ARTPULSE MAGAZINE

Cory Arcangel: Masters

raisa — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 03:23:51 +0000

Carnegie Museum of Art - Pittsburgh
Curated by Tina Kukielski

By Stephen Knudsen

No longer do most of us give a second thought to the invasion of lowbrow [pop]ulism in the elitist white cube. Warhol’s Marilyns and Elvises have begotten Koon’s puppies, Hirst’s sharks, Murakami’s superflats, and much more. The ubiquity of such work asks a simple question: Why should speed, spectacle and celebrity only intoxicate us in the streets and our homes? Why not the museum? Framed in this way, Cory Arcangel’s survey exhibit “Masters“ seemed-in theory-on track for an “A” game as it promised to ask an even deeper question about speed: As we blow through endless upgrades of hardware and software in our glorious skim on the information superhighways, where is it exactly that we think we are going?

Adding further promise to this exhibit was the chosen venue, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum located in Warhol’s hometown and just across town from the Warhol Museum. I scheduled to be at the museum for a full day, from open to close, to view the exhibition, a reflection of Arcangel’s work since 2002.

“Cory Arcangel: Masters.” Exhibition view. Carnegie Museum of Art, Forum Gallery. Photo: Tom Little.

Despite my better intentions, in the end I felt mostly unease (verging on embarrassment) for veneration of simplistic videos of YouTube cats, cardboard box pedestals and other altered ready-mades. For instance, to view Klavierstücke op. 11 (2009), one was to sit in a chair equipped with headphones and then watch quick edits of various cats supposedly walking out Arnold Schoenberg music on piano keys. Now, to some people, the atonal music of Schoenberg does sound like cats randomly walking on piano keys. But be assured, Arcangel’s appropriated and staccato cat clips sound almost nothing like Schoenberg’s 12-tone row. I am not sure Schoenberg himself would have recognized his music in the piece. The real problem with the work is that it better belongs back where it came from-on YouTube. Arcangel seems to agree with at least part of that sentiment, as he has posted it on YouTube where at last count it had 87,000 hits, 130 “likes,” and was brimming with comments like “f-ing amazing.” I must then ask what kind of importance can this add to art’s critical discourse in the museum?

Sliding to the next monitor, one was invited to view Untitled Translation Exercise (2006), the full-length feature of Richard Linklater’s 1993 teen cult film Dazed and Confused. Arcangel appropriated the full 103 minutes of the film, including the iconic opening: the orange 1970 Pontiac, “The Judge”, rounding the lot to Aerosmith’s hit song Sweet Emotion. Roger Ebert’s review (concurrent with the 1993 film release) praised Linklater’s artistry stating, “The years between 13 and 18 are among the most agonizing in a lifetime, yet we remember them with a nostalgia that blocks out much of the pain.” This is a truth well understood by Dazed and Confused, Linklater’s film about the last day of school and the long night that follows it. The film is art crossed with anthropology. It tells the painful underside of American Graffiti.”¹

In a demonstration of vacuous buffoonery Arcangel dubbed the English dialog of Linklater’s film with new voices (still in English). Arcangel downloaded a free copy of the script and sent it to Bangalore so the new voices would have British/Indian accents. Meaning beyond the joke is thin at best especially when the artistry of Linklater (even so dated) far outshines any strip-mining by Arcangel. In other words, the piece remained more Dazed and Confused than Untitled Translation Exercise.

Then it was on to the next monitor and so on.

Cory Arcangel, Sweet Sixteen, 2006, Dual-channel video, color, sound, 15:55 min Courtesy of the artist and Team Gallery, New York

In a separate museum gallery, Sweet Sixteen (2006) was given a higher position on the big screen in the theater-like space. The work is a dual-channel video installation of the first 64 measures of the appropriated Sweet Child of Mine stage video by Guns and Roses. The two video channels, playing simultaneously, move in and out of phase (almost imperceptibly on a first listen) as the iconic song intro looped.

Now, I appreciate R. Mutt smartassness as much as anyone, especially when the fooling around with dated bites of culture is also trying to add something relevant to the critical discourse. But I question the vitality of some of the work in Masters when it is barely more interesting than what one might find through a search of the un-appropriated original material on the Internet.

Something more is needed. Arcangel has proven before that at his best he is astonishingly capable of delivering more. Consider the artist’s answer to Warhol’s Silver Clouds (1966): Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2003). His piece is thought-provoking and dare I say a beautiful work the way the artist originally made it for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s permanent collection. I was left wishing the Masters exhibit had used this version.

Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds , 2002- (installation view, “Synthetic,” Whitney Museum of American Art, 2009), modified Super Mario game cartridge; Nintendo System. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York © Cory Arcangel. Courtesy of the artist and Team Gallery, New York.

Arcangel hacked and modified the eight-bit computer in the obsolete Super Mario video game so just the puny clouds float endlessly across a big, blue screen. Museum text by “Masters” curator Tina Kukielski gets it right, stating, “The work operates as both pop icon and dystopian dream.” The piece is also theoretically relevant. It both confirms and denies art critic Boris Groys’ argument that digital artwork must change as it is re-translated as technology advances (90). It is true that Clouds could be displayed on endless reinventions of a screen, but the hardware/software of Clouds will always be the hacked game cartridge and untranslatable into other technology.

Unfortunately for the 2012 “Masters” survey exhibit, the theatre ambiance of Clouds was dumbed-down into a small monitor placed next to the monitors mentioned above. Clouds put in the context of simplistic recorded video gags made Clouds like a video recording as well. Thus, the key aspect of the work was lost: that Clouds was not recorded data but was being created in real time from an actual altered Nintendo gaming system. To see Clouds on the much-more-effective big screen in a darkened room (with long cords tethering the gaming system), I had to go to a concurrent group exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (”Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists Fifty Years”²).In the Met exhibit, Clouds was given the respect it deserved and thus was a highlight in this group exhibit bursting at the seams with iconic works by 60 of some of the most important contemporary artists who have been influenced by Warhol. The best Warhol works exemplify an answer worth emulating. Take popular culture to the museum, but in doing so make sure the soup has spice.

(November 3, 2012 - February 27, 2013)

Works Cited

Groys, Boris. Art Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Notes

1. Roger Ebert, September 24, 1993, Chicago Sun Times

2. “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists Fifty Years” has since moved from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York to the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA. (February 3 - April 28, 2013)

Stephen Knudsen is a professor of painting at Savannah College of Art and Design and exhibits work internationally. He is a regular contributor to NY Arts Magazine, Chicago Art Magazine and The SECAC Review Journal.

Alexandre Arrechea: No Limits

raisa — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 03:10:17 +0000

Park Avenue - New York

By Stephen Knudsen

Alexandre Arrechea’s No Limits¹ is so good that I am going to skip the dance drill and stake out a conclusion right from the beginning. The 10 sculptures are unpardonably smart, humorous and beautiful-with Kantian flourishes of spirit.²

With art history’s grand narrative annulled (thanks, Arthur Danto), one might think art criticism’s wars of spirited yore are over.³So, what to do with Arrechea’s genius? He deserves more than the usual narration. So here goes…writing theory with my left hand and dirty judgment with my right.⁴

Arrechea’s latest body of work is a sociopolitical and formal meditation on NYC icons, such as the Chrysler Building, U.S. Courthouse and Empire State Building, in a series of approximately 20-foot-tall, stainless-steel sculptures temporarily on display across a 20-block stretch of green-zone median on Park Avenue. The sculptures stand near the buildings of inspiration, making the dialogue lucid.

One point of clarification: These sculptures are not bromides; they are not mini-me replicas of the buildings they sit adjacent to. Arrechea is clearly not a cliché meister. The art works extrapolate so far out of their inspirations and into animated distortions that at a peripheral first glance one might not even see the building in the form. Some of the works shift perceptually more than others and are better for it.

Alexandre Arrechea, Helmsley, 2013, steel, 177” x 173 ¾” x 31 ½”, located at 65th Street, Park Avenue as part of No Limits, a project presented by Magnan Metz Gallery, in partnership with the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation and the Fund for the Park Avenue Sculpture Committee.

Case in point: the Helmsley Building sculpture. This 15-foot sculpture pays homage to the 35-story building but is equally recognizable as a snake eating its own tail. The Cuban artist has spoken of the Ouroboros myth: “It’s like a city that devours itself. That has always been my first vision of New York.”⁵ Interesting, but even without this verbal dressing one does not need to be a herpetologist to see it. The viaduct slot at the bottom of the building, as a mouth, elegantly fellates the pretty cupola atop the building and in doing so makes perfection, a circle.

For those who like their meditations on beauty and art to be disinterested, skip this next paragraph. But I only had more respect for the work when I remembered that Ayn Rand’s famous novel Atlas Shrugged used the Helmsley building to lay bare immoralities in a backdrop of business, sex, steel, glass and concrete. The real 1929 Helmsley building is portrayed as the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad Building and office of the novel’s protagonist, Dagny Taggart. She (Dagny) is in charge of operations for Taggart Transcontinental, under her brother, James Taggart. However, Dagny is ultimately responsible for the running of the railroad, as her brother’s ineptitude and depravity does nothing but cannibalize the Taggart legacy and fortune. He does it in part by using a false altruism to debase his fellow men and women.

But to prove again that real life is better than fiction, we should remember two words: Leona Helmsley. The billionaire, the so-called queen of mean, could cannibalize with the best of them. At Helmsley’s income tax evasion trial, her housekeeper reportedly repeated the Helmsley’s mantra, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”

When General Tire & Rubber Company sold the building to Helmsley-Spear, Leona Helmsley renamed the building The Helmsley Building and put in a clause that when sold it could never be renamed. The head just keeps eating the tail on this one.

But the work implicates us all-the circle, the wheel, the speed. In Arrechea’s sculpture, the Beaux-Arts style of The Helmsley Building spins into a wheel of Italian futurism-a mash-up true to our times. We are getting somewhere fast. But where? Do we believe in it? Is it worth it? The sculpture animates the space and speaks to it in splendid site-specific form. The sculpture is to the actual building as the animating soul is to the body. Here is hoping it is not simply a heart of darkness. Arrechea’s humor in the work lends itself to some optimism. And with that another perceptional shift is present, one concerning content: utopia versus dystopia. The brilliance in this work just keeps unraveling.

Alexandre Arrechea, Seagram, 2013, steel, 236 1/4 x 113 x 40 1/2 inches, located at 55th Street, Park Avenue.

Other Arrechea sculptures (especially the Seagram’s Building homage) have the inflated cuteness of an Oldenburg sculpture. Think of the building-to-sculpture playfulness of something like Claes Oldenburg’s and Coojse van Bruggen’s work, Shuttlecocks, at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, where the giant birdies are in dialogue with the museum building as the museum itself becomes the net.

It would have undone the piece if Arrechea’s sculpture was just cute. An added carnal playfulness comes by virtue of the red coiler against the complementary bit of fertile green bush cover. The building seeks erection as a hose-gone-wild with liquid pressure. Thus, the work is a meditation on the mid-20th-century bravado that colored the legacy of this skyscraper. Completed in 1958, it is 38 stories of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe architectural genius-and the birth of the International Style. One also thinks of the testosterone of Philip Johnson (designer of the interior) and the Mark Rothko fiasco with the structure’s restaurant, The Four Seasons. It was built for the Seagram’s liquor/beverage empire. The pressure in the hose-so to speak-was brought along by Phyllis Lambert, daughter of Seagram’s CEO. She was instrumental in the realization of the building.

Alexandre Arrechea, Metropolitan Life Insurance, 2013, stainless steel, steel, 13 1/8 x 12 1/2 x 2 1/4 ft. Located at East 57th Street on the Park Avenue Malls.

I will suggest that the most ingenious work in the series is made after the Metropolitan Life Insurance building (occupied from 1909 to 2005 by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company). The essence of Arrechea’s sculpture is so clear that a postmortem is not needed. Let me simply remark that if you stand in just the right spot, this fully coiled, hulking giant (at the ready) points down directly at you. It is an implication of life and death and the business that tempers such certainties.

In his Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art, French philosopher Alain Badiou states, “Art…should hang together as solidly as a mathematical demonstration, be as surprising as a nighttime ambush, and be as elevated as a star.” Those words start to mean something with demonstrations like No Limits. Arrechea’s aesthetic equation perfectly positions modernity’s persistence in Postmodernism. In spite of all of the anxiety, we still want to believe in the possibility of “no limits.”⁶

The great irony of Arrechea’s No Limits is that despite being a temporary project, it was executed more like a permanent installation. I am left wishing this install could be permanent. The works are for sale and will have life elsewhere, but unfortunately they are so site specific that the full nature of the works is not likely to be realized again. But then again, there was that little change of heart with the Eiffel Tower. Please consider this review as the first signature on a petition to urge the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation to keep at least one of these Arrechea’s in place permanently.

(February 28 - June 9, 2013)

Notes

1. Alexandre Arrechea’s No Limits is on view at Park Avenue, from 53^rd to 67^thstreets in New York City.

2.Arthur Danto essay “Kant and a Work of ART” 2008, from the anthology, The Art of Critique/Re-Imagining Art Criticism and the Art School Critique, c. and e. Stephen Knudsen (publishing date pending). In this essay, Danto is enthusiastic about the contemporary relevance of a kind of Kantian spirit or genius in creation of art that-unlike Kant’s ideas on disinterested judgments of beauty-spirit does embrace content. Danto states, “What impresses me is that Kant’s highly compressed discussion of spirit is capable of addressing the logic of artworks invariantly as to time, place, and culture, and of explaining why formalism is so impoverished a philosophy of art. The irony is that Kant’s Critique of Judgment is so often cited as the foundational text for formalistic analysis.”

3. On February 7, 2007 Frieze Talk Thierry de Duve speaks of his longing for “the esthetic wars of yore” and the possibility, today, of finding “the singularity of a true work of art” even as the art world loses part of itself in the reign of “exacerbated idiosyncrasies.”

< http://friezefoundation.org/talks/detail/theory_practice_thierry_de_duve/>

4. The idea of ambidextrous art criticism comes from James Elkin’s remark about Arthur Danto’s writing in Elkin’s introduction of The Art of Critique/Re-Imagining Art Criticism and the Art School Critique, c. and e. Stephen Knudsen (publishing date pending).

5. Alexandre Arrechea, Knudsen interview with the artist. This quotation was verified as accurate directly with the artist.

6. Alexandre Arrechea’s work is, for a lack of a better term, a demonstration of metamodernism, the to-and-fro occupation of both the positions of modern attachment and postmodern detachment. See Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin van den Akker. “Notes on Metamodernism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Vol. 2, 2010. Also see the issue No. 14 of ARTPULSE (Winter 2013) and the essay “Beyond Postmodernism.”

Stephen Knudsen is an artist and a professor of painting at Savannah College of Art and Design. He is a senior editor and art critic for ARTPULSE and a contributing writer for New York Arts Magazine, Hyperallergic, The SECAC Review Journal and theartstory.org. He is the senior editor of the anthology The ART Of Critique, which will be published this year.

CHRISTOPH COX

raisa — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 15:50:17 +0000

Christoph Cox teaches philosophy and art theory at Hampshire College and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He is the author of Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (1999) and co-editor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (2004). Cox has curated exhibitions at the Kitchen, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and other venues. His essays on philosophy, art and music have appeared in October, Artforum, the Journal of Visual Culture, the Journal of the History of Philosophy and other journals and magazines. Cox is currently working on two books, a philosophical book about sound art and experimental music, and an anthology examining the impact of new realist and materialist philosophies on artistic discourse and practice.

Manuel DeLanda. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997

DeLanda’s book doesn’t say a word about art, music or sound. But I’ve found it to be a crucial resource for thinking about those things. The author— a Mexican-born autodidact who began his career as an experimental filmmaker—is a brilliant synthesist, drawing material from geology, history, biology, linguistics, economics, and countless other fields to produce evidence for his central thesis: that all of nature and culture must be conceived as a collection of material and energetic flows operating at various speeds and scales. We are inclined to think in terms of things (bodies, artworks, compositions, buildings, books). But DeLanda encourages us to think of these as temporary coagulations of material currents that are both more elusive and more important. The book also anticipates the recent turn to realism and materialism in philosophy and cultural theory.

Chris Cutler. File Under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music. 2^nd edition. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1992

Those who know Chris Cutler tend to know him as the percussionist for avant rock bands such as Henry Cow and Pere Ubu, and as key player in the international free improvisation scene. But he is also an extraordinarily acute and intelligent theorist of music. Though Cutler has written a few additional essays over the past two decades, File Under Popular (first published in 1984 and revised in 1992) is his only book. I am continually astonished and dismayed by how little-known the book is, even among the cognoscenti of experimental music and sound art. In 16 pages, the essay “Necessity and Choice in Musical Forms” offers a significantly more compelling and prescient history of music than Jacques Attali’s celebrated book Noise. The essays on musical politics and the “popular” in popular culture extend and outstrip Theodor W. Adorno’s writings on those subjects. The book is due for a third edition, revised and expanded to include more recent material.

Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn, eds. Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966-1973. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011

Lucy Lippard’s celebrated anthology Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 ably captured the wild profusion of postminimalist and conceptualist practices that reconfigured the very notion of “art” in this volatile and seminal period. During exactly those years, a kindred and allied revolution was taking place in music via composers such as Alvin Lucier, Annea Lockwood, Max Neuhaus, and Dick Higgins. This revolution was documented in real time in the pages of Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, a gorgeous, small-edition artist’s publication that included experimental scores (some notated in fur, printed on Plexiglas, or riddled with bullet holes), circuit diagrams, descriptions of sound installations, manifestos, interviews, concrete poems and magnificent 10” thick-vinyl LPs. I am lucky enough to live near two libraries that have complete runs of the journal. But for those not as lucky, this new anthology is the next best thing.

NIELS VAN TOMME

raisa — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:26:31 +0000

Niels Van Tomme is a New York-based curator, researcher and critic. He currently works at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in Baltimore where his project Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki & Trevor Paglen will open in the fall of 2013. Most recently, he curated the traveling exhibition “Where Do We Migrate To?” (Baltimore, New York, New Orleans, El Paso), as well as the group exhibitions “Melancholy is not enough…” (Bucharest) and “There is Nothing There” (New York). Van Tomme publishes internationally in journals, magazines and exhibition catalogues, and is the guest editor of a special issue of ART PAPERS (Jan/Feb 2013) devoted to the theme of temporality.

Svetlana Boym. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Whenever I am tired of all those essential but often exhausting theoretical texts, or those filled with the kinds of references only the art crowd gets, I turn to Svetlana Boym’s elegantly written and meticulously researched The Future of Nostalgia. In this book, Boym rejects the notion of restorative nostalgia, which is closely entwined with conspiracy and a return to origins, in favor of the more progressive notion of reflective nostalgia. The latter contains a critical dimension and is concerned with individual and cultural memory, and a kind of utopian longing. Writing from the position of loss and displacement instead of belonging, the study of nostalgia becomes for Boym potentially prospective in nature. It is the book I have recommended most often to artists and other wandering spirits, who can find in her notion of the off-modern new ways to think and act beyond the current cultural impasse defined by stifling retromania.

Werner Herzog. Of Walking in Ice. New York: Free Association, 2008.

In November 1974, a friend calls Werner Herzog from Paris to tell him film critic Lotte Eisner is seriously ill and will probably die. As a protest to the approaching death of his ailing friend, Herzog embarks on a three-week long odyssey from Munich to Paris to “bring her back to health.” The book is the diary Herzog kept during his walk and is filled with delirious philosophical ramblings and poetic encounters with nothingness. There is a quality of haunting disquiet to the writing, which is, at times, so personal and obsessed that it becomes somewhat disconcerting to read. With his personal action, Herzog adds a sense of metaphysical urgency to a long line of literary and conceptual artistic practices concerned with ideas of walking, and the result is nothing less than transformative. When he finally arrives in Paris, Lotte Eisner is miraculously healed. The book was out of print for the longest time, and this 2008 edition by Free Association is a triumph in both design and substance.

Branka Stipančić (editor). Mladen Stilinović, Artist’s Books 1972-2006. Istanbul: Platform Garanti, 2007.

There are certain secret bonds between artists and curators, and one of them is that a major part of our work is born out of less elevated conditions such as “laziness” and idling. Croatian conceptual artist Mladen Stilinović’s seminal piece Artist at Work from 1978 shows this process: captured through a series of photographs, we see the artist lying in bed while doing nothing, at times sleeping. Of course, this piece, which was turned into one of his exquisitely handcrafted artist’s books gathered in this volume, is also much more than that. Presenting oneself as a parasite in a working society, the artist’s performance is a refusal to participate in socialist Yugoslavia’s conception of labor as a foremost propaganda tool. Mladen Stilinović remains a constant inspiration; not only through his many artists’ books but also through the small exhibitions he occasionally mounts in his apartment. For him, a “room” is not just an exhibition space, but also a search for new forms of creating and presenting art and for establishing new relationships with the audience.

Arnold Mesches: A Life’s Work

raisa — Wed, 22 May 2013 06:32:53 +0000

Miami Dade College Museum of Art + Design

Curated by Kim Levin

The Cultural Contexts of Arnold Mesches

By Jill Thayer, Ph.D.

During the Great Depression, artists portrayed the plight of the working class by exposing the dire economic and social conditions of the 1930s. Throughout this period, Arnold Mesches developed a penchant for social change. His left-wing proclivities and outspoken activism defied the social structures perpetuating these conditions and informed his voice in Social Realism. Mesches’ figurative style evoked that of the gestural Action Painters, as his work would rival the critiques of genres to follow–the human existence in Existentialism; the instinctual understanding of Abstract Expressionism; the commodified culture represented by Pop Art; the literalness in Superrealism; the emotive intensity in Neo-Expressionism; and the transformative liberation in Feminism. His formal grounding set into motion a lifelong inquiry of art’s historical trajectories, which would transpire in contemporary culture. The paintings and drawings Mesches produced throughout his nearly seven-decade career expound upon issues of the day through a mise-en-scène of masterful articulation.

“Arnold Mesches: A Life’s Work” is currently on view in a retrospective at Miami Dade College Museum of Art + Design. The exhibition portrays the artist’s powerful and thought-provoking depictions of a changing society amidst turbulent times in our country’s 20th-century history. The horrors of WWII, the anti-Communist crusades of the McCarthy era, civil rights, the Vietnam War and peace movement, social stratification, the political policies of the Reagan and Bush years, terrorism and the Iraqi War are a sampling of the cultural contexts that Mesches defines.

Arnold Mesches, The FBI Files 56, 2003, acrylic, Polaroids and paper on canvas, 14” x 22”. Collection of Glenn and Trish Zelniker, Gainesville, FL. Courtesy for the artist and Miami Dade College Museum of Art + Design.

The main gallery features more than 85 works from 1945 to 2012, including large paintings from many of the 14 series completed. Curated by Kim Levin, the exhibition marks Mesches’ 90th birthday and 136th solo show to date. “A Life’s Work” is augmented by three satellite-campus galleries, which total over 200 works. An elaborately designed 280-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essays by Lowery Sims, Peter Selz and Robert Storr.¹

“Arnold Mesches: The FBI Files” at Kendall Art Gallery at Pat & Martin Fine Center for the Arts presents a series of collages resembling illuminated manuscripts. The mixed-media pieces replete with mid-century iconography were transformed from 57 documents from his 760-page dossier citing 26 years of FBI surveillance.

“Arnold Mesches: Minispective” at Centre Gallery on Wolfson Campus looks into the process and methodology behind many of the artist’s large-scale works from 1996 to 2012. Included are small paintings, drawings and collages–a road map through the imagined realities and social consciousness of Mesches.

“Arnold Mesches: Noise” at the North Gallery on the North Campus displays more than 10 works from 2010 to present. The series reinterprets Brueghel’s Renaissance motifs through present day semiotics in which opposite extremes happen simultaneously. Mesches’ allegorical staging shows the complexities of a burgeoning society and the angst of its discord.

Though mostly self-taught, Mesches attended the Art Center School (now Art Center College of Design) on a 1943 scholarship where he gained formal training in composition from professor Lorser Feitelson. His early aspirations to become a commercial artist segued into painting as an illustrator in Hollywood’s film industry. The oppressive entanglements he faced as an activist in the McCarthy Era during the late 1940s and 1950s–and consequential shadowing by the FBI from 1945 to 1972-revealed a dicey tome of the artist’s political and social activities. This involvement helped shape his view of the cultural discourse and define the sociopolitical currents of our time.

Arnold Mesches, Shock and Awe 1, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 44” x 601/2”.

Mesches was influenced by Brueghel and Goya; German Expressionists Ernst Kirchner, Käthe Kollwitz and Anselm Kiefer; and Social Realists Ben Shahn, José Clemente Orozco and the Mexican muralists. His paintings reveal a dissension of government views on issues concerning the working class, economic hardship, war, racial injustice, class structure and power, much like the works of post-World War II figurative Abstraction and Expressionists Reg Butler and Leon Golub; German Dadaist/Expressionist George Grosz; and Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning and David Smith.

Social commentary is a narrative theme in Mesches’ work. Series such as: Anomie (1989-2006), It‘s a Circus (2004-2005) and Coming Attractions (2005-2007) are reminiscent of the theoretical touchstones of Mikhail Bakhtin, who signified carnivalesque humor as a participatory spectacle and social force in cultural transformation; and Bertolt Brecht, whose exploration of epic theater presented a social and ideological forum for political expression and critical thought.

Weather Patterns (2009-2010) is a series about the precariousness of today. The incongruous schemes align with Surrealist techniques and imagery, which express a free association of visual elements. This notion regards the psychological theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud and the political ideas of Karl Marx.² Mesches also explores this construct in Coming Attractions (2005-2007), evocatively illustrating the Bush years and the uncertainties of life.

Weather Patterns 10 (2009) depicts a trapeze artist in mid-flight, poised under siege from an imposing tidal wave. His sunlit physique is clothed in bright yellow, taupe and orange in sharp contrast to the deep azure blues of the turbulent sea. The acrobat, in static equilibrium, is on the verge of safety as a swinging bar beckons his grasp to offer reprieve from a sky fall into the abyss. The powerful juxtaposition alludes to the instability of the day and our futile attempt to control an unpredictable world with an unforeseeable future.

The FBI Files (2000-2003) is a series of interpretive montages from Mesches’ activist years. The censorship in the film industry, which blacklisted artists and writers for alleged Communist subversion during the Hollywood strike of 1946-1947, contributed to the national consequences of the McCarthy era in the late 1940s and 1950s. Mesches gained access to his abridged FBI files in 1999 through the Freedom of Information Act after the demise of The House Un-American Activities Committee. This inspired an eclectic array of collages from the partially blacked-out documents that reminded him of Franz Kline paintings.

Regarding these series, Peter Selz observes, “With each new countenance, Mesches alchemizes the Renaissance glazes and vigorous, wild brushstrokes, until his canvases rival Action Painting, the human face barely distinguishable in the gestural paint (Selz 8).” The series, resembling contemporary illuminated manuscripts, was first exhibited in 2003 at The Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 in New York and traveled to other venues, including the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, N.C.; and the University Galleries at the University of Florida School of Art and Art History, Gainesville, Fla. In the catalog of this exhibit, Selz notes, “The exhibit happened to coincide with the passage of George W. Bush’s odious Patriot Act, which permits broad surveillance of citizens, and remains largely in force in the Obama administration (6).”

The FBI Files 56 (2003) is a diptych collage incorporating a page from Mesches’ file. On the left is a portrait of a man in a dark suit–his head shown in close-up, disproportionately large for his body. A pompous expression is loosely painted in analogous shades of vermillion, red, gray and black as swashes of white cast a revealing spotlight on the intent of his message. The subject’s exaggerated features resemble a caricature of an orator, a trial prosecutor or perhaps McCarthy himself. On the right, a Federal Bureau of Investigations letterhead with singed edges is mounted close to the diptych’s center. The typing describes an announcement designed by Mesches. Entitled “Come Walk With Us For Peace,” the flier urges attendance at a vigil under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee on Saturday, April 1, 1961.

Further down, the text reads, “A suggested letter to President John F. Kennedy regarding disarmament; and an announcement about the Walk For Peace.” The record is stamped May 31, 1961. Mid-century cutout reproductions border the page with objects such as Roman warriors, keys, dark mannequins dressed in pink and green, two doll heads, one end of a double Ferris wheel, a winged sculpture, a skeletal spine, a tricycle, finger puppets and a partially eaten apple. The background transitions from black to vivid red, unifying the disparate images in a surrealistic dreamscape of existence.

The vastness of Mesches’ oeuvre is astounding. From the sublime character of his haunting portraiture and intimate sketches to the profound intensity of his paintings that bear his conviction towards social change, “Arnold Mesches: A Life’s Work” is a compelling trek into the mind’s eye with an empowering initiative that seeks justice for all.

(February 14 - May 4, 2013)

WORKS CITED

• Selz, Peter. “Arnold Mesches: Aesthetic and Political Engagement,” Arnold Mesches: A Life‘s Work. Gainesville: Cement House, 2013. Exhibition Catalogue.

Notes

1. Arnold Mesches: A Life‘s Work is published by Cement House and distributed by the University Press of Florida. Exhibition Catalogue design by Connie Hwang Design, San Francisco.

Jill Thayer, Ph.D. is an artist, educator, and curatorial archivist. She is online faculty at Santa Monica College in Art History/Global Visual Culture.

Triple Points: Commissioners Holly Block and Carey Lovelace Introduce the Work of Sarah Sze for the United States Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale

raisa — Sat, 18 May 2013 03:52:43 +0000

Sarah Sze. Photo: Mike Barnett.

The nomination of Sarah Sze to represent the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale is also the first time a relatively small institution such as the Bronx Museum is acting in a commissioning role. With Sze already in Venice working with local university students on her installation, ARTPULSE took the opportunity to talk to the curators of the project, Bronx Museum director Holly Block and independent curator and writer Carey Lovelace.

By Michele Robecchi

Michele Robecchi - In recent years, the concept of having national representations in Venice has been the subject of many critical approaches. There has been Jason Rhoades co-representing Denmark in 1997, Santiago Sierra‘s refusal to let visitors in the Spanish Pavilion unless they had a Spanish passport in 2003, up to this year‘s decision of Germany and France to swap exhibition spaces. Do you think it is still a viable model?

Holly Block - Well, the Italian Pavilion is the perfect example of how many artists from all over the world can convene in one location. As for the other national pavilions, I still think that it’s a fantastic opportunity for artists to present their work in an international format, and for the art-speaking world to share and exchange many artists’ work at the pavilions who are setting up their work by not just unpacking crates but are actually working on site. For artists who have very few opportunities to compete worldwide, it’s still an important experience, and in my own career, it’s a trajectory that makes perfect sense. Having curated the Cairo Biennale in 2003, and having worked in an international mode for 25 years, I think it’s absolutely credible.

Carey Lovelace - I think this idea of the national models is outmoded in many different ways, and different countries deal with it in different ways, even by being critical. The U.S. Pavilion in 2011 was very critical of national identity. Or, as you mentioned, when you have some pavilions that are featuring artists that are not from their nationality. They are from other countries, and they’re trying to reach out in terms of heritage and identity. We live in a new global reality, and I think all artists and pavilions are trying to deal with it in their own way.

Holly Block, Co-Commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion and Executive Director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Photo: Peter Sterling.

M.R. - Do you think the ultimate scope of the U.S. Pavilion should be to present artists that have a strong national reputation but that haven‘t been fully acknowledged on an international level yet, like it happened with Ann Hamilton in 1999 or Fred Wilson in 2003, or do you think it should showcase more established artists like Ed Ruscha and Bruce Nauman and play a more representational role in what American art is about?

H.B. - In my point of view, I think there is room and opportunity for all that, for both levels. Also remember what happened with Félix González-Torres, where there was a curator who liked his work and put together an exhibition with a non-living artist who clearly didn’t have any sort of involvement. I think it sets a really broad spectrum. It’s great to see Ed Ruscha’s work there in that site, and we are using the pavilion of Richard Serra, and Serra has been using the pavilion in a completely different way. What is nice is that every two years there is a different approach.

C.L. - And I must say that I think all the pavilions have a range. They have classic figures and younger artists. I mean you don’t want to do the same things every time anyway.

H.B. - I think earlier on, traditionally, it was about hanging art works on the wall. And over the last 40 years this has changed, as art-making practices have evolved to incorporate artists working with different materials and within different boundaries.

Carey Lovelace, Co-Commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion. Photo: Mauro Benedetti.

C.L. - Or even dealing architecturally or theatrically in some way with the space.

M.R. - You must have been to Venice a few times over the years. From your previous visits, what‘s your take on the architecture of the U.S. Pavilion? Did you form opinions of what can or shouldn‘t be done?

C.L. - I think the pavilion gives you a challenge to work with an artist in different ways. It’s interesting to see how each artist and their commissioning curator deal with that. If you look at Sarah Sze’s work, she deals with boundaries in a very imaginative way, and that was one of the delights of the possibility of her working with the pavilion. She sets a lot of different types of space that have come up with fascinating functions for that.

Sarah Sze, 360 (Portable Planetarium), 2010, mixed media, wood, paper, strings, jeans, rocks, 13’5” x 11’3”x15’4”. Courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Photo: Tom Powel.

M.R. - Many commentators in New York saw your nominations as commissioners as a symbol of the renaissance of the Bronx.

H.B. - I think the story here is about how smaller institutions can take on a project like this. And also, it’s the first time something like that has happened. But Fred Wilson, who was born and raised in the Bronx and also works in the Bronx, has represented the U.S. before, so you have some Bronx connections, but nothing like a sponsoring institution. I think it’s important to remember that with the United States it’s very different than in other countries. There is a competition, we have to submit a proposal, whereas in other countries there is a ministry of culture or a council that makes a selection and just appoints. It’s just a very different process, and I think what is great is that we are doing a whole series of engagement programs, involving our regular audience with the Venice community. All that work will unfold over the next six months of the project, and the show in Venice will eventually turn into a Bronx Museum exhibition.

M.R. - So you are planning to exhibit again the show in the Bronx?

H.B. - Not the whole show, it’s just too big. But some of the works will be featured in the museum next spring.

Sarah Sze, Tilting Planet, 2006, mixed media, dimensions variable. From “Sarah Sze: Tilting Planet,” Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden, December 1, 2006 – February 18, 2007. Photo: Helene Toresdotter.

M.R. - Can you give a preview of what Sarah Sze will do?

C.L. - We are trying not to give away too much. It should be having the same approach as before-kind of large architectonic structures with high levels of details, and drawings from objects from the everyday that are not necessarily discarded objects. They are objects with no history. This is part of what she does, recontextualizing objects and then creating these amazing structures that are very much in dialogue with the spaces that she is in.

H.B. - All I can say is that she is doing six works. Sixty percent of these will be done in New York, and 40 percent will be done in Venice. She will be on site, and I think that’s an important part of her work. It will evolve while she is there, and we are all going to be positively impressed.

M.R. - It is certainly good to see a woman representing the United States in Venice. The last time was 14 years ago.

C.L. -Yes. Actually, with us as commissioners, it will make three females!

H.B. - And this is the third time only that there has been a female artist, after Jenny Holzer in the 1990 and Ann Hamilton in 1999. Well, three and a half, if we consider Allora & Calzadilla last time. But we actually have female installers too this time, so this is great.

Michele Robecchi is a writer and curator based in London. A former managing editor of Flash Art (2001-2004) and senior editor at Contemporary Magazine (2005-2007), he is currently a visiting lecturer at Christie’s Education and an editor at Phaidon Press, where he has edited monographs about Marina Abramović, Francis Alÿs, Jorge Pardo, Stephen Shore and Ai Weiwei.

TOP ART BASEL

raisa — Fri, 17 May 2013 06:55:53 +0000

The Long Sweep. A Conversation with Ed Clark about His 60-Plus Years in the Art World

raisa — Tue, 14 May 2013 22:53:43 +0000

Edward Clark in his studio. Photo: An Liping. All images are courtesy of the artist and N’Namdi Contemporary Miami.

Abstract Expressionist painter Ed Clark has been an influential figure in the world of painting for more than six decades. In addition to his signature push-broom sweep paintings, he was also an innovator in the field of shaped canvases and one of the original artists in the Brata Gallery during New York’s Tenth Street co-op gallery boom in the 1950s. His works are included in the permanent collections of more than a dozen museums and institutions, including The Art Institute of Chicago, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the California African American Museum in Los Angeles and the Centro de Arte Moderno in Guadalajara, Mexico. In anticipation of his upcoming retrospective at N’Namdi Contemporary Miami, we spoke with Clark about his life as an artist, the evolution of his style and techniques, and some of the experiences he’s had during his travels around the world.

By Jeff Edwards

Jeff Edwards - You were born in New Orleans, but during the years of the Great Depression your family moved to Chicago. When were you first interested in art, and when did you discover your vocation as a visual artist?

Ed Clark - It was in Louisiana when I first kind of knew. I was in Catholic school in Baton Rouge when I was about six or seven, and this teacher-who didn’t like me very much-had us draw a tree, and I drew a tree with branches and everything. Whoever did the best drawing would have got a gold star, but she dismissed the class and wouldn’t give me or anyone else anything. That helped me all my life, to know that I could be the best. But I didn’t know what art meant, and I never said I was an artist, even when I would draw.

When we moved up to Chicago I was at another Catholic school, and one nun there had a flower. She asked if I could draw it on the blackboard. When I finished, it looked just like the damn thing. And that’s when I knew that I had that facility. I knew it wasn’t art, though, because I was just copying. Then I heard from someone that there was a guy better than me in another school in Chicago. I went down and took one look and knew that he was junk compared to me. So I knew I was an artist, but I never tried to say I was until I went to art school.

Edward Clark, Louisiana Red, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 67” x 72”

J.E. - After you served at the Air Force during WWII, you began studies in 1947 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. What does this first contact with the history of art mean for you?

E.C. - What World War II did for a lot of guys was enabled us to go to school, because you’d get money to go. The Art Institute is one of the best art schools in the country. I studied art history with Helen Gardner, who wrote Art Through the Ages. You had to pass history, and I was worried because you had to write an essay, but luckily you also had the choice of making something contemporary in an old style, like a painting of Chicago looking like the 15th century, or something like that.

Edward Clark, Blue Force, 1960, oil on canvas, 74” x 82”

J.E. - In 1952, you went to Paris to complete your studies. How was the artistic environment there during the early 1950s? What artists did you meet who influenced your career?

E.C. - I had 15 months left on the G.I. Bill, so when I went to Paris, I knew I’d get money every month, and I knew that I’d get art supplies for free. There was one other guy there who became my first collector. He loved my work, and he would sell his art supplies so he could do other things because he wasn’t an artist. He started buying my paintings. All of a sudden I had someone that was interested in me above everybody else.

A lot of American artists were in Paris: Al Held, Sam Francis, Beauford Delaney-he and I were good friends. Everybody was there. You name them and I knew them. My best influence was Louis Rittman, an Impressionist. He was old then. Monet died in 1926 down in Giverny, and Rittman was there too, so he knew Monet. I’ll never forget the influence he had on me. Something different that I noticed about French art was that in Paris, every studio you’d see had a skylight. You could paint out-of-this-world colors. When I went to Paris I had to go to school, even though I’d been through so much school already. I went to L’Académie de la Grande Chaumière. There was a teacher there named Goreg who put me in the Salon d’Automne.

Edward Clark, Untitled, Paris, 1952, oil on canvas, 31" x 25."

J.E. - You‘ve said that your style has been influenced by your contact with Nicolas de Staël‘s work. Can you share with us how this happened? In what way did his work influence your path as an abstract painter?

E.C. - I’d never heard of Nicholas de Staël before Paris. When I was in the Salon d’Automne, there were maybe 500 artists in it. Matisse would have something in there, and Picasso just for the hell of it, and most of the rest were just mediocre guys. But then I saw a painting by de Staël like I’d never seen before. I couldn’t believe it. It was the presence of it, up front, the surface. I read later that it was about football-European football. I didn’t know it was about a game at first. But that was good for me, because I said, “I’m more interested in the surface than that it’s about a game.” Immediately after that everybody could see the influence in my work.

J.E. - During the five years you lived in Paris, how did you insert yourself within the local art scene? How was your work received?

E.C. - It was because of George Sugarman, the sculptor. He told me about a show called “Large Paintings of Montparnasse.” He said, “Why don’t you take your painting there, they’re looking for large paintings,” and I had one. And that’s how it all started. It got written about by M.C.L., the critic from Le Monde, and then I was found by Galerie Raymond Creuze, which is a first-class gallery. There was one thing I got upset about with that. I was sitting in a café, and someone said, “Ed, you’re famous,” as a joke. When they translated the review to me, it said, “negro of great talent.” I’m sitting in Paris, and here’s a reference to race. I didn’t feel too comfortable about that. Later, M.C.L. told me what happened. When I met him, I said, “You’re younger than I thought.” And he said, “You’re not as black as I thought.” I asked, “How did you know about that?” because I hadn’t met him before. And he said it was because the woman who ran the American Center in Paris must have said 30 times: “He’s a negro.” So he wrote it like that.

Edward Clark, Moroccan Series, 1970, dry pigment on paper, 36” x 46"

J.E - In light of incidents like that, how much did you think about race during your career, and do you think that ever affected what came out of your studio or the way people interpreted it?

E.C. - No, but sometimes it pops up. Just when I was thinking it’s not a problem, it becomes a problem. I’ve been in New York forever, almost, and I’ve never been in a gallery except Brata, and a dealer never took me. Even though I know I’m an exceptional artist, they never did. I don’t know why. Someone said Basquiat was influenced by me a little bit. He came to my studio one time before he was famous. And I didn’t even know he was here until someone said he came over. I like him, though. Now, when they talk about black artists, they always mention Bearden, Lawrence and all those guys, but then Basquiat came out of nowhere and got 10 times the money that they got. I’m not so sure that he’s really that important, but maybe he is. And if you’re black you can’t even say anything about how they discriminate when there’s Basquiat. Obviously, he’s black, and everything he touched is worth a lot of money.

J.E. - When you were back in N.Y.C. from Europe in the late 1950s, you became an active member of Brata Gallery and the Tenth Street art movement. Tell me about the environment of creative exchange that shaped the New York art scene during those years.

E.C. - When I was still in Paris, George Sugarman wrote to me from New York and said, “Why don’t you come? Things are happening here.” When I got there with my friend Sal Romano, we had a meeting with a few other people and decided to form Brata. There were a lot of my friends from Paris around-George, Al Held and some others. The pendulum had swung in New York, and that was the first time they had co-ops, when all the galleries opened on Tenth Street. They decided at one point to make all of them open at the same time. No one had ever done that before. You couldn’t get down the street, it was so crowded: rich people, poor people, everything.

Ed Clark, Silver Screen, Paris, c.1957, oil on canvas, 70" x 90"

J.E. - You created your first shaped canvas in the late 1950s, an innovation that definitely influenced contemporary art. How did you arrive at this formal solution, and how was it received by other artists, art critics and collectors?

E.C. - When I did the first shape painting, I wasn’t really thinking about anything. Al had money problems, so he started painting on paper. I started doing it too, but I also had a rectangular painting on a stretcher. I liked what I was doing with the two, but they were separate from each other. I tried to put some torn paper over the canvas, but nothing worked until it went outside the edges, so I built up behind the limp paper with wood. And that’s how it started. Everybody saw it because everyone was there on Tenth Street. The Krushenick brothers, who were also part of the Brata Gallery, put my painting up right in the middle as you’d go down the steps. And it struck everybody. They’d never seen a painting like that. And they wrote about it right away. I was the first, and it’s documented.

J.E. - You expressed in an interview with Quincy Troupe that “the real truth is in the stroke.“ You‘ve certainly taken the stroke to other dimensions that involve physical activity. Your ‘big sweeps’ have elevated gesturality as an expression of mental or psychological state. Can you talk a little about that?

E.C - In France, Pierre Soulages and Hans Hartung used a broom, but their strokes just went straight. What I did that’s different was that I worked with a push broom. The moment you get a push broom, that’s a different thing. You sweep through the paint. I had to be the first to do that, but I never really thought about it at the time.

J.E. - Do you think that color in your works is influenced by the environment in which you create, your travels, and/or events that influenced your state of mind?

E.C. - Yes; it started in 1971 with the painter Jack Whitten. He’s an American, but he’s got a place in Crete. He invited me and my wife, and I started making some things with pastels while I was there-I couldn’t get any acrylics. I did maybe 12 or 13 paintings, not very big, and took them back to New York. When I talked to someone who saw one of them in somebody’s house and they asked if I had any more like it, I realized my colors had been influenced by Crete. When I knew I was that sensitive without thinking about it, I started going to different places to paint. I decided to go to Nigeria, then, I went to Martinique. Later on I did series in Bahia, Morocco and Paris in the late 1980s and the 1990s, and Mexico in 2001. When I go someplace, unconsciously it gets different, without me thinking about it.

Ed Clark, Pink Maple, 1962, oil on canvas, 72" x 76"

J.E. - During your career, you have always been interested in innovation and the exploration of new techniques and new ways of creating. We‘re in a moment when a significant number of painters seem to be looking backward to-and reprising-earlier moments in modern art history (Anton Henning, for example, or Neo Rauch and some of the other members of the New Leipzig School). What do you think about the state of painting right now?

E.C. - I’m interested in everything. I read; I don’t get art magazines, but I look at The New York Times, and I’ll go to any show that my friends tell me about. I don’t like some things that other people do, I think they’re overrated, but I’m into everything. I didn’t think much of Warhol at all. I saw the soup cans and the Brillo boxes and thought, Ha ha ha ha. But then I saw these paintings in the Whitney one time, or the Museum of Modern Art, these big paintings with bright colors and photographs of people in automobile accidents. I thought that was very interesting that he did that. I liked Oldenburg. I was in Janis Gallery once in 1964 and there was a living room with an old-fashioned bed and a round mirror, but the mirror wasn’t a mirror, it was just a piece of metal. Even that I thought was very interesting. That’s not me, but it shouldn’t be me. You can’t be one to do everything anyway. But that’s art; that’s cool.

J.E. - There are a handful of critics, such as Ben Lewis, who have argued that the art market has had a growing negative impact on the contemporary art scene, and that things like speculation and branding have stifled the cultivation of artistic talent. Do you think the market ever affected the way you‘ve made your own work over the years?

E.C. - No, never. I know that I’m doing something, so I’m not worried about it. I still think that I’ve got the ego that I may be the best artist ever. Obviously, a lot of artists think that. I’m like everybody else. At the top, though, there are great artists.

J.E. - N‘Namdi Contemporary Miami will be exhibiting a survey of your work in May. What works will you exhibit?

E.C. - It’s going to be a big show, like a museum show, with new and old paintings. They also had a big show of my work in Detroit in 2011.

J.E. - What pieces are you working on at the moment?

E.C. - I’ve got several things in the studio, and I’ve also been finishing a portrait of my daughter. I work everyday.

Permission is a Material. An Interview with Jill Magid

raisa — Tue, 14 May 2013 21:24:53 +0000

Jill Magid, Control Room, 2004, Evidence Locker, two-channel DVD, edited CCTV footage 10 min. loop.

Working in a wide range of mediums including video, performance, installation and writing, Jill Magid creates art that examines the relationship between individuals and the monolithic social and political institutions-both official and informal-that surround and shape us. Many of her works involve a deliberate blurring of the boundary between art and life, and Magid often serves as the main actor in the situations she explores. In this interview, we spoke with Magid about some of her projects, the notions of trust and personal surrender that are so central in many of them, and the ways in which witnessing, intimacy, speech and silence have also played a crucial role in her work.

By Jeff Edwards

Jeff Edwards - Your website (jillmagid.net) contains the following artist statement: “Permission is a material and changes the work’s consistency.” I’m fascinated by the idea of consent as an artistic medium, because it can be both intangible and definitive at the same time. It’s either there or it isn’t, but it can also shift or read ambiguously to different people, and that can radically change the feel of a situation for both participants and observers. How does this play out in your works?

Jill Magid - Permission is not ambiguous. It is the authorization I aspire to gain from the institutional power that I am applying to, seeking access. The process of gaining (or not gaining) consent can be part of the work; other times it is what allows the work to proceed (or, without it, to continue in another direction). I first became interested in gaining permission from the police after I had been hacking into the informational monitors on MIT’s campus. In the performance Lobby 7 (1999) I hijacked one of these monitors and inserted a live feed of myself searching my body beneath my cloths by way of a wireless surveillance camera that I held in my hand. The police were called in, but could not connect the image on the screen with me standing in the lobby, my hand moving beneath my clothes. I became interested in seeing what would happen if I worked with the police instead of against or in spite of them: If the authority was complicit with me, how would that affect the meaning of my actions? Could responsibility and vulnerability be shared? Permission is a pact, a covenant. It binds the institution and me together, and thus has the potential for intimacy.

Jill Magid, Lobby 7, 1999, performance and documentation video, 7min.

J.E. - Several of your projects have involved you being controlled by other people, as in the video Trust (2004), in which police CCTV operators guided you remotely through the city of Liverpool while you kept your eyes closed. How hard is it for you to abandon yourself to external control like that and why do you find those kinds of experiences so compelling?

J.M. - The experience of being led blind through the city by a police CCTV controllers (which became the video Trust) was one of the most romantic moments of my life. Letting myself be controlled by a policeman via the camera-letting his eyes, by way of the camera lens, stand in for my eyes-was the most extreme extension of the relationship I’d formed with the CCTV operators (and of that system itself) since arriving in Liverpool three weeks before. The act of abandoning myself to a larger power is one that requires a foundation that I do work to build. It is a risk on both ends, but not a blind one. There is a tenuous trust between the system and myself that we are pushing and testing; this is what I find compelling.

J.E. - What kind of relationships grow over time with the people on the other side of these transactions? Do you ever find yourself controlling your controllers?

J.M. - Of course, but control is fragile. It moves fluidly between the authority and myself. Each relationship is unique: I had a different relationship with the CCTV controllers in Liverpool than I did with the Dutch secret service in The Spy Project, and yet another kind of relationship with my reporter and trainer in Failed States. In each, though, trust is an issue, and one that is never quite resolved: their own towards me or mine towards them. This is where the tension lies.

Jill Magid, Trust, 2004, Evidence Locker, DVD, edited CCTV footage and audio, 18 min.

J.E. - Being alone in a crowd or creating an intimate space with someone else while you’re out in the open are persistent themes in your work, going back at least as far as Lobby 7 and The Kissmask (1999). Can you tell me a little about those works and their influence on your later work, and also about the relation between public and private space in your more recent projects?

J.M. - With The Kissmask I made a tool to be worn by two people simultaneously to both capture and create the awkward moment of a first kiss. In the mask we, the participants, were like mirrors of one another. In Lobby 7 I captured myself through the spy camera and projected my abstracted and naked body, live, back into the public place I was occupying. I think all of my work carries these themes of pulling something foreign or distant closer to my body, and creating a new space for us to share. The works since then create somewhat analogous relationships between institutional bodies such as police, secret services, the media and the U.S. court system and myself.

J.E. - In 2005 you entered into an agreement with the AIVD (the Dutch secret service) to make an artwork for their new headquarters, based on interviews with some of the agency’s employees. One result was Becoming Tarden, a novel that presented a lot of the information you gathered in narrative form. When you showed it to the AIVD they quickly decided to censor it. You were eventually allowed to display the original book only once at the Tate Modern in 2009/2010, and only as a piece of visual art sealed securely behind glass. After that they confiscated it and redacted about 40 percent of the text. How did you feel after three years of work went into the void like that? Did the AIVD’s reaction to the work surprise you at the time?

J.M. - When I learned the AIVD was going to censor 40 percent of the text, I was devastated. I obtained an American lawyer who was convinced that I had a very good chance of fighting the agency’s decision, as I never signed a confidentiality agreement with it. After a long consideration I decided not to fight the censorship but to acquiesce to it and to every demand the agency made. I realized that the more boundaries and new rules it imposed upon me the more it exposed itself. And this had been my initial proposal: to find the human face of the secret service.

Jill Magid, Failed States, 2012, mixed media installation, detail of rearview mirror.

J.E. - I’m also really interested in the human and social side of your dealings with the AIVD. Do you think you were able to collect so much sensitive information from the AIVD’s employees because people there viewed you as harmless (i.e., because you were “just an artist”), or was there some other reason for their opening up to you?

J.M. - Being introduced to an institution like this as an artist was a first with the AIVD project. In my previous projects I never identified myself as an artist to the institution because I’d learned that doing so led to quick and inaccurate assumptions about my intentions. Calling myself a researcher (and arming myself with as much information as I could gather on the system) proved more ambiguous. I could present what I was doing or looking for rather than what I was identified as. But with the AIVD, I got “the job” because I was an artist. It was not that the agents told me things because I was an artist as much as it was the administration that disregarded me because of it. The agents and I met multiple times, got closer, while the administration turned a blind eye-until it read what I wrote and did not like it. I think the agents had many reasons for speaking to me: curiosity, wanting to use me to share their stories when they could not otherwise, wanting to see their institution through my eyes, needing to unburden themselves of their own histories-these were just some of the reasons they gave me. I also believe they spoke to me because I was genuinely interested in who they were, what they were doing in the agency, and what it was like to become anonymous. I think it is regrettable that we are in an age when a government institution like a secret service no longer assumes artists can have a real effect, beyond the decorative.

Failed States. Installation view at Honor Fraser, LA. 2012. Six Empty Shells, 2011 Wall installation 20 »x 30 ». Photo: Joshua White.

J.E. - On January 21, 2010 you were doing research in Austin, Texas, for a project about snipers, and you stumbled into an incident on the State Capitol steps in which a man named Fausto Cárdenas fired several shots into the air after unsuccessfully trying to speak with someone on the governor’s staff. The event led to Closet Drama (2011) and Failed States (2012), two mixed-media installations that presented the shooting as a strangely compelling expression of thwarted speech. What was it about that chance occurrence that led you to make it the basis for such a large body of new works?

J.M. - When I began the project I did not know how it would unfold or its eventual scale. It began with Fausto’s absurdist gesture of shooting up into the sky from the steps of the State Capitol. It was an irrevocable act; Fausto was condemned to await trial in jail (which took one and a half years), charged with making a terrorist act against a government institution. I’d witnessed the shooting by chance, but then chose to remain his witness by being present for all of his court appearances. Meanwhile, also in Austin, I was being trained by an Associated Press war reporter to embed with him in Afghanistan-a process that would teach me to be another kind of witness. As these two narratives unfolded simultaneously, I wrote the book Failed States to explore their connections, collected materials, and from this made many works and installations that took on the names Closet Drama and Failed States.

View of the exhibition “The Status of the Shooter,” 2012. Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris. Photo Didier Barroso.

J.E. - You brought Goethe’s Faust in as a reference point in Closet Drama and Failed States What’s the connection between Faust and Fausto Cárdenas, and how did you end up using the play in the works that resulted?

J.M. - Initially, it was a hunch to read Faust due to the similarity of their names and the theatricality of Fausto’s act. Once I read the book, I became convinced that the associations were fruitful. A main connection is that both Faust and Fausto relinquished words in place of deeds, a choice that led to tragic consequences for both of them. The fact that Faust was originally conceived of as a closet drama (a play written for the mind rather than the stage), and the format of Goethe’s text helped me to think about and structure my installations. I treated the wall vinyl as stage directions and the prints, videos, objects, sound works and photos that I made as points along a narrative.

J.E. - More recently, you’ve worked on The Status of the Shooter (2012), based on an unrelated but eerily similar incident in which a student named Colton Tooley walked around the University of Texas at Austin firing an AK-47 into the air and ground, after which he committed suicide in the library. Can you describe some of the works in this project, and its relation to the prior Fausto Cárdenas works?

J.M. - The Colton Tooley shooting happened while I was following Fausto’s case. A professor of German literature at UT Austin that I’d been meeting with mentioned that he thought Tooley was “more Faust than my Fausto.” Wanting to explore what that could mean I filed an Open Records Request to the Austin Police Department to see what information the police had on the incident. Like Fausto, Tooley’s shooting had the feeling of a public performance. Tooley “performed” as a school shooter. Dressed in a black mask and trench coat and carrying an AK47, he walked through campus shooting into the air and ground, hurting no one. I received DVDs and a USB stick from the police. The DVDs held the dash cam surveillance footage from each cop car called to the library that Tooley had entered. I synced them and transcribed the audio. From the transcriptions I wrote Tooley A Tragedy, a libretto that literally dramatizes the action, and formatted it like Faust. I also reprinted Faust, but in an abridged form, cutting the play at the moment Faust is about to commit suicide in his personal library. The videos of the cars played on five screens, hung in relation to where each police vehicle parked outside the library. The chaos of the police search is juxtaposed with the silence of the books and the intimacy of the monologue from Faust, audible on headphones, of Faust considering his suicide.

Jill Magid, Faust, A Tragedy Abridged, 2012, Torn hardcover book.

J.E. - A lot of your work directly invokes stage plays and cinema. Among other things, you’ve juxtaposed Faust with police radio transcripts in The Status of the Shooter, staged dramatic readings of your novella Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy (2007), treated the Liverpool CCTV surveillance zones as private movie sets and instructed the officers monitoring you in film theory, and placed stage directions on the walls of the Closet Drama installation at the UC Berkeley Art Museum to help viewers navigate the space. Why do you use such artificial, fiction-oriented means to present real-world events?

J.M. - I am not a journalist.

J.E. - When I watched some of the news footage of you taken during the Fausto Cárdenas trial, it occurred to me that a lot of viewers who didn’t know your resume probably took you for an obsessed fan of the defendant or some kind of true-crime junkie. That led me to wonder how much of your work has involved taking on a role, as opposed to just “being yourself.” Do you make that kind of distinction, and if so, do you ever find the two merging or alternating during a single project?

J.M. - In life people are always taking on roles. I do this in my life and in my work, but all of those roles are part of myself.

J.E. - Finally, I’ve heard that you’re working on a new project about corporate power. Is there anything you can tell us about that yet? It sounds like a kind of new arena for you, and I’d love to know what direction you’re thinking of taking your work after the recent pieces about Fausto Cárdenas and Colton Tooley.

J.M. - I am learning the differences between the powers of a corporation as opposed to those of a government institution. They are run by a different set of rules, and the former need not explain many of them. As for the direction I am taking this, that will become clear with time.

Melanie Bonajo: One Question, Three Rooms, 44 Possible Answers

raisa — Mon, 13 May 2013 17:36:41 +0000

P.P.O.W. - New York

By Stephanie Buhmann

Based in Amsterdam and Berlin, Melanie Bonajo creates works that draw on everyday stereotypes and misconceptions. Her photographs, installations and performances are inspired by the shortcomings of contemporary society and its obsessive glorification of excess. In Bonajo, we find the world in free fall, scarred by consumerism, injustice and alienation. Nevertheless, we also encounter the artist’s belief that there are still enough conscious individuals to realize and act on this terrifying fact.

In this exhibition Bonajo specifically proposed a series of questions that were both printed on the press release and written on three large panels leaning against the exhibition walls like proclamations set in stone. Most of these were poignant and reflective and several were offered with an eye on the future. While “Where does change start?” could be understood as the overarching theme song, “Will Families remain to exist?” reveals that Bonajo ponders the changes in humanity at large and in the face of the destructive powers of capitalism and technological innovation. By challenging us to imagine what might be yet to come, she makes her audience both a witness and a principal actor. Her work stresses that it is indeed our actions or passivity, the questions we raise or omit that will determine the future. It is us who will be held responsible and Bonajo’s work offers a captivating last chance wake-up call.

“Melanie Bonajo: One Question, Three Rooms, 44 Possible Answers,” installation view. Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York.

Along these lines, this exhibition served as a conversational forum, where answers for the posed questions were not provided but the search for them was illustrated in poetically abstract form. To Bonajo, art is a medium for exchanging ideas. Her work is characterized by a sense of openness and intentional imperfection that suggest improvisational freedom. Many of the works on display were photographic tableaux, featuring individuals or groups in still life-like settings. These ranged from simple-showing a figure disappearing in the sea with a sign reading “Progress” in hand, for example-to elaborate. One of the most memorable images featured a nude woman stretched out on a kitchen table, like an offering placed on a shrine, covered with burning candles while the door of a fridge has been opened underneath her. Another grouping showed several digitally enhanced animal prints that generated a New Age inspired air of utopia cosmic-kitsch. Occasionally, photographs were installed like post-modern totems, held by fine wooden rods that were centered in bases by means of clay. It is in these constructions that Bonajo is at her most ritualistic, establishing a visual symbolism that honors ancient tribal aesthetics.

Overall, nature was the dominant theme in this exhibition. Her images of individuals who are almost absorbed by or at least appear alienated by it, hint at the troubled relationship of contemporary man to nature. It is a slowly escalating conflict and a dangerous state of existential misguidance. The more we attempt to increasingly control and manipulate nature, the further we are led astray. Bonajo summons up this paralysis with her images and offers one more question: “Does the sun only set for humans?”

(February 28 - March 30, 2013)

Stephanie Buhmann is a contributing editor at Artcritical.com. Her essays and art reviews have been published internationally, including by Kunst Bulletin, Sculpture Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Art on Paper, Art Collector and Art Lies, among others. She also has a regular art column in Chelsea Now. She is currently working on a series of interviews with contemporary artists based in New York.