Dia: Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, NY, 845 440 0100

“Isn’t she so kind and warm?” Dia’s PR staff swooned as they took turns leaning into me. I watched the artist and host Isabel Lewis float past her guests while circling her wrists into widening arcs. “Hi, welcome.” Lewis cooed as she spun around and drifted through the clusters of curious people sipping their Summer Ale, lovingly provided by Brooklyn Brewery. I myself held an eco-friendly carton of water, which I had plucked out from one of the ice buckets scattered around the back of the immense space.

I was at Dia: Chelsea’s garage party loft, like one of those factory-turned-nightclubs in Williamsburg where you are a minority if you don’t have a tattoo. The music, interior, and vibes felt hip, too. Chic white couches were scattered throughout the space where exotic plants (Spanish moss and air plants) hung from the ceiling or sat on top of the furniture. Some visitors clutched their beers around the round tables with wiry legs. Mysterious speaker-like boxes emitted a faint scent concocted by the artist’s collaborator Sissel Tolaas, a Norwegian chemist and olfactory researcher. The bass-heavy music (composed by Lewis herself) began as quiet pulses and escalated into mobilizing booms. A few couples got up from the long white couches to step to increasingly dance-friendly beats. I declined to take from a plate of vegan hors d’oeuvres; pickled vegetables, said one of the PR staff flanking me. The air felt sultry after the rainstorm had passed — the lingering humidity fit the environment created by the artist.

Berlin-based artist Isabel Lewis comes from a background in choreography and literary criticism. While she lived in New York City from 2004 to 2009, she presented her dance works at major hot spots such as Dance Theater Workshop, the Kitchen, and New Museum. She has created and presented site-specific “occasions,” such as this one commissioned by Dia, to choreograph not just the movements of people’s bodies, but also their olfactory, visual, auditory, and gustatory experiences.

At first I was skeptical. Wasn’t this just another party with some pretentious art people? The hostess and DJ happened to be an artist, but this Friday night “occurrence” didn’t seem so different from other exhibition openings, aside from the original music and some interrupting philosophical lectures. Surely this work is a reference to the happenings of the 1950s and ‘60s. But Allan Kaprow did weird things like throw tires; nothing seemed weird in Lewis’s occurrence at all.

Shortsighted judgment. Nothing weird is precisely the point of Lewis’s work. The artist had created a modern-day happening in a way that addressed our contemporary climate and needs. In the late 1950s and ‘60s, throwing hundreds of tires into a room made sense because it radically merged mundane everyday life with so-called elevated art. On the other hand, strange acts now do not merge the everyday and “high” art, but rather create a greater disparity between real life and the mysterious luxury called art. This is now truer than ever with the post-1980s art market and celebrity culture surrounding a select number of big-shot artists. Art is an inaccessible luxury of the 1% who can afford to visit a gallery or museum during work hours. Art is an inaccessible language spoken and understood by a select few — the more cryptic and exclusive that language, the better and truer the art it refers to.

Lewis brings art back to the rest of us. She understands the function and purpose of art to be a connector — among ourselves and between us and the cosmos. I agree. Art was once a practical necessity for survival. Art not only helped the people of the pre-writing age pass down wisdom, but also brought a community together through collective sensory experience.

During one of her lecture interruptions on the Friday night occasion, Lewis spoke of “erotic sociability,” a concept articulated by scholar Roslyn W. Bologh in Love or Greatness (1990). To the artist, erotic sociability can guide us back to where art should take us, but often no longer does. She invites the rest of us — the ones with full-time jobs to support ourselves and our families — to unwind after another day when we had to sacrifice true connection in the name of practical survival. She invites the rest of us to follow her on a short escape from the city to a languid waterside upstate, where we are allowed quiet contemplation and a return to the larger universe where we all belong.

The artist prepared an aperitif for our one-and-a-half-hour trip to Beacon. On the way to the occasion, Lewis primed us with a streamable mixtape with tracks that correspond with each stop, beginning at Grand Central Terminal. The mixtape is meant to be a companion to her occasions, and was a collaboration between the artist, Dia, and the MTA. The tracks begin with voices and familiar sounds of the city but slowly ease into a gentle rhythmic beat that continues at the site up north. At Scenic Hudson’s Long Dock Park in Beacon, the host didn’t work the room like on Friday, but stepped back after providing the tools for each of us to fulfill our private but neglected tasks of connecting to the cosmos, the natural world.

Lewis, leading us from the city to upstate, brings us back to where we must return, a place to meditate and to connect back to each other and the world. In the midst of human priorities, we often forget the importance of true connection to each other and to the natural world, so much that we become blind to the destruction that our oblivion and negligence has caused to ourselves. In a contemporary society in which screens and devices increasingly distance us from each other, feigned connections destroy genuine empathy and lead to destructive hatred. Lewis — as host, as choreographer — directed us to that place where she waited with music that beat to the splash of waves. She directed us to a place where 15 dancers came and went, swaying with their eyes closed as though they were intoxicated from the salty air and regular beat under the sound of water.

Lewis’s background as a choreographer is clear in her latest work at Dia: her aim is to direct people’s movements into a carefully drafted trajectory. And she succeeds. She does for us what we need from art. We often forget one of art’s most important functions, which is to unite us through a collective sensory experience. She provides us this platform, not through years of expensive art education or through knowing all the right people, but through something all of us do — eat, drink, dance, talk, and play — at a time when most of us can be there to do it together. Lewis gives us what is usually a luxury for the few who can afford not to work during gallery or museum hours: art that the rest of us can partake in too.

The post Back to the Rest of Us: Isabel Lewis at Dia appeared first on artcritical.

February 18 to March 26, 2016
555 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 741 1111

Throughout much of her artistic career, Taryn Simon has utilized the power of visual media — including photography, sculpture, video, and performance — to critique systems of power. Her work exposes the dark side of existing practices and, in particular, the ways in which law affects the lives of people. Simon exploits the dual record-keeping and fiction-making role of photography to document and fabricate the invisible. For example, in The Innocents series (2003), the artist shames the flawed American criminal justice system by photographing wrongfully convicted men at the sites of their alleged crimes. Such works reveal the inadequacies or, more often, harms that result from the current systems in place. Her works compel the question: whom are these laws meant to serve?

Simon’s work answers that the law is meant to serve its people, but the practical applications of law often do not reflect this purpose. Law exists to maintain order that will facilitate a free society in which people can pursue happiness without impinging upon the pursuits of others. However, law is often used against the very people it was meant to serve and protect.

If Simon’s previous work exposed the perverse applications of law, her most recent body of works on display at Gagosian Gallery reveals another side of law: its empty and symbolic nature. Part humor, part lament, we often joke that politicians are full of crap. Unfortunately, the statement is funny because it is often true. Simon’s photographs and sculptures highlight the artificiality and hopelessly symbolic nature of international treaties: perhaps some of the emptiest promises by one group of politicians to another.

The 36 large-scale photographs depict recreated floral centerpieces that had ornamented press events announcing an international treaty or decree. Each photograph is accompanied by a description and the fates of the international agreements the flowers were meant to commemorate. Most agreements influenced systems of governance or economics, such as the Convention of Cluster Munitions in 2008, where 91 nations and the Holy See agreed to ban the use of cluster bombs, which continue to be used by countries today, including the United States. Simon framed the photographs and their descriptions in a rich mahogany, as though the works could be part of the very boardrooms at which these agreements took place. 12 sculptures in the center of the room consist of pressed flowers, specimens of the 36 centerpieces, sewn onto paper, that sit above or between tall concrete flower presses — the heavy masses bear their weight into the floor with the gravity of solemn monuments.

The power of these works — the large photographs in particular — stems from captivating images that, despite their startling vividness, remain harmless to the viewer.

We use flowers as harmless speech. We buy flowers most often as symbolic gestures to commemorate an occasion or to express particular sentiments to others. We use flowers as harmless objects of contemplation, to provide visual reminders of such sentiments and occasions.

Such speech-flowers are fragile and ephemeral. Their visual and olfactory pleasures expire as quickly as the feelings of the occasion begin to fade from our memories. When they lose their value as sensory pleasure-givers, we toss them out. Unlike other symbolic gifts, we readily dispose of flowers because of their purpose as temporary symbols. The other side of this sad fate of flowers as symbols is that if one does not wish their flowers to meet their inevitable destiny in the trash, one must prematurely remove them from their life-extending environments in water and place them between the pages of a book — or a flower-press, as Simon has — and crush them live in the name of preservation.

Simon highlights the utterly symbolic and superficial role of flowers — and the occasions they were to commemorate — by exaggerating the surface beauty of flowers that were once sitting on the tables where international powers signed various agreements. Most of the photographs show exquisite arrangements in intensely vivid colors, all against equally striking and beautifully color-blocked backgrounds. However, the texts accompanying the mesmerizing centerpieces state the common fate of all these treaties: failure of the signatories to implement them.

The artist thereby disturbs the easy assumptions held by many people: that once codified into law, the harms addressed by the law will remedy themselves. Her beautiful photos and their accompanying texts expose this as a faulty assumption, which presumes the automatic integration of such agreements into real life. However, laws do not execute themselves — people do.

First, many international treaties are not self-executing; local governments must pass laws that allow their execution. Even after the agreements are passed as local laws, law truly exists — and therefore holds power — only when it is enforced in everyday life. Without enforcement, these international agreements remain as mere words on paper, nice and fanciful ideas, and nice gestures by participating governments, yet nothing more.

The horror bestowed upon us by Simon’s beautiful work stems from the realization that this is actually how legal systems in general work, and that substantial harm can result from the nature of law as a multi-step process. A law may be passed because of a felt need to address existing problems, but the law can only fulfill its initial purpose when it is executed properly in everyday life, down to the policemen, government agencies, and the judiciary.

Today, when instances of misapplication and faulty enforcement of the law continue to demonstrate the shortcomings of the current system, Simon’s recent work prompts a second look at law as “mere words,” and invites us to emancipate it from its purely symbolic status toward a working system that better serves its true master: the people.

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