Features Archive
"I love Mumbleboy!" That's not the kind of exclamation you would have heard from me before I met Hanna Fushihara Aron and her husband, the artist David Aron. Hanna's gallery, Little Cakes, cherishes the power held by all things gentle. In other words, everything I mistrust when it comes to art. And Mumbleboy? He's half of the duo known as Mumbreeze whose 2007 show at Little Cakes featured paper maché super heroes. This is not something I would have found immediately convincing had Hanna's curatorial tastes not already demonstrated the weight in whimsy so many times before.
Surfactant - A Group Survey
Rupert Ravens Contemporary
85 Market Street, Second Floor, Newark, NJ
In Surfactant, as 17 artists chart immanent relationships amidst a stratum of novel material, surface tension waxes and wanes (a surfactant is a substance that reduces the surface tension of a liquid in which it is dissolved). In the midst of mining obfuscated properties embedded in the art terrain, the viewer is propelled into an intensive dialogue with the historical and metaphorical qualities of each of these works. Capped eloquently by Charles Baudelaire’s “On the Heroism of Modern Life” from Salon of 1846, “Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface,” therein divulging inner layers of the objects and installations presented.
With her triad of Asian-styled cylindrical structures, Gae Savannah takes on superficial fashion and “life of Girl.” These towering columns, housed in over-the-top fabric, embody the element of surprise. Topped with pagoda-like peaks, Savannah’s gangling tourelles contain tiny enclosures mimicking mini-boudoirs whose seduction is ultimately subverted by their reduced scale and inaccessibility. In Lu Shia, a plastic shower curtain wraps around its conical understructure while abbreviated details, such as a piece of lavish, quasi-fluorescent fabric, drape and tuck around an interior space like shining satin found in draperies in an Old Master painting, gone “Girl.” With combined references to the oriental and occidental, the ritualistic wrapping of fabric functions both inside and outside the structures, layering the work with cultural and metaphorical meaning. Not content to arouse the viewer with mere self-referentiality, these three regal beauties, in all their gleaming glitterati, strike a pose on a fictitious pop culture runway.
From Another Shore: Recent Icelandic Art
May 1 - August 15, 2008
Scandinavia House - 58 Park Avenue
Initially, the most noticeable works at the gallery at Scandinavia House are the pieces comprising Haul. Five tiny models scattered around the floor envision lightly populated landscapes; viewed from above, the sculptures give visitors the effect of the ground viewed from an airplane window. Referencing the artist’s own tendency to move around the world, the landscapes are built within cargo crates sized to fit them; the crates themselves look haphazardly opened and ready to be packed back up at any moment. Their creator, Katrín Sigurðardóttir, is from Iceland, as are all the artists featured in From Another Shore – studies have brought her to San Francisco and New Jersey, and in that way she exemplifies a part of the premise behind the organization of the show.
Anat Litwin is an artist, curator and founder of the HomeBase Project an exhibition program which manifests itself in a different, gentrifying New York City neighborhood each year. S.C.Squibb caught up with her downtown on May 22nd.
SS - So, you graduated from Hunter...
AL: Right. After I graduated I became the director of the Makor gallery at the 92nd street Y. It was just a week after I had finished my final project at Hunter and it was a really strong shift – going from being an art student to running a residency program, curating… I was creating a context for art. Though I wasn’t entirely focusing on my own work, I discovered the immense power of working in and for a context of an artistic group, and it thoroughly convinced me that kind of passion and interest in dialogue and study, is something very meaningful that's hard to find. There is such a thirst for that place. So In 2006 I started this project called Homebase independently from my job at Makor. 2006. I received a whole floor in a building from my landlord - it was an office for a Polish bank in Greenpoint, and I had it for two months before they were going to renovate it…
SS: So the space came first -
AL: Yeah, for the first project, and I was thinking – what am I going to do with all this space? How can I use it? I decided two things. First that I wanted to do an exhibition, and second, that I wanted other artists using the space, and working in a group - so I started Homebase I, with 12 artists, Israeli, American, Polish, local artists… and the topic of the exhibition was home – something so basic, its almost banal, almost gross – an exhibition about home? It's something that seems unsophisticated and invites a very sentimental dialogue, or rather it allows it to happen… so anyway, 12 artists, different mediums, different backgrounds; they all had a month and each got a room to create a site-specific work about home, and then the space was open to the public for a month.
This year's three-day Bushwick Open Studios (BOS) – part of the larger Bushwick Open Studios & Arts Festival – landed on a blistering weekend in June that hindered studio hopping for everyone but the artistically most adventurous. The event demonstrated the growing presence of this north Brooklyn neighborhood in the city's artscape. A mixed bag of quality and vision, BOS has grown to include hundreds of artists in about 100 locations.
From the neighborhood's new downtown area near the Morgan L stop to the cemeteries near Jackie Robinson parkway, this huge swathe of New York's most populous borough attracted over a thousand art tourists from near and far.
Now with various non-profit institutions (Lumenhouse, 3rd Ward), four art galleries (Ad Hoc, English Kills, Pocket Utopia, Factory Fresh), a burgeoning downtown area (Morgantown) and an artistic energy that encourages experimentation, the latest installment of BOS may be proving that Bushwick is getting ready for a bigger role in the city's creative life.
The State Itself Becomes A Super Whatnot
Liam Gillick
Casey Caplan - 525 West 21st Street New York, NY
8 May 8 - 14 June 2008
Recent economic and political crises, such as the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, have called attention to the problematic position of the nation state in contemporary global culture. The current American recession, whose genesis lies in the unprecedented growth of liquid capital in the global marketplace, and a complex series of obscure banking and investment strategies, has ended with United States government propping up investment capital, such as Bear-Sterns, in an effort to avoid a projected global meltdown. The oft-repeated explanation was that Bear-Sterns was "too big to fail." That is, its connections with the global marketplace ran so deep that a collapse of the company would set off a domino effect, wreaking worldwide financial havoc. The government must therefore protect this corporate citizen, or risk endangering its own position of power. The penetration of global capital into the apparatus of the state leads one to ask whether or not it is the tail that wags the dog. Liam Gillick raises some of these issues with The State Itself Becomes A Super Whatnot, his new solo show at Casey Kaplan Gallery. Gillick has made a career of repurposing minimalism and conceptualism into neatly designed objects embedded in complex theoretical narratives that are dispersed through the artist's prolific writings, performances, and talks.
His biggest formal debt is perhaps owed to Donald Judd, whose works Gillick’s on view here most resemble, and whose overbearing critical practice is evoked by Gillick’s complex theoretical interpretations of his own work. Unlike Judd’s criticism, which was always intended as supplemental to what he considered his actual artistic production, Gillick’s critical and theoretical writing is an essential element of his artistic practice. In blurring the lines between artistic production and the disinterested gaze of the cultural critic he reveals that the motivations and strategies of the critic are as much an act of creative agency as that of the artist himself.
To that end, he has created the long running potential, or unwritten, text, Construcción de Uno. This unwritten text never completely reveals the artist’s intentions, but positions a hermeneutics whose unquantifiability acts as a buffer for those critics who would seek to reduce the artist’s practice to their own terms. He has revealed a few details about this text, however: one of the principle scenarios of the text, whose narrative frames this exhibition, follows the former workers of an experimental Volvo manufacturing plant located in Brazil who return to the workplace after it has been decommissioned by Ford. There they spend their time producing elegant theories on labor equivalence and begin to refashion the site as a testing ground for new models of production.
Laura Paulini's work, along with that of Derrick Melander Penelope Umbrico, was recently on view at Repetti Gallery in Long Island City.
Laura Paulini paints with her lucky chopstick. It's a cheap wooden one that she that found with a meal. Yet, the artist soon discovered that when she dipped this particular stick in tempera paint and then dabbed her birch picture planes, the dot turned out chillingly perfect. There is just something magical about the tip's shape and how it holds paint. Paulini theorizes that after many sessions of use the stick has not worn but actually calibrated to her technique. The artist has likewise honed her skill to the qualities of this chopstick. The utensil is so valuable that Paulini was tormented recently over bringing the stick along on her next residency or avoiding the risk of loss and leaving it at the studio. This modest but powerful tool looms behind each of her paintings.
Dot by dot, row by row, column by column, Paulini creates geometric Op Art patterns with a pointillist style. From a distance the Tron-like grid is clear but as a viewer approaches the field dissolves into a series of well placed dots. This game of distance and watching the image modulate with each step is one trademark of good pointillism that her works display with flying colors.
It has now been eighty-nine years since Mondrian's first grid paintings in Paris. The rigidly organized field still manages to touch a nerve on the retina. Let's forgo the predictable arguments over Rosalind Krauss's essays and appreciate the grid's tenacity when so many elements of modern painting now fall flat. The grid is like the friend you still call even though you've spent evenings cataloging his or her flaws. The grid is that dish that your mother never aces, but prepares with that bizarre twist that is her enduring signature. Paulini's work draws upon the grid's bittersweet stamina as recent painting stands between the hard rock of modernism and the harder place of what comes after.
Street Language
Darkcloud & Matt Siren
Woodward Gallery - 133 Eldridge Street New York, NY
May 10 - June 28, 2008
Sign Language
Woodward Gallery - 133 Eldridge Street New York, NY
May 10 - June 28, 2008
The two simultaneous shows at the Lower East Side's Woodward Gallery are a complicated affair. One tagged — pardon the pun — as Street Language is by two prominent New York street artists, Matt Siren and Darkcloud. The other, titled Sign language, greets visitors to the gallery before they proceed to the larger two-person show.
"Sign Language" is comprised of small metal signs created by a dream list of street art brands, including Phalllic Memory, Celso, Vor138, Keely, Deo, xinagrafx, AVone and 2esae. These "Untitled" mash-ups juggle various styles (or brands) to produce exciting, fun and engaging panels. When Matt Siren layers his thick lines over top of The Lovely Brenda's pin up girls, there's a dialogue — each panel is like a paragraph in a larger story. The street artists vie for attention like advertisers in the city.
If the individual pieces are interesting, the show does little more than try to blatantly market aspects of a scene that doesn't really thrive in a petri dish (or a conventional art gallery). This exhibition highlights the continuing problem street art faces as it responds to growing popularity and its practitioners try to cash in on their burgeoning fame. The show does little to address the urban lexicon and some of its volatile energy.
The gallery press release tries hard to establish a relevance for what we're seeing: "Connected through the rapid waves of text messaging, blogs, and websites these urban artists are now able to connect internationally with their peers creating a shifting social network. Their organized approach to a self-guided movement, so prominent in user-generated wiki-culture, is mirrored in each artist’s unique attempt to edit the urban landscape."
The problem is that removed from the city, these sanctioned works don't edit as much as decorate. Robbed of their "natural" context they look design-y. That's not to say they aren't good, but their success is in spite of the gallery context. The works themselves are small and suffer from the choke hold of their diminutive size.
Bushwick Open Studios & Arts Festival
6 June - 8 June 2008
Various Locations
BOS Preview & Sample Sale
7:30 - 10:30pm (open bar from 7:30 - 8:30pm)
Friday 30 May 2008
Lumenhouse - 47 beaver Street Brooklyn, NY
The periphery of commercial art exhibition and production sites in this city is a constantly shifting front. Studio spaces, for instance, of artists both emerging and established dot the heavily polluted Gowanus canal on both its sides. Studio occupants catch the lunch hour takeout drift from the South Slope, while long-term development plans are underway to build a 68,000 square foot Whole Foods near the intersection of Third Avenue and Third Street. Industry City meanwhile, an industrial complex in Sunset Park, is now renting spaces to artists and developing arts organizations for a kind of tempered integration of cultural workers into the declining but still active industrial sector. Industry City developers have taken note of the wild, market-driven development cycles of neighborhoods like Williamsburg and DUMBO, the former of which is being intensely reimagined on recent subway ads the city over as the latest fledgling, luxury and culturally oriented neighborhood.
Even changes such as these however might not preclude us from suggesting that there has remained, for some years now, a kind of gravitational center for this periphery in Bushwick – at least here in North Brooklyn. Intrepid would-be gallery owners and artists seem to open new venues here each year, while a few older exhibitors calcify their rightful position in the neighborhood with strong programing. The tenor of many such programs seems more conventional than vanguard, with group and solo shows often hung that could easily be transplanted to a Williamsburg gallery without much modification (and to Chelsea perhaps with some.) Rather than launching provocations at either patrons or peer organizations, many of these galleries and spaces seem instead focused on developing interesting, ongoing programing and forging new entry paths to commercial subsistence for both themselves and the artists with which they work.
The dispersed Bushwick arts community manifests next weekend with a 3-day "self-organized art festival where anyone and everyone in the community is welcome to participate by presenting art work, organizing activities or helping to produce the event." Bushwick Open Studios & Arts Festival is sponsored by local businesses, staffed by volunteers, and promises its usual diverse range of open studios, guided history walks, weekend-long group exhibitions, performances, barbecues, film and video screenings, and probably a few parties. A week before these events, however, Lumenhouse hosts a preview and sample sale event to benefit the festival. The benefit will take place tomorrow evening, from 7:30 - 10:30, will feature an open bar for the first hour, and priced to sell donated art works for the generation of funds for the festival.
Actuellement : Regard Sur Mai 68: Photos, Musiques Et Voix
Alain Quemper
Dorothy's Gallery - 27 Rue Keller, Paris
11 April - 2 June 2008
The specter of May 1968 has been haunting us for forty years now, and it is time to put it to rest. This does not mean surrender, either to the rightist vision of a capitalism both benevolent and triumphant or to the reformist project of accommodation. Rather, it requires seeing this last gasp of revolution in the West for what it was: a failure as colossal in its implications as it was glorious in execution. "Those who make revolution halfway only dig their own graves," said the graffiti of the time, quoting Saint-Just. We — today's radicals — risk being buried alive in the grave May has dug for us.
For it was in fact a failure on many fronts. Not just in the obvious sense — the ensuing return of normalcy and a rightward electoral shift almost unprecedented in French history — but also in its successive reincarnations as a banner of the revolutionary left. The fact that May became a spectacularized image, a simulacrum, represents perhaps the greatest betrayal of its politics. Indeed, this is a central warning of Debord's Society of the Spectacle: the ideological image of the proletariat creates Bolshevism, while the ideological image of the revolutionary moment, the anarcho-syndicalist fantasy of the day of the general strike, cripples the capacity for real action. The fetishization of May does the anarchists one better. Rather than placing the magical moment of revolt in an always near but never achievable future, it relegates it to the dead and irretrievable time of the past. This facilitates the production and marketing of glossy, red-tinted souvenirs — from the works of Badiou to The Dreamers and the myriad wistful think-pieces in the left-wing dailies.
In fact, as « Regard sur mai 1968 » at Dorothy's Gallery in Paris suggests, there was never quite as total of a revolt as some imagine. The show exhibits a hundred (quite unremarkable) 1968 photographs by Alain Quemper. Of these, perhaps half a dozen depict the flag-waving revolutionary protesters we are used to seeing (and even these contain a fair number of bored or vaguely interested bystanders). Another dozen show scowling apparatchiks like Pompidou, angry at the unrest. But the rest — the overwhelming majority — show the smiling and content faces of the culture industry: actors, singers, athletes. They look as unruffled as they do in any other year; as students and workers made lofty speeches, the capitalist apparatus they represented continued blithely to chug on. In short, though the French government was briefly in danger, neither capitalism nor the State itself had anything to fear — it was a replay, not of 1789, but of 1830.
