artblog

Saturday, October 16, 2004

Thumbs up for Hyper-Runt hybrids

 
Post by Colette Copeland

Images of mutant offspring come to mind with the name, Hyper-Runt. Curated by Emily Zimmerman and Ebon Fisher, Inliquid’s new media exhibit ended its brief run on Thursday evening.


My major complaint with new media exhibits has been that they are typically low on the visual aesthetic/high on concept. I for one would rather not sit at a computer terminal at a gallery, when I can comfortably access the sites from home.

Inliquid addressed this challenge, resulting in an exhibition, which is both experiential and conceptual.

Hyper-Runt refers to the offspring spawned from hybridization; the hybridization of artists collaborating with scientists and engineers as well as the hybridization of digital and organic processes, which produce unforeseen or new systems. The featured artists simultaneously embrace and question technology, science and information systems.

An installation by neuroTransmitter entitled, "All Frequencies" (2002/4) (top image), converts an image into sound waves, which are broadcast over radio airwaves. The installation consists of the source image (a poster created in 2003 during the FCC discussions around media de-regulation), an old TV displaying the sound waves, and two transistor radios playing the airwave frequencies. The resulting piece references the Cold War era, alluding to military surveillance and intelligence operations. A very timely reminder, given the impending election.

Ken Goldberg’s web project based on Fitt’s Law was disappointing. His talking head sculptures from the 2002 Whitney Biennial were brilliant in both concept and execution. This current project left me feeling very unsatisfied. I spent the time taking a test on-line, which included clicking back and forth on two lines as fast as I could. My result was 966 msec. The results did not give me a comparison to others or to the meaning of the numbers. I felt cheated—perhaps that was Goldberg’s intent.

Joseph Nechvatal and David Brody’s work addresses issues of transformation.


In Nechvatal’s "Black Attack" (2002) (left), a computer virus resembling small white bugs, slowly devours a densely layered, abstract color field. Installed in its own darkened room, the projected video has a beautiful tactile quality, which references both techno and biological viruses. Sounds of computer buzzing and insects crunching combine the synthetic with the natural.

Brody’s work entitled, "Proliferation" (2004), is an animated drawing of a Christian cross, which continuously transforms itself. Fortunately, the cross icon is not immediately apparent. The moving architectural structure resembles a microorganism or the child’s toy Kinex/ Legos, in which many pieces are constantly expanding and retracting. The absence of stasis suggests the perpetual shifting of ideology within power structures.

Other highlights included Natalie Jeremienko’s "Do Geese, See God," (2003/4), Yael Kanarek’s "Hello" (2000), and klip//collective’s "Super Luminous" (2004).

Jeremienko collaborates with scientists, zoologists and Debra Solomon to create hybrid ecosystems, fostering unions between animals and humans. Solomon produces the food recipes, which are appealing to specific animal species and humans. I tried the geese/human food, which looked like black cubes covered with sesame seeds. It wasn’t bad. Apparently the geese in Germany liked it as well.


Kanarek’s computer piece (right, "Hello") is an offspring of her larger work entitled, "World of Awe," which I saw in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. The screen features an alien desert landscape, devoid of human presence. As the viewer moves the mouse across the computer monitor, a voice echoes, “helllooo”. This simple, yet poignant piece reinforces the notion of the human need to communicate face to face.


klip//collective’s video installation (left, "Super Luminous") seduces the viewer with its eye candy appeal. The rear-projected video encompasses two doorways. The images result from feedback derived from source footage. The swirling kaleidoscope of colors produces a hallucinatory trance-like state.

Co-curator Ebon Fisher states that this is not the usual kind of art exhibit, with the multi-media blitzkrieg, leaving the viewers more dazed than moved. He suggests that culture is beyond the conscious production of artifacts. Hyper-Runt succeeds in taking viewers out of their ‘art’ comfort zone, yet also allows for the physical space with which to navigate the work.

Other artists in the show, which was up for only a week at the National Products Building, were Bigtwin, Shawn Brixey, Bradley Eros, Mark Napier, MTAA, and Caterina Verde.

--Regular artblog contributor Colette Copeland is a video-maker and installation artist.
permanent link  libby 4:59 PM
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Friday, October 15, 2004

Rebecca Westcott, an appreciation

 
We're sorry to report the death of artist Rebecca Westcott, age 28. (shown right at Spector Gallery in front of a painting by Oliver Vernon, summer, 2004.) We admired her portraits of her peers and friends for their forthright gazes and for their honesty. At a time when the art world is enchanted with surface beauty she gave you soul. Three of our appreciations of her work are at the end of this post. What follows are an obituary that ran in today's Daily News and a notice on the memorial service and other information on the Spector Gallery website. [ed. note: we have supplied images for this post that didn't appear with the original stories.]



Rebecca Westcott, 28, rising artist
By Yvonne Latty, Philadelphia Daily News, October 15, 2004

MOST PEOPLE who knew Rebecca "Becky" Westcott thought she was an angel.

Sweet and big-hearted, Westcott was a local artist on the rise. She recently won the prestigious Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a $50,000 prize to develop her craft.

She was happily married to her soul mate and fellow artist, Jim Houser. They shared a bright rowhouse in Queen Village with their two big, rambunctious dogs, Ella and Stugley.

"If you saw her work, it told you a lot about her, and what it told you was that she loved her friends, cooking, plants and her surroundings," said Shelley Spector, a close friend and the owner of Spector, a gallery in Philadelphia that represented Westcott.



"She painted all about her surroundings. She painted an atmosphere that was homey, warm and showed her sincere love of her life. That was what was inside of her."

The recent opening of her solo show at Spector was packed with patrons and admirers of her paintings. The show was just another step for this local art star. She was booked for shows around the country for the next year. (shown is "Royal" from her solo show in September)

On Tuesday night, after visiting family in Nantucket, Mass., Westcott was driving back to Philadelphia on Interstate-95 when she got a flat tire in Hartford, Conn. Westcott pulled far over to a grassy area to change it. As she was working on the tire, a car swerved off the road and struck her. She died instantly.

No charges have been filed yet against the driver, who has a history of reckless driving and a DWI, police said.

Westcott was 28. She was born in Vermont and moved to Philadelphia about seven years ago.



"Becky was the type of person you felt lucky to have in your life," Spector said. "She always had the ability to be positive and find the sweetness in things. Just being around her was a reminder of what are the really important things in life."

Westcott received her bachelor's degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. She also attended the Pont-Aven School of Art, in France.

Westcott had solo exhibitions of her work at Space 1026 and 1 Pixel Gallery, in Philadelphia. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at New Image Art, in Los Angeles, 111 minna, in San Francisco, White Columns and Diesel Gallery, in New York, Virginia Beach Contemporary Art Center, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and Vox Populi, among others. (image is installation shot from New Image Art)

Westcott's parents lived in Nantucket and she was always going back and forth. She worked occasionally on the island doing floral design and she loved to spend time with her mother, Nadine Bernard Westcott, children's book author and illustrator. They were planning to go to Paris together next week.

Westcott married Jim Houser two years ago. Her father, Bill, and mother gave her away as Jim and their dogs waited at the altar in a field near her parent's home.

The couple met more than eight years ago when Westcott was in college. Houser was instantly smitten by Westcott and they had been together ever since.

"She pushed Jim and made him the driven person he is today," said Ben Woodward, an artist and a close friend, who introduced the couple. "She encouraged him, challenged him and held him to his word. She was a very powerful woman. They completed each other."

The couple weaved a successful career together. They often showed their work in galleries together and worked out of studios in their home.

Melissa Franklin, the director of the Pew, said Westcott was one of the youngest artists they had ever funded.



"I was captivated by her work," she said.

"I really responded to it, then meeting her, she was an incredibly warm person. There was so much talent there, to have that snuffed out, it's an incredible loss for the art community." (detail from portrait of local artist Andrew Jeffrey Wright)

In addition to her husband and parents, she is survived by a sister, Wendy.

Services: A memorial service will be held at 4 p.m. Oct. 23 at Space 1026, Arch Streeet near 10th. Burial is private.


Shelley Spector who just showed Westcott's work last month at SPECTOR Gallery posted this on the gallery website.

I'm so sorry to say that Rebecca Westcott, a beloved local artist and friend, died suddenly on October 12th. Becky, who was returning from a visit to see her family in Nantucket, was struck down by a car while she was changing a flat tire.This is a huge loss to not only her friends
and family, but the art community who loved and admired her. There will be a gathering at SPACE 1026 October 23rd beginning at 4PM. It is open to the public. If you have any of Becky's work please bring it to this memorial which will also be a one night show of her work. If you
want to send anything to her husband Jim Houser and their family please send it here c/o SPECTOR and I will make sure that they get it. Thank you.

Here are some excerpts on Westcott's work from past arblog posts and from Philadelphia Weekly reviews.


Saving Face
by Roberta Fallon, Philadelphia Weekly, January 17, 2001

If van Gogh is the father of modern portrait painting and Alice Neel is the mother, then call Rebecca Westcott--whose portrait show, "Ladies Room," is at 1Pixel.com--a loving daughter.

For Westcott's portraits of her friends owe something to van Gogh's fierce tenderness (seen in this season's blockbuster exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art). And they owe even more to works made by Neel, the New York portrait painter who pioneered a kind of stylized, off-balance portraiture that's unsparing in its approach. Westcott shares Neel's unblinking focus and a tense moodiness invoked by the tight, sometimes twisted body language of the sitters.



Westcott, a 1998 Rhode Island School of Design graduate and member of the Space 1026 collective, is a dedicated portrait painter. "I have no interest in doing anything but real portraits," she says. She paints her friends and an occasional commission. A year ago, for example, Rebecca and Gil Kerlin of Gallery Joe commissioned a portrait.

Lately, she's pared down her compositions to just the figure and some rune-like word fragments on an unprimed linen support, leaving out background details like furniture, walls and windows. This spareness isolates the figure like a painted orphan in a sea of oatmeal-colored cloth. While enhancing the raw quality of the work, it fosters a reading of these young women as unfinished. (image is "Chi and Atari")

The runish word fragments are a counterbalance to the weighty figures. They lock the work into our info-overloaded age, where words come at us day and night, fragmented or whole, piling up like so much junk.

Westcott works from photographs. She takes many shots of her subjects and comes up with an amalgamated pose that feels right for each person. Then she paints quickly, applying a red underpainting right on the linen with no preliminary drawings.

"They're really fast," she says of her paintings, explaining that, with the exception of Ingrid, all the work in the show was made since late October. "The faster I do them, the better they come out."

A good portrait may describe a person, but because it also comes out of a particular place and a time, it's full of other kinds of information. And because it offers a kind of meta-human encounter, an Alice's-looking-glass reflection, it is universally engaging as an immersion in the other.

So without reading too deeply, Westcott's "Ladies" captures a group of young women at the beginning of their adult lives. There's an urgency here, and a youthful holding on for dear life. These heroines look you in the eye while they clutch the edge of their chairs or stand with their arms tightly folded.

Chi is a fashion designer and best bud of the artist. Alley is a friend of a friend just getting over a bad bout of Lyme disease. Piper is jobless and just graduated from college. She positively squirms in her chair. And Ingrid is a budding art consultant who grips her chair with both hands.



Untitled, a young woman in a high-necked blue jacket with her shoulders back and hands out of sight, is a sweet work based on a snapshot Westcott took of a passing stranger, someone she felt a connection with but did not know. It's perhaps the calmest work in the series, capturing a childlike vulnerability and unselfconsciousness missing from some of the other paintings. Untitled will be included in this spring's New American Painters, a juried national art magazine. (image is "Kathryn")

The paintings are a hot lot due to a combination of edgy pose, vigorous brushwork and the use of red in the underpainting and finishing touches. "I don't like to pretty things up," says Westcott, who confides with a laugh that her models look better in person.

Westcott says she wants to continue her portraits of young women. Every age needs a portrait painter. And it looks like Westcott has the energy, talent and insights for the job.

"Ladies Room: Portraits by Rebecca Westcott"
1Pixel.com Gallery, Philadelphia

from Picture This: Local galleries and museums present challenging exhibits this fall.
by Roberta Fallon, Philadelphia Weekly, September 15, 2004

Newly minted Pew fellow Rebecca Westcott's portraits of her friends at Spector Gallery are stylish but rooted in a real world completely unlike Bartlett's. The twentysomething Westcott is attuned to the body language and personalities of her sitters. And in her first solo show with Spector, she captures people as individuals who are less symbols than representatives of themselves--a generation on the verge of adulthood.



Westcott's painting style is reminiscent of the late Alice Neel's. Like Neel, the artist doesn't feel the need to fill in the painting's background--she lets her subjects sit on minimally depicted chairs in front of a white void. And Westcott isn't afraid to paint her crew warts (prominent teeth, red knuckles, stringy hair or awkwardness) and all.

What's at stake is documentation, not prettiness, although Westcott's paintings truly have style. Neel collected souls in her edgy portraits, and I believe Westcott is doing the same. (image is installation shot from New Image Art)

"Homemade: Paintings by Rebecca Westcott"
Through Oct. 2. Spector Gallery, 510 Bainbridge St. 215.238.0840. www.spectorspector.com

from Earnest youth and comic book crewel at Spector
By Libby Rosof, artblog, September 19, 2004

If you're not familiar with the portraits of Rebecca Westcott, you can see them this month at Spector Gallery.

Westcott's portraits of young adults--her crowd--against fairly blank backgrounds capture their earnestness, their tentativeness, and their everyday clothes. Unlike Elizabeth Peyton, who's working the same age group and paints only the cool, flattened stares of languid youth posing for Ralph Lauren, Westcott gets personal.



I also like the contrast between traditional portraiture--of people who can pay for their likenesses--and these pictures of the young, not-yet-successful who are still a little unformed (like the backgrounds) and finding their way in the world. Most portraits of young people come out of art school, practice ventures for the artist-in-training. But these are accomplished paintings with a point of view. (image is from postcard for September show)

"Homemade: Paintings by Rebecca Westcott"
Spector Gallery, Philadelphia

permanent link  libby and roberta 10:56 AM
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Thursday, October 14, 2004

A dealer's dream

 
I stopped in the Hernan Bas show at Daniel Reich Gallery, to try to figure out why he's such a hot ticket, and learned that every painting had sold! While I was there, some disappointed would-be collectors were leaving.

So I asked them why they liked the guy, and they started with the narrative qualities (check), how he reminded them of Goya (really?), and then about the paint quality (if you like scratchy, agitated, struggling strokes, I suppose). Such is the art market feeding frenzy that people believe what they will believe.

These paintings are certainly more engaging than the camouflage-colored watercolors I had seen of his work to date.

For one thing, they have glints of color like the stain of pink blanket (above) in "The Kept Boy" and they have light like the watery reflections of the flamingos (left) in "Fitting In." For another, the space in some of them is deeper, less hermetic, the imagery more varied. The young men themselves remain isolated, unreachable, and dreamy, their attention turned inward. The narratives feel like illustrations for adventure tales in some magazine called Gay Boy's Life. The work's outlook is young and mired in growing pains.

In short, I was glad I saw these works. But sold out?
permanent link  libby 5:11 PM
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Videos, photos from here and mostly there

 
I saw so much art in New York yesterday, some great, some no so great, but much of it thought provoking.

I drove up with Judy Gelles, who was delivering some new work to Photo New York. We stopped back there late at night and I took a shot of her trailer park photos (right), one of a number of her displays in the show.

My first stop was an enormous video installation by Pipilotti Rist at Luhring Augustine (up until Oct. 23). Rist has gotten on the Swiss self-criticism bandwagon, and has produced in "Herbstzeitlose (Saffron Flower or Fall Time Less)." With four dvd projections, two sound systems, part of a wooden house covered with tiny shakes (I entered the exhibit through the door of the house), a real branch from a maple tree, a backlit panorama propped on the floor in front of two of the projections, and a table and three chairs, Rist presents a Swiss mountain scene that conflates reality and tourism cliches. I took the clear molded plastic packaging pieces hanging from the tree branch as a commentary on the packaging of Switzerland, its culture and its landscape.

But still, the trademark lush colors from Rist are there to enjoy, as is the lush scenery. She gives a lot to look at--and to listen to. My favorite sounds are the scream/yodels.

In the back room, her "Grabstein fur RW (Tombstone for RW)," (right) resting in strewn autumn leaves, includes a fisheye video screen showing a mouth with a very transgressive red tongue sticking out and moving around. I'm reminded of the old custom of embedding photos on gravestones. But that old custom seems tame compared to this in-motion and color image of life and sex and naughtiness.

Next door, at Matthew Marks' 24th Street gallery, Sam Taylor Wood is showing very trendy photos and a video until Oct. 30. Taylor Wood is the artist who offered a Last Supper rip off at the infamous Sensation exhibit, with Christ a bare-breasted woman and socialite disciples.

The "Crying Men" series of portraits of weeping actors in their own homes seemed jejune and cut from pretty much the same piece of photo paper. So, men cry, too. And because these guys are actors, they can turn it on, so it's even less interesting, if that's possible. But the list of names would draw a crowd of pop culture fans--we've got the Hoffman boys, Philip Seymour and Dustin; we've got Laurence Fishburne and Steve Buscemi (image left); Willem Dafoe, Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn and for the older ladies, Paul Newman and so on.

The photo that almost redeemed the series was Robert Downey Jr. (right) posing like an odalisque a la Jean-Auguste Ingres or Francois Boucher, a sheet draped around his unmentionables. Mmm-mm-mmm. And he wasn't crying.

Her other photo series, "Suspension," caught my interest by way of comparison with the Philip-Lorca diCorcia's poledancers that Roberta and I had seen at the Carnegie (see post).

Taylor Wood's series is of the artist, suspended in air in relaxed postures, in her workhorse, Jockey-style underwear, in front of a daylit loft window, the space around it painted white (image above left).

DiCorcia's night-owl athletes (image right, detail of "Harvest Moon") become religious icons, whereas Taylor Wood, in languid suspension in daylight, just seems like nothing more than herself playing tricks with Photoshop--a literal artist-in-the-studio approach. My favorite tidbit on this work is that bondange expert Master Rope Knot tied her up several feet above the floor using dozens of ropes. (She then Photoshopped out the ropes).

The video of a man with a white dove on his head casually tapdancing over a sleeping (or dead?) body also didn't offer much. I read in the gallery notes that the tapdancer was dancing on the prone guy's chest and stomach, but to me it just looked like he was behind him. Without believability of the transgression, this was a lost cause (would your tap shoes make clacking noises on someone's tummy?)

For other really interesting photos and video, I'd have to send you to "Adaptive Behavior," one of the inaugural shows at the New Museum's new home, in Chelsea. My favorite pieces in the show were by Robin Rhode (also up at Perry Rubenstein's 23rd Street gallery until Oct. 30), Fikret Atay, Yoshuo Okon and Tsuyoshi Ozawa, but everyone in the show of 11 artists from five continents had work worth considering. The others were Kwabena P. Slaughter, Bojan Sarcevic, Suchan Konoshita, Fiorenza Menini, Kerry Tribe, Robert Melee (sooo transgressive), and Tonico Lemos Auad, many of whom required program notes for clarity.

At the moment I'm high on Robin Rhode, who mixes low-tech drawings of props with equally low-tech performance that he either videos or photographs (photos at the New Museum, videos and photos at Rubenstein). Whether he's drawing a skateboard on a wall and then mounting and dismounting the image (detail above left), or he's drawing dice and then throwing them and scooping up his winnings, or drawing a car and then washing it (image right, "Whitewalls" video ), he's got this tender wish-fulfillment story that's loaded with cultural values. Rhode, who was born in Cape Town, S.A., offers up in his photos a stop-action series that's more cartoon cell than Edweard Muybridge, but it's the sweet chalk drawings in deserted urban landscapes of a street urchin who is struggling to bring his 2-D dreams into the 3-D real world that's touching and noble and touches on poverty, hip-hop and pop culture and street life.

Part of what I love about his work is its relationship to personal mark-making, which in general loses out in photography and video.

I also admired two videos of people dancing in unexpected circumstances from Fikret Atay of Turkey; I admired a pair of videos of two Mexican policemen in uniform performing, one twirling his nightstick (image left), the other dancing, the video showing only a tight shot of their bodies, from Yoshua Okon, a Mexican who lives and works in both Mexico City and Los Angeles; and I got a laugh out of Tsuyoshi Ozawa's political clown, a character from a Japanese children's program, who, manages to communicate some serious absurdities about deadly weapons and such even with a language barrier.

This show, which bills itself as exploring the shaky border land between private and public worlds is well worth a visit. Oh, and the new New Museum space far outdoes its former SoHo home. The work looks great here. (I didn't have enough focus, so late in the day, to get much out of Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting's show, "Rules of Crime," which looked sort of interesting, with instructions to follow and survivalist themes. Like "Adaptive Behavior," it runs until Nov. 13. A show on Agnes Denes' installation art also challenged my attention span. It was more about art than it was art. I wasn't in the mood.

More New York later, but I thought I'd get these up first and fast.






permanent link  libby 1:04 PM
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Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Carnegie objects

 
When I interviewed Laura Hoptman Sept. 9 she told me she was surprised at how much sculpture there was in the International.

In particular, she was taken with the number of sculptural objects as opposed to sculptural installations coming in. (top is detail of Maurizio Cattelan's object, "Now," made of wax, human hair, resin and clothes)



It's a lesson on how far sculpture has flexed over the last couple of decades that sculptural objects should be a surprise in a big, all-encompassing show like this.
(image is installation shot of Kathy Butterly's jewel-like vessels, made of porcelain, earthenware and glaze)

The Mother of all object making?


Of course Lee Bontecou, who has 27 works in the exhibit, makes objects and even makes paintings that are sculptural objects. Bontecou's 3-D works, which dangle like an intergalactic armada with tiny masts, flags, sails and cyclopsian eyeballs, are most wondrous to behold. Jewels in the air, they are infinitely evocative and seductive. (image is installation shot of Bontecou's untitled works, made from welded steel, porcelain, wire mesh, silk and wire)



Isa Genzken, too, makes jewel-like objects, although her pedestal-mounted mini-worlds might be considered installations since they encompass a multitude of objects situated in a real, although, tiny space on a pedestal. But I'll call them objects just the same. (image is a Genzken environment from the Empire/Vampire series)

Butterly, Bontecou, Genzken and even Cattelan are making love objects. You can feel the artist's hard work, sweat and happiness in their making. It's the happiness of messing around in the 3-D world, something that will never go out of style as long as there are people on earth -- and clay and Home Depot.

Darkling objects

Jim Lambie and Francis Alys make objects with a darker edge. Lambie's objects, like "Bleached Highlights" (shown) look cobbled together from second-hand materials (mirrors, sneakers, paint) and while the bright colors and slip-sloppy construction connote happy, playful, childlike, there's a forlorn quality and a message about a world too cheerful for its own good.




Lambie, by the way, actually made an installation of sorts. His objects sit on a floor covering, a wall-to-wall carpet of sorts, he made out of electrical tape. It's a black rug that's reminiscent of a Frank Stella black painting.

Alys, who paints like a charm and is madly trying to make sense of things like life, death, suicide bombings, the uprisings in Chiapas (he's lived in Mexico for 20 years) has fashioned a couple of machine guns from wood and movie projector reels that are crude but effective communicators about violence, broadcasting and exploitation. (shown)



Ugo Rondinone, who shows up with a video installation that was nice but seemed familiar (it reminded both Libby and me of the Doug Aitken video installation at the Fabric Workshop a couple years back) also made a sculptural object. A luminous Sesame St. rainbow whose message "Everyone gets lighter" is so forlorn it would fail the tryout for a spot on PBS. By the way, Libby and I saw the installers struggling with this, seemingly trade show simple piece the night before the show opened. In fact, the morning of the press preview it still was not functioning. Only when we exited the museum at around 3 p.m. was the work up and fully operational. (Some installations are probably simpler.)

Where there's a rainbow, can a greenhouse be far behind? Carsten Holler's "Solandra Greenhouse" (shown) is what it sounds like -- a glass house loaded with plants. The piece, by the Belgian-born artist who is also a biologist is sited in a sunny hallway and replete with Solandra maxima vines that throw off "pheromones capable of inducing amorous feelings." There are also green flashing strobe lights and grow lights and Holler who lives Sweden is obsessed with human emotion and human interaction. As the plants grow and emit more pheromones it might be possible to get a whiff and fall in love with someone or something with you in the space. As it was when I walked through it smelled a whole lot better than Frank's Nursery and I kind of liked it.



Libby and I both scratched our heads at Rachel Harrison's sculptures. Harrison, who also has a suite of photographs situated on the walls surrounding her 3-D works, would have been better served if the photos had been separated from the 3-D works. Their close placement together caused more confusion than necessary as I, for one, kept trying to piece together a narrative of sorts that linked the two.

Because the photos deal with belief systems (they show religious devotees touching the window of a house where an apparition of the Virgin Mary had appeared I read belief system into the sculptures as well. Whether or not that's right, I couldn't avoid the interpretation due to the photos. The sculptures, which involve colorful blobs sitting atop a house or a set of steps, or in one case a box atop a tower made of styrofoam, seemed to refer to belief systems, the blobs being the belief, the house or steps the system. (shown is "Marathon Station" which shows a man placing money in a soda machine and waiting for the can to descend...belief system at work?)


Off the Charts


I left the most disturbing piece in the show for the last, John Bock's sculptural environment used in his filmed performance "Meechfever" which plays somewhere in the big museum. (I'm sorry we didn't get to see it.) Like Paul McCarthy, Bock's work registers high on the nasty scale. The work has an entryway with carpets and a glass vitrine holding Bertolt Brecht's fingernails. It's downhill from there on in. You descend into a world of mad, inwardness that's like the sanctum sanctorum of a scientist who can't deal with the external world any more and is living in lies, dreams, and memories, constructing a monstrous thing in the straw-filled attic. (image--somebody said it was an airplane; Libby said it was Frankenstein; I agree with Libby -- it's mad science)

I interpreted this difficult, Halloweenish piece as a condemnation of isolationism in all its personal, national and international meanings. It was hard to look at but I admired its passion.

In sum, objects, objects, objects are singing in this show. And installations like Holler's and Bock's are the exception, not the norm. In all cases, the works had much to say for themselves and I was happy to be all eyes and ears.
permanent link  roberta 6:53 PM
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Carnegie people

 

Maybe it happens with all triennials. They rolled out the red carpet (top image). And the red flowers, the red swag and the top hatted door men -- all for us! No biggie, we had our red carpet stroll and felt no different than if we had been going in the service entrance. (Well, maybe a little different.)

The press preview seemed less mobbed than the 2004 Whitney Biennial press opening, and since the Carnegie Museums sprawl over what seems like miles of corridors, we hardly felt the crowd.



Speaking of sprawl, one of the Carnegie's most imposing spaces is the Hall of Sculpture, which seems to be a great space to hang art that's not sculpture. This show has, as we told you, Philip-Lorca diCorcia's large, jewel-like photos of pole dancers placed in perfect harmony with the Greek statuary.

San Francisco performance artist Trisha Donnelly's "Letter to Tacitus," was performed in the Hall while we were there. The piece, in which a man strides one lap around the atrium space speaking a script from a single sheet of paper (image above) is incomprehensible -- the man's words are completely garbled and gobbled up by the atrium's acoustics. But nevermind, the idea of fuzzy oratory now, in this election year, is message enough.

Speaking of messages, we ran into artist Maurizio Cattelan and gallerist Marian Goodman while we were all looking at -- and trying to take pictures of -- Cattelan's fantasy sculpture of a dead Jack Kennedy. The piece is truly a highlight of the show, transcending creep show -- just barely -- and engaging on many levels.



The artist was in and out of the room while the gallerist snapped away, and we were told by the guard, who refused to turn the lights up so we could take a decent picture, that the artist had just turned them off -- and wanted it that way. (Image right shows Cattelan and Goodman in caucus with other museum staff, perhaps getting directions out of the Founders' Room corridor and back to the path of the show. )

I can't tell you how many times we had to ask for directions. In spite of the pink and red tape path on the floor delineating the route(s) it's still pretty confusing.



A German television crew was busy interviewing Curator Laura Hoptman in the Neo Rauch room. (image left) The footage was for the news program "Tagesthemen," and Producer Daniela Hetz (pink sweater) corralled Libby and me and our Carnegie Museum buddy, Madelyn, to be the warm bodies in a few shots they needed to fill out the report. They wanted us to act natural and stand there talking about Rauch's paintings. Typecast!

We extracted our payback by asking Hetz to translate the titles of Rauch's paintings which she did with great charm and, we hope, great accuracy.



One of our favorite rooms -- and mostly each artist got a room of his or her own to display a generous amount of work -- was Isa Genzken's. The German artist's eyelevel mini-environments, made from Partyland's best toys, tumblers and plastic champagne glasses and Dollarland's nicest vinyl handbags were loaded with visual play and happily we lingered looking. (image is me and Madelyn under Genzken's pink parasol piece.)

That's all for the moment. I'll be back later with thoughts about sculpture which makes a strong showing.
permanent link  roberta 8:59 AM
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Tuesday, October 12, 2004

It's a wonderful town

 
I got a ride to the Big Apple tomorrow. I couldn't pass it up. Roberta will hold the fort.
permanent link  libby 9:42 PM
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Five at Art Alliance

 
I went to the Philadelphia Art Alliance to check out Samantha Simpson, and on my way up to the third floor I passed some really great clay pots by Nicholas Arroyave-Portela.

The turned shapes are distorted by punching or crumpling, and the two-tone colors breathe with the shape. Although these are essentially traditional thrown shapes, they have been rendered non-functional, by-in-large. (Image top, "Tall Terracotta shlashed crumpled form ..." and detail right.)

The show description compares the work to Lucio Fontana, Anish Kapoor and Mark Rothko, but I'd have to take a step back from that. The intensity of a spiritual experience and a willingness to go to extremes is not quite there; on the other hand, the work has a skin and anthropomorphic quality that gives it life, if not pulsating Presence.


Also on the way up to Simpson's work were Burt Glinn's photos of Cuba right after Castro's victory. Fine photojournalism, indeed. The people are filled with revolutionary fever, Castro is youthful, and everyone looks a lot healthier and wealthier than they do now. (Image, "...and responds with delight..." to Castro's arrival on the podium.)

Simpson's mural-sized pieces continue to please with their wonderful storybook charm mixed with gorgeous color and decorative elements. The new, site-specific painting, "Pokeweed Alley (Grip and the Nevermore Raven with Respective Badgers)" continues using badgers, snakes and stenciled on motifs used in previous work. The two badgers were especially beautiful, with their flowered clothes, a nearly matched pair. The oldest of the three large pieces, "Mythologizing Back" (shown) was the most simple, graphically, but it was "Peony," with its ambiguous, layered space and content that interested me most (although I confess I love all of her work).


Also at the Art Alliance were Brian David Dennis' "Leaning Keep" (left), a site-specific installation that blocked the light in the stairway in protest of the security measures now infringing on freedom (I take this to mean the Patriot Act).






And in the first floor galleries, Tamar Hirschl's mostly AbEx paintings focusing on her own experiences with war, violence, past and present. Born in Zagreb, she moved to Israel in 1948 and studied art there, moving here relatively recently. That arc of experience and transience informs her work (image right, "Fragmented Memories").



Over at the Art Alliance Annex, Tadashi Moriyama's paintings also reflect the experience of shifting cultures.


His mix of cartoony imagery, including UPC coding for polyp-like creatures, distorted planets, rickety planes, bending buildings and floating money and abstract expressionist layers of paint often hits the nail on the head with emotional truth. Moriyama brings a wry point of view as a stranger in a strange land (image left, "Temporary Planets With Bills and Coins"), and a sort of queasiness from the shifts in terrain.

The paintings range from tiny (approx. 3" x 2") to enormous (6 or 7 feet wide). Overall, this was promising, witty work worth some time.
permanent link  libby 8:35 PM
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Monday, October 11, 2004

The evil eye

 

The television in your living room is a force of evil--the biggest enemy of truth in our world-wide culture today. At least, that's the message I got from this year's Carnegie International (it's the 54th of this estimable triennial, by the way), which dipped it's arty toe into international waters and found that a lot of artists feel like they and the world around them have been swept away in an ocean of lies via the tv screen. Belief systems--politics of all stripe, religious movements, big business and government have captured the storytelling aparatus of society to tell it like they want it to be.

Paul Chan's "Now Let us Praise American Leftists" (image top) is a letterboxed video on a television screen showing faces from just above the tip of the nose to just above the bottom of the chin. All the faces were created in FACES, a computer program that helps law enforcement agencies create sketches of criminals. The idea of using stereotyping formulas in art is not so new, but the video was great to watch as it raised issues of preconceived notions about physiognomy, ethnicity and enemies of the state. Chan, a native of Hong Kong, now lives in New York.


Tiny, tiny television screens showing scenes of red coats at war in Revolutionary War era dollhouse rooms as well as broadcasts of other historic wars in other period rooms was Londoner Jeremy Deller's jab at how we get our news and whose point of view the so-called truthful news represents ("Breaking News," image right).


And Harun Farocki's three installations, "Eye/Machine I, II, and III," each a pair of television screens, raise the issue of machine-interpreted vision, something we use increasingly in warfare to determine bombing targets. The imagery, full of crosshairs and explosions and control-panel views serve as chilling reminders of how tenuously machines render facts. The work was also a reminder that the American "precision" military strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq were a lie based on this kind of machine-mediated information. Was the bombed wedding really bombed or really a wedding? Farocki, born in Czechoslovakia, lives in Germany (left, from Farocki's installation).

Consistent use of television screens in art to raise these issues (see post below for a descripton of the Kutlug Ataman piece) is of course telling. Ataman's piece, "Kuba" (detail, right), shows that you don't have to go to a mosque or a church to hear a story to believe in. You can just turn on the tube in your living room, on your personal tv, amidst your most comfortable furniture, and society will beam in its version of the truth.

The more we stare into the moving box, the more removed we are becoming from our own personal interaction with and judgment of the real world, for certainly the "Real World" of television is anything but. What's coming forth in "Joan of Arcadia" (left), "Will and Grace," "Fear Factor" the nightly news or "The Jerry Springer Show" is a corporate projection for you to believe in--myth-making or religion for the 21st century. The tv--and the computer, which is close behind in claiming to project truth--is the high priest, and he's taken up residence in your home, presenting mysteries and miracles edited--by producers, writers, cameramen, ideologues and honest men--to look like your truth .

permanent link  libby 9:13 PM
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Deep thoughts, deep show

 
The Carnegie International is a great show--it requires a full day of looking, or even two.

Any of the art could have been made anywhere. The painting and video looked especially strong. Apart from a few moments of joie de vivre, it’s a pretty serious slog about the meaning of life, the reason we’re on earth.

A lot of the work is difficult, but we felt it was fruitful spending the time to decode it; and it definitely was an antidote to the navel-gazing that doesn’t go anywhere beyond reflecting the popular culture.

The catalog is a beauty with three Biblical bookmark ribbons in the colors of the show’s ribbons--your daily missal on art that thinks about goodness, badness and the cosmos.

There are three shows within the show, miniexhibits of work by Robert Crumb, Lee Bontecou and Mangelos. We won’t comment here except to mention that they also are concerned with universal questions and they give context to the other artists.

Here are a few of the reasons, in alphabetical order, of why we loved this show: We’ll both come in later with more thoughts and pictures. We took a ton of pix and know you want to see them.



Francis Alys--Hundreds of paintings, sketches and objects in a setting that evokes a study hall (shown at top), part of his display of an ongoing project, ”The Prophet,” to study the world and try to make sense of the horrible and wonderful things that happen there. There’s an artist’s work-book quality (left), with revisions and emendations, and lots of beautiful, Cezanne-colors paint. Born in Belgium, he lives in Mexico City.




Mamma Andersson--For a completely different approach to paint quality, but not necessarily to subject matter, Andersson’s thin application of paint implies a world that is temporary, disposable and embattled. Swedish. (Andersson painting right)





Kutlug Ataman--”Kuba” a 40-channel video installation (left) won the $10,000 Carnegie Prize--a good selection. It is a communal portrait of Kuba, a shanty town of criminals, drug addicts and religious radicals, who tell their stories on 40 mismatched televisions on a thrift-shop array of tables and chairs looking like a classroom of school desks. Ataman didn’t try to tease out the fact from the fantasy in these stories, and you get the questioning of truth from the subtitles, the multiple stories, the delivery via tv. Commissioned by Artangel and coproduced by Carnegie International, et al. Born in Turkey, lives and works in Turkey, Spain and London.



Robert Breer--”ATOZ” A film animation of photos, paintings and drawings that’s a joyful, playful, energetic take on the abc's. An unconventional use of animation by the oldest artist (born 1926) in the show. The dancing, high-speed imagery was mesmerizing, humorous and an ode to life. We missed his other video, "What Goes Up" (detail right). Boo-hoo. Breer is from Detroit and works in Tappan, New York.






Fernando Bryce-- Hand-drawn, ink-on-paper recreations of political posters, tourist brochures, newspaper pages and government documents that highlight the lies of the revolution--from both the revolutionaries and the counter-revolutionaries. “Inter-American Affairs” (detail left) is 230 works, and Bryce, who was born in Peru, now works in Berlin, Germany, as well as Lima.






Kathy Butterly -- Non-functional, small (approx. 3 to 8 inches high) clay objects that are joyous, humanistic, fantastically beautiful in a show with not so much beauty or joy; the Crayola-colored glazes in some cases were18 layers deep. (detail right) Pulling from many different cultures--Chinese lions, American cartoons, Egyptian ornamentation--these detailed labors of love had a squishy, droopy and drapey, skinlike quality. The work was perfectly placed between cartoonist Robert Crumb and animation cartoon meister Robert Breer. Born in Amityville, New York, Butterly works in New York City.



Maurizio Cattelan--”Now,” a wax and resin JFK in a completely open coffin on a bier, barely visible in a darkened room. (left) He was vulnerable (without his socks and shoes), demystified, humanized and totally false (his head was intact). A crowd pleaser, open to interpretation, and definitely revealing of age-specific reactions. Born Italy, Cattelan lives in New York.



Philip-Lorca diCorcia--Can you believe pole dancers? DiCorcia’s 10 untitled chromogenic color prints are show stoppers. The almost life-sized dancers, most upside down, look more like athletes than sex objects. Filled with religious and Old Masters references, they hold their own between the Greek statues in the Sculpture Hall (detail right). Born Hartford, Conn., diCorcia lives in New York City.





Saul Fletcher--These tiny photos, many 3 1/2 x 4 1/2, the largest 8” x 6 1/2”, document a sort of secret performance and installation in his house, creating a cosmology of saints of questionable virtue. But the series offers a complete belief system that is open to interpretation. The work is painterly and intimate as holy cards. It’s not about photography per se. (detail left) Fletcher was born and works in England.




Katarzyna Kozyra -- Koszyra’s video installation, is a rethinking of the Stravinsky/ Nijinsky “The Rite of Spring” in the context of gender and aging. Gender confusion adds humor and stop-action photography gave the motions a frenzied, comic quality. The three old guys were the chorus -- Motown for the old. The virgin dances wildly until she flops down dead. (installation right) Kozyra also had a commissioned performance, but we didn’t see it. Born in Warsaw, Kozyra works there and in Berlin.



Julie Mehretu--More ambitious than what she showed at the Whitney, Mehretu’s stadia series, the swirl of the vacuum of our empty culture and its militaristic jingoism in the huge series of paintings of stadia convinced us that this was powerful work. (Stadia series detail left) Born in Egypt, Mehretu works in New York.




Payne and Relph--Oliver Payne and Nick Relph’s animated “Comma, Pregnant Pause,”(right) commissioned for the Carnegie, lampoons the tyranny of corporate-supplied technology and its false promises-- on people hooked up to their technology as the real world is passes them by. Charming and humorous. There was another video but this was the one we saw. Born and live and work in London. (You may remember seeing their work at the ICA in the 2002 “Shoot the Singer” show.




Neo Rauch -- Seductive, Hitchcockian nightmares, illustrate almost-real spaces and situations. ("Brandung" translated, where the waves break, left) The bureaucracy of the universe breathes down the necks of the players in his paintings, with people in uniforms and governmental buildings that loom mixing with symbols like bones in a box and double-tailed fish. The paintings parody old, propagandistic textbook illustrations and are unsettling. He continues to intrigue us. Born and lives in Leipzig.

We’d love to hear if you went out to Pittsburgh, what you thought of the show.
permanent link  libby and roberta 1:21 PM
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At Bridgette's, Part 2

 
Well, now, where were we?

Bridgette Mayer has a good group sculpture show, as I told you here when I wrote about Scot Kaplan's surveillance installation.

The show's three other participants use vastly different means from Kahn's to achieve their ends. They're object-makers, although as with all art today, the objects are conceptual. Interestingly, some of the best conceptual pieces are also functional.



Scott White, a musician among sculptors, produced a series of functional works -- trumpets (top image) and an accordian (left) -- using the most improbable materials. White's copper tubing trumpets were scheduled to be played at the opening. I couldn't stay to hear it but they held great promise. The artist's "The Accordian," a furniture-oid piece whose top ended in 8 tiny bellows, was the instrument in play when Libby and I were there.

Viewers were pulling up the tops and creating squeezebox harmony. White says in his artist's statement that he is interested in the single note and not the composition, believing in that one note's power to express the instrument/object's voice. You could argue the point but White's pieces, inventive, expressive and idiosyncratic, are individual voices in themselves -- without having to play a note. I look forward to seeing more of them.




Mike Stifel, who curated the show, according to what Mayer told me, is the mechanic of the lot. His pieces use spigots and motors and feel very much from the hand and mind of the Home Depot afficionado. Plumbing problems were on Stifel's mind in general. Two works, including "Where the F!** is the Landlord" (shown) used water -- dripping, flowing through clear plastic tubes, as a kind of threat. That's something we can all identify with after the recent floods from heavy rain.



I like mechanical sculpture in general and thought Stifel's piece in the back utility closet which required the viewer to step on a foot pedal to activate the rush of water through surgical tubing, was the highpoint, evoking as it did, not only floods and sump pumps but the rush of blood through the human body and how we ourselves are but sophisticated machines of a sort -- hydro-chemical-electrical power generators -- that need constant maintaining and fall apart so easily.

Finally, Brant Ritter's light boxes (left above) are elegant reminders of the seduction of light. These boxes, which used fluorescent lights to draw lines in space had a spiritual quality (albeit a minimalist one) that evoked heavenly light beyond the closed door. They are the wallflowers in this show. However I found their square upon square ambiance a nice resting place in the crowd.

The exhibit's up to Oct. 30.

permanent link  roberta 8:45 AM
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Sunday, October 10, 2004

Back and showing

 
We made it back from Pittsburgh and the Carnegie International just in time for Dear Fleisher, a fundraiser for the venerable Fleisher Art Memorial (where we each have taken classes in the distant past). It's this afternoon, 3 to 6 p.m. and has a star-studded list of local contributors (including us!) If you're there, say hello.

The deal is each piece of art is 4" x 6", like a picture postcard, and sells for a flat $50. The pieces are not labeled by artist so you don't know who you're buying (unless of course you recognize the style), only what you're buying.

Also coming up, the inliquid benefit Thursday, Oct. 14, to which we also contibuted. Online bidding begins tomorrow (good luck with navigating the Web site). The real-world auction begins 5 p.m. Thursday at 119 Arch Street (at the loading-dock entrance to the National Products Building). Again, if you're there, say hello to us.

Beginning tomorrow on artblog--our take(s) on the Carnegie International.
permanent link  libby 11:35 AM
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