Artillery Magazine

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  • Rebecca Ripple

    Rebecca Ripple

    At the core of Rebecca Ripple’s practice is the question of historical authority and traditional truths—who sets the stage for what truth means and how it gets enforced. In past works, she has examined the bounds of Catholicism, the issue of constraining the female body and how the dictates of ideological or political systems are transmitted. She continues these investigations in “licking yellow fog,” an exhibition of sculpture and drawings. Here she also delves into how domesticity—specifically suburban rule systems—and individual perception entwine.

    Typical of Rebecca Ripple’s artwork, Scorpion (2012) explores the contradictions at the heart of a life under scrutiny and interrogation. A makeshift set of wooden struts supports a jagged, fragmentary group of linoleum tiles erupting upwards. From the center of this improvised floor, two interwoven tendril-like elements emerge, at first carefully covered in the kitchen linoleum and then progressively encased by faux wood material. Two cast aluminum elements crown the work. Located somewhere between a set of blunted scissors/forceps or an enlarged speculum, the open hinge looks like alternately threatening blades or the hand signal for A-okay.

    Rebecca Ripple’s sculptures typically combine both found and fabricated sources, making use of heavily worked materials, through which she continues in her exploration of the contradictory intersections between art and the everyday. In particular, her 3D work evokes a simultaneously visceral physical response together with a protracted intellectual quandary, pulling the viewer into her musings.

    Paradox is often a strategy Ripple deploys in her search for the schisms she sees between the religious and the secular, the generalized and the idiosyncratic, the reasoned and the emotive. In a work such as belt (2012) the leather fragment of a belt, looking much like a wizened black tongue, is affixed via transparent tape to a linoleum tile set off the wall by a clear acrylic box. Is the fetish meant to conjure up the act of licking the kitchen floor clean, being tongue-tied, or is it simply two unlikely fragments of domesticity which collide in an abject assemblage celebrating brute materiality covered with the signs of a past life? The strength of Ripple’s work resides on being able to straddle those multiple interpretative axes without losing pungency and significance, whichever axis any given viewer favors.

    Her drawings give insight into the poetic construction she is creating. Notes to herself about how many haloes of meaning to incorporate into a given sculpture bear witness to the complexity of inferences she is building up. The scrawled images themselves favor the conditional and variable: conditions that are a part of her working process. A passionate fixity to her desires is tempered by a provisional quality to her results, underscoring the anxiety of her interrogatives.

    Like the title of the exhibition, which refers to the yellow fog of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, with its difficult stanza, Ripple’s sense of the inscrutable is that it is something to be seen and felt, rolled over in the imagination, but not ever entirely consigned to the bounds of language.

  • Tom Dowling

    Tom Dowling

    Two dozen drawings, paintings, constructions and hybrid pieces from 2011-2012 express Tom Dowling’s keen knowledge of architecture and art history. These pieces allude specifically to theories of modernism as expressed in early 20th-century architecture and in mid-century visual art, the latter including German Bauhaus, Minimalist and Hard-Edge movements, and artists Mondrian, Rothko and Diebenkorn. Within Dowling’s deliberately non-painterly works, circles and squares are elevated to visual harmony, grace, and even to meditative and iconic states. Further, the configurations of these are pared down to their basic elements, resulting in impeccable design that bridges reductive aspects of modern art with the simplification and “form follows function” aspects of modern architecture. Indeed, many of his paintings suggest architectural depth, while his constructions employ paintings within three dimensions. As a collection, they provide “Insider Information” (the exhibition title) about the nature and beauty of architecture reduced to its essence.

    Four drawings on paper in the series “Sacred Geometry” each contain a small abstract, colored design made of circular and square shapes interacting. These organic drawings reveal myriad ways to reconfigure simple shapes. A second series of double panels, with titles like Equinox and Solstice, features circles and squares and other basic shapes intersecting at odd angles. Several pieces—Chiesa, for example—have conceptual elements, revealing just a segment of the circle, leaving the empty space to our imaginations. Aventino is dramatic with a deep magenta rectangle dominating the left panel, contrasting a textured gold panel on the right. Isoloa Tiberna and a few other pieces are playful exceptions with flowing strokes on solid backgrounds.

    The hybrid constructions in this exhibition are miniature architectural masterpieces and attain coherence for the show. Several, 30 inches wide or less, are created from wood, metal and cardboard, with acrylic paint and graphite; each is a reductive version of a building that the artist has visited. Dowling’s interest in architecture, particularly Italian, compelled him to spend a year in Rome, perusing Baroque churches, paring the buildings down to their essential, classical shapes, using his imagination to remove the flourishes. Along with his understanding of modernist art movements, the artist has distilled the nature, beauty and harmony of classical European buildings in these sculptures.

    Apparently serving as models for larger constructions to hopefully be created in the future, each maquette features a wooden platform and frame, while several have slender linear “zips,” the term used by Barnett Newman referring to lines that traverse his canvases. But “zips” in this exhibition are free-standing, painted wooden sticks that the viewer is invited to pick up and move. In Frieze, Tower Gateway, Golden Path and Passamezzo the artist again employs circles and squares in his designs, several echoing the configurations of the smaller two-panel paintings. Yet with warm wood for the framework and platform, and inclusion of the zip—to engage the viewer, to be moved in any desired direction—the hybrid work is its own world, a minimal version of Joseph Cornell’s assemblage boxes, welcoming the viewer inside.

  • Editor’s Letter

    Editor’s Letter

    Tulsa KinneyDear Readers,

    I didn’t get a chance in my last column to talk about art critic Dave Hickey’s announcement about being fed up with the art world and “quitting.” This is old news by now, but I feel compelled to continue the discussion. When I first read the U.K.Observer article, it felt celebratory. The interview ended with Hickey calling the art world “nasty and stupid,” and he doesn’t care if he’s invited to the parties anymore. Good for you, Dave!

    That’s not to say I think all art sucks. There’s plenty of fresh and powerful work being made (see inside these pages), but have you noticed a lot of the work at the top of the spectrum does sort of suck? Many of the artists that have “made it,” seem to be just cashing in and going through the motions. But for some reason they are still on top.

    The main thing I like about Hickey is his sassiness and spunk. Unlike a curator quoted in the same article, who wished to remain anonymous, Hickey is not afraid to speak his mind. You don’t have to agree with Hickey—although it’s pretty easy—point is, you gotta love his confidence in saying what he thinks, no matter how eloquent (or not) he chooses to be.

    As for that cowardly curator, he (or she) wished to remain anonymous when voicing the opinion that maybe, just maybe, big-deal artists like Tracey Emin might be a little overrated. Ya think? Someone was afraid to say that?

    I feel a segment of “REALLY?” coming on from SNL’s Weekend Update skit. Really? A curator? A curator that maybe had to include Emin’s work in a show, and really, underneath it all, that curator thought the work stunk? A curator—who the general public looks up to as an arbiter of taste—was afraid to assert themselves on matters of taste? Perhaps a sponsored exhibit funded by investors that have a lot of Emin work kept them silent? Perhaps? Really?

    We all know what’s required to make it in the art world: Play the game. Kiss the right ass. But truly, that’s not where art comes from. In his interview, Hickey longed for the old days when artists were independent thinkers and creators and cared about life and communication. In the same article, a BBC arts editor put it this way: “We need artists to work outside the establishment and start looking at the world in a different way— to start challenging preconceptions instead of reinforcing them.”

    To tell you the truth, that’s precisely why I started this magazine. I was an artist getting nowhere, trying to get somewhere. It wasn’t because my art stank… who can really determine such matters these days? It’s a free-for-all as far as I can tell. I knew my art was good. But I also knew that I was in a world of doublespeak—of false idols and price points—and I wanted to challenge that.

    I’ll close with an anecdote. One big-time dealer (whose name shall remain anonymous) told me recently that he simply did not like the magazine. He put it plainly. “The reason I don’t like Artillery is because you tell the truth.” I think that was supposed to be a criticism, but I think I’ll take it as a compliment. Thank you Mr. Big Shot Dealer. What can I expect from your next show? Beauty? Truth? Really?

    — Tulsa Kinney

  • Enrique Martinez Celaya

    Enrique Martinez Celaya

    Stating that visual art derives from a “poetic impulse” reduces the experience of looking at a particularly seductive or engaging work of art to a passing mystery, some moment of gloriously inexplicable inspiration that is bound to pass. While the work of Enrique Martinez Celaya, who was born in Cuba but spent much of his youth in Spain and Puerto Rico, is luminous, and perhaps even “poetic” in the very best sense of the word, both Celaya’s paintings and sculptures push way beyond the single transformative gesture that poetics all too often suggests, to encompass a territory of staggering complexity.

    Celaya’s paintings beg no obvious questions, but instead provide strange and sometimes incongruous vantage points into a universal human narrative. Celaya’s images are illusory, and at times wondrous, and have a distinctly filmic quality like stilled images from a Guillermo del Toro film, wherein the narrative is simultaneously beautiful and haunting, seductive yet terrifying. The One Who Has Taken Its Place (all works 2012) suggests an ecstatic if perilous relationship between reality and the world of dreams—a German shepherd overtaking a terrified unicorn could represent the struggle between the known world and that of imagination. Celaya’s animals don’t function as anthropomorphized stand-ins for humans but instead operate as incontrovertible reminders of the struggle between the conscious and the unconscious mind, between desire and denial, and finally, between reality and imagination. Artists like Marino Marini and Rene Magritte come to mind as influences, as both engaged mythic imagery in the service of the imagination—Marini especially, as he, like Celaya, utilized the horse as a metaphoric symbol of transcendence.

    Celaya’s exhibition is filled with dualities. In the painting The Tunnel and The Light (For the Ones Who Hope to Come Out), the darker interior space of the cave, replete with a cluster of dangling and sharply delineated icicles, gives way to a misty field of spring flowers, implying a relationship between the known landscape with the more sacred but brutal topography of the artist’s own interior world. It’s tempting to read this work as an image of rebirth or redemption, yet like the exhibition’s title, “The Hunt’s Will,” Celaya posits the simultaneity of life and death. Perhaps the “hunt,” i.e. the journey through life, is autonomous as though it were a viable and traceable phenomenon that acts upon us and propels us forward.

    Other images are more concrete. Celaya’s sculptural work The Enchantment, for instance, creates a visceral relationship and yet another duality between nature and the desire to contain it as a small bronze birdhouse rests wedged between the branches of a low tree. As with Celaya’s paintings, the narrative is fractured, the bird hunted to extinction or simply walled up inside a manmade container. Either way, this work, like poems written by Celan, Martinson and Frost—among Celaya’s favorites—derives its power from the complex relationship between disparate ideas and images, deliberately fragmenting narrative in order that we, as viewers, might lean in closer to glimpse the otherworldly.

  • Featured Review: MexiCali Biennial 2013: Cannibalism in the New World

    Featured Review: MexiCali Biennial 2013: Cannibalism in the New World

    The moment the elevator of the Vincent Price Art Museum opens onto the second floor, one is immediately confronted with artist Matt MacFarland’s cartoon sandwich boards, part of a body of work called Steakation (2012). The nearest one depicts a heart-shaped steak with face, arms and legs proclaiming, “I want to be inside you!”—A rather forward sentiment, not to mention a graphic one. Mental images of red meat consumption are instantly conjured, seasoned with the uncomfortable psychological intimacy of a wide-eyed cartoon character who wants to enter your digestive system. The experience is funny, grotesque, highly physical and disturbingly mixed in its messages.

    After walking through the entire MexiCali Biennial exhibition, packed enthusiastically into a single large gallery, it becomes apparent just how apt of an opening line the sandwich board is. The 2013 edition of the seven-year-old exhibition series is built around the historically loaded theme of cannibalism—which, as the curators note, was one of the rationales for colonialism in the New World—and is filled with works referencing food, consumption, sacrifice, violence, trafficking, appropriation and conquest. The show, whose subject matter boils down to the strange detritus and occurrences that erupt out of cross-cultural pollination, succeeds in getting under one’s skin; its effects are tactile and visceral, sometimes literally so, as many of the artworks are interactive and invite touch. There is a sense of much being at stake, but at the same time, an infectious humor is maintained.

    Matt MacFarland, Steakation, 2012
    Matt MacFarland, Steakation, 2012

    Judging from accounts provided by helpful museum staff, Latin American border issues were especially highlighted by performances that occurred at the raucous opening reception. At the gallery’s entrance, artist Sergio Bromberg had installed an untitled contraption that mimicked the recording devices commonly found at border checkpoints; a “guard” ordered everyone entering the exhibition to submit to having their photo and fingerprints taken. Inside the gallery, Dino Dinco and Rafa Esparza served Paletas de Sangre (blood popsicles) out of a real Mexican ice cream cart. The popsicles were actually hibiscus flavored and made by the popular company formerly known as La Michoacana, which had to change its name in order to distance itself from the notorious drug cartel, La Familia Michoacana. This interactive work, which made for many bloody-looking mouths that night, is a clever metaphor for the violence of border commerce.

    Other works in the exhibition evoke in less direct ways the strange mutations, or sense of not belonging, that can occur when mismatched phenomena collide with one other. Matthew Carter’s intriguing Five Stacks of Death, Dread and Darkness (2012) is a gooey black sculpture that attempts to capture in material form a catch phrase from the reality show Ghost Adventures. Christopher Reynolds offers an eccentric series of works addressing food consumption—among them, Appetite Apparatus #1 (2011), an understated sculpture that proposes, via chromatherapy, to suppress the viewer’s appetite through deployment of the color Baker-Miller pink.

    There is also a sense in the exhibition of bodies literally moving through space, across zones of determinacy. Nancy Popp’s Untitled (Street Performance), Concept Drawing (2013) is a photograph of a building under construction in Mexicali that is stitched through by the artist with thread to trace her proposed bodily movements in a future action. On the grittier side, The People Movers (2012) by Fred Alvarado records the artist’s travels through California via jumpy video footage, coloring books depicting the state’s prisons and yoga mats spray painted with all of the prisons’ acronyms.

    Natalia Anciso, Two Spics and a Dude ("The Smile Series"), 2012
    Natalia Anciso, Two Spics and a Dude (“The Smile Series”), 2012

    There are times when the exhibition seems excessive. In one section of the gallery are crammed Juan Bastardo’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (2012), Natalia Anciso’s Platicando con las Comadres (Chatting with the Gossips) (2012), and Reynolds’ The Pleasure of the Table (2012), all within yards of one another. Despite the theme of the biennial, there are an awful lot of overly-dramatic, dinner-referencing installations for one exhibition. Similarly, Marycarmen Arroyo Macias’ harrowing Tomad y Comed (Take and Eat) (2012), in which the holy communion phrase is spelled out in pig’s blood on the wall, is right around the corner from the blood popsicle cart. Still, one can’t deny the delicate beauty of Anciso’s piece, which weaves drawings of border arrests and other sad situations into the soothing comfort of domestic decorations, or the succinct effectiveness of Macias’ virtual scream of protest against unsustainable growth. And perhaps it could be said that such histrionics are warranted—both as an accurate reflection of the vivid subject matter and as a curious means of force-feeding its effects to viewers, making us, in the end, the ultimate cannibals.

    MexiCali Biennial 2013 runs through April 13; info at vincentpricemuseum.org; all images courtesy Mexicali Biennial 2013

  • NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH

    NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH

    One of the largest survey shows of contemporary Canadian art ever produced, “Oh Canada,” is the culmination of five-year’s research and 400 studio visits by North Adams MASS MoCA curator Denise Markonish. It joins a history of international survey exhibitions of Canadian art as well as biennials in Montréal, Alberta, Quebec City and by the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa from 1926 to 1989. The project’s scale—120 works and 10 commissions, by 62 Canadian artists—is a testament to Markonish’s genuine curiosity about Canada and the impressive scope of contemporary art being produced there.

    Realizing that she knew more about artists from China than artists from her northern neighbor, Markonish set out to counter what she calls an “extreme exoticism” in the art world by looking for work closer to home. For better or for worse, she chose not to include many of Canada’s best-known visual art exports: Vancouver photoconceptualists like Jeff Wall, Roy Arden and Rodney Graham, or others like David Altmejd, and Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, who now mainly live and work abroad.

    “Oh Canada” is an idiosyncratic snapshot of current art that highlights several surprising works by Canadian artists. It has no overall theme, but there are a number of inter-related ideas—conceptualism, cultural hybridity, colonialism, material and craft practices, surreal humor and popular culture—introduced in the 450-page catalog, which includes Markonish’s epic essay, “Oh, Canada: Or, How I Learned to Love 3.8 Million Square Miles of Art North of the 49th Parallel,” reflections by creative writers, critical regional overviews by Canadian curators, artist-to-artist interviews and a historical timeline. Notable is the impressive legacy of Canadian conceptual art, which had its heyday at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax in the ’70s under the leadership of conceptual painter Garry Neill Kennedy, who produced new work for the exhibition. Process painter Eric Cameron, known for his thick paintings, would arrive there from the U.K. and later migrate west to teach in Calgary, as would performance/installation artist Rita McKeough, a Halifax native who now teaches at the Alberta College of Art + Design. Octogenarian Ontario filmmaker and jazz musician, Michael Snow’s 62-minute fixed frame video Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids) (2002) evocatively recallsWavelength (1967), a conceptual classic about place, space and time. Lines of association are drawn between these artists and other generations of NSCAD alumni: Micah Lexier, Kelly Mark, Graeme Patterson and Michael Fernandes, as well as diverse conceptual practices in other parts of the country.

    Marcel Dzama, A Game of Chess, 2011, black and white video projection with sound, Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York
    Marcel Dzama, A Game of Chess, 2011, black and white video projection with sound, Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York

    Much of the work engages material and craft-based practices that re-materialize the art object through process, labor and hand skill, hallmarks of late conceptualism. Luanne Martineau’s felt-sculpture Form Fantasy (2009) straddles high modernism and craft, mashing-up references to Robert Morris and Barnett Newman with feminism and popular culture. Gisele Amantea’s site-specific commission Democracy (2012) cloaks a long entrance foyer with an enlarged black velvet flocked design by the American modernist architect Louis Sullivan, who saw ornamentation an expression of democratic principle. Ornamentation is seen as an expression of conquest and violence in David R. Harper’s Finding Yourself in Someone Else’s Utopia(2012), and it becomes indicative of class and gender in Clint Neufeld’s cast porcelain truck engines displayed on Victorian settees. A younger generation of painters, Etienne Zack, DaveandJenn and Chris Millar construct baroque narrative bricolages steeped in popular culture, the history of art and the materiality of paint; they make paint do things it shouldn’t do!

    “Oh Canada” has a playful, wry, ironic tone that artist Pan Wendt says is typical of “Canada’s messy pranksterism.” Indeed the Cedar Tavern Singers have made an artistic practice out of it, and their newly recorded song “Oh MASS MoCA” sings funny anecdotes about Canadians in the Berkshires. Pointedly, John Will’s title wall implicates all of the artists by name, then facetiously cancels them out with a graffitied “NOTHING.” Dark humor persists in Shary Boyle’s fantastical drawings and Spider-Woman installation, Patrick Bernatchez’s surreal film Chrysalides Empereur (2008—11) and a Dada-inspired video by Marcel Dzama. Sentimentality becomes post-ironic in Daniel Barrow’s exquisitely complex projected drawing installation “The Thief of Mirrors” (2011) and in Amalie Atkins’ “Three Minute Miracle: Tracking the Wolf” (2008), a sugary sweet performance and film installation about reciprocity.

    The idea of Canada is constantly being re-imagined here. The trickster is alive in Kent Monkman’s double diorama Two Kindred Spirits (2012). It tells an amorous tale based on fictitious duos, Tonto and the Lone Ranger and Germany’s Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, an imagined reversal of colonial power, the legacy of which continues to shape Canadian identity and inflict devastating effects on aboriginal peoples. With reference to the oil industry, Rebecca Belmore and Terrance Houle address how political-ecological exploitation affects us all. Inspired by the Radical Faeries, a gay hippie subculture, Noam Gonick and Luis Jacob’s utopian geodesic dome video installation “Wildflowers of Manitoba” (2008) also imagines an alternative history. More menacingly, Charles Stankevich’s mesmerizing video installation “LOVELAND” (2011) tracks a purple cloud from military smoke grenades across the Arctic Ocean, a sublime homage to Jules Olitski’s Color Field painting Instant Loveland (1968) that also serves as an ominous reminder of current tensions in the far North. The idea of the North is less abstract in Annie Pootoogook’s pencil crayon drawings of the sometimes heart wrenching social conditions in Cape Dorset, and Joseph Tisiga’s watercolors of indigenous life in the Yukon today.

    The struggle to maintain an identity while becoming something else is a very Canadian story. In her essay, Markonish notes differences between Canadian and U.S. immigration policies; differences that result in a complex Canadian identity where there is no singular culture but newly formed hyphenated identities. One could argue that since the Canada Council for the Arts (a main funder of the show) was founded in 1957, and artist-run culture began the parallel gallery system in the ’70s, Canadian cultural policy has also chosen to foster diversity within Canadian art. Markonish cites the fierce autonomy of Les Automatistes, mid-century Québec modernists who railed against the provincialism of the Catholic Church; and Greg Curnoe’s radical regionalism in London, Ontario, which struggled to maintain a distinct Canadian cultural identity against the overwhelming influx of cultural exports from the U.S. Curnoe also co-founded Canadian Artists’ Representation (CARFAC) in 1968, which advocates for the improved financial and professional status of artists to facilitate maintaining their artistic practices. So, in amongst the art there lingers a political question too about the differences between the Canadian and American cultural (and other political) systems, and how they affect artistic production in each country. Markonish’s “Oh Canada” seems to yearn, not without envy, for what can be learned from one’s neighbor.

    “Oh Canada: Contemporary Art from North North America,” MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, through April 1, 2013, for more info: massmoca.org

  • Duron Jackson

    Duron Jackson

    Duron Jackson gives us a key to decipher his Blackboard Paintings (2010-2012), the most compelling parts of his installation “Rumination,” the latest of the Brooklyn Museum’s “Raw/Cooked” series. The wall text is that key, informing us that the enigmatic glyphs are prison aerial views: Riker’s Island in New York, River Junction in Florida, Pelican Bay in California, and several others.

    The symbols are powerfully charged ideographs despite their abstracted, cool precision. It is right to call them ideographs, because these glyphs represent more than floor plans. They signify an entire socio-historical discourse that, when it has been heard at all, has often been rendered in the thunderous voice of denunciation: generations lost to prison, male impotence and rage, an invisible underclass, fear of the monster who comes in the night, brooding black bodies packed in cells, our culture’s inability to deal with those it cannot control and won’t control themselves, and the costs of having a civilized society. The paintings conceal these meanings behind cool surfaces of burnished silver-gray graphite on a matte, black wooden substrate. What they quietly signify is awful.

    However, Jackson does not trust us to grasp the underlying sociopolitical history or the critiques of the prison industrial complex his visual symbols call up. That, or he does not trust his logographic language to clearly relate these meanings. He adds other pieces to point to the relation of the slave trade to black men’s current state of incarceration, but in doing so dilutes his most forceful statements. Included in “Rumination” is his didactic painting, a body print of a male figure tumbling head first, fiery red on white paper, Devils’ Exit (2007). The middle of the room, meant to invoke a parlor, is taken up by a throne-like chair covered in white ceramic dominoes sitting atop a contrasting dais made of black dominoes (Ruminations 2012). Finally, in case we still do not get that his references are to black bodies, he includes Malvina Hoffman’s representational bust titled Senegalese Soldier (1928), borrowed from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. The head, slightly larger than life, has beautifully stylized African features. The premise of the “Raw/Cooked” series is that new artists might take inspiration from existing work in the museum’s collection. Here, that inspiration is manifested too literally.

    Jackson fails to keep faith with his own symbols that have carved out sense from absence. His paintings are the strongest elements of the exhibition, reading as cuneiform communiqués broadcast from another sociohistorical reality, or the lost hieroglyphs of an extinct branch of the human family. Ultimately, he would have benefited from more restraint. Less needed to be said here. Too much of “Rumination” is his earnest attempts to generate serious contemplation using wizened metaphors. The truly unnerving question his abstractions raise (that appears over and over again in history) is: What happens to the unregulated body, when in our collective consciousness we attempt to make it disappear?

  • Tomer Aluf

    Tomer Aluf

  • Facing the Sublime in Water, CA

    Facing the Sublime in Water, CA

    NOTWITHSTANDING THE RECENT HURRICANE THAT FLOODED New York City’s galleries, the mundane act of pouring four liters of sea water from the nearest shoreline and leaving it to evaporate on the gallery floor creates a profoundly moving effect. Emilie Halpern’s installation, Drown (2012), in a ritual of self-effacement, utilizes the amount of water sufficient for a person to drown. The trace of sea water which remains, before it is replenished each day, is portentous and suggests the fragility of life.

    “Facing the Sublime in Water, CA” is divided between works, like Halpern’s, that employ water as a reflection of sublimity, or expose the futility of human actions, and works that address the socio-political considerations of water and scarcity. Pieces in the latter category tend to look back historically, calling to mind the dynamics of planetary geology. At this scale, humanity is merely a drop in the bucket.

    Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn’s single channel video All Together Now (2008) suggests the possibility of a future collapse, or perhaps a vision of life into the first few decades of such a sea change. The rambling and nebulous narrative offers a dystopian view. The handheld, whipsaw camera work is likely to induce a measure of discomfort, if not nausea, and provokes anxiety—or more likely, primordial fear—as access to clean water becomes a defining challenge for humanity in the 21st century.

    The show addresses, elliptically, global issues surrounding water rights. Enid Baxter Blader’s HD stop-frame animation from her 16mm film The West (2012) examines the history of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, William Mulholland, the Owens Valley, the damming of rivers in the western United States, and the Reclamation Act of 1902. The historical realities observed in the West—he appropriation of water and the persistence of humans in outstripping natural resources—acutely illustrate human folly.

    In a slightly different vein, Luis Hernandez poses the transportation of water across borders as an indicator of cultural preconceptions. Untitled #12 (fountain) (2010), a water fountain made with ordinary materials, allows visitors to slake their thirst with water imported from Mexico.

    The most absurd and eloquent expression of the sublime can be found in Ger Van Elk’s The Flattening of the Brook’s Surface (1972- 2001), a video in which the artist, paddling along a channel of water in a rubber dingy with a trowel, attempts to smooth the surface of the water that he has stirred up in his passage.

    The expansiveness of “Water, CA” incorporates a wide range of ideas, while wrestling with contradictory impulses, in some cases, sacrificing continuity for breadth. In a somewhat obvious curatorial gesture, Roi Clarkson Coleman’s early 20th-century romantic painting of the California coast,Seascape, hangs in close proximity to Dodge and Kahn’s video, Van Elk’s The Flattening of the Brook’s Surface, and Hernandez’ Untitled #12 (fountain), signaling that we have left far behind any idealized notion of California.

  • Amanda Ross-Ho

    Amanda Ross-Ho

    WHETHER ONE THINKS OF AMANDA ROSS-HO AS A SCULPTOR, A photographer, or more broadly, a conceptual artist, it is clear that she applies a deliberate approach to exploring and controlling a passion for “stuff.” Through inventive modes of display—of objects and images that are both found and to varying degrees of her direct making—she contemplates her own aesthetic.

    In “Teeny Tiny Woman” Ross-Ho draws upon a familiar set of motifs from recent work, most notably paint-streaked drywall “canvases.” These framed-up sheetrock planks lean against gallery walls to signify the germination space of the artist’s studio. She pins or tapes images and small objects to them, and installs sculptural pieces amidst them. It’s a set-up that functions like animation storyboards and architectural models, as analytical tools to diagram acts of creative thought and production.

    “Teeny Tiny Woman” conjures up the artist’s younger self, growing up in a family of photographers and painters, presumably with encouragement and freedom to try her own hand at making art. She’s the daughter who metaphorically inherited two ginormous artists’ smock-shirts and use of a four-times-life-sized enlarger. The latter is clearly the centerpiece of the exhibition: Omega (2012) is a fake, but it looks shockingly real, with a wooden baseboard and all-metal parts found or fabricated to scale.

    Nostalgia can be dangerous territory. But Ross-Ho’s sweet homage to her creative family is fortunately cloaked in an industrial, work-obsessed vibe. Glass bottles with dark liquid line the museum stairs; a re-photographed portrait of the artist at age 11 with a wooden toy camera crafted by her father; a darkroom timer; a reproduction of her mother’s photograph of a window; partially painted canvases and folded drop-cloths; strips of artists’ blue tape; colorful paintings that replicate ones the artist made as a child. Then there is work by the grown-up Amanda Ross-Ho, whose still-childlike playfulness can be felt in acts like stringing cheap jewelry across a museum cart.

    Curators see exciting possibility in Ross-Ho’s signature amalgam of painting, photography and sculpture, and in just a few short years she has gained national-level status. Two years ago she was included in MoMA’s annual “New Photography” exhibition, where her Richard Prince-like strategy of re-photography and her Wolfgang Tilmans’ display-style aesthetic became a lightning rod to criticize the curator’s decision to include her (likely because the field of art photography itself is still quite insular). But as much as the artist herself seems to assert that she is a photographer, her art is most interesting as a hybrid with sculpture.

    The affective qualities of Ross-Ho’s art are most potent within the relative intimacy of smaller settings than the museum’s large, single-gallery, second floor. “Teeny Tiny Woman” suggests Ross-Ho’s experimentation with size and scale could actually stand to become more pronounced. This playful mode of deception offers an appropriate spatial and visual negotiation to enhance the intriguing slippages between her funky images, objects, and their contexts.

    – Anne Martens

  • London Calling

    London Calling

    Phyllida Barlow, “Rift,” a site specific installation in three parts, 2012: Untitled: hoardings, 2012, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London, photo by Maksim Belousov, Mykhailo Chornyy.

    DO WE NEED ANOTHER BIENNALE? CERTAINLY UKRAINE SEEMS to think so, with Kiev staking its claim on the international art scene.

    From Liverpool to Venice, from Istanbul to São Paulo the world is awash with contemporary art. Is there really enough good work to go round, or, like nature, does art abhor a vacuum, growing to fill the ever increasing number of biennale-shaped holes? An attractive and sophisticated city, Kiev very much wants to be part of the international scene. “If we wait for the good times, we never start,” claims the immaculately coiffed Nataliia Zabolotna, director of Kiev’s Mystetskyi Arsenal, the 18th-century arms store which will become one of Europe’s largest art centers when completed in 2014. The Kiev Biennale’s English artistic director, David Elliott, said earlier this year that “Most exhibitions today are Eurocentric in their assumptions.” While not rejecting this, the Biennale tried to present another picture, one that also took into account the political and aesthetic developments that have shaped so much art of the present. “The international art community’s perception of Ukraine as some kind of a post-Soviet hinterland has changed,” said Elliott. That’s as may be, but E.U. leaders, led by the German chancellor Angela Merkel, threatened to boycott the Euro 2012 football championships held during the Biennale and co-hosted with Poland, in protest at the treatment of Kiev’s former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who was reputedly beaten up after her arrest in October. No doubt there was a touch of British irony in Elliott’s choice of theme taken from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: “The best of times, the worst of times: Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art.”

    On my quick 24-hour visit, the city was busy sprucing itself up for the football. Grass was being laid and flowers planted. The organizers obviously hoped that these dual sporting and cultural events would raise the profile of the country—though it didn’t bode well that during our first tour to the National Art Museum of Ukraine, we found the installation Pipeline “Druzha,” a golden-foil spiral wrapped around the classical pillars of the building’s façade by the artist Olga Milentyi, being removed by the authorities. As one young translator muttered, “We have some problems here with democracy.”

    Since the opening of the George Soros-funded Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in Kiev, which had its funding withdrawn after the Orange Revolution, it’s Ukranian steel magnate and former politician Victor Pinchuk— who is married to the daughter of the former president of Ukraine and whose estimated fortune exceeds $3 billion—who has become the backbone of contemporary art in Kiev, reminding anyone who was ever in any doubt that art and money often share the same bed. The Pinchuk Art Centre, the first private museum in the former Soviet Union, with its ubiquitous glass, concrete and steel, is every bit the stylish modern gallery. During the Biennale, it is showing work by Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, though more interesting for a western viewer overfamiliar with these artists were the intense figurative paintings by the winner of the PinchukArtCentre Prize, Artem Volokytin.

    But back to the Biennale. The opening was chaotic, the speeches long, the work not all installed, and we were severely delayed getting in. Explaining the lack of organization, Elliott said, “There are things that you can’t plan for, like having to install for 36 hours with minimal electricity and no light.” Inside paintings were languishing in their bubble-wrap, and wall markers were non-existent or left lying around haphazardly, while technicians drilled holes in the walls, ran out electric cables, and tinkered with the videos.

    Despite the distractions, there was much that impressed. A new series of photographs, by Ukrainian Boris Mikhailov, of rusting factory plants that still scar vast swathes of the Ukraine landscape spoke of the collapse of the Soviet dream, while nearby Louise Bourgeois’ “cells” made reference to the repressed feelings of fear and pain underlining Elliott’s belief that “you have to understand the past to understand the present.” British artist Phyllida Barlow had specially created “Rift,” an impressive three-part site-specific installation of wooden scaffolding that stands like some dystopian cityscape responding to the massive columns and vaults of the imposing Arsenal building. Other new pieces included Yayoi Kusama’s site-specific walkthrough tunnel—studded with pink nodules, decorated with black polka dots, and titled Footprints of Eternity—and a vast projection of a letter written in 1939 by Mahatma Gandhi to Adolf Hitler, in which he urged the Führer to avoid war “for the sake of humanity.”

    There were works from China (Liu Jianhua and the MadeIn Company), Korea (Choi Jeong-Hwa) and Turkey (Canan Tolon), as well as 20 artists total from Ukraine, including Vasily Tsgolov, Nikita Kadan, Hamlet Zinkovsky and the U.S.-based couple Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, whose trenchant pieceMonument to a Lost Civilisation (1999) reflects the false utopian dreams of those living under communism. The American painter Fred Tomaselli created two large new apocalyptic works, while British artist, Yinka Shonibare contributed paintings that continue his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism. First shown at the 53rd Venice Biennale, Miwa Yanagi’s macabre 4-meter-high photographs of “goddesses” stood in a windswept landscape. The conjunction of old and youthful bodies—aging breasts on a young torso, with sagging legs beneath a taut frame—spoke of collapse, putrefaction and renewal.

    Song Dong is known for his innovative conceptual videos and photography that reveal the changes in modern China and express his response to the country’s rapid development while retaining a spiritual connection to the past. The centerpiece of Song Dong: Dad and Mom, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well was the large-scale installation “Waste Not,” comprising thousands of everyday items collected by the artist’s mother over the course of more than five decades. The project evolved out of his mother’s grief after the death of her husband and follows the Chinese concept of wu jin qi yong(“waste not”) as a prerequisite for survival. Vitrines full of dried soap and stuffed with cabbages created a powerful metaphor for the effects of radical change and social transformation on individual members of a family.

    In part, the chaos of the Kiev Biennale was the result of the Ukrainian government’s failure to provide its half of the funding on time. (The other half was provided by corporate sponsors and private individuals.) The government seemed to hope that their involvement would fortify their claim to join the E.U., but the country’s problems with human rights make that far from certain. Catching David Elliott in the bar after the opening, I asked if he thought there’d be another such event—after all, there needs to be at least two to warrant the use of the term “biennale.” “Who can say?” was his enigmatic response.

    The First Kiev International Biennale ARSENALE 2012 ran from May 24 to July 31,www.artarsenal.in.ua

  • UNDER THE RADAR

    UNDER THE RADAR

    UNDER THE RADAR Pearblossom Hwy

    MIKE OTT’S PEARBLOSSOM HWY REACHES for reality, in a real way, sort of.

    LA filmmaker’s Mike Ott’s last movie—LiTTLEROCK (2010) was a surprise smash in indie terms, racking up the kewpie dolls at LA’s AFI Fest, indie fests in Boston, Reykjavik, and Montreal and the Independent Spirit and Gotham Awards—the latter included a limited commercial theatrical run in NYC. Eventually the moody low-budget feature was picked up for DVD distribution by Kino Lorber and instant streaming on Netflix.

    That’s a helluva act to follow, and expectations have been riding high for Ott’s follow-up, Pearblossom Hwy, which had its North American debut at the AFI Fest in November and is currently making the rounds of the festival circuit. A sequel of sorts, Pearblossom seems to pick up with the two main characters of LiTTLEROCK—Japanese tourist Atsuko/Anna and SoCal white-trash stoner Cory—a couple of years down the line, but still stranded in the buttcrack of the Antelope Valley.

    At least Cory seems to be the same character—though he seemed to have a dad in the earlier movie—the latest hinges on a road trip to reintroduce him to the man he believes to be his biological father. Atsuko is now an immigrant reluctantly studying for her citizenship test, and has picked up considerably more English than the none she conspicuously spoke in LiTTLEROCK. Several ofLiTTLEROCK’s strong support cast—Roberto Sanchez for example—show up in other roles inPearblossom.

    Fans of LiTTLEROCK might find this slightly disorienting, but it’s really just the first level of a complex and rewarding indeterminacy at the heart of Pearblossom’s successful simultaneous embodiment of bleak alienation and heart-rending humanism. Not to mention a healthy dose of hilarity—usually accompanying Cory’s attempts to fend off or cope with the demands of the square world. His attempts to make something of his life are pretty much limited to compiling a rambling, drug-fueled audition tape for a reality show called The Young Life, and jamming with Cory & the Corrupt, his death metal band.

    The deeper ambiguities of identity and authorship are embedded in Cory’s recurring video diary sequences, where he talks about his history, family, sexuality, and ambitions, or recites fragmentary poems and song lyrics. These were generated when Ott gave the actor Cory Zacharia a camera and told him to start recording whatever was on his mind, which—over the course of several months—added up to over 100 entries. The cream of the crop are dispersed along the story arc, as the character Cory Lawler confronts his feelings about his domineering older brother and absent father, and explores his ambiguous sexual orientation—until close to the end, when the director’s offscreen voice interrupts one of Cory’s monologues to ask “Are you talking about your real Dad or talking about your Dad in the movie?”

    Atsuko’s blurred boundaries are subtler, if no less compelling. Luminously portrayed by screenplay coauthor Atsuko Okatsuka, the character draws heavily from Okatsuka’s life experiences, though she was careful to point out at the after-premiere Q&A “I’ve never actually been a prostitute.” The character Atsuko finds herself engaging in the world’s oldest profession in between working in her uncle’s tree nursery and boning up for the green card exam. Profoundly isolated, she’s trying to save enough money to return to Japan to see her ailing, beloved grandmother. Most of her dialogue is conducted over the phone with her grandmother or with a bemused but sympathetic Japanese john, rather than with her ostensible best friend Cory. Their greatest moment of intimacy occurs in a repertory theater, as both cease any effort to communicate and stare at the screen, enraptured by Chaplin’s The Kid.

    Pearblossom Hwy manages to up the ante for the new wave of DIY auteurism that LiTTLEROCKexemplified, and it’s no coincidence. Ott’s seat-of-the-pants semi-improvisational approach has often (and rightly) been compared with that of John Cassavetes and Robert Altman, but Pearblossom is a declaration of affinity with a cinematic canon at once more respectable and more troubled: La Nouvelle Vague.

    To signal his intentions, Ott quotes the cartoonish gunshot effects that punctuate the soundtrack in Godard’s 1966 lo-fi masterpiece Masculin F&eactue;minin—a notoriously episodic and technically anti-virtuosic (or at least anti-craft fetishistic) slice-of—The Young Life of Paris, studded with scenes of ill communication. With Cory Zacharia as the new Jean-Pierre Léaud, Ott updates Godard’s bleak survey to address the contemporary phenomenon of digital globalization, and its border-dissolving impact on our understanding of reality, fiction, and self. At its core, though, Pearblossom Hwy is riddled with a redemptive humanistic compassion beyond Godard’s capacity, leaving us strangely hopeful, in spite of the darkness of Ott, Okatsuka, Zacharia, and company’s vision of the American Dream.

  • Eli Langer

    Eli Langer

    ELI LANGER’S RECENT SOLO SHOW IS AN ENCHANTING LANDSCAPE of nocturnal emissions and conversations. Seemingly crafted out of countless late nights spent in furtive dialogue with self, nature and others, the show offers suggestions of urban influences and psychological musings that beautifully coalesce into a hypnotic inner world. Initially pleasing on a formal level, Langer’s installation becomes more intimately engaging as one spends time sitting in its presence and letting it unfold.

    The exhibition offers a variety of complementary insights into the artist’s current practice. Langer has said that he is a “mixed-media artist trapped in a painter’s body,” and in this show we can often see a painterly impulse manifesting itself in his composition of objects. The large and immersive rear room of the gallery is painted entirely in black and harbors a collection of assemblages and wall hangings with partially reflective surfaces lit by fluorescent light bulbs. A sense of nighttime and the visions that emerge from it are intriguingly captured here. In one corner are two slow exposure photographs,Influential Moon I and II (2012), in which the moon seems to eerily float like a sea anemone. Throughout the room are thin wooden sculptures, reflective panels and light arrangements that are at once highly abstract and slyly suggestive of painter’s easels, Hollywood film sets and nightclub sound systems.

    Langer’s “Waves and Particles” (2011) paintings—small, heavily textured, monochromatic abstractions—neatly assimilate into these arrangements. Two of them taped to the wall at an angle mimic windows or doors. Street culture, salvaged junk, the seediness of Hollywood and its aspirations toward glamour can all be detected here, perhaps constantly simmering within the consciousness of the artist, who does in fact live in Hollywood and has been known to scavenge his artmaking materials from dumpsters and the occasional altruistic Scientologist.

    One wall of a narrower space in the gallery is filled with untitled drawings, which look like stream-of-consciousness doodles done during extended phone chats. These are not so much intimate as meandering and elliptical, snaking through such considerations as aggression, loneliness, innocence, drugs, community, women, energy and Mike Kelley. The words, filled with frenetic energy, sometimes form pictures that spill off the page. Nearby, a collection of small, untitled clay pieces record imprints of the artist’s hands and face, as if to capture his gestures in a more elemental form.

    The front room of the gallery juxtaposes large, close-up photographs of tree bark from the “White Pine” series (2010) with small, tight abstract paintings, seeming to offer a dialog between the natural and the man-made. Gently placed in front of this dialog is another moon motif in the form of two neon light circles and Step Up (2012), a rectangular wooden sculpture that acts as a framing device.

    Filled with monkishness, elegance, a yearning for communication and a certain street sensibility, the Canadian-born Langer’s work is in a charmingly decrepit state of perpetual becoming, hopeful and alarming all at once, just like the city he has lived and worked in for more than ten years.

    – Carol Cheh

  • Kerry Tribe

    Kerry Tribe

    IN HER CURRENT WORK, KERRY TRIBE APPROPRIATES CONTENT from Hollywood films, specifically those shot at the Greystone mansion in Beverly Hills, piecing together dialogue culled from over 60 films. “There Will Be” features the 30-minute original film Greystone, as well as a shorter video Bibliography, photographs of the bloodied actors, and works on paper that read like concrete poetry featuring lines taken from the scripts used to compile Greystone.

    Greystone Mansion was the most expensive residence in California when it was built in 1929 and is imbued with its own intriguing history. It was the site of the murder that same year of its owner, Edward Doheny Jr. and his personal secretary Hugh Plunkett. The circumstances of the deaths were never solved and at the time it was widely speculated as to whether it was a double murder or murder/suicide.

    Aware of the aura of mystery surrounding the Greystone mansion, Tribe researched its history. She has meticulously crafted a script that weaves together both well known and little known films that were shot on location in its various rooms. The mansion functions as the set, and is the only constant in the project, portrayed as a silent holder of an unattainable truth.

    While strategies of appropriation have been in use by artists working in both film and photography for many years)—like Christian Marclay’s culling of clips relating to time in The Clock (2011) and the proliferation of art made from YouTube videos in the manner of Natalie Bookchin’s “Now he’s out in public and everyone can see” (2012)—Tribe montages fragments of Hollywood cinema to explore an unsolved mystery. In Tribe’s live action film five different scenarios of the murder are depicted. Each scene was shot in the actual rooms where the murders occurred. The actors are dressed in period costume from the time of the original Greystone murder and perform stereotypical roles: the jilted lover, the maid, the inspector, the closeted homosexual. They recite lines of conversation that simultaneously propel the narrative forward, yet sometimes appear to be out of context. Tribe adapted the dialogue to create multiple points of view and to offer different possibilities as to who might have committed the murder and why.

    Those with an encyclopedic knowledge of film may recognize both the settings and snippets of dialogue Tribe uses and be able to connect them back to the actual scenes. Without this knowledge, however, the work still resonates. In much the same way as she appropriates images and language, Tribe engages with Hollywood’s practice of endless recycling. The mansion eventually became a popular location appearing as the backdrop for movies including Eraserhead, There Will be Blood, The Social Network and The Big Lebowski. In Tribe’s meta-narrative “There Will Be” she both critiques and embraces the myths of Hollywood and the ability of a dynamic medium like film to be a purveyor of truth.

  • PARADISE—TRILOGY: LOVE, FAITH, HOPE

    PARADISE—TRILOGY: LOVE, FAITH, HOPE

    AUSTRIAN FILMMAKER ULRICH SEIDL’S PARADISE trilogy takes an unflinching look at society, portraying the lives of three women: an elderly woman and sex tourist (PARADISE: Love), a devout Catholic (PARADISE: Faith), and a teenager who stays at a weight loss camp in the Austrian Alps (PARADISE: Hope). At festivals in Cannes, Venice and Berlin the films earned praise and prizes but also drew sharp criticism. In 2013 all three films will be released in the USA.
    Seidl’s protagonists are socially withdrawn, isolated and lonely. They are frequently abusive and find pleasure in physically and mentally torturing themselves or each other.

    Anna Maria’s idea of paradise is closely associated with Jesus Christ. In PARADISE: Faith we see her praying while walking on her knees. She spreads the word of God by walking from door to door with a statue of the Virgin Mary. Anna Maria’s relationship with Jesus Christ becomes more and more physical: she masturbates with a crucifix and flagellates herself. PARADISE: Hope depicts Melanie, who hopes to be slim and happy one day. At a weight loss camp Melanie is trained in fitness, nutrition and behavior change. The girl smokes her first cigarette and falls in love with an older man, the manager and doctor of the camp, who struggles with the girl’s innocent attempts at seduction. Teresa, from PARADISE: Love, is a plump blonde in her 50s who no longer meets the Western world’s standards of beauty. She travels to Kenya in search of love but finds herself turning from one beach boy to another. In a hotel room Teresa and two other women verbally humiliate a young stripper who cannot get a full erection.

    Seidl’s films are not for the faint-hearted. By deploying social taboos, the films challenge the standards and norms of Western society. Outspoken dialogue such as the one between Teresa and her friend reveal social dynamics, power relations and hierarchy.

    Teresa: Do you think I should shave down below?

    Teresa’s friend: No. [The men here in Kenya] like that we look different from [their] women. They have tiny curls. It’s all frizzy, while we [whites] have a bush.

    Teresa: My last boyfriend wanted me to shave.

    Teresa’s friend: Don’t do it. You look like a naked baby. […] It’s natural and they like that here. They like everything that’s wild.

    Seidl lives and works in Vienna, where he runs his own production company. He was born in 1952 and spent his childhood in Horn, a small town in Lower Austria. His upbringing was characterized by bourgeois morals and the dogma of the Catholic Church. Seidl describes his father, a doctor, as pious and strict, and his mother as a devoted wife who raised five children. Seidl attended various Catholic schools and served as an altar boy in his parish. He suffered under these rigid structures but he was also fascinated by Baroque churches with their elaborate altars and dramatic intensity.

    His first films were made while he was still a student at the Vienna Film Academy. The short One-Forty (Einsvierzig) (1980) portrays a man of short stature, while The Prom (Der Ball) (1982) depicts a graduation dance in Seidl’s hometown. The filmmaker never spares the protagonists in these films. He shows no insincere sympathy, neither for a physically challenged person nor for the hypocrisy of an inhibited, ritualistic society. This has led to harsh criticism in Austria and established Seidl’s reputation as a cynical and exploitative social-pornographer.

    When shooting a film, the director does not use a detailed screenplay. Instead, he creates various dramatic settings in which the actors are free to improvise in ways that often alter the director’s initial ideas. He films almost exclusively on location and frequently uses nonprofessional actors whose manner of speaking is an integral aspect of his work. All of Seidl’s characters speak Viennese, or the dialects of Eastern Austria. The sound of these dialects is rather soft, which stands in stark contrast to the aggressive body language and cruel nature of many of the characters.

    Seidl never judges but rather observes and depicts his protagonists’ pursuit of happiness. Critics and audience seem split between vehement disgust and fervent praise. Repetitive scenes of humiliation and intimacy can turn the viewer into an unwilling accomplice. This makes the films fascinating and shocking at the same time.

  • Richard Artschwager and Wade Guyton

    Richard Artschwager and Wade Guyton

    RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER WAS AHEAD of his time. In 1964 he painted the Whitney Museumon Madison Avenue with the documentary precision of black and white. It was, for the record, a cloudy day. <!–more–>

    Only one thing: the building dates from 1966. Artschwager painted the planners’ vision with his characteristic detachment, on Celotex, the fiberboard then being used as ceiling tile. It functions as a kind of signature for an artist who does everything he can to reject expression or a signature style. With his icy mix of photorealism, pop art, conceptual art and industrial materials, Artschwager was making post-minimalism from the very dawn of Minimalism.

    His exhibition runs at the Whitney, a floor above Wade Guyton, a much younger artist who has earned a similar label, which makes Artschwager at age 88 seem even more forward-looking. Yet in the space of six years, starting in 1962, he produced a full body of work. It includes his lozenge-shaped “blps” and exclamation points, both with their 3D counterparts in formica or rubberized horsehair. Not many artists seem less likely to raise their voice, but an exclamation point also enters the retrospective’s title, “Artschwager!”

    The years covered by the exhibition include Artschwager’s period of thoroughly nonfunctional geometry made with lamination on wood. No one will ever touch the stops of his organ, set their feet under his table, or turn the pages of his imposing book. No one can, for they are solid blocks. Moreover, rubber bristles line the few objects that have recesses, like an otherwise empty drawer.

    Artschwager’s is a world claiming absolute authority, like the open book, seemingly a huge Bible or Koran, merged with its pedestal. It is also a world in the process of self-destruction, as with Train Wreck from 1968 or a whole series on high-rise demolition from the early 1970s. A self-portrait hangs alongside portraits of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, with the latter looking benevolent by comparison. There’s a natural segue here from political self-destruction to environmental catastrophe. It seems only right that Artschwager lost Celotex as a material because lawsuits over asbestos helped drive it to bankruptcy.

    Artschwager had his first solo show at Leo Castelli in 1965 when he was 42. He took up art after studying science, a background that may reflect his near-clinical detachment. He made furniture for money, presumably functional furniture, and photographed babies. Another early Celotex shows a baby smiling, and it is not heartwarming. One can look for parallels in Andy Warhol, another artist with a commercial background and a decidedly morbid side.

    Guyton may not seem like an heir to Minimalism. During his childhood in small-town Tennessee he did not enjoy art classes but preferred video games and TV. This surely establishes his credentials for contemporary New York. The Whitney calls its mid-career survey”Wade Guyton OS,” as if he were competing with OS X Snow Leopard or Mountain Lion. The dominant motif is an X. Guyton sets it there with an ordinary inkjet printer.

    Much of Guyton’s early output amounts to book pages fed through such a device, cataloging such influences as Joseph Beuys, Martin Kippenberger, and Mies van der Rohe. Together, they operate between painting, conceptual art and design—and so does he. The show’s largest works consist of red and green stripes, akin at once to Kenneth Noland and Christmas wrapping paper. They are also site-specific, framing the trapezoidal depth of a Marcel Breuer window.

    Already the simple design elements suggest Richard Tuttle, but now Guyton nurses them as painting. He folds the linen in half before feeding it through twice, allowing for misalignments. He accepts the printer’s traces as smears, but they feel like an artist’s pride in gesture. Like Artschwager, Guyton puts the Post in Post-Minimalism.

    The Whitney sticks to Guyton’s solo act rather than also showing his collaborations with Kelley Walker. A Gen-Xer born in 1972, Guyton appeared among emerging artists at PS1 in 2005, smashing a found Mies tube chair into elegant twists. A work from 2007 could pass for industrial chairs, too, in a long row of shining metal that could pass for a single sculpture. It also brings in a second letter, “U,” the same letter that stands against images of fire from Guyton’s oeuvre the year before.

    The “U” could refer to YOU and to US, but Guyton’s strength is not depth allusion. For now, it is his operating system, and that may well be enough.

    “Richard Artschwager!” runs thru Feb. 3 and “Wayne Guyton OS” thru Jan. 13; whitney.org