ARTPULSE MAGAZINE

How many of you saw the gorilla… or the return of mural painting?

raisa — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 21:20:11 +0000

The Strange Alliance between the Oldest and the Newest of all Media

History is always moving in unexpected ways. The paradox of the return of mural painting, the oldest of all media, in the era of the Internet and because of the Internet might well oblige us to change all of our parameters in reading art history. Is it possible that because of its exceptionality, painting is one of the most recognizable manifestations that you can find on the Net, and as such, is the only artistic medium around which it will be possible to create an audience?

By Nicola Verlato

In his most recent book, Richard Dawkins reports on an interesting experiment conducted by Professor Daniel J. Simons at the University of Illinois:

“Half a dozen young people standing in a circle were filmed for 25 seconds tossing a pair of basketballs to each other, and we, the experimental subjects, watch the film. The players weave in and out of the circle and change places as they pass and bounce the balls, so the scene is quite actively complicated. Before being shown the film, we are told that we have a task to perform, to test our powers of observation. We have to count the total number of times balls are passed from person to person. At the end of the test, the counts are duly written down, but - little does the audience know - this is not the real test!

After showing the film and collecting the counts, the experimenter drops his bombshell. ‘And how many of you saw the gorilla?’ The majority of the audience looks baffled: blank. The experimenter then replays the film, but this time tells the audience to watch in a relaxed fashion without trying to count anything. Amazingly, nine seconds into the film, a man in a gorilla suit strolls nonchalantly to the centre of the circle of players, pauses to face the camera, thumps his chest as if in belligerent contempt for eye-witness evidence, and then strolls off with the same insouciance as before.” (14-15)

Nobody sees the gorilla because they are too busy counting ball passes.

Attributed to R.O.A. Graffiti in Bushwick Streets, New York. Photo Nicola Verlato

THE RADIO FOR IMAGES

What is this gorilla in the contemporary art scene that nobody is able to see? In the last 10 years, the Web has been invaded by images of all kinds, many of them paintings, drawings, graffiti, wheat paste art, stencils etc. Every painter, draftsman, or graffiti artist younger than 30 with an Internet connection has his or her own Web site or blog, and participates in forums and image exchanges through Twitter, Flickr, or even Facebook and other social networks. The Web seems to have become the radio for images.

Swoon, a graffiti artist, knows perfectly that her audience is not limited to the people that are walking the streets of Bushwick, where she pastes her images on the walls, or to the people that are gathering at the opening at the Deitch Projects. She knows that those events are just the tip of an iceberg whose giant submerged portion consists of the thousands of images that people view and download from the Web. She, as well as all the other artists present at the Graffiti Museum, can count on an enormous audience that supports their work on the Web. Galleries pay attention to this kind of widespread audience and may offer these artists the opportunity to show with them; for example, Jeffrey Deitch hired Shepard Fairey, an artist who was already a well-known legend on the Web.

THE GRAFFITI MUSEUM IN WYNWOOD

During the last art fair week in Miami, many of us had the opportunity to come in contact with this very interesting phenomenon, a phenomenon which has been moving in the artistic underground for quite a while, but that has never achieved major recognition in the official art system.

At the Graffiti Museum in the Wynwood District, Jeffrey Deitch offered one of the first opportunities to view many different graffiti styles in a common area, a sort of garden in which it was possible for visitors to enjoy these types of images without being bothered by the urban traffic that is usually connected with this kind of art. Rather than simple graffiti, these images were almost frescoes; the artists took the whole surface of the wall to create intricate compositions, showing a sort of virtuoso dominance of their medium of expression, whether mural paint, aerosol, or wheat paste.

Swoon, David Ellis and Ben Wolf, The Wynwood Walls, 2009. Photo courtesy J.E.L.

One artist, Stelios Faitakis showed an interesting combination of traditional byzantine icon style and the urgency of narrative of a Panavision movie, demonstrating an amazing control of composition on such a large scale. Meanwhile, Shepard Fairey’s mural was an excellent example of his art (though it did not deviate much from the usual, he’s a necessary presence at an event like this.) Unfortunately, Swoon did not finish her ambitious undertaking; nevertheless, it was interesting to witness the spectacle that a work in progress of such titanic proportions presents.

Kenny Sharf’s painting reminded us of another era with a different approach to the media, a rougher conception of the image, seen more as a proof of existence of the artist himself instead of an image. His is a kind of a logo or signature, painting while running away from the police in the New York City of the 80s.

If the work of Kenny Sharf represents the old approach to graffiti, what exactly has changed between the old and new school? Why is the new “graffiti” more like big paintings than simple logos painted in a hurry?

It’s been at least 30 years that we’ve been talking about graffiti art. It has been sometimes exciting, sometimes boring, and other times we considered it pure vandalism.

What’s changed in the last 10 years that’s making us begin to be intrigued by this form of expression again?

TOWARDS A ‘DEMOCRACY’ OF THE VIEWER?

What I think is really changing due to this developing link between the arts and new media is the relationship between the various figures of the art system.

The artist is able to create his or her own notoriety even without gallery representation, which in this different kind of environment, is acquired later. This dynamic doesn’t create the artist ex nihilo as we have witnessed over and over again in the last 20 years. Instead, galleries are gathering art that has already won over the widespread audience of the web. This shift in the relationships between the figures of the system is obviously reflected in the language that generally these young artists are choosing for their work. The public, instead of art professionals, is the entity which is now determining the success of the artists, and the public is doing so through the web. It therefore seems almost obvious that the prevalent language is, 90 percent of the time, pop or figurative, and in the vast majority of these cases the media are paintings and drawings. It is basically the reverse of what would usually happen in the mainstream contemporary art system, which is an elitist social system where the artist is usually imposed upon by a very closed circuit of people (curator, gallerist and so on) on a more or less wider audience.

This reversion of the process of consensus can happen because of this alliance between new media (the Internet) and visual arts. Can we expect to witness the application of the same historicist evolutionary model to the artistic language of this new post-Facebook generation of artists, the same one which was applied to the arts of the last two centuries? I personally don’t think so. I think that a new approach to the arts will be needed for the years to come.

Shepard Fairey, The Wynwood Walls, Miami 2009. Photo courtesy J.E.L.

I also think that at this point it would be interesting to do a comparison with what happened in music the last 40 years. Who is still listening to Berio, Maderna, Stockhausen, Boulez, or even Xenakis? Of course, they still have an audience of aficionados, but they are no longer able to fill opera houses, as they did during the 1960s and 70s. What has happened to music that 30 years ago was considered the future of the musical language?

The answer is simple: a different kind of music was rising in the same period, with the help of a tight alliance between the record industry, the radio stations, and all the new audio media. The music of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and so on was created in order to fit perfectly with the electronic media. It didn’t need the medium of a concert hall to be experienced, unlike Nono, who by the way, as late as the early 1980s managed to have a new theater planned by Renzo Piano, constructed within a church in Venice for his opera Prometeo, which was to be experienced in that specific space. The opera was unable to be experienced on the radio the same way it was experienced in the concert hall, and in that way it perished from our memory.

Can an installation be experienced on the web? Can the meaning of a video projection be understood on YouTube? Personally, I don’t think so. On the other hand, a mural by Doze Green or a painting by Robert Williams can be appreciated in a picture casually found through Twitter. This is what galleries like Jonathan Levine in New York or Merry Karnowsky in Los Angeles, and of course Jeffrey Deitch in New York, have understood for many years. The exhibitions in these galleries are much like live concerts: the audience gathers there to see in person something they have already seen on the Internet. The exhibitions create the opportunity to get in touch with the physicality of the image which was originally seen through a computer screen.

All of this despite the destiny of “[t]he work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility… ” (Benjamin).

WORKS CITED

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Boston: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008.

Dawkins, Richard. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. New York: Free Press, 2009.

Nicola Verlato is an Italian painter and sculptor based in New York. He has exhibited his work internationally, mainly in Europe (Italy, Germany, Holland, Norway) and the United States, in public and private spaces such as Venice Biennale, Prague Biennale, Laguna Museum, MART, MACRO, Stux Gallery, Jonathan Levine Gallery. He is currently professor at New York Academy of Art.

Dialogues for a New Millennium: Amanda Coulson

raisa — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 22:52:47 +0000

Amanda Coulson is the executive director of the VOLTA contemporary art fair in Basel, Switzerland and VOLTA NY in Manhattan. Former editor of the International Edition of Tema Celeste magazine, Coulson continues writing for a variety of art journals, and represents this new breed of art critics and curators that have engaged actively during the last years with art fairs. We discuss her art fair experience and expectations.

VOLTA Executive Director Amanda Coulson (VOLTA 5 2009). Photo courtesy of Nicholas Winter Photography.

A CONVERSATION WITH PACO BARRAGAN

Paco Barragán - I remember that the first time we met during ARCO in 2002. You were by then working freelance for magazines like Tema Celeste and Contemporary. What memories arise when you think of that hectic but intense time of arts writing?

Amanda Coulson -Well, it’s very funny to remember how differently I was treated when I was solely a critic/curator compared to now, also an art fair director. As a writer you are more courted in a different way and given a certain amount of intellectual respect; you are certainly more deeply entrenched in “the scene” because of networking and just being constantly out. Seeing everything possible is 75% of the job. You work for yourself, so there is a lot of independence, but it’s also tough always having to sell yourself as a freelancer. However, I do still write, and I think that this engagement with the art world on another level, from a different perspective than just ‘the market,” is vital to my point of view and really informs my work as a fair director.

P.B. -Times were quite different back then. What is it that you recall most of the art and art structures of that time?

A.C. -Well, I was living in Milan, Italy so I have a very particular memory of what was happening there and in Italy in general, which was honestly not very much as far as contemporary art goes! The art world back then was much smaller-fewer biennales, fewer art fairs-and while people bemoan all of these additional events, it’s born from a fundamental point: there are just so many more artists and galleries. I mean, think of where Berlin was 12 years ago and what it symbolizes today! Before there just wasn’t this mass. The art world was a smaller neighborhood in general rather than this big gleaming metropolis it’s become.

THE ADVENT OF THE ART FAIR AGE

P.B. -Let’s recall that the year 2001 was a crucial year: Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB) was cancelled due to 9/11. But, strangely enough, one year later the advent of ABMB meant the final consolidation of the art fair as absolute protagonist in the art world.

A.C. - Yes. I actually attended that 2001 Miami Non-Fair event. Sam Keller was smart enough to know that a lot of people still had plans to be there and so he organized some impromptu things but, yes, that was the end of the “neighborhood” feel to any of these things. Then it all shifted into high gear and become very glossy and party-oriented. That’s not to say fairs previously never had a party scene, but somehow it wasn’t the main event in the way it became. But I don’t think you can blame the fairs themselves: Sam was always brilliant at taking the temperature of a time and responding to it, and the advance of the art fairs were really just a response to a given situation.

P.B. - Art fairs have kept growing since then, and not only in the West (VOLTA in Basel and New York, ZOO in London, PHOTOMiami, etc.), but especially in China (Art Shanghai, Art Hong Kong), Puerto Rico (CIRCA PR), Bogota (ArtBogota and La Otra), Dubai (Art Dubai), etc. It seemed like every city wants to have a signature fair. How was this move from art critic to art fair director?

View of Gallery Loevenbruck (Paris) Booth (VOLTA 4 2008). Photo courtesy of Nicholas Winter Photography.

A.C. -The move from art critic to art fair director was bizarrely quite organic, mainly because none of us really ever intended this to be a business. It’s not like I woke up one day and decided to do it. We were all fairly idealistic and just thought “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to do this project with a few galleries”… VOLTA started out with only 23. But, as I said, we hit a nerve or responded to a need, or what have you, and it just gradually grew.

I suppose the biggest change is, as I mentioned, how some people will treat you. There is an intellectual pecking order in the art world, which I find quite absurd, and somehow it’s that the less money you make, the more serious or intellectual you are.

P.B. -I see three periods in VOLTA’s life: the very beginnings of the fair (the first 3 years) when the fair was small and like a friend’s club as a result of the initiative of the galleries Voges & Partner, Kavi Gupta, and Wohnmaschine. And the second phase is when you start working at the fair, and the fair enlarges a little bit due to the success it’s generating. Do you agree in this appreciation?

A.C. - Yes, sure, completely. The reality is I was always there but more behind-the-scenes. The first year the founders were totally involved-up ladders and hauling crates-and I was more behind-the-scenes in the office and running PR. This was because it was their baby and also because of our actual babies: we had a 2-year old at the time and we discovered I was pregnant with our second child on VOLTA’s opening day! So, it was indeed their brainchild and they were super-involved in the first few years, while I was juggling the writing, curating, fair, and kids, but, as it grew up, VOLTA became a full-time job and the founders needed to focus on their galleries and then, as our kids grew up, I could take on more and more, arriving at this role.

P.B. -The third phase starts when VOLTA is being bought out by Merchandise Mart (MMPI), that also took over The Armory Show, Art Chicago, NEXT, and Art Toronto. Both fairs VOLTA Basel and New York experienced a considerable enlargement.

A.C. - To continue the child analogy, basically VOLTA grew up. That’s not to say we’ve lost our vision. We are maintaining it but within a structure that is easier to work with. Yes, we expanded to New York, but I love that show and we never could have done it without Merchandise Mart behind us. I was actually against it at first but then, when I pushed myself to come up with a format that I could stand behind, I felt had a reason to exist in NY, and I got really excited. I love the solo show format. I think the fair really has a great focus and is a valid addition to Armory Arts Week and creates a great complement to our sister fair, The Armory Show. In New York, we haven’t grown at all since we founded before the crash. There are more exhibitors every year but that’s only because the booths keep getting smaller!

VOLTA Basel did get a bit too big last year; that I’ll concede. But while everybody wants to blame it on MMPI I can honestly say it wasn’t from any pressure there. It was my exhibitors who’d been pushing for two years for a new location that would allow for bigger booths. They were all complaining 25 sq. m. was too small, so I found a bigger location and then the crash happened; everybody wanted a 15 sq. m booth. Then we lost our sponsors-there goes 75 sq, meters of lounge space-so I had far too much space and not enough galleries prepared to take large enough booths to keep the numbers down. Then literally weeks before the fair, people were dropping out and we had to fill spaces really willy-nilly … It was a perfect art fair storm, not something really planned. This year we are in a smaller location and, with 79 galleries, we’re back down to a good number that takes us back to our original mandate.

P.B. - Isn’t it surprising, not to say contradictory, that in the actual times of severe economic crisis, some art fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB), The Armory Show or even VOLTA have been growing in numbers of participating galleries? I would rather have expected the contrary. How do you explain this? Isn’t that diminishing the exhibited quality?

Collectors Michael and Susan Hort (VOLTA 4 2008), Gallery Dogenhaus (Leipzig). Photo courtesy of Nicholas Winter Photography.

A.C. - I can’t speak for the other fairs but course I can speculate! I think times of difficulty are also times of opportunity; for example, after the mortgage crisis it was the best time to buy a house. In Miami I would speculate that now some of the satellite fairs are weakening precisely because galleries of that level don’t have the cash flow of the majors, so it’s hard to fill space. ABMB considered they could take the cream off the top and perhaps then lessen the amount of competition. It might not kill NADA and I’m not saying that’s their intention, but if NADA took up galleries from Pulse and so on, it might bring the 23 art fairs down to 12 and somehow they could take control back to the week.

There is a risk to this-if you lose the visitor confidence maybe existing won’t matter any more. But most of our visitors and galleries are savvy enough to see the situation. And let’s be honest, in these times many galleries go for the “easy” install, which from my point of view was a problem at ABMB, not only the size.

ART FAIRS AND FAST CURATING

P.B. -A complaint heard many times is that art fairs look like malls with unchallenging, bad presentations and easy not to say bad quality art.

A.C. - Yes, that’s to a certain extent true, but let’s be brutally honest: an art fair is a mall. A gallery is a shop. An artist is a producer of commodities. Of course that’s not all they are by any means, and I say that to be a Devils’ Advocate, but this idea that a fair has to be like a museum or a show is just trying to dress mutton up as lamb. Yes, I am trying with VOLTA to bring some kind of curatorial position to vet the work, to try and make a vague context, but let’s not pretend I am curating a stand-alone exhibition.

So I suggest everybody stop judging fairs as if they were supposed to bring some new insight or deep experience, as you might get with a gallery or museum show. Fairs exist for galleries to present themselves to new clients and to sell work.

P.B. -In this sense, art fairs have hired more and more curators to conceive special projects (i.e. Frieze projects and special sections), and more and more curators have found their way to selection committees like VOLTA. How do you interpret this “curated” art fair trend and what has been in your opinion the benefits of it, if any?

A.C. - I do think there has been a benefit, for sure. For one, it brings in more curators who may see artists at booths they will put in institutional shows, and also artists, who feel less like a commodity and perhaps more able to be part of the whole discourse of the event if there are lectures or films or projects. Certainly people think a lot harder about their booth presentations, I think, with a tendency toward solo shows or more tightly-curated booths. Projects like Unlimited or Frieze Projects-a vague attempt to give a glimpse outside the market context-are great and allow for a deeper understanding of a certain practice, though I don’t have the kind of sponsorship dollars to pull off something like that.

P.B. -Can we consider the art fair as just another curatorial platform with its own rules in terms of conceptualization, duration, presentation and the possibility of “fast curating”?

A.C. - I loved the idea of “fast curating” that you introduced at CIRCA, where a curator sped around and put together an “On the Spot” show at a pre-dedicated booth out of exhibited works that had to be taken on temporary loan from the galleries. It was a great way to contextualize the works. But aside from that I do think it’s almost impossible to really curate an art fair in a deep way. You can mostly control the quality of work; you can control, sometimes, what is placed where, you can counsel the galleries on their individual booths, but ultimately you are dealing with 80 curators, and we can’t honestly pretend we can get 80 people to work together in a coherent fashion in this context.

GALLERIES IN SEARCH OF NEW STRATEGIES

P.B. -It is a common remark that galleries don’t sell these days in the gallery, and that less and less collectors visit the gallery premises. Do you share this opinion?

A.C. - Not entirely. A good gallerist has a network of loyal clients that he or she has built up and can sell to “from the gallery” (even if they’re not in the same city). A lot of younger galleries only remember the times when having a gallery meant opening the doors and having stuff fly off the walls, so many aren’t as well schooled in running the gallery from the gallery, in reaching out, knowing a client’s taste and sending unsolicited offers, in follow-up. Yet there’s no debate that people in general have less time, and therefore the temptation for a collector to go to three fairs a year and see a variety of work from around the world is certainly more time- and cost-effective than flying to Berlin/Paris/London (let alone Düsseldorf/Marseille/Liverpool)… so I am sure that actual gallery visits are down.

P.C. -I just read a survey among Spanish dealers from arteinformado.com, a Spanish arts website, stating that the overall conclusion is that there are not really sales at art fairs but contacts. From my own experience with PHOTOMiami and CIRCA Puerto Rico, I would say that maybe 30% of the galleries at art fairs have good sales and that the remaining 70% have few or no sales. But still many galleries keep going to art fairs. How do you explain this?

A.C. - It’s simple: a contact becomes a future client. Good dealers know this and again, part of it comes with age and experience. When I started out working in galleries 15 years ago, selling two works at a fair and having a book full of new contacts was a really good fair; no one went in expecting to make a profit. Covering expenses was already a big deal. Galleries realized that the expense was a PR expense, like an ad in a magazine. You don’t spend $6,000 on an Artforum ad and expect someone to come in and buy something as a result; you are creating your persona. But the boom turned fairs into these cash machines and people got used to that.

P.B. -I think that at this point many dealers are confused and only focus on art fairs being incapable of finding new ways of selling art, and this situation hinders art fairs from changing, as up till now most of them just act as real estate agents hiring space from galleries but hardly adding any value. Art fairs do need to reinvent themselves.

A.C. - Well, I do think they should be a little more adventurous at fairs! What I also find really surprising is how, even with the evident economic benefits, galleries don’t want to share booths or go in for a double presentation. I am talking about galleries sharing artists and such, not just random people. But again, it’s something they really don’t want to go for. So until their minds open up it’s hard to make changes in the fair context. They want their little white box. They want their sign. They want the same old catalogue even if it is totally obsolete as an object.

I think that several fairs have reinvented the fair as much as one can for the time being… As far as main fairs go, a fair like Artissima in Turin is amazing in how they create so many great film and theater events and that it becomes a cultural event in the city, as does FIAC in Paris with events like Jeff Koons at Versailles.

P.B. -It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for your time.

Paco Barragán is an independent curator and an arts writer based in Madrid. He is curatorial advisor to the Artist Pension Trust (APT), New York. Some of the shows he has curated most recently are “Cinema X: I Like to Watch,” MoCCA, Toronto, 2010; “The Non-Age,” Kunsthalle Winterthur, 2009. He is the author of The Art Fair Age (CHARTA, 2008) and editor of Sustainabilities (CHARTA, 2008).

Cory Arcangel: The Sharper Image

raisa — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 20:52:09 +0000

Cory Arcangel, Photoshop CS: 84 by 66 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient "Spectrum", mousedown y=8900 x=15,600, mouse up y=13,800 x=0, 2009 Unique c-print, 84 x 66 inches, Image courtesy of the artist and Team Gallery, NY, Collection of Ninah and Michael Lynne.

Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami

By Irina Leyva-Pérez

Technology has invaded our daily lives in a permanent and dominant way. So it is not a surprise that artists have found inspiration in the equipment that they use every day. Cory Arcangel is one such artist, and “The Sharper Image,” his recent exhibition at MOCA Miami, is clear evidence of this statement. Starting from the title of the exhibition, it is easy to see his intentions, aside from ‘repeating’ the well-known company name; he is participating in a seemingly universal quest for a neater and sharper image. This quest has produced the DVD and Blu-Ray, and has now culminated in the 3D movie. We are searching for something beyond an ultra realistic image; we want reality in front of us.

The exhibition included works made with video games, fragments of cult films and videos from YouTube, created and/or modified with Photoshop. This was an interactive exhibition, and the spectator was encouraged to participate through playing with his games. I Shot Andy Warhol (2002), one of the central pieces of the exhibition, is based on a well-known Nintendo game called Hogan’s Alley, and Arcangel has replaced the main elements: Andy Warhol replaces the gangsters, and the so-called innocents are replaced by other popular characters, such as the Pope, rapper Flavor Flav and Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Colonel Sanders. Spectators were able to shoot at the figures with a plastic gun attached to the monitors.

These were ironic pieces, and Arcangel was unquestionably testing his spectators on their appreciation not only for technology but for humor as well. One of the pieces was a projection of the cult movie Dazed and Confused, but the dialogue was replaced with the original script, read by Indian workers without artistic training. The monotone voices bring both confusion and at the same time a smile to whomever is listening. In a way, Arcangel is commenting on globalization and the reality of exporting jobs to other sides of the globe.

As we all know, YouTube has become one of the most visited web sites on the Internet. Armed with fragments from many videos posted on YouTube, Arcangel recreated Arnold Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11 (1909). The result is his piece, Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 (2009). This piece shows fragments of incoherent bits and pieces of different videos of cats walking over pianos. This apparently random exercise can only be seen for what it actually is by those who know the musical reference; the rest only see a disjointed parade of cats and their crazy owners. Arcangel is a cannibal in the anthropophagic term, he is literally copying and pasting images to create this piece and other works.

Throughout the exhibition it is very easy to see that Arcangel is enthralled with technology. He is questioning the fast pace at which technical equipment changes. Looking at the accumulation of different types of equipment, beginning with the 9mm projectors, make us a bit nostalgic. It is, up to certain point, a generational sense of appreciation. There are generations that grew up with projectors, others with VCRs and Nintendos, and the latest with DVD players, Blu Ray discs and Play Stations. Another prime example, and one of the many surprises of the exhibition, is the temporary modification of MOCA’s web site by Arcangel.

Arcangel is part of the contemporary artists who are constantly pushing boundaries, making us re-evaluate what we do and see daily. Our society is living at the speed of light or faster, and we don’t stop to marvel at new technological advances. We just take them for granted in our thirst for innovation and our consumer frenzy. Arcangel is looking beyond that. He is daring to challenge us with his pieces, forcing us to look at technology as a source of inspiration for art.

(March 11 - May 9, 2010)

Irina Leyva-Pérez is an art historian and critic based in Miami, FL. She is the curator of Pan American Art Projects and former assistant curator at the National Gallery of Jamaica.

Production Site: A Compound Eye on the Artist’s Studio

raisa — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 20:46:33 +0000

Nikhil Chopra, Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing XI. Part of Production Site: the Artist’s Studio Inside- Out, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2010. © Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Photo: Nathan Keay

Museum of Contemporary Art - Chicago

Curated by Dominic Molon

By Jeriah Hildwine

“Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside Out,” represents the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s contribution to Studio Chicago, a year-long, citywide event focusing on the artist’s studio. In curating “Production Site,” MCA curator Dominic Molon faced the challenge (as with any themed group show) of striking a balance between works that address the theme, and works which stand as meritorious in their own right. It would be a fool’s errand to attempt to curate a show consisting solely of works which directly address the idea of the artist’s studio. Instead, Molon has assembled a diverse array of works of art, each of which reflects a different vantage point on the artist’s studio.

An effective group exhibition addresses its theme in the same way that a nanorobotic swarm from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (or Michael Crichton’s Prey) can function as a camera. Each piece in the exhibition provides only an oblique, tangential, narrow view, like a tiny robot equipped with only a single photoreceptor. When taken as a whole, however, the differences in perspective allow the collective to form a highly detailed image. Each artist in “Production Site” represented an integral part of this composite image.

The new work by Chicago-based artist Deb Sokolow, commissioned by the MCA specifically for this exhibition and installed in the main lobby directly facing the front entrance, functions as a perfect figurehead for “Production Site.” The work is a large-scale drawing depicting a floor plan of the artist’s studio building, embellished with both factual and fictional metadata, which are conflated to create a piece of personal historical fiction. The work addresses subjects both serious (meth labs operating in warehouse spaces in the city) and comical (a pair of men claiming to be Russians, suspicious in both their accent and their names, Kremlin and Smirnoff). Sokolow has continued working on the drawing throughout the exhibition, bringing an added dimension of the studio into the exhibition space and giving some insight into the awkward community that is a shared studio building.

Outstanding in its own right, though less obviously related to the more overt aspects of the artist’s studio, Mumbai-based artist Nikhil Chopra performed Yog Raj Chitraker: Memory Drawing XI, in which he assumed the persona of a Victorian-era artist based loosely on Chopra’s grandfather. The performance took place on February 9th and 10th; what remain in the exhibition are artifacts from this performance. The looping spiral charcoal drawings on the wall and plates of desiccated fruit and cheese give a viewer some clues as to what took place there, but are a pale shadow compared to the eerie spectacle of Chopra’s performance. The portion I witnessed featured Chopra in an opaque black bodystocking, high heels and a wig, transforming him into a creepy, faceless, feminine specter. Chopra’s angle on the artist’s studio is more oblique than most, but the performance was among the most powerful work in the exhibition.

Curated by Dominic Molon, “Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside Out” features work by William Kentridge, Bruce Nauman, Tacita Dean, Justin Cooper, Deb Sokolow, Kerry James Marshall, Andrea Zittel, Peter Fischli, David Weiss, Amanda Ross-Ho, Ryan Gander, Nikhil Chopra, Rodney Graham, and John Neff.

(February 6 - May 30, 2010)

Jeriah Hildwine is a Chicago-based artist, writer, and curator. He writes for Art Talk Chicago and Chicago Art Magazine, and works as an educator at Wilbur Wright Community College, LillStreet Art Center and Hyde Park Art Center.

Arctic Hysteria

raisa — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 20:37:39 +0000

Mika Ronkainen, Huutajat: Screaming Men (2003), video-installation, courtesy of the artist and DA2.

Curated by Marketta Seppälä and Alanna Heiss

By Teresa Arroyo de la Cruz

There is widespread belief that in Finland people inhabiting remote northern landscapes and thousands of lakes and islands are calm, mellow and equally adaptable to the endless sun of the white nights of summer and the long weeks of darkness and sensory deprivation of winter. By the nineteenth century, however, ethnographers who explored the arctic countries spoke of the irrational behavior of the native people who, among other psychopathologies, drank uncontrollably for no apparent reason or disrobed and ran through the snow as if possessed until they fell to the ground completely exhausted….

“Arctic Hysteria,” an exhibition produced by FRAME and the PS1 MoMA of NY in collaboration with Salamanca’s DA2, stems precisely from these paradoxes. Inter-generational artists have created works on all kinds of supports under a series of common leitmotifs in an effort to demythify the cultural clichés associated with Nordic countries. One can observe the appearance of the irrational within daily life in the paintings of Stiina Saaristo, eccentric people obsessed by the paranormal in Veli Granö’s videos or the “hysterical” performances of the choreographer Reijo Kela. The clash between nature and culture is made manifest in the enormous photographs of natural landscapes that Ilka Halso has transformed into “thematic parks” using digital manipulation, in Anni Rapinoja’s “boutique” with its garments made out of flowers, leaves, roots and other elements of nature or in the delightful “philosophical hares” of Pekka Jylhä.

Some of the most exceptional works in this exposition analyze the failure of the science-fiction utopias of the nineteen sixties and seventies. Such is the case with the collection of videos and photographs assembled under the title The Future Is Not What It Used To Be (2002) by Mika Taanila and Erkki Kurenniemi or the terrifying installation Kursk (2004) by Markus Copper, which refers to the Russian nuclear submarine that sank in the Arctic Ocean in 2000 with its crew onboard.

The collision between public and private identity and a deeply rooted sense of community in a country that presumes to embody the benevolence of the welfare state better than anyone else can be seen in the video-installation 9 Easy Steps to Organize a Complaint Choir (2008) by Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen. It refers to the ludic-political power of collective action through the mise en scène of a “complaint choir,” a deeply rooted Finnish civic tradition. This can also be sensed in the The Screaming Men (2003) a documentary by Mika Ronkainen that, under an aesthetic reminiscent of the romantic painting of Gaspar D. Friedrich, depicts the preparation of a choir’s concert/performance in the midst of a desolate arctic landscape or in Salla Tykkä’s photographs and movies that focus on power relationships between the sexes.

In summary, we are in the presence of a collection of extreme and disconcerting offerings that, under the mantle of that indescribable “arctic hysteria,” question the commonly accepted clichés regarding Scandinavian society, culture and folklore. Over 50 years ago, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Marko Tapio, explained this phenomenon better than anyone else when he pointed out: “Arctic hysteria is not a disease. We don’t know what it really is … Every so often, an extreme phenomenon appears in that region … Its outbursts reach utmost extremes and no means of self-control can contain them …”

(March 30 - June 27, 2010)

Monica Bonvicini: Bet Your Sweet Life

raisa — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 20:31:31 +0000

Monica Bonvicini, Scale of Things (to come), 2010, © Monica Bonvicini @ VG BildKunst. Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin

Galerie Max Hetzler - Berlin

By Helmut Schuster

What began in the year 2007 as a temporary location for the Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin (originally in Stuttgart and Cologne) is now the major gallery’s sole, central exhibition location. In Berlin, where the crisis in the art market has been successfully resisted by the establishment of new art centres, as in Heidestrasse, Potsdamerstrasse and the area around Checkpoint Charlie, the move to the solitude of the Osramhöfe in the district of Wedding is rather surprising and may not have been completely voluntary. It is here, then, that Monica Bonvicini, the gallery’s new supernova, is staging her exhibition “Bet Your Sweet Life” on approximately 1,000 square metres.

If one actively follows the career of the artist, who was born in Venice in 1965 and has been active for many years now, one can identify a thread running right through her work. Bonvicini grapples with interface between architecture and sexuality. In her work, she repeatedly and critically tackles the question of male power and men’s role in modernistic concepts of urban order and planning.

In this respect, Bonvicini is a child of her time. She grew up in late-Fascist Italy, where Catholic and male power figures were dominant within society and the family. There, as in Germany, many of the former, mainly male, perpetrators regained their former positions and authority. In her youth, Bonvicini experienced a second phase of de-democratisation and followed the rise of media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, who - as is well known - still shapes the values of Italian society to this day. Her studies in Berlin and California, two regions superficially overloaded with myths of freedom, compelled her to confront herself in reality with phallocentric structures.

Bonvicini responded to these heteronymous social structures - which influence her, too - with the means of art. She created key works such as Wallfuckin (1995) and Pavilion (2002). At the time, the women’s movement in Europe was essential and the gender discussion was at its height. Bonvicini was spot on, and her artistic activities were one of the stepping stones necessary for taking small steps towards achieving the changes that would make a new conception of gender roles possible in the first place.

Now, in 2010, the United States has its first African-American president, and Angela Merkel is the German chancellor. The world has been pillaged by corrupt economic systems, and the issues of migration, inequality and environmental destruction are becoming increasingly important. Now, in 2010, women must ask themselves whether Monica Bonvicini’s seemingly provocative, critical attitude still gets to the crux of the matter, or whether she is simply reproducing only herself and delivering stereotypes in order to fulfill expectations on the global art market.

Scale of Things, an interactive staircase leading nowhere, is certainly well crafted; ultimately, however, it is merely a replica of her work Stairway to Hell (2003), which was definitely relevant at the time - especially at the 8^th Istanbul Biennial (2003). It shows how critical debate has degenerated into slick salon art.

Black you, an installation comprising a bed, a chair and a table covered with leather, repeatedly cites the role image of a woman, who is half whore and half domestic, at the stove. Here, the significance of leather as a fetish material is overstated to the point of banality.

Of all her works, the video No Head Man (2009) speaks in the most direct language. In the end, the men bash their heads against a wall. That is about as near as the entire exhibition gets to making a statement.

Nevertheless, the series of large-size tempera and spray paint drawings is genuinely moving. The works entitled Hurricane and Other Catastrophes are masterfully drawn, and moving in their simplicity.

Success is a blessing and creates new potential, as Monica Bonvicini proves in her work She Lies, which is situated in front of the Oslo Opera House. This makes the current exhibition at Max Hetzler all the more dispensable. Occasionally, plus and plus produce only minus.

(April 30 - June 5, 2010)

Helmut Schuster is a psychologist and art historian. He is an independent curator and director of Galerie Schuster in Berlin and Miami.

Marcus Antonius Jansen: Zeitgeist

raisa — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 20:27:38 +0000

Marcus Antonius Jansen, The Apprentice, 2009, oil enamel collage on canvas, 60” x 72”. Courtesy of the artist and 101/exhibit.

101/exhibit - Miami

By Janet Batet

Marcus Antonius Jansen is an urban artist. Chronicler of the metropolitan lifestyle and its surroundings, Jansen is interested in exploring the contemporary human condition trapped in the knotty system of the city. “Zeitgeist,” his exhibition at the 101/exhibit gallery, is a vast survey on the latest production of the artist.

Jansen’s childhood was spent in the midst of the emerging graffiti movement that starred the Bronx in the 1970s. Later, his parents decided to move back to Germany, where the strong expressionist tradition and his extensive traveling definitely influenced the artist. His vivential experiences in neuralgic urban centers and his enrollment in the army in the 1990s were two crucial factors for the understanding of the complicated urban network in the era of the post-industrial society and the transnational corporate world.

Jansen’s oeuvre is a sort of urban legend: mystery and foreboding at the same time that the viewer is compelled to decipher. At first glance, his work seems charged with a surreal urban-like atmosphere, where the conscious and unconscious coexist in a commentary of our everyday world. In fact, the artist faces the creative act as a free flow from the unconscious, without prior sketching or references. This technique allows him to recreate a very particular universe where the most dissimilar icons amalgamate into a superlative palimpsest expression of the interdependent world in which we cohabit.

These frightening and enigmatic suburban cityscapes reveal receding farms, residencies in foreclosure, scattered debris of industry, inhabited by the most capricious creatures: tire-horned goats, flying targeted pigs, silhouetted crows on wires, lonely clowns. Jansen’s characters are victims of oblivion, populating a sort of Limbo, symbol of their pariah status. Alongside these creatures, anodyne signs proliferate: eclipsed suns, abandoned colorful toy balls, tires, fences, supermarket carts, boarded up windows; all of them waste and trail of the urban life. The historic and literal symbols are another imperative key of this disturbing but captivating universe. In this sense, Jansen highlights the allusions to the Weimar Republic as a parallel to our contemporary society, the conjunction of the Titanic and Noah’s Ark in a completely new allegory, or the recurring references to the Wizard of Oz, one of the most widely known American popular culture icons.

Jansen’s artwork is autobiographic in a certain way, and some characters may be identified as the artist itself. Such is the case of the Tin Man, and the errant figure of the artist carrying with his portfolio as the only baggage.

Formally, his work is the result of multiple crossings between historic expressionism, abstract expressionism, graffiti, and pop. With very aggressive and spontaneous brush strokes, Jansen’s mixed media canvasses highlights by the magisterial use of twisted forms, emotional color, and the insertion clips from newspapers, digital prints, or stencils that the artist juxtaposes in a commentary of the global village.

Considered the father of “Modern Urban-Expressionism”, Marcus Jansen entitled his first art book after this movement, characterized by a rebellious response to the rising political and social changes in the postindustrial society.

(May 8 - June 8, 2010)

Janet Batet is an independent curator, art critic and essayist based in Miami, FL.

Leslie Gabaldón and María Cristina Carbonell

raisa — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 20:20:32 +0000

Maria Cristina Carbonell, La Voyeuse (2007), 3 minutes, HD Video Transfer into DVD. Courtesy of the artist and Dot Fiftyone Gallery.

Dot Fiftyone Gallery, Miami

By Irina Leyva-Pérez

Dot Fiftyone presented solo exhibitions of two female artists: Leslie Gabaldón’s Goody Two-Shoes and María Cristina Carbonell’s An Idyllic World. On the first floor, Leslie Gabaldón continued with her theme of domestic life in her new series Goody Two-Shoes. The title is a phrase that has become part of the popular culture used to describe, in an ironic and pejorative way, someone who is ‘excessively good.’ Gabaldon, inspired by this phrase in an autobiographical manner, made life-sized cutouts of herself wearing only underwear, in the tradition of paper dolls waiting to be dressed in their various outfits. These realistic-looking “paper dolls” greet you at the central wall of the exhibition, and behind them are hanging paper dresses in a 50s fashion, ready to be used. By mimicking a traditional game for girls, she is talking about the face many women show to society, presenting themselves as the image of perfection. Gabaldón, in a revisionist fashion, questions the motives behind such ‘virtuousness’. Is it real, or is it part of the obsessive and perfectionist contemporary society? She is criticizing the way many women are embarking on a pursuit for an unreal perfection at any cost, pushing themselves to the very limit no matter what they have to sacrifice in the process. As Machiavelli would say: the end justifies the means.

On the second floor of the gallery, María Cristina Carbonell shows a different side of the coin in An Idyllic World. Through her videos she brings up to life a cosmogony of her own with very unique characters. Her videos have a dream-like atmosphere in which real people coexist with what seem like ghosts. One of her main characters is a woman in geisha regalia that ‘walks’ and ‘flies’ around visitors at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, then again in a garden, and later in a tea house. Carbonell is, in a way, erasing the line between reality and fiction, mixing together the two dimensions. The ‘geisha’ has a mask on her face, hiding her real identity from the viewer. This is a resource that Carbonell uses throughout her work by playing different characters. She is the protagonist of all her videos and is constantly changing hats: from an almost naked woman, to the pole of a nightclub, to a geisha ghost. All these characters share some trait of hers; they are showing the many facets of her personality, much like the ying and yang we all have inside. Her imagery is a compilation of universal fragments: from the East to the West, from the North to the South.

Leslie Gabaldón, Vero from Calling Cards series 1/1, 2010, ink jet print on wood-board, 30" x 21". Courtesy of the artist and Dot Fiftyone Gallery.

Another video, Dream Lips, appears as a sweet game between a woman and a girl, in which they play to put on putty and plump lips, similar to what the existing ideal of beauty dictates, reproduced even in dolls. This seemingly naïve exchange between the girl and the woman could scar the girl by setting her physical ideal. It could be seen as a mother not just playing with her daughter but also passing on her own expectations.

Although the works of Gabaldón and Carbonell are clearly different from each other, there are points of contact. In a way both are commenting about their intimate lives and the way they perceive themselves in a social environment. Both are using their own image as an unmistakable self-reference. While Gabaldón is focusing on her private life set within a domestic environment, Carbonell sees herself as a part of the whole world, as a woman of many phases and places.

(March 13 - April 30, 2010)

Vargas-Suárez Universal - Cosmodrome Vectors

raisa — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 20:09:10 +0000

Vargas Suárez Universal, Cosmodrome Vectors, 2009, oil on formica panel 97” x 49”. © Vargas-Suarez Universal. Courtesy of the artist and Think21 Gallery.

Think21 Gallery - Brussels, Belgium

Curated by Lara Pan

A Trip to Baikonur with Vermeer

By Ekaterina Rietz-Rakul and Steve Schepens

Artists of the seventeenth century were fascinated with the development of science facilitated by the invention of the telescope and microscope. Scientists and the work they were undertaking became a subject of painting, and since then the interest of humanity towards the mysterious endless space surrounding their home planet has yet to fade.

Growing up in Houston, Texas, in close proximity the Johnson Space Center undoubtedly influenced Rafael Vargas-Suárez to study both astronomy and art history, eventually combining his knowledge and fascination of both fields in his work. His installations, wall drawings and paintings seem a result of intensive scientific-style research. In the beginning, Vargas-Suárez Universal was using various charts, architectural blueprints and other geological documentation almost exclusively from Houston. Over time, his installations became site-specific, dealing with the architecture and the history of the exhibition spaces; and the sources of his work became more personal as he decided to draw his inspiration from his own experience and imagination.

To create his works–large-scale wall paintings, installations, sound-installations and drawings–the artist utilizes different materials. His wall paintings, permanent or temporary, are made on real walls or their photographic reproductions. The artist paints and draws on pictures of buildings and fashion models, surfaces which are otherwise difficult to obtain as a canvas. In his Paris exhibition, though, VSU managed to make drawings on the face of a real model. This work reminds one of patterns for plastic or reconstructive surgery and relates to Angst caused by time and gravity.

The exhibition in the Think21 gallery, curated by Lara Pan, shows VSU’s kaleidoscopic and dynamic oil paintings, which create an illusion of being three-dimensional. They are painted–just like in the Middle Ages, Gothic and Renaissance–on wooden panels or their contemporary synthetic pendants– Formica panels and vacuumized aluminum thermal blankets on panels. The latter is a carrier for a series Эльдорадо (El Dorado, 2009), which refers to the mythological land of infinite wealth– a legend extremely popular in the seventeenth century. Brought to Europe by the sea explorers in the sixteenth century, it was based on culture and legends of Natives. The shiny surfaces of the paintings, as well as the Russian title, seem to deal with the space race between Russia and the USA, as well as the fact that the cosmos becomes humanity’s new El Dorado.

One of the most important notions for VSU’s paintings is a vector. In Cosmodrome Vectors, the black and white abstract composition describes lively interaction of personnel, buildings and space machines. STS 126: E.V.A. 1 - 6Hrs 52Min, as well as the other works of this series, seem to be composed from the vectors of space walks. The latter might soon take place on humanity’s next home planet, whose topology is explored in the triptych Next Green Sphere. Obviously, the vector of our development points to the expansion of the universe. So are we anxiously standing on the launching platform of Baikonur, in the company of Johannes Vermeer and Vargas-Suárez Universal?

(January 22 - March 6, 2010)

Shahzia Sikander

raisa — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 20:03:49 +0000

Shahzia Sikander, video still from Bending the Barrels, 2009, digital video, colour/sound, 20'. Courtesy Pilar Corrias Gallery.

Pilar Corrias Gallery - London

By Michele Robecchi

Praise for Pilar Corrias Gallery is well-deserved. In little more than a year, the gallery has established itself as a driving force amongst the very competitive UK art scene, introducing young guns such as Patrick Tuttofuoco, rejuvenating old masters like Miguel Barcelò, and bringing to London artists who, despite their international recognition, quite unbelievably have never had the opportunity to have a solo show in town.

In this latter category falls Shahzia Sikander. The Pakistan-born, US resident artist emerged in the mid-1990s with a series of works deeply indebted to Indo-Persian miniature painting–which she studied while attending the National College of Arts in Lahore–and her personal experience, largely brought into the picture through the exploration of memories, and how these relate to her present condition. Such a combination of private and traditional elements is carried out with a great sense of immediacy, possibly the result of a practice still quintessentially based on drawing.

Sikander’s exhibition in London, titled “I am also not my own enemy,” is inspired by Ghalib, an authority in the Urdu interpretation-defying poetry genre known as Ghazal, and is inscribed in graffiti fashion at the center of a large painting. Fused with the fragmented poetry, the painting creates a tension between the abstract and the representational, blurring the dividing line between popular and elitist art, as well as depicting a perennial shift in meaning.

Bending the Barrels (2009), Sikander’s latest video, is a 15 minute journey through military rhetoric and pageantry (different groups of soldiers are portrayed while playing music), which shows how a form of artistic expression can be turned into a political statement. Inspired but nonetheless authoritative, the army men’s performance is occasionally paired with military jargon, like “We were left with no options,” “We were asked to be here,” and “The situation is now calm, stable and under control”– the kind of rhetoric aimed at defusing a situation but that people should not really hear, especially when things really are calm, stable and under control.

The current political climate in Pakistan and the country’s long struggle for democracy are at the core of the piece, but what is really striking is how even in the strongest moments of group affirmation, Sikander makes the personality of every single man involved vividly perceivable. The gentleness and sense of discipline they emanate are an invitation to revisit the piece, revealing how even the most apparently mono-dimensional situation involves multi-layered realities.

(October 16 - November 21, 2009)

Michele Robecchi is an Italian writer and curator based in London. He is currently a visiting lecturer at Christie’s Education and an editor at Phaidon Press.