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Category: reviews
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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London Calling
It’s that time of year again. The clocks have gone back, the streets are strewn with fallen leaves and there is culture, culture everywhere. Not only is the London Film Festival in full swing but there is Frieze Art Fair—with ever more American and Asian galleries making a debut showing—and it’s the Turner Prize season too. Now in its 28th year, this once rather shock-horror affair has become as much a part of the British social calendar as Wimbledon or the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Last year, when it decamped to northern climes at the BALTIC gallery in Gateshead, it added a certain frisson for those in need of maps and special travel equipment to leave the comfort of the metropolis. But this year it’s safely back in the hallowed portals of Tate Britain. Four very disparate artists—I was going to say “the good, the bad and the ugly”—but that doesn’t quite work—but you get the point, are up for the prize. Sometimes I wonder if anyone would care if it wasn’t set up like some beauty contest—with all the possibility for tears and gushing Academy-style acceptance speeches. But prevailing PR is that it’s the annual barometer of the newest and the best of British art; though in truth it’s really no more than the five judges’ current fave artists.
It kicks off with Paul Noble, the most obviously traditional of the contenders in that he makes graphite drawings on paper, producing works with the consummate skill of a surreally dystopian, fictional city called “Nobson’s Newtown.” Get it? ‘Knobs On.’ (For my American readers this is a bit of naughty British slang). Though, actually, it refers to the name of a blocky-looking typeface. Each drawing starts with a word at its center, spelling out its subject, which is then woven with a web of eclectic visual narratives. Intricate and scatological, from a distance they look like plans for a renaissance garden or a futuristic science laboratory. But get up closer and they’re full of rubbish bags and curious flora, as well as strange turd-like columns. Excreta seems to be a recurring theme. Noble’s is a futuristic world devoid of human presence so that it gives the appearance of being created by someone with Asperger’s syndrome but with inbuilt references to modernist art, including the sculptures of Henry Moore and the dreamscapes of Giorgio de Chirico.
Two of this year’s contestants are video artists and I found myself much affected and engaged by Luke Fowler’s work, All Divided Selves, 2011, the third in a trilogy of films that explore the ideas and legacy of fellow Glaswegian, the anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing (1927-89). I’m just about old enough to remember the effect of reading Laing for the first time in books that radically challenged the orthodoxy of psychiatric practice of the day and placed “madness” firmly within the arena of “society.” The matrix of archival material, intercut with clips from his own life, is too long for The Turner Prize to do it justice but evokes this truly revolutionary period with its complex philosophical and, at times, moving discussions that were carried out in smoke-filled rooms by those who might now be considered in need a good wash, a shave and a haircut. Still only 33, Fowler has produced a thoughtful and complex work that maps changing social mores and ideas.
The clever money is on the relatively unknown Elizabeth Price and her 20-minute The Woolworths Choir. Price uses archive film, diagrams and sound to create a work that’s part power-point lecture, part computer game. Using different sources—an Open University film on church architecture, clips of a girl band and some 1970s news footage of a terrible fire, she creates a potent mix. The first part is an illustrated lecture on ecclesiastical architecture of the 13th century. Using black-and-white archival photographs and textbook illustrations to define the shifting meaning of terms such as choir, quire and misericord, she takes us on a virtual tour of a Gothic church. The second half of the film tells the horrific story of how the Woolworths fire started. A stylish and sophisticated work, it plays with the shifting entomology of words, making reference to the Greek chorus which transmutes into the church choir and is cleverly linked to the girl bands. Though highly original, in comparison to Fowler’s baggier and felt work, it feels cooler and more contrived.
That just leaves Spartacus Chetwynd—and with a name like that who needs to worry about the art? At the private view I just missed her performance and found her cast of characters standing around with smudged face-paint dressed as trees, root vegetables and monsters like lost children after the school nativity play. The worthless performance may have been fun on the night but going back to the gallery on a weekday there’s nothing left except the empty props.
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Juan Capistran
“White Riot…be the beacon, be the light. KO’d by love” seduces with its elegance then simultaneously puts one off and seduces a second time with its literary and other cultural presumptions. Not pretensions: we can see that Capistran is intimate with these literary (and pop culture) references. (LA viewers may recall the break dance he performed on a Carl Andre in the 2008 LACMA “Phantom Sightings” show.) Capistran has had similar engagements with, among other divergent facets of the cultural mainstream, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Led Zeppelin, Black Flag and Sister Sledge.
The show’s title is an almost infuriating mash-up of references. In a gallery become seemingly a chamber of visual white noise, we get that it’s coming from a place both beyond comprehensive grasp and radiant, with an illumination borne out of something very dark. The show consists of five photographs of objects chosen with deliberately political intent. Two are ambiguously cubical objects presented in flat, foreshortened orthogonals in a white field; another (flatter still), a placard in a slightly half-tone gray-white field; another a ghostly Molotov cocktail, a broken semi-lunar ellipse describing its base, with its faintly articulated body eliding into the white background; another, necessarily the most clearly articulated among the group, a clenched fist that might be a power salute, also “whited out.” On closer inspection, one of the cubical objects turns out to be a brick; the other, a pamphlet or booklet, which as it turns out is none other than Mao’s famous “Red Book”—painted white.
Capistran’s focus here, both formally and philosophically, is the liminal domain between conscious apprehension and comprehension or intention; the intersection—suggested by the Hawthorne passage from which he takes his titles—of memory, anticipation, desire, active consideration. The objects simultaneously emerge from and sink or fade into an abyss. But the work clings to its apprehensiveness in every sense. Capistran seems intent on focusing the viewer’s eye/mind on both confrontation and evasion. The whitewash fades into ink-stained, even blood-stained actualities, as on one of two prism-shaped columnar objects displaying a cloth “object,” folded like a flag and wearing a button “Till the razor cuts.” The white pedestal that lifts its white cloth banner is the central pivot of the show, none other than a black anarchist flag that has been bleached.
But Capistran seems to be reaching for something even larger—hence the self-consciously literary titles. Into the “intermediate” liminal space of Hawthorne’s “The Haunted Mind” comes “a funeral train” laden with the freight of Capistran’s parenthetical subtitles: “Passion and Feeling” (the brick); “Sorrow” (the bottle); “Hope turned to Disappointment” (the protest sign). The ‘power salute’ (“Shame”) comes closest to an actual response to the text: a waking conscience firmly asserting the fiction of innocence.
Can there be a romantic undercurrent to this austerity? You have to wonder with a title for the cloth and pedestal like “…when darkness has swallowed the reality…there is a light that never goes out…” The second half is not Hawthorne; and although I’m not going to say what I think it is, there’s something darkly romantic in it; and I think we all know that song.
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Michael Light
Michael Light has been shooting photographs of the western U.S. landscape for over 20 years. They are generally taken from a small light airplane that he flies himself, and explore the majesty of these vast and variegated lands, creating dense patterns akin to abstract art. At the same time, many sites reveal details about our use of the land showing it to be anything but a beautiful or intangible design. While Light himself steers clear of moralizing about how and why the land is tilled, mined, tunneled, poisoned, drained of resources or riveted with abandoned artifacts, the viewer can infer Light’s extended considerations about what is going on out of sight in the immense hinterlands of the West. His current exhibition “Idaho, Two Sublimes,” places rather different takes on Idaho side by side as a way of bracketing the artist’s overarching photo project.
The “Sawtooth Mountains; Stanley, Idaho” series (2009) of large-scale black-and-white prints is aligned with a study of romantic beauty, a romanticism that is generated by the sheer scale depicted and the kinship to landscape painters such as Caspar David Friedrich or Albert Bierstadt. The closely cropped images have no horizon line, since they are viewed from above, and alternate between jagged, flattened modernist-like patterns and oddly displaced and weightless landmasses. The use of the stark black and white further skews a viewer’s ability to recognize the mountains. Light appears to employ this mental distance to suggest viewers look more closely. Beauty is central to his construction of meaning but throughout is his ability to cause skepticism and doubt.
Michael Light, Interchange of Highways 60 and 202 Looking West, Mesa, AZ, 2007. Courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery. Works in his other series delve into human usage of the earth. The foregrounds center on outlying areas of our wilderness turned into places for dumping, storing and testing an incredibly messy and dangerous weapons system. Strangely iconic when seen from the sky, the circular and square buildings and connecting roadways that have been cut into the land almost turn into emblems or talismans, beautiful in their own right. Once abandoned, however, they look more like scar tissue on the earth than a symbolic beacon of ongoing societal or industrial progress. Light provides us with a tangible reminder that off in the distance and out of view, the military industrial complex is busy turning the wheels of its bellicose enterprise, churning up the earth in its path.
Michael Light’s double take hinges on our moving back and forth between the stirring majesty of the one set of images and the history of destruction the other recounts. The power of his images reside in the mixture of surface beauty and depth of truth he discovers. Implicitly sharing the company of photographers such as Richard Misrach, collectives such as CLUI, and activists such as EcoFlight, he moves us to examine and critically account for our world.
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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.
Kerry Tribe, Joe, 2012. Courtesy of the 1301PE, photo by Fredrik Nilsen. 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.
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Ed Moses
In the city of the dubious “angel” we all embrace our icons, whether dead or alive, real or imagined. And if not all the time, then certainly when they deliver to us a newly birthed, risky body of work. Ed Moses has done just that with “New Works: The Crackle Paintings” at Patrick Painter, and while the paintings do at times alternately bristle and breathe, fissure and reattach, ultimately the visual trope is played out as though Moses’ central motivation for creating these strangely static works was decorative rather than, as per his usual aesthetic, aggressively and gloriously experimental. Still, many of the paintings do manage to catapult out at the viewer, only to draw back in again as though one were witnessing a sudden explosion and the inevitable settling of sediment.
The paintings in this exhibition emphasize a sweeping color palette from ominous, lusterless blacks to voluptuous pinks and vibrant golds. Moses utilizes his crackle methodology as a means of breaking up the picture plane, separating the background color from the more aggressive gestural embellishments that are overlaid to comprise the central imagery. His instincts are for the most part sincere; however, works like White Over Black (all works 2012) run the risk of falling short of high art, only to be reclassified as decorative tableau painting, or in league with a shabby chic mentality. Other paintings have more evident pulse and vitality.
In a recent interview, Moses admitted that the process by which these images came into being was partially an accident. The swirling, spiraling effect found in many of these images had its inception in a mishap where Moses tripped, and falling onto the canvas, created an impression with his elbow, which he then recognized as a discovery within the work. Many of the paintings in the exhibition, including Black Over Bronze, contain this circular gesture, and these are by far the most successful works. The impetus for movement appears more organic and fully realized as the bronze underpainting takes on the effect of skin, breaking open and peeling away, revealing a more violent undercurrent. The same is true of Red Over Black where the colors appear more stylized and far less decorative, as if the relationship between the two shades and the shapes they create is somehow necessary, even inevitable. The suggestion of some kind of obsessive violence exists, or perhaps an awareness of mortality, the crumbling and falling away of the physical body. Regardless, these swirling, intoxicating shapes seem vital and all of a piece.
The more brightly colored images—the electric pinks and greens—appear less convincing, perhaps due to the fact these colors bring to mind a psychedelic mind warp or Easter bunnies, or rolling hills of plastic grass. The best work in this show is grounded in the body—sanguine reds and ominous blacks. Moses obviously has a love affair with the color red, and this unbridled obsession gives the work its breadth, power and distinction.
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Gallery Girls
IF ANY OUTLIER SLEEPER CELLS OF AL QAEDA need further evidential motivation to make another terrorist strike against the decadent West, they need look no further than Bravo’s new so-called reality series Gallery Girls. In a desperate ploy to further capitalize on the machinations of the New York art world—as they did with their earlier Work of Art—Bravo and LA-based production company Magical Elves have unleashed an inexcusable mutant offspring. Appealing to their proven demographic of gay men and the mentally disabled, these television crap peddlers have cooked up a series wherein a coven of privileged, loosely connected millennial shrews suffer the First World humiliations of working extended, unpaid internships at gallery front desks, assisting personal art advisors and making a go at running their own boutique-galleries.
The nascent gallerists consist of anxious, entrepreneurial brunette Claudia, who worries that the $15K loan from her family will never be repaid because she charges too much for art that nobody wants, and her partner Chantal, who exhibits the worst traits of her narcissistic generation. With a voice like the scraping of a soggy balloon and an affectation to match, Chantal lowers clueless selfishness to a new, grotesque nadir. She’s the type who shows up to work late and leaves early and can’t figure out why everyone has a problem with it. Like, whatever.
Young punching bag Maggie can’t escape her endless codependent internship for misogynist Asian-art dealer Eli Klein, the sort of Jewish caricature that only a Nazi propagandist could fabricate. He repeatedly, callously insists that Maggie perform demeaning tasks like counting the hundreds of pebbles in a plant-based sculpture or scrubbing floors while he grinningly sucks up to wealthy prospective buyers.
Fag hag, part-time model and party photographer Angela brings some sass and sarcasm to the mix but is also annoyingly self-absorbed, and is more concerned with creating hype around her “fine art” than actually making it anything other than sophomoric and mediocre. On her prowl for a heterosexual male partner she is frustrated about the shrinking stock of available men and claims that anyway she can’t date a man who doesn’t have an iPhone and a Gmail account.
The most interesting thing about Liz is her schlubby, estranged father who also happens to be a well-known collector. She is well set up in an expensively decorated apartment pursuing a degree at SVA, where she complains about the preponderance of Asian students. An ex-junkie with a wounded heart and some serious daddy issues, she has a certain realness to her despite having grown up about as destitute as Mitt Romney.
Amy is the brazen, know-it-all heifer who sucks as much alcohol as she does air and turns into a raging hot mess when she hits the bottle, which is often enough that everyone complains about it. The best contribution she could make to society would be getting fatally run over by a truck, thus reducing the burden on the health-care system and being a job creator in the mortuary industry.
The least offensive character is Kerri, who actually works a real, paid day job as a personal concierge (yes, that’s a real, paid job) while interning for art advisor Sharon Hurowitz. She manages to embody the myth of the Long Island girl from the blue-collar background trying to improve her station in life in the big city. She is sincere and straightforward and does not reek of the oppressive entitlement of her cohorts, which may eventually lead to her undoing.
In a flailing, transparent attempt at street cred, the producers have “cleverly” named each episode after a Velvet Underground tune, perhaps to pave the way for a new VU line of perfume or handbags marketed at young women whose only form of expression is shopping.
In addition, they try to drum up a kind of rivalry between the uptown bottle blonds with their meathead banker boyfriends and the “funky” Brooklynites with their metrosexual mates who are all skinny jeans and nerd glasses. It is refreshing to know that the diverse population of New York City can’t be so easily reduced to embarrassing stereotypes.
There is some twisted guilty pleasure to be had in watching overeducated women cat scratch at each other and humiliate themselves as they chase after some unspecified “dream,” but mostly it is a shame-filled experience that leaves the viewer with a fecal taste in the mouth and a deep resentment for having carved even one second of precious time from this short life to squander on such a vile and pointless fiasco.
Gallery Girls, Bravo, Mondays, 10/9c
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Daniel Martinez
TRANSFORMATION CAN BE PERILOUS TERRITORY FOR AN ARTIST TO navigate, and to be authentic necessarily involves pain, either psychic or physical. Daniel Joseph Martinez’ newest exhibition, the first in Los Angeles in five years, displays a fiercely compelling and forceful visual lexicon drawn from the artist’s personal associations with body dysmorphia, and which combines images of the physical body with overtly politically-charged iconography including the Statue of Liberty and various religious artifacts.
Working with large-scale photographic images, sculptural works, and found objects including a police riot shield, neon signage and a bullhorn used largely by street preachers, Martinez communicates a rapidly unraveling human dystopia as everywhere people struggle to express their own identities despite the fact that space is getting tighter and money more scarce.
In the photographs, the artist transgresses against his own body, sporting a grotesque hunchback and positioning himself at various turns on a prayer rug, or wearing a papal tiara and a mask that has a vague and unsettling resemblance to Richard Nixon. In several images his tattooed arms display the holiest Hebrew prayer: “Hear Israel, God is one,” written in Latin, Hebrew and Arabic, further exemplifying the body as a politicized public space where pain is often invisible. But pain is a universal human experience around which entire civilizations have rallied and here Martinez implicates the entire living world. Each photograph leans against the gallery wall, yet the content of each is painfully aggressive. We are reminded of artists like Coco Fusco, Cildo Meireles and Ken Gonzalez-Day who have charted similar territories, recalibrating history with all its itinerant ugliness and violence, conflating public and private spaces to reflect a more authentic experience of the world.
Martinez’ immense sculptural work titled Who Killed Liberty, Can You Hear That, It’s The Sound Of Inevitability, The Sound Of Your Death (2012) literally pierces the gallery wall leading from the main space into the adjacent project room. It operates as a “fallen angel,” revealing to us our own human shortcomings and inadequacies. A mirror, affixed to the bottom of the massive work and in which we cannot help but find our own faces, is also angled awkwardly toward the ceiling, further skewing our perceptions of ourselves. Lady Liberty appears thus truncated, profoundly damaged and crumbling as though the weight of today’s fractured political climate were dragging her down. In addition, a gold-plated multiple edition of the statue further collapses “liberty” with commodification, as though our basic human, and supposedly inalienable rights, i.e., life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, can be bought and sold at a price, thus completely nullifying their original meaning.
Ultimately, Martinez suggests that democracy and all it once stood for is broken in much the same way our collective human consciousness and our bodies are ailing, yet we are trapped inside them and all we have created. Liberty is in the final devastating throes of her own death. This politically charged symbol appears to be languishing in her own liminal and uncertain transformation, and perhaps all of us on the planet are headed toward the same ambiguous, painful end.
– Eve Wood
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Nothing to Buy
Documenta 13More than 30 venues—166 international artists within a few square miles—a forum for ideas rather than conspicuous consumption: it’s Documenta 13! Held every five years in Kassel, Germany, and founded in 1955 by Arnold Bode, an art professor and designer from Kassel, this is the world’s most important and enduring contemporary art show. Depending on the curatorial vision of the exhibition organizer(s) that shape the content, you might encounter a scolding, pedantic treatise on colonialism, or a Teutonic, oppressively intellectual “march-of-death” experience. Thanks to American-born artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, this iteration of Documenta was accessible to nearly anyone with interest in the larger world around us, and provided conceptually rich art while also feeding the senses. The overarching theme of the mega-exhibition was “bearing witness,” with all that the phrase implies.
Museum Fridericianum, 2012, Museum Fridericianum, 2012, photo by Nils Klinger © dOCUMENTA (13) Don’t get me wrong: I love art fairs and revel in such market-driven events. But after the parties and the bright shiny happy pretty things, Documenta was the perfect antidote. Where else in the world could you see, under the same roof, one-quarter of all the ancient carved-stone “Bactrian Princesses” known to exist in the world, then go to debate the relationship between art and philosophy in a closed seminar? The exquisite Earth Goddess-like sculptures from Central Asia date back to the 2nd millennium B.C. and were borrowed from a private collection; the seminar was German philosopher Christoph Menke’s “What is Thinking? Or a Taste That Hates Itself,” held on Tuesdays from 11–1 p.m. in one of the galleries at the Fridericianum museum, the main Documenta venue. This brings a saying to mind: the French eat; the Italians make love; and the Germans think.
Among the most memorable projects was Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz’s installation, featuring shards from the destroyed Buddhas of Bamiyan (“All we are breaking are stones”); the burnt remains of books ravaged when the Fridericianum was bombed by the Allies in 1941, and deemed too unimportant to restore; as well as beautiful stone books symbolizing the lost volumes carved by contemporary Afghani carvers using stones quarried at Bamiyan. The emotional impact of this powerful installation was that of a body blow, as our complicity in the destruction of cultural treasures crept into conscience like a bad memory. The title of Rakowitz’s installation (What dust will rise from one horseman?) was taken from an Afghan proverb on cooperation.
Michael Rakowitz, “What Dust Will Rise?,” 2012, Commissioned and produced by Documenta 13 with the support of Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris, and Lombard Freid Projects, New York, courtesy the artist; Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris; Lombard Freid Projects, New York, photo by Roman März. At the Neue Galerie Kassel, Sanja Ivekovic’s “The Disobedient (The Revolutionaries),” 2012, was a stand-out. The Croatian artist assembled plush toy donkeys of all eras, shapes and sizes, and displayed them in a glass case, capturing the attention of hordes of German schoolchildren touring through the galleries. (Note to self: art education is alive and well in Europe!) The piece provided a great example of an artwork that is cute on the surface but has a dark underbelly: adults were absorbed by the text on the opposite wall, describing the political protestors and martyrs symbolized by each cute lil’ stuffed animal, from Anna Mae Aquash to Primo Levi—a broad international assortment of political protestors who died because they were stubborn—like donkeys are reputed to be.
Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s wonderful sound installation “Forest (for a thousand years)” featured a recording of a choral piece sung by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, set in a glade deep in the recesses of the landscaped Karlsaue Park. Speakers were hung in the trees surrounding the tree-trunk stool seating arranged in the center of the clearing, and if you found your way there through the mud, your reward was 25 minutes of transcendent, blissful listening to a composition by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Cardiff and Miller had another site-specific installation at Documenta, in Kassel’s Hauptbahnhof train station. The “Alter Bahnhof Video Walk” used augmented reality to guide audiences on an engaging walk through the station. After borrowing an iPod from an office inside the station, you were told to take a seat on a bench and wait. As you held the media player in front of you, Cardiff guided you on a walking tour through the station as various video and audio vignettes unfurled. You proceeded as directed, often wheeling around since the recorded events were both mundane and convincingly realistic—people running to catch trains, a dog barking, a baby crying. At one point, Cardiff guided viewers to one of the train platforms, the same platform where Nazis loaded victims onto cars bound for the concentration camps. At another point, Cardiff stopped the narration and “turned off” the video at the request of a mysterious man who preferred to remain incognito.
The tour ended with a duet dance performance, a wonderful chance encounter made all the more powerful by Cardiff and Miller’s playful manipulation of temporality. At Documenta 13 there was nothing to buy—just pure experience to remind you what contemporary art can be.
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Fashionably Macabre
Of course I knew of bad-boy provocateur Alexander McQueen’s reputation as a brilliant couturier, with words like “artist” used to describe him, but such hyperbole is thrown about willy-nilly in the fashion world, and I just assumed it was an exaggerated way of saying he was really talented. “Savage Beauty,” the exhibition, which spans McQueen’s 19-year career at the Metropolitan Museum, changed my mind.
An unlikely fashion darling, McQueen triumphed in that difficult world by dint of hard work and amazing talent. But he never seemed dazzled by it all, maintaining a healthy cynicism throughout his career. Working class and overweight (he did eventually slim down), McQueen was also gay, which must have been a burden growing up in London’s tough East End. Thrice an outsider, McQueen developed within his steely self a rare empathy with the downtrodden and outcast and a richly honed perspective that made him constantly question the status quo.
There is no shortage of beautiful clothes showcasing McQueen’s renowned tailoring skill in the first couple of rooms. These are clothes with attitude, referencing S&M mixed up with Victorian romanticism. McQueen liked his women fierce and viewed his designs as a kind of armor that would shield and empower them.
Cabinet of Curiosity It is in the room “The Cabinet of Curiosities” where things get really interesting. Here shelves and niches along the wall display some of McQueen’s more outré dress designs and various accessories, shoes and headgear he created in collaboration with jewelers and milliners. There are also videos of his fashion shows. These extravagant spectacles, with their bizarre take on beauty, enigmatic story lines and over-the-top garments and makeup, reminded me immediately of Matthew Barney, not in a derivative way, but in a parallel way. One dress with an anatomically correct lilac leather bustier atop a wide horsehair skirt, matching leather hood and horsehair “pony tail” was particularly Cremaster-worthy. Though I could find no paper trail connecting the two, I am sure they knew each other and were members of a mutual admiration society. McQueen collaborated early on with Björk, Barney’s wife, and both men, as part of their explorations into the nature of beauty, used the double-amputee model Aimee Mullins in their work. The beautiful carved wood boots McQueen designed for her (that many in the fashion world initially took for conventional boots, as opposed to prosthetics) are on display here.
Another dress, with a splatter design of paint, is exhibited next to a video showing its creation during a fashion show. Two robots shoot paint at the model as she revolves on a stand between them. Loaned by an Italian auto factory, the robots are sinister, Transformer-like with their wildly waving robotic arms — you can only imagine how nervous you’d feel sitting in the audience waiting for them to turn on you. Still another dress features a carved balsa wood skirt that flares out to at least four feet in back.
There’s a carved wood Chinese village headdress, which I imagine would be much like wearing a dollhouse on one’s head: a twiggy, upside-down nest of a “fascinator” composed of enormous porcupine quills and many examples of McQueen’s extreme footwear, including the notorious hoof-like clodhopper known as “the armadillo.” One of the real highlights is an incredible metal ribcage and vertebrae complete with curling tailbone. It’s a gorgeous piece of stand-alone sculpture. Seeing it as a kind of body art that someone would wear sparks an unsettling visceral reaction. I overheard one viewer remark: “It’d be tough going to the theater in that one.” I know she was making a joke, but she got to the crux of the matter. None of these items were really meant for public consumption; they were made for the runway and are part of the statement McQueen was making about his vision and himself. Yes, they were powerful marketing tools, and some may shy away from the overt commercialism that suggests, but they fulfill my criteria for art.
Alexander McQueen, gallery view, The Romantic Mind From a purely aesthetic standpoint, I think my favorite part was the Romantic Exoticism section, which featured extraordinary embroidery. At Givenchy, McQueen became exposed to the rarefied world of haute couture, embracing many of its techniques and tempering somewhat the fierceness of his designs. One beautifully tailored dress, a combination kimono and straitjacket, was particularly powerful, speaking volumes about fashion and its subjugation of women. Here too was a hilarious East-meets-West amalgam, a playful silk romper complete with an obi worn with American football shoulder pads and helmet painted with delicate Japanese designs.
McQueen took inspiration for his shows from film, history, art, African tribal garb and nature. His Scottish heritage figured prominently in his work, in particular the centuries of oppression that occurred there at the hands of the English. McQueen incorporated feathers, horns, shells, bird skulls and caiman heads into his clothes, and in one of his final shows, “Plato’s Atlantis,” he developed a technique where digital images of animals and insects were woven into fabric.
One of his more provocative explorations of beauty and ugliness was inspired by a Joel-Peter Witkin photograph featuring a grotesque image of a fat, naked woman wearing a weird, fetishistic full-face mask and breathing through a tube. McQueen incorporated it into his 2001 Voss fashion show, which took place inside a giant mirrored box that reflected the appearance-conscious audience’s images back to them as they arrived. For the finale, the mirrored glass walls of a second box at the center of the room came crashing down, revealing a tableau vivant re-creation of the photograph. In this setting, where beauty had just been the focal point for the greater part of an hour, it must have been immensely shocking. It was pure McQueen. As he once said, “I don’t want to do a cocktail party, I’d rather people left my shows and vomited. I prefer extreme reactions.” But in this case, there was more to it than that, because it strikes me as intensely personal knowing McQueen’s own status as outsider.
McQueen was fascinated with death; morbid themes are constant in his oeuvre. Early on in his career, in a nod to Victorian funerary jewelry, McQueen included a lock of his hair as part of the label in each garment. At one fashion show in a church, he placed a skeleton in a front-row seat, and he topped an opulent ostrich-feather evening gown with a bodice of laboratory slides on which fake blood had been painted. What is remarkable about this dress, and all the rest for that matter, is that, despite these unorthodox materials, McQueen never sacrificed design or beauty, and so the end result is absolutely stunning. You’d never think the shimmering rectangles were anything but over-scaled pailettes unless you read the description.
The catalog accompanying the Met show features an eerie hologram on its cover, which changes back and forth between McQueen’s face and a skull. The catalog is unique in that photographer Sølve Sundsbø shot the garments on live models and subsequently manipulated the images to make them look like mannequins, complete with joints. There is a veracity to how the clothing looks on the body and an eeriness to the living flesh, supported by real muscle and bone, transformed into lacquered fiberglass.
One comes away from the exhibition very moved by the depth of McQueen’s passion, his incredible imagination and his pain. He was a fragile soul, committing suicide in February 2010, nine days after his mother succumbed to cancer and three years after his friend and champion, fashionista Isabelle Blow took her own life. McQueen burned with such intensity, producing two couture and two ready-to-wear lines every year, and presumably double that during his tenure at Givenchy; one feels he simply wore himself out. For McQueen, who was compelled to delve so deeply into his core for inspiration, the effort was enormously draining. Looking at his body of work, one is bowled over by the sheer beauty and creativity, but you can also clearly see the blood, sweat and tears writ large amid the satin and silk.
All images courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
