narratives, the artists stress a humorous element that lifts the atmosphere of the exhibit in a spirit that accepts life’s unpredictability. Jody Culkin, Michael Zansky, TODT, D. Dominick Lombardi, Laura Parnes and Chitra Ganesh all express feelings that partake of society’s sense of ill-starred destiny.
Jody Culkin questions visual appearances in her photographs of tiny charms found in bling jewelry, magnified with an electron microscope. The charms transform visually, giving the impression of fragmented sculptures that convey an immediate connection with the antiquities found at Pompeii; the pocked, worn appearance of these remnants elicits a sense of grief that portends the sadness that tragedy can imprint on a locality. These photographs highlight the vulnerability of sensory perception subject to technological manipulation.
In his wooden dioramas, Michael Zansky investigates the vicissitudes of optical perception, employing thick, grooved glass that makes both a visual bridge and a barrier to viewing the objects within the dioramas. When seen at certain angles the glass blurs, obstructing the interior elements. The viewing process demonstrates metaphorically that when close to a situation it is often hard to see it clearly. Zansky includes characters culled from history and philosophy, entertainment, art history, and sports. Zansky explores the swings between superstition and reason throughout history. He includes Voltaire and the Three Stooges in his scenarios, emphasizing that the realities of history are constructed by and subject to the viewpoint of the on-looker.
The collaborative group TODT’s installation, entitled “Reaper,” consists of farm machinery made with a grid of sharp steel blades, situated on soil-like turf. The piece accentuates the inevitability of the cycle of birth and death, underscored by the massive blades of the reaping machine. The blades generate viewer fascination with the macabre aspect of this iconic installation.
In his sculpture “Beachcomber” (sand, acrylic, medium and objects), D. Dominick Lombardi employs the simple forms and contours found in videogame figures. He uses sand, the quintessential artistic medium of symbolic impermanence to convey the passage of time. Sand ignites childhood memories of castles dissolving in the ocean’s tide. Lombardi keeps one side of his sculpture intact, while the exposed side reveals painted blue plastic cleanser bottles, children’s forgotten toys and broken shells that mirror the color of water and sky. The piece stresses the uncomfortable fact that our commercial culture focuses on mundane material things that pollute the environment as well as the spirit. They are not biodegradable. The intact sand “gun” implies that such priorities dehumanize us, killing spiritual values.
Chitra Ganesh’s images of fantastic hybrid bodily deformities suggest results of scientific exploration with nuclear materials, or thalidomide deformities. She works with flattened space, captioned text bubbles, and outlined, complex forms. These visually arresting, disturbing works pair text with imagery in a challenging balancing act. The written notes compete for attention with the forms, creating viewer tension. Ganesh accesses the Hindu destroyer God Shiva in neo-mythological studies that explore the drives and dreams that can precipitate both personal and global crises.
It is no surprise that sensitive artists have channeled universal feelings of societal unease into art that taps into general viewer concerns. America has been assailed for some time by politicians determined to use the system for power and profit. In the 1950’s, President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the self-serving excesses of the Military-Industrial Complex. In our time, the earmarks of Hollywood melodrama have merged with religious fanaticism and celebrity worship, to create an unbalanced caricature culture about which it can be said that “the sleep of reason produces monsters.
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Mai Braun
Feature, Inc.
By Megan Garwood
Comprised of several seemingly separate installations, Mia Braun’s solo exhibition, recent object, invites the viewer to dive into her chosen medium by stylistically reformulating and reconstructing recognizable subject matter into novel visual content. The works coalesce into a vibrant amalgamation of form and substance. Braun’s ultimate transformation of ubiquitous material, such as a shredded copy of a newspaper (The New York Times), works on several levels; she introduces a new user value for commonly considered, “trite” objects. Braun asks the viewer, “Why not sculpt with newspaper, not marble; why not use cardboard as a canvas; why not use enlarged tissue as wall hangings?”
Using unexpected yet familiar medium as a foundation, Braun produces works that play on the viewer’s familiarity with the material and, in turn, reveal underlying ideologies. For example, in the work, NYT-Nov 16, 2007 (Pakistan), Version 2, a newspaper “collage,” depicts The Times’ November 16, 2007 cover story interjected with taped paper cut-outs that resemble a Mickey-Mouse-eared shape. By appropriating the newspaper as a canvas—not only a medium to spread news—one must relearn how to view a newspaper as the physical material, as well as to discover anew the aesthetic and intellectual values projected onto it.
Here she only slightly shrouds the main context of The Times’ cover and does not blanket the story wholly. Therefore, even when conceived as art, the newspaper’s story remains a pivotal matter of discussion. Her usage of found, mass-produced objects echoes Duchamp’s famous “Fountain”. But unlike Duchamp, Braun does not completely negate the found object’s original use; instead she utilizes the newspaper to build a complex rhetoric discussing printed news and unprinted reactions. Located on the upper-left corner of The Times, the newspaper purports that it disseminates “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” but Braun’s NYT-Nov 16, 2007 begs to differ.
Braun’s involved study of unique medium allows her to acutely develop the form and texture of her works as she experiments with sculptural and pictorial shapes and representations. She sculpts with tissue, cardboard, newspaper and wood; she draws on tissue, cardboard and newspaper; she marks with paper, tape, ink and acrylic paint.
In contrast to her newspaper collages, Braun’s unfolded origami figures fully illuminate formal techniques, emphasizing aesthetics, showing her sculptural acumen. Nine sheets of tissue paper, a little over two-feet by two-feet, hang in a pattern of three by three. Each sheet titled after a different animal, which can be sculpted in traditional origami: pig, crab, beetle, crocodile, chicken, swan, pelican, goldfish and wild duck. Rather than nine sculptures in the round (tradition origami), Braun has unfolded the group and left the folds as “lines” tracing the “shape” of the animal. Brilliant neon colors are silk-screened onto the front and back of the tissue and fill the space that has been created by the folded lines; each piece of the series is purposely colored on both sides, forcing the viewer to examine the work from multiple viewpoints, as if it were a sculpture. This tension between sculpture and drawing, further tantalizes our visual perception.
Braun delineates the artistic struggle between planned precision and empirical surroundings by working with pliable medium, constructing forms that benefit from interaction. Rather than strive for that “perfect” static depiction, Braun embraces the malleability of her work and celebrates the ephemeral. Her playful choice and use of medium alludes to a larger motif, her insistence on a “teetering” humor in her art and her acceptance of uncontrollable ends.
Ed. Note:
Mai Braun’s solo exhibition, recent object, shares the gallery with Franck André Jamme and Toadhouse’s group exhibition, text works, an exploration of letters and words.
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Yasumasa Yonehara
Barry Friedman LTD
By Natane Takeda
The apparent focus of Tokyo based photographer Yasumasa Yonehara’s Tokyo Amour is cute, young Japanese girls in semi-nude poses. As such, the work draws obvious comparisons to Nobuyoshi Araki, Japan’s most famous chronicler of all things prurient. But there is a kitsch quality in this show — which is part photography, part instalation — that feels deliberate and yet hard to figure.
Yonehara utilizes a Japanese-made polaroid camera called "Cheki," which produces 2 x 2 inch sized photographs. A sequence of snap shots of young semi-nude Japanese girls is laid out in a plexi grid frame. From a distance, the work looks like transparent square sculptures. The viewer must get much closer, standing just a few inches to see. Passively manipulated into this intimate proximity, the seductive girls (posed on a sofa or bed) catch the eye. Only parts of their bodies are shown, such as the upper torso and thighs, and as such the work looks almost like a puzzle. The snap shot presentation intones a friendly, immediate quality.
In some respects, Yonehara's work recalls Araki's nude series, in so far as that both artists deal with the erotic nature of images and our desires on a gut level. But there is a significant difference in how these ideas are conveyed. While Araki's work produces an invisible tension between the subject and the viewer, Yonehara's work focuses more on the subject matter itself. Just ask him and he’ll tell you matter-of-factly: "My work is all about Japanese young cute girls."
In technical terms there isn’t much detail here; unlike Araki's mastery of composition, particulary in the use of light and shadow, Yonehara's work is more raw, improvised.
Like Hiromix, another young Japanese photographer who uses a Polaroid camera to make visual diaries (she was born 1976 in Tokyo) Yonehara’s brand of “hip” feels somewhat dated here. Then of course the question arises, is this fashion photography or art? Now that fashion magazines reposition themselves as barometers of the art world — re: the W “Art Issue” — and art magazines court fashion ads, the line between kitsch, faux kitsch and fine art is truly in the eye of the beholder, or in this case, in the hands of that young guy the camera.
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