What drew you to blood as a medium in the first instance?

I was interested in exploring ideas of life after death and how connected body and spirit are. During that time, I was looking at medical encyclopedias and came across a series of images of childbirth, that were hand-drawn illustrations in black and white, and there was no blood in them, they had edited it out. I understood birth to be a bloody process, so that was odd and fascinating. In considering mortality and spirituality I used those images, enlarged them, photocopied them and adhered them to canvas and dripped red paint onto them with the aim of putting the blood back in. Paint provided flat, lifeless results that lacked charge, so I began using real blood, and it was almost immediate – the charge – was so different from paint, it was a powerful moment. Over several months the blood altered color from vibrant red, to an earthy tone, and from there I learned preservation techniques through trial and error. If you are thinking about immortality, spiritual beliefs etc, then philosophical questions come into play, primarily, that if you’re preserving blood, essentially, the body, are you also preserving spirit? And do the works themselves preserve spiritual essence, not creative energy, but genetic spirit? The thoughts become about existence.

When blood is so ubiquitous a subject today – brutality in movies; normalized, extreme photojournalism – as an artistic material, has its potency been diminished at all?

Everyone has a personal relationship to blood, so regardless of how much it is seen on TV, or in pop culture, it doesn’t change the amount of blood that’s in your body. You’re coming to it with preconceived notions regarding your own experience with blood; women and men for example have different responses to blood – we’re not even thinking yet about violence, but the premise of how blood behaves within you; there is body function, life giving, circulatory systems et al.

Using the blood of animals from a slaughterhouse, one of the thrusts behind that is the idea of regeneration, taking this life-force material, presenting images and preserving that blood in such a way where it evokes life, and life-cycle, the universe, really focusing on the material, and presenting it in a way where it is a natural specimen. There definitely is a sense that the blood comes from a slaughterhouse, and there is an inherent violence in that, so it’s interesting to take something that gives life, that also has hints of violence in it, and create something that is beautiful, or whatever word you would put toward what’s happening, that the pieces emit an energy.

It’s cyclical in a way because some of your work evokes vast cosmologically explosions, supernovas, galaxies, so while they aren’t blood-related trauma, such events are as violent as we can imagine. In a sense then, the violence associated with where the blood comes from is carried through in the imagery?

It’s the death and birth of stars, and the evolution of the universe, and that relates to those initial childbirth illustrations; generally women don’t describe childbirth as a peaceful process. Also, personal growth comes from struggle, it’s an undeniable part of living. But in terms of where the blood comes from, my treatment of it, and respect of it, is drastically different to the violence. With my recent Blood Mirror project, I moved into using human blood and the idea of peaceful giving of one’s blood, that it can be used for live-saving purposes, not about death or disease, but the ability to save a life.

And, most people don’t usually see blood, but it’s here with us right now. It’s contained within us, we’re held together by a thin membrane of skin. Blood is always present, but seen primarily in moments of injury, or for women during menstruation. So, what is interesting about the material is that it is so relevant in so many ways, from the representations mentioned at the start of your question, but there is also science, religion, so many themes to explore. It was my impression that when imagery of blood became more prevalent in society through prime-time shows like True Blood and Dexter, there was a shift in perception of blood, and it became easier for a viewer to approach it without fear. Although, however much it was out there in culture, it is a very different experience to stand in front of the artwork, and be with it.

What struck you about the FDA amending its ban on gay men donating blood, to allowing donation after a year of celibacy, that compelled you discuss the issue through your work?

In 2013 I started thinking about the lifetime ban, on which there was very little conversation. It is something that has always bothered me. I’d tried in my 20s to donate blood, and was unable to because I’m gay. And there was a moment when I thought maybe I could help engage dialog on this equality issue. The first iteration of the project, a December 2014 blood drive, and subsequent preservation in sculpture of the first 9 of an eventual 59 blood donations – existed before the amendment was put in place. One of the many intense components of Blood Mirror was the process of finding and connecting with the donors, because it’s very different working with blood from donors who are alive, and standing with them against discrimination. Everyone has opinions, they joined the project because they wanted to share, contribute and they want their voices to be heard, and so the blood in a way is not silent. I felt that responsibility to the men who participated. We continued working through the FDA’s deliberation process and eventual introduction of the new celibacy rule during 2015, because it occurred to me that the amendment was not the answer we needed, and in fact it was worse.

Why?

It is one thing to have an outdated policy that is put in place during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the early eighties, grappling with how to detect for HIV, there was no medicine, there wasn’t even the ability to do testing; medical professionals back then had to do something urgently, and so I understand the drastic step of implementing a lifetime ban on gay men donating blood.

But in 2015 when you had the science and knowledge at your disposal to correct that policy, but instead introduced a one year celibacy, it adds insult to injury. You are not examining the issue from a scientific basis, and that becomes an absolute disrespect. By shifting it in this way you are perpetuating stigma, because here we are in the modern age and we are still saying that it’s gay men who are the only transmitters of HIV, and so we have to be celibate for a year. This is a year after the CDC suggested that gay men at higher risk go on PREP; it was the same year that gay marriage passed; so monogamous gay men in a married relationship can’t have sex with their husband for a year? The premise of how they came to that amendment is ridiculous because it shows that we are not trusting in science, in our scientists and we are making blankets judgements.

What are the purposes, or ideal outcomes of the Blood Mirror Project?

One of the reasons for creating this sculpture was to be able to say, that all of the blood in this sculpture could have been used for life-saving purposes. The point is that the way the FDA is editing gay men out of the equation is not considering the HIV- gay men who could be donating blood. For example, The Williams Institute’s research suggested that, if the ban was lifted, over a million lives a year could be saved, and that’s gay blood. So, I wanted to invite individuals who would be eligible for blood donation, were it not for this discriminatory policy.

There are two components, there are the first nine men who donated, each with very different lives and stories, and thus they help articulate the issues behind the policy; For example having Rev. John W. Moody, addresses religion and spirituality, or Dr Larry Mass, one of the co-founders of Gay Mens Health Crisis, the first person to write about HIV/AIDS, anchors the project in this sense of HIV/AIDS history.

The second layer of Blood Mirror was a 50 man blood drive, each donating a tube, equalling a full pint which would be added to the sculpture. An important part of Blood Mirror was inviting individuals from the medical and LGBT communities, who were already engaged in this issue, who could make recommendations as to what the proper procedures should be. For example, Kelsey Louie, current CEO of Gay Mens Health Crisis, is a donor to the project, and GMHC have been advocating on this issue; another donor is Dr Demetre Daskalakis, the Assistant Commissioner of the Department of Health for New York City. These are people who were passionate about this personally, and also could speak to the different themes relating to blood scientifically, medically and spiritually.

Recently, I did the Blood Equality Program at the Hammer Museum, and Dr Peter Marks who’s the Head of Biologics at the FDA, recorded a video message in response to the program, that we played there. He talked about how the FDA would like to move toward an individual screening assessment. Currently all potential donors get the same form, one of the questions being, “are you a man who has had sex with another man in the past year?”, and if you say yes, you are excluded. So, what we are working towards, is to realize a policy of individual screening that is fair and inclusive for everyone.

Another component was to help start a blood equality campaign, which is a collaboration between, FCB Health, GMHC, and the Blood Mirror Project, to raise awareness and to create a medical board, which we have done and which the FDA has participated in.

What are the differences between working with animal and human blood?

There are differences; aesthetically – almost the same. With Blood Mirror the time coordinating the blood drives was something I couldn’t have imagined. Producing became the main thrust of my practice for over a year. To coordinate 50 men, with the amount of people required – phlebotomists, medical supervisors, documentarians, assistants, it was full staff environment, with a lot of moving parts. So at the end, in the studio with 50 tubes of blood, you’ve been working 3 months just to get that blood. So there is excitement, that a community of men on PREP, came together. To me the blood drives themselves were art. I had interviewed many of the men who donated, heard their thoughts, and why they showed up. Having communicated with those people, to then show up at the studio that night with the blood, it is as though that blood is speaking to you. It’s a powerful feeling to be pouring that blood into the Blood Mirror sculpture. Working with human blood is different because those donors are trusting me. At the end Blood Mirror invites the viewer to see themselves and their reflection through the blood of the donor individuals, and to see yourself through other people is a timeless conversation.

Part of what makes Blood Mirror special for me is the immensely collaborative nature of the project,from the medical team – led by Dr Howard Grossman to creative partners, advisers, organizational and institutional support, and obviously the many men who donated their blood and voices in the name of equality.

Your work – while underwritten by subjects including religion and corporality – is undeniably beautiful. This is often an often unfairly disregarded notion in contemporary art, derided as not being objective or socially relevant. What are your thoughts on beauty?

It’s a matter of taste of course, but I immediately respond to artwork that hits me on a visceral level. I appreciate going to an exhibition and being wowed by an artwork. I like that immediacy, not just visually – it might be a sound piece or other art-form – and because that is my taste I bring that energy to my practice. Blood is a incredible material and I can do a lot of very interesting things with it. Blood preserved in resin is fascinating to look at (for some people, others won’t be fascinated by it) And I’d say that beauty is a word for my work, but it’s not the only superlative. The way that blood can be edited to generate organic patterns through manipulation of resin intrigues me. Also the way in which blood illuminates helps create a different mood. So when you are considering blood with the resin, with light, and dimensionality, I think of them as painting/sculpture hybrids. Then, there are the additional materials of blood soaked gauze, blood dust, etc. There are a lot of different components involved, even within the blood itself, how it is manipulated, the age of the blood and so on. The combination of all of those aspects does create impact.

I’ve noted before that you espouse an impressive level of professionalism, efficiency and efficacy toward the job of being an artist, both in the studio and after the work is complete. Can you talk about that?

Blood is a very time-based material. So when you make marks, it needs to be preserved at a certain moment to maintain the integrity of color, texture the patterns. So it is happening now, in the present, I have maybe 3 hours and the preservation has to take place. So there is a certain work-discipline that comes with this material. I also find nothing more exciting than the moment a piece is finished. My catharsis is when the piece is lifted off of the table, leaned against the wall and lit for the first time, and there you have the results of that discipline realized.

After the work is completed It then depends what you want to communicate. With Blood Mirror the agenda is different. That project lives primarily outside the art world. We showed it at American University Museum, who were incredibly supportive, which is an art museum – and then is another thrust of that project which is social media – more people have seen Blood Mirror through Youtube or on MSNBC, than they have through the sculpture in person, which is unfortunate because the work should be seen first-hand, but if the idea is to change policy it needed to expand that way.

Generally speaking the reality is that more people will see my work online than they will in person, other than an art fair, or when I did an event on the High Line, what was so wonderful about that was that there were a thousand people at one time, that was amazing. But otherwise you’re dealing with the digital world, So, what are you trying to communicate to your audience, and given what set of circumstances are available at that moment, what’s the best way to do it? Art is a way to communicate with people, and there’s a lot of parts to how that communication plays out. I mean somebody has to do the work! (laughter) someone’s got to do it.

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DARREN JONES: What experiences learned in your earlier days, starting out in the 1980s, are still relevant to your work today? What’s been consistent from then until now?

NANCY WHITENACK: Everything remains surprising to me. When someone walks into the gallery, you cannot ever assume anything about them because of how they look or dress. That they are walking in means that they’re interested in art. Don’t discount people, and treat everyone with respect. I learned that early, and it has always been true. Also, we’ve had so many ups and downs, economically, and even if I’m wondering how the rent is going to be paid, something always catches; I have learned to trust that I can keep going, that I can tighten up, be lean if necessary, but I know that I am going to be able to continue to do this.

In my estimation it’s so little about commerce, it’s really about the artists, and how they create and the ideas that come out of that. It is artists who have sustained me. I work with artists long term, and when I take an artist on I place a great deal of trust in them and what they do, and I learned quickly that I have to take on work that I think is substantial, and interesting. Otherwise how can I show it in good faith, much less find someone to own it?

What are the main changes that you have witnessed during the years in Dallas, and how have they affected the art scene, and art dealing in the city?

When I opened, contemporary art and going to galleries was not something that people did. We had openings, and we’d have people in, but there wasn’t an enthusiastic embrace. Several key points made a difference. Certainly the Rachofsky family, the Roses, and the Hoffmans, who decided to give their collections to the Dallas Museum of Art, made a quantum difference in how people paid attention to the magnanimity of the gifts and material, and that caused people to look more, including at contemporary art.

The Dallas Art Fair has been a boon, not only to the Dallas public but to dealers coming into the city, who discovered that there are amazing collectors here, incredible wealth here, and great art being made here. Also the collaborative groups of artists who finally decided that they cannot sit back and wait for someone to come to them, and so they organize exhibitions and pop-up shows, which have revitalized the whole art scene and have filled it with activity. Several years ago curator Gabriel Ritter did a summer show at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) with a number of these groups, which was really helpful. It was sensational because it brought further attention to what is happening here and signaled to collectors here to look in more depth at what is happening in Dallas.

With all the progress that is being made, is there anything that has been lost, that you would like artists today to experience?

Years ago, a large group of artists used to meet every Saturday morning at Kuby’s Sausage House, and whoever got there grabbed a place at the table. It was a great time to get together, check in and talk. I don’t know if that happens anymore. Today, I get a sense that artists can often feel isolated; beyond the gallery-going they don’t perhaps get that kind of interaction. Frances Bagley, a sculptor, and a group of women would meet regularly for critiques; it’s been documented in a recent DMA show. So if those kinds of things were lost it would affect how artists connect to the community.

CentralTrak, a residency at the University of Texas at Dallas, has enlarged the parameters of what this city is and how artists perceive it. CentralTrak is a place where artists gather, hold panel discussions about artmaking, and talk about the difficulties that artists face. CentralTrak’s success in addressing such issues is down to the director, Heyd Fontenot.

Can you speak about some of the differences between the art scenes in Texas’ major cities and, I have to ask, whether there are any rivalries in their relationships?

Houston has always been the art center in Texas, and it has changed. Bill Davenport, who used to write for Glasstire, came to my gallery one day and said “What is it with you guys? Why is everything going on here?” He’s Houston-based. There was a sense that maybe Houston had lost some ground and that things were just really exploding here. He wanted to know what was making that happen, and we talked about the reasons. I loved that, because we’ve been the banking capital, not the art capital. And that has changed now. San Antonio is a unique city that has some interesting things going on in the art scene.

What I don’t understand is Austin: it has a lot of artists. It has some of the greatest art collections of any university, too, and an art library that puts NYPL’s resources to shame. But there are so few galleries. It is the number one city in terms of the coolest place to go, and for music, but not for visual art. I know why Houston was the art center. It has always had a very integrated sense of the city, in terms of ethnicity and urban development, certainly in terms of city code: a bar sits next to a residence building, sits next to frame shop, next to a church, next to a mausoleum. I think that with so few zoning laws, it made people more tolerant of their neighbors and more open. It causes people to think about how they are going to get along with whatever is happening next door.

In Dallas we are incredibly separated, and constructed to divide neighborhoods. The consequences are that when you go to most any cultural thing, it is predominately white, and that is a tragedy. And that’s got to change. The DMA has changed radically, because of its former director, Bonnie Pitman, who came in initially in the education department and she set about making people feel welcomed there. And if you go on the first Friday night of the month it is packed with a diverse mix of visitors. That’s what has to happen if you want a city that believes in itself and believes in the artists who are here. People have to feel that they are part of the whole. That’s always been on my agenda. Fort Worth is very independent and down-to-earth, and they really support what is going on there without looking to what’s happening in Dallas, although they don’t have many galleries. And of course they have these great museums like the Kimbell and The Fort Worth Modern. 

Is there a sense that an artist needs to leave Texas to gain notice, and has the forming of artist collaboratives arrested the movement of artists out of Dallas?  

Earlier, I would have said yes, if your intentions are to be successful and make a name, you’ve got to go to New York, and find exposure, get in the galleries there. Now, I think that is less the case. The groups of artists that have come together have created a sense of community and a sense that there is something here worth investing in. When you look at artists such as Arthur Peña, Francisco Moreno, Eli Walker, and others, they’re making good tracks, and getting attention. They have stayed right here, and have been self-motivated to make things happen. That’s what it’s about.

Stephen Lapthisophon has been of enormous importance, at the University of Texas at Arlington. He’s mentored a number of people — Jesse Morgan Barnett, Michael Mazurek, among them — who have plugged in right here and are really making things happen. Stephen has been really important in being a mentor, pushing people to get out there and do it. Younger artists have a different sense of who they are, and what the potential is and that anything is possible. You’re here? Dig in! It has fomented a different sense of energy for what is going on in the city.

Then you also have the mid-career artists who galleries and museums need to pay attention to, guys like Jay Sullivan and Robert Barsamian, who have been working hard and doing great work all along. So there is a balance to be found between supporting more established names and newer artists. We’ve just taken on Anthony Sonnenberg, who is fabulous, and I’m very excited about that; we dance with him, but we also have to make sure that we’re putting on really good shows for guys who have been with us for a long time. Making a community happen takes artists who are committed to being here, and doing things that are not commercial and engage us in different ways. And then galleries have to take risks, too. Anything can happen here in Texas: it’s part of the mystique but it’s the truth. And I have seen so many things come together in the last eight to 10 years to promote Dallas as a cultural city.

What do you rely on, recognize or look for in an artist? What tells you that you can work with them? 

I really want them to be decent people! [laughing] Why work with a cad? It’s my good fortune to work with artists who are the most generous people I know. I look for someone who I think is honest and who is willing to give as well as expect us to give. It is a two-way street! It has to also be work that I am stimulated by and causes me to ask questions and want to dig in more.

I want to make sure that one artist doesn’t overlap too much with another, so that each artist has some breathing room in their style or manner and there is nothing that is so close that it becomes uncomfortable. I like things to be distinctive. We have a broad spectrum of artists, and what delights me about that is that you never know what to expect here. I look for artists with a deep sense of craft, and that know how to put elements together. I don’t meant that it has to be meticulous because I also love work that is raw, but I am fascinated by intricacy and when it takes an almost manic energy to make the art happen, I’m very drawn to artists whose work consumes them.

What are you working on now, even outside of gallery exhibitions? What is exciting to you right now?

I stay involved with the Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas (CADD), of which there are 12 members. I, with others, have been really involved in trying to make the dealer group impact the community in ways that help artists and promote the idea of contemporary art. We do two events a year, one is the CADD FUNd, which is a soup dinner where we invite people to listen to six artists make presentations about projects they want to do that they don’t have money to do. The dinner costs $40, which goes into the pot, and then there is a vote at the end, someone wins, and they take the pot home. That is about engagement, which is important to me. We work at community outreach, we do bus tours to get people into private homes too as a way of looking at how and why people collect art. The LGBT Resource Center has just built a wonderful new building, and it’s been fun to work with artists to donate work to the center.

Community is important to me. These interests are about what a community can be.

The post “Why is everything going on here?”: Nancy Whitenack Talks Dallas Art appeared first on artcritical.

Carlos Rigau is a Cuban-American artist, raised in Miami’s Little Havana and currently based in Brooklyn. He works principally (though not exclusively) with the moving image and what he terms video-sculpture. Rigau co-founded and now runs General Practice, an experimental space in Bushwick dedicated to exploration and collaboration between artists. Rigau also hosts “General Practice Presents,” a New York cable access show filmed at BRIC studios and broadcast on Wednesdays at midnight. The program expands General Practice’s ethos toward collective behavior, and has featured interviews with the Jack Roy collective, artist-run music label Primitive Languages, and end/SPRING BREAK, a Miami/NY artist group.

Underpinning Rigau’s prodigious output is his natural facility as a charismatic social organizer. This manifests through his ability to bring people together via art events, after-parties, and openings, from the Lower East Side scene to major city institutions, where he often DJs. During Art Basel Miami in December, Rigau worked between his solo show, “Santa’s Toy Shop Goes to Cuba,”“at Meeting House, a presentation at Pulse Fair with LMAK Gallery, and an extensively covered — yet controversially cancelled — beachside performance called Dance of the Designer Refugee, for Untitled Fair in collaboration with Helper Gallery. 

Within his own practice, a founding interest and constant theme, is the subject of artifice. Rigau explains: “It’s to do with where I grew up. Artifice is a big part of Miami life, and accepting that aspect of the city is to acknowledge my own upbringing within it and how that background informs my work.”

It was during a trip to Las Vegas — a city that takes artifice to greater excess than perhaps anywhere else — that an informative irony was revealed to him. “I was standing there among these facsimiles of great buildings, these copies of European capitals and iconic works of art — the Sistine Chapel, the garish beauty, the pinging cacophony of slot machines. It just hit me, that it isn’t fake. The facsimile is more lifelike today, certainly in terms of our data selves and the skewed realities we present. The plasticity of Miami (or Las Vegas) is real and it is authentic and it is a great thing — not as a copy of the original Venice or New York, but great in and of itself.”

Relatedly, Rigau looks to the the darker side of Miami life: the extremes of social economics, lurid newspaper headlines, drug use, unusual behaviors. “Sensational things happen in Miami. Maybe it has something to do with its position as an apex of the Bermuda Triangle,” he says. “I love that aspect of Miami that is like an adolescent looking for attention.” This too percolates into his working method, so that a thread of discontent is extant. He asks “Why do so many weird things come out of the city?” He aims to locate the viewer in a moment where accepted understanding of one’s place in the corporeality of daily life is jarred or shaken by confrontation with the unexpected, the esoteric or even the mystical. “The frustration of the underclass and the anger permeating some of my work is an outcome of the artifice. It’s not an antidote — it’s an outcome. I want to create through artifice, and to create some kind of disturbance in the everyday.” That attitude is exemplified in Rigau’s current solo exhibition “Delusions Through Details” at LMAK Gallery in New York.

The exhibition consists of a single video sculpture with two projections, seen from opposite sides of the gallery. The films are housed in a box-like structure typical of department store-style Formica display pedestals. One video shows a window with an unremarkable urban view across city buildings. Through extensive editing, the scene becomes dislocated, as layers, including crackling bubble wrap, appear to obscure the window. Strange symbols of an unfamiliar language emerge on the panes, and spots of melting flames drip and sizzle in gravity-defying directions. The other screen shows a model skull on a white workbench, replete with hat and pin, in enigmatic, muted colors. An aproned figure standing behind the skull begins to break it apart, fingers frantically working, until it is in pieces, at which point the video reverses and the skull is marvelously reformed, as fragments of Styrofoam cranium weld back together.

Both videos are so painstakingly altered from their opening frames that visual understanding is arrested and any linear narrative of what is happening is corrupted. “Everyday materials sometimes are charged with something beyond their functionality,” he explains. “When I’m around bubble wrap, I want to pop it. It is at the point where your senses are fully engaged, that things start to feel otherworldly.” A potent aspect of the work is the seeming contradiction of quotidian items and magical symbolism. “Through editing and shooting, the image reveals optical tricks,” says Rigau, “as when a glass in front of the window ‘breaks’ and the viewer sees another layer of glass behind. Other times layers are removed by ‘cheesy’ artificial editing effects. These approaches to editing add up to an affect of disembodiment upon the viewer.”

“Some members of my family have practiced African-Caribbean religions such as Palo and Santeria. For example, you’re driving your new car and you feel under the seat and find that there’s a decorated coconut shell, and you think, How did that get there? It turns out to be a good-luck amulet — blessed, I believe, by Elegguá, the custodian spirit of travel — and placed there without telling the recipient, Rigau says, returning to his familial and cultural background in Little Havana to provide insight into this area of his work. “This interaction with an unknown realm pierces the humdrum of what we expect while driving from A to B. That has imbued me with an acceptance of a certain darkness in life. I’m not a practitioner of these beliefs, but they are a part of my early experience and I do think that there is a supernatural world, or a not visible or understood world.” 

Ultimately, Rigau considers artistic process to be art world language for what could be more accurately described as “ritual.” His ritual — subtly informed by autobiographical, magical and historical frameworks — involves a constant process of making and destroying within the physical backdrops he sets up for his videos, similar to the way that a priest or shaman would set up specific environments to aid the practice of their rites. The results are often mesmerizing spatial and dimensional experiences where visual uncertainty and symbolic motifs cause a temporary fusion between the familiar tropes of daily life, and unknown planes that may lie just beyond our comprehension.

The post Plastic Darkness: Carlos Rigau and His Work appeared first on artcritical.

DARREN JONES: What is the subject matter that forms the basis of your practice?

RYAN ROA: I’m really much more focused on the act of making than the finished object, the interaction between my body and the materials. It is about that impact and what results when those two elements connect. The creation of the final form comes out of that.

The works here convey strain, physicality, even potentially violence. Yet your adherence to line and architectonic beauty of form makes for an immensely graceful, harmonious body of work. Can you discuss these quite different characteristics?

They are opposing but complementary. For instance in military tactics you begin with a formation but then it moves into calamitous or chaotic situations. So a lot of my work begins with a system often of refined and considered lines, plot and balance. I base this on physics, engineering, and consideration of what happens when two objects come into contact with each other and then separate again. It may be a simple mathematical principle based on the measurements of a sheet of expanded steel, or the points I set up to begin my geometric drawings, but when they are in place I can then detach from conscious decision making, and get down to a raw emotional state of reacting to the material. I liken it to a boxer stepping into the ring. You take your skill, your past training, but when the match begins you just go, and whatever happens, happens. The resulting object is the record of that process.

There is a working class, urban New Jersey bent to your character that embodies grit, perseverance and survival. There is a confidence that can even border on arrogance. It would all fit well into a Bruce Springsteen lyric [laughter]. And you’ve already mentioned the military and boxing. How much do your experiences and personal environment filter into your work?

Well I think that is true. A lot of times I say that I use my studio in the way that an athlete would use the gym for training, and later, the work comes to fruition when there is an exhibition, when it needs to be seen. So then when I am making my pieces in the gallery or museum I’ll often ask to be left alone in the space so that I can go through the exploration of creating the piece in solitude. And these character traits that you mention and my history and background do play into the process. There is an ongoing encounter, physically and emotionally, as I contemplate that relationship.

You have been filmed during the installation of your last two solo shows tussling with the work, getting cut, fighting with the medium as you pin it into place. You’re bleeding and tired at the end of it. Is there a competition going on here?

Yes, there is. There is in a sense a direct combat with the material where there is a push/pull and where we are sometimes working against each other. Neither side is willing to give, but then at times we are going in the same direction. There is energy and there is friction: the anvil on which my practice is forged.

There is the material, and you, but then there is a third element, the universal forces determining the state of all matter. Aren’t the unseen laws of physics also your medium?

Yeah. And to me it’s almost a metaphor for life, the way they surround us all the time. We are subject to scientific principles, mechanics, gravity, force, tension. And we aren’t always aware of it. For instance a car hitting you when you are checking you phone on a New York street. What happens then? Encountering something that impedes upon you and completely changes your day, your plan, or your life. So in my work I am trying to capture that uncertainty, that moment of possible unraveling, where the work is being held together, but the substance or matter could snap back and hit you in some unexpected way if it wasn’t secured. During the making of my work it is me who could be injured or affected in some way, so when that does happen I am almost a victim of what I am creating.

Or the viewer?

By the time it comes to an exhibition the work is secured and totally safe. I’d never have any intention of injuring anyone with the work.

Never? [laughter]. Wouldn’t that be the resolution of the work. The final act of what you are doing, to move from potential to actual connection, literal not metaphorical contact with the viewer?

Well I guess I’m more interested in the potential, rather than the resolution [laughter]. But yes, that is always there. There are times when the material has lashed out or gashed a hole in the wall as I am trying to figure it out. But that allows me to understand the steel better, or whatever I’m working with, and how it moves and reacts to pressure and external force.

A lot in the work seems autobiographical. The work is skeletal. It is mesh and line that you can see through. It is like a body, your body, albeit mechanical. These are the bones, the nuts and bolts of a person. Over there the bungee sculptures are ribcages, the steel objects are suspended organs, the plasterboard piece is skin. Are you wrestling with yourself here?

A lot of what I am interested in is capturing the struggle, it is the idea of trauma and how trauma affects a person. I do have a melancholy outlook due to my life experiences. You mentioned earlier the tension or violence and I want to not suppress it but release it into the work. I wouldn’t call this therapeutic, and it isn’t consciously autobiographical but it’s almost inevitable. It is about taking on a conflict and then leaving that energy behind in the work. The residue of past events in life is always a kind of ghost in the room. And there is something I like to get into which is the notion of facade, what we show the world, so a lot of the materials I use are what is hidden inside a building – steel, wood etc – that isn’t meant to be seen. It is the structure underneath, but here I am presenting it in its base state

The materials you use and the formal aspects of your installations are redolent of the minimalist and conceptualist canon. Frank Stella, Carl Andre, Robert Morris and company. How do you – indeed, do you – distinguish yourself from those artists?

A lot of my work has an art historical reference that I am aware of. It is an investigation of sculpture and the object and where that can go. I go all the way back to Rodin, and his removal of stone, or Brancusi who made the pedestal a part of the work. I like the simplicity of everyday industrial materials. But beyond the formalist tendencies of the finished piece what I am really interested in is the emotion of the action, the history of the act of manufacture. That is important to me, whereas minimalist works are often about no feeling or a feeling of blankness. Minimalism sought to remove itself from the human or the corporeal, whereas I embrace that and I think that is where I break from the minimalist canon. I am seeking expression and self.

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DARREN JONES: What drew you to Fire Island as a subject for this body of work?

GABRIEL MARTINEZ: As a child growing up in Little Havana, Miami, I was first introduced to Fire Island through the Village People’s song of the same name. I was just nine years old when that song came out in 1977. I was instinctively drawn to the image of masculinity on the cover of the album, the song’s rhythmic disco beat and to the lyrics: “Don’t go in the bushes/Someone might grab ya…” I had a subtle sense of what those lines referred to. It took me 36 years to actually step foot upon this mythical location, and I’m still not sure if it actually exists.

For most of my artistic career, I’ve investigated various themes related to masculinity from a Queer perspective. Lately, I’ve been specifically focused on Queer history, with a particular interest in the time period between Stonewall and 1981, including Donna Summer, AIDS, the films of Wakefield Poole, the novels of John Rechy, and now Fire Island. I’m intrigued by the national sites of particular importance to the history of gay culture.

What is Fire Island to you?

It’s a place of intense beauty and sorrow. It’s a living memorial, a sacred space, a state of mind.

Fire Island is rife with personal transformative encounters and shared collective experiences. I want the exhibition to reflect both points of view.

The title of the show is redolent of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945) — a story that while in a different time, deals with a lifestyle and environment hitherto unknown to the narrator. The story touches on homosexuality, desire and nostalgia. It is observed of Brideshead Castle that it had “”the atmosphere of a better age.” How did you come to choose the title?

Any associations with Waugh’s novel are conscious, yet general and loose. I worked closely and collaboratively with John Caperton, the Print Center’s Jensen Bryan Curator, on all aspects of the exhibition, including the title. This show is presented as part of the Center’s Centennial, and so an exploration of history itself, in various dimensions, is an integral aspect of the exhibition. For instance, the beginnings of the island’s Cherry Grove as a safe haven for queer people can be traced back to the mid 1930s. The show also explores issues deeply interrelated to narration, homosexual desire, camaraderie and nostalgia.

Fire Island is associated primarily with the summer season. You have included winter scenes in the exhibition — silence, desolation, aloneness. Why did you expand the exhibition into a time of year that so few have experienced?

Traveling to Cherry Grove or Fire Island Pines via the ferry from Sayville during the winter months is impossible. The bay is usually frozen. I wanted to experience this sense of impossibility and to explore the quality of the island, by myself, during a moment that is the polar opposite of the high season. s a sort of pilgrimage, I hiked five hours in freezing temperatures from Robert Moses Park to reach Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines. What I discovered was isolated and solemn, yet powerfully charged. I wanted these images to present an atmospheric antithesis of the festive social scene that was/is Fire Island. I created multi-layered hybrid prints (silkscreen, inkjet and silver leaf) that evoke and mirror a sense of what I felt that particular day: decay, tragedy and trauma.

Mythology is a major currency in the perception and story of Fire Island. It is a place that almost seems to evaporate as soon as you are back in “reality.” How much does the concept of that place conflict with or complement the actuality of it in your work?

This factors greatly in “Bayside Revisited.” Once you enter through Donna Summer, your journey begins. The space is dimly lit alluding to a nocturnal experience. The soundtrack to Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand permeates the space with angelic voices. You are within the fantasy. Stepping back out of the main exhibition space, you are coldly reminded of the paradise to which you immediately long to return.

By projecting an original copy of Boys in the Sand onto a mirrored ball you splinter it into a kaleidoscope, giving tantalizing glimpses rather than a full screen. Why?

I’m indebted to the source material and at the same time feel that it’s imperative for me to transform it. By projecting the 16mm print the film disperses into the realm of the cosmos, day into night. The images seem to radiate around you, enveloping the viewer. The wall onto which the film is projected via the mirror ball is coated with sand from the Meat Rack [a section of the island known for public sex], and glitter. Both the ephemeral and tangible are depicted.

The viewer enters the exhibition through a wall-to-wall curtain of Donna Summer in ecstatic voice against a blazing sunset: it’s carnivalesque, implying something to be discovered on the other side. It could be illusionary, supernatural or historical. What do you intend to communicate through the supernatural or magical artifice inherent in the subject?

On July 7, 1979, Donna Summer was scheduled to perform before an audience of 5,000 adoring gay men on the oceanfront there, but she canceled last minute. Many speculated that the “queen of disco,” growing increasingly religious, did not want to be so directly connected or associated with the gay community.

Last year, I placed her iconic Live and More (1978) album cover on the Fire Island seashore and let the waves drag her away. Through photography, Summer now posthumously performs on the island for the first time ever.

That image has been converted into a curtain that signals the beginning of your journey through the exhibition. I definitely intended to set up a kind of funhouse atmosphere resplendent with wonder and excitement, with just a touch of anxiety and apprehension. You’re entering Neverland; let the Peter Pan Syndrome take over.

There is the vaguest sense that you long for a Fire Island that no longer exists. You are too young to have been there in its ‘70s heyday, and it is understandable for men of our generations to wish to have seen a pre-AIDS Fire Island. How do you negotiate the distance between you and the times you portray?

I look back at the ‘70s with a great sense of admiration and empathy. It was a time of intense struggle, but also of outrageous courage and creativity. Yes, I wish to have lived though that era, and at the same time grateful that I came out when I did, in the mid ‘80s.

The theme of AIDS has been embedded in my multidisciplinary projects from the outset of my career. I have created works that pay homage to those who perished since the start of the epidemic. I have also created various works dedicated to the memory of those who have lost their lives while seeking freedom from oppression.

Lately, I find myself positioned in the middle, both as a mid-career artist and as an openly gay Latino man centered between the older and younger generations. I sympathize greatly with the older generation, a group of individuals who fought so vehemently, faced such animosity and experienced such profound loss. I liken my current role as an artist to that as conduit between the two generations, as inter-generational mediator.

“Gabriel Martinez: Bayside Revisited” is on view at the Print Center, Philadelphia, through December 19. For more information please visit printcenter.org/100

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Who’s Afraid of Chuck and George? at CentralTrak

February 13 to April 4, 2015
800 Exposition Avenue (at Ash Lane)
Dallas, 214 824 9302

For 25 years Brian K. Jones and Brian K. Scott, have collaborated as the Texas-based artistic partnership known as Chuck and George. The duo incorporate a wide range of media — including animation, found material, illustration, painting and sculpture — to build their kaleidoscopic world of fairground macabre, corrupted Grimm’s tales, surrealist environments and loyal legions of heraldic grotesques, with “the Brians” themselves acting as Pied Piper ringmasters to their gargoyle cavalcade.

Chuck and George’s current exhibition at CentralTrak, The University of Texas at Dallas Artist Residency, was organized by the program’s director Heyd Fontenot, and consists of more than 80 works, almost all of them from 2014, made by the artists’ friends and colleagues in tribute to the longevity and inventiveness of their personal and professional relationships. As with much of the Brians’ own work which includes often-distorted self portraiture and altered depictions of their bodies within domestic or imagined spaces, this exhibition continues a theme of the artists as subject. As a fortification of their homey intentions the exhibition is located not in CentralTrak’s expansive white-walled gallery, but in the narrow hallway behind it which leads to the studios of resident artists. This domiciliary scale, allied with walls decorated by the couple to mimic their Oak Cliff home, meant that the opening night seemed more like a packed house party than a vernissage, with the exhibition functioning more as a roguish family album. In fact, the Brians’ home could be considered the third member of Chuck and George. It operates as dwelling, muse, studio, evolving large-scale installation, museum, and social hub for the local art scene. Its enchanted nooks and crannies are a magical trove of sculptures, figurines, artworks, collectibles, and decorated furniture, giving it the atmosphere of a warm, Technicolor version of Rocky Horror’s Frankenstein Place.

Many works here hint at the subsumption of singular identities into one, lending insight into contributors’ perceptions of the artists’ connectedness: A startling drawing, Chuck and George of Finland by Jason Cohen, presents the Brians as a hyper-masculine figure, their heads sharing a muscular chest, ripped torso and enormous endowment protruding from open jeans. A pair of languid fabric sculptures sitting on a mantelpiece, Brian Scott Doll and Brian Jones Doll by Gillian Bradshaw Smith, are naked but for their sneakers, with Jones’s likeness positioned so that a hand delves into his rather non-plussed partner’s nether regions. And a fiery Goya-esque portrait by Mark Ross, titled Chuck and George, merges their faces so that they have one eye each, while sharing a third, in reference to mythological tropes from Cyclopes to the Graeae. Here the Brians are presented either as so close as to share the sense of sight, or to be struggling against further integration. In J.D Talasek’s photograph of the artists circa 2000, called Brian and Brian, they sit vulnerably, again naked, huddled against each other with knees drawn to their chests, staring wide-eyed out at the viewer, their poses and expressions presenting an image of spiritual unification, inquisitive but nervous. They may have been older than they look at the time but the impression remains of adolescent disquiet.

Through such works the exhibition becomes an artistic microcosm akin to the Granada Television series Seven Up (1964 – present), which follows 14 British children throughout their lives from the age of 7, and has so far spanned 49 years. Within these dozens of artworks, themes can be discerned and timelines plotted through which we all must travel: youthful wonder and fear at the world observing us; sexual awakening; the eternal grappling with our individual meaning and what happens to that selfhood when it is met by another; aging, aspirations, inevitable disappointments and corporeal decline are all touched upon beneath the initial visual sauciness of this character-full firmament.

Inevitably recalling artists of past (or alleged) relevance whose work is themselves or at least draws heavily from their actual or politicized physicality — the turgid Gilbert & George and Tim Noble & Sue Webster spring tiresomely to mind — the injection of fantastical whimsy and dark cartoonism by the Brians and their friends infuses their production with humility and mirth, thereby rejecting the staggering pomposity of those pretentious Londoners. While the subject of egotism cannot be ignored in “Who’s Afraid of Chuck and George?” where the work is centered so heavily on the protagonists, a small black-and-white image of an anus by Jesse Meraz, titled Wink, offers a critical opening. It could be seen as an event horizon of self-subsumption, through which the above-mentioned British artists and their suffocating contrivances slid long ago. While the gravitational drag of this particular rabbit-hole can be felt within the Chuck and George universe, they are kept from plummeting through it, by their deftness in tempering vanity with vagary and accessibility. They do not attempt to set themselves up as aloof pseudo-shamanistic oracles, but rather through the veracity of their output, they offer the opportunity to glean insight into our own earthly trajectories.

The post Dallas in Wonderland: Chuck and George at CentralTrak appeared first on artcritical.

January 29 to March 8, 2015
245 Broome Street (at Ludlow St.)
New York, 212 228 1600

New York-based artist Scooter LaForge paints his subjects — among them floral arrangements, marvelous creatures, fairytale vignettes, friends and pop cultural motifs — with a fluidity and generosity that beguiles. Through his technicolored cornucopias run an honesty and vibratory sense of celebration that make the paintings seem as much invitations to the viewer to experience his world, as they are artworks. Yet his engagement with darker matter, the gleeful macabre, as well as the depth of sentiment in the faces of his sitters, positions him as a soulful chronicler of emotive gravitas.

The theme of “Travels with Johnny,” his second solo exhibition with Munch Gallery, is a 2013 journey by road across the United States, for which LaForge was joined by his friend, the photographer Johnny Rozsa, and Rozsa’s three dogs. Initially recording scenes that appealed to him through photographs and sketches made during the trip, the artist continued work over the last year and a half on the 15 pieces shown here, all of which were completed in 2014.

Such trips in the United States often impress because of the romantic vastness of the country — an elusive experience to relay in any medium. Ironically, LaForge conveys such melancholy grandeur in several works through surprisingly intimate details and by suggesting less the landscape itself, but rather the sobering perspective, and the brevity, of our lives within it. Road Side Memorial With Virgin Mary (Bisbee, AZ), Black Spider Web, and Bullet Hole in Window, each depict modestly scaled remains of emotionally resonant events which might have remained unnoticed on such an expedition were it not for LaForge’s near-gnostic observational humility. This is effective far beyond so many impoverished press releases that futilely try to convince us that an artist has — often through folly and enormity — evoked the sublime.

Unanimity with the great thrum of nature emanates from Self Portrait Yellow and Self Portrait Pink, which employ closely cropped background environments of trees, sky, and ground, the former during the day, and the latter, at night. This compositional device increases the viewer’s proximity and (allied with a riotous palette of pinks, greens and blues that present the natural and the human in similar tones) reflects each in the other as symbiotic parts of the cosmos. The impact of this immense individual experience is realized then by LaForge’s deftness with his subject, rendering unnecessary the need to illustrate any physical greatness through which he traveled. The human within the natural world is a topic further explored in a picture of the artist’s niece, Dausi in a Field of Flowers. Here the scene is more expansive, with the blue sky and meadow joining at the horizon. There is a transcendental quality within the breezy lightness of this work, its floral plain hinting at more than the merely earthbound, and a reference perhaps to a charged familial reunion that occurred during the trip, an acknowledgment of the poignancy and passage of time.

Bear and Roadside Tornado conjures elemental foreboding with its livid black, pink and pale yellows as symbols of meteorological power loom in the form of lightning, roiling skies and a twister. In the center, between a large bear and the tornado, a road stretches into the distant fire of the horizon. This work, considered along with a smaller painting, Mystery Machine in the Middle of Moab Desert, Utah, illustrates a darkly carnivalesque aspect of LaForge’s oeuvre. The title refers to the van used by Scooby-Doo and his friends, while reminding us of the artist’s own canine companions. Bear and Roadside Tornado calls to mind the mounting suspense of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked this Way Comes (1962), wherein calamitous atmospheric conditions presage the characters’ travails. Taken with the lighter touch of the Mystery Machine’s intrepid gang of animated adventurers, LaForge might be regarded here as an enigmatic Jim Nightshade, the investigative protagonist of his own alluring traveling show; the evolving landscapes reflecting shifts between light and gloom within us all.

While many people today would present such an odyssey through heavily edited social media accounts, culling only the most advantageous shots, LaForge has kept a different kind of diary, one refreshingly emancipated from the anxious shackling of posts and likes. He transmits instances of uncontrived beauty and introspection that require no shoehorning of contextual meaning to buttress the work’s relevance, the hallmark of so much pedestrian painting today. Such openness of heart and intuitive choice of imagery are rare and even courageous traits in an often-cynical art world, and through LaForge, they underpin the veracity of this exhibition.

The post States of Mind: Scooter LaForge Paints Cross-Country appeared first on artcritical.

Considering the clamorous and literally unbelievable results of the life-editing that has corrupted our presentations of who we are — replacing them on social media with desperate assertions of who we would like to be seen as — rather than contrive a list of what I would prefer my topmost visited sites to be, thereby concocting some intellectual fantasy about myself, I remonstrate here against digital self-denial and provide the list of my actual recent most visited sites, and what impact they have on my life as an artist. They are in no particular order.

www.pornmd.com

This site is the Kayak of porn, alleviating of hours whirring about the web in frustration, by efficiently finding the pornographic clips that a person most responds to. Type in the word or phrase that you are looking for, and it searches all the top porn sites in an instant. It even makes suggestions. PornMD frees up oceans of time for considering my next exhibition, while simultaneously offering up the male physique as artistic inspiration. And anyway, it’s on doctor’s orders.

Kate Bush Youtube/Google searches

She is only considered bizarre or banshee-like by incompetent journalists without the capacity to consider a songwriter/singer existing beyond the narrowly defined societal prescriptions of what a female artist ought to be.

The worlds, sentiments and experiences that she has conjured through her intellectual, sonic and visual individualism have been a constant source of reference to me since youth, outstripping that of any visual artist. The two minutes and seven seconds of “Under the Ivy” (1985) are among her most excruciatingly beautiful retreats. Bush is one of three principal figures who anchor my artistic sensibilities by forming a trajectory of sweeping gothicism across art, music and literature; the others are Emily Bronte and Casper David Friedrich.

Wikipedia entry on Scottish castles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_castles

Having left Scotland at age 19 to live among the tumult of London and New York, I often long for the solitude, brooding history, and enchantment of my ancient home. When the rigors of urban life mount, I’m afforded distance from the present by an Internet journey back in time through the presence of spellbinding buildings that embody the gruesome, captivating march of humanity.

Castles have lent me an artistic dowry since I was young and spent time investigating ruins, searching for secret tunnels and seeking the supernatural. The experience of such places endows the mind with boundless imaginative force, lowering the divisions between reality and the mythological. Related artworks include Portrait as a Gargoyle (2013), photographed at the Tolkien-esque Castle Glume, situated above the Burns (rivers) of Sorrow and Care in the Ochil Hills; and Portrait as the Devil (2014), taken at Glamis Castle, and referencing the Devil’s visit there one stormy night to play cards on the Sabbath with the fiery Earl of Crawford.

www.wordsmith.org

Words are to me what clay is to a sculptor. As a text-oriented artist, words are the pleasure and pain of my existence. The limitless potential that text contains for communication, connection and harm, positions words as the most powerful tools for construction, and weapons of destruction, that humans possess. This website remains a source of delight, humor and alternate truths in relation to my ongoing series of anagrammatized vinyls.

www.darrenjonesart.com

Physical exhibitions of contemporary art in galleries have been around for perhaps 200 years. They ideally present much art, which is often created with consideration as to how it will appear in the gallery. It’s hard to imagine now, but they may not always exist. The computer disseminates work far more efficiently and to a larger audience than a traditional gallery, while the computer screen need no longer be considered a virtual gallery but an effective and autonomous exhibition space. If the requirement to experience the work in person is reduced or eliminated, and if the sentiment or intention of the work can be liberated from the physical and adequately conveyed across the internet, then the need for an actual site is lessened. I visit my website a lot, to regard and refine the work, and what I say about it. It is a working platform not dissimilar to an artist taking up residence in a gallery space. It functions as a studio, and a place to present work, ideas and observations that are sometimes fabricated and pictured in situation as completed pieces, but increasingly that exist entirely in sketch, or conceptual format on the screen.

www.maploco.com

Maploco enables viewers to create personalized maps of the states, countries or continents that they have visited by clicking to highlight each territory. The thrill (or disappointment) lasts about 10 seconds. By inserting various maps into photoshop, cutting, resizing, flipping and rearranging various regions I have formed a series of geographic motifs that include responses to empire, gay marriage and the recent tragic events in France.

www.thesaurus.com

Another marvelous tool for an artist enamored with vocabulary and words, who also writes about art. Clichéd phrases and art-world gibberish so quickly become bankrupt husks exhausted of impact and meaning, and deft new ways of saying something are refreshing. However, there are artists whose descriptions of their work are so stuffed with superlatives and overwrought language that they are downright fuliginous… I mean opaque.. I mean, well, confusing.

www.logolalia.com

Concrete poetry is the use of visual or typographical arrangements or patterns of words to convey the meaning of a poem or text. It wasn’t an art form I was familiar with until discovering this site, which is a portal to some brilliant, simple combinations of word, image and meaning.

The post Aural Sex: Kate Bush, Word Play and Towering Old Erections appeared first on artcritical.

Spencer Finch is well known for installations that reflect and alter perceptions of light and color. Typically they are installed in glass atriums or windows, and consist of colored gels or panels that act as intermediaries between external and internal chromatic effects. Finch often employs a scientific approach, gathering information on the intensity of color that is absorbed by a site, the movement of sunlight throughout a space, or the refractive qualities of water or clouds, translating the data into vibrant, kinetic works that immerse the viewer in kaleidoscopic silhouettes.

His current installation, “A Certain Slant of Light,” at the Morgan Library & Museum, consists of hundreds of square film panels affixed on all sides throughout the four-story glass walls of the Morgan’s Gilbert Court. As sunlight moves around the space each day, and during the seasons, it filters through the panels, sometimes casting intensely colored beams. Suspended from the ceiling, 12 clear glass panels turn slowly, transmitting further migratory reflections.

The piece takes its conceptual framework from books of hours — popular from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance — of which the Morgan holds the country’s most extensive collection. These were often lavishly illustrated prayer books containing several parts including, most importantly, the Hours of the Virgin, from which books of hours derive their name. This was a series of prayers to be recited throughout the day to the mother of Christ, who was regarded as an intercessor between humanity and God. They can be regarded as the iPhones of their day: religiously venerated, checked multiple times a day, directing life by the hour, and providing essential texts. A calendar was also a standard feature, not defined by 365 numerical dates as we would use, but structured around the feast days of saints, and events in the life of Jesus. The most important of these liturgical dates throughout each 12-month cycle were written in red, hence the origin of the term “red letter day.”

“A Certain Slant of Light” is intended to operate as a calendar of sorts, as well as an optical feast. When calendars in books of hours were illustrated, they depicted the traditional labors of each month, with color palettes varying according to those seasonal tasks. Finch has allocated a season to each side of Gilbert Court and varied the palette of his panels accordingly. The north wall is winter, the east is spring, the south is summer, and west, autumn. Throughout are intensely hued red panels, in reference to the most vital of dates in books of hours, only here they represent secular instances that Finch finds compelling — such as Isaac Newton’s birthday — and that were planned to align at noon with the sun’s trajectory on those dates.

The conceptual panoply upon which this project rests is magnificent: it spans centuries, draws directly from among the greatest canonical manuscripts, gleans motifs from the crowning events of religious history, while utilizing astronomy and the photonic power of our home star to ignite it. Even the press release conjures the sublime; though it is perhaps this illustrious framing that causes a sense of deficiency to come to light.

On a sunny day the visual allure of the piece is enjoyable, and it can be appreciated for this alone, but while many visitors may be only peripherally aware of the culture surrounding books of hours, the more one understands of them, the more derivative the installation becomes. The paralleling of colors, seasons and calendars istight and clever, but predictably, superficially so, as thin conceptualism often is when employed to imbue contemporary art with meaning and a patina of relevance. Here, it is insufficient to grant the piece its own authority or self-confidence when set against the mystical historicism surrounding Finch’s source material.

Despite the artist’s meticulous approach, there are practical incongruities that undermine the conceptual integrity. Knowledge of the work’s lofty inspiration doesn’t prevent its visual proximity to the kind of empty decorative design found in shopping malls — something Gilbert Court’s architecture convincingly emulates — where coloring vast glass swathes is an easy solution to transform bland environments. Furthermore, on overcast days the work is rendered disappointingly dormant.

Two of the four sides of the court are glass curtain walls with expansive connection to the sky beyond, effective backdrops for Finch’s panels. But the winter season is located on an internal glass wall that fronts offices. These panels are duller and, if the blinds are up, people can distractingly be seen working at their desks. Hopefully this isn’t explained as being passable because winter is a darker time. Autumn fares even worse, diminished and fragmented by the architecture where there are no substantial areas of glass, presenting an unwelcome contrast with how well the two external walls function.

Perhaps it was by necessity of having to fit in 365 panels, but placing them on the glass elevator seems excessive. Considering the sun’s stately influence and the sedate movement of light and color around the room, witnessing the elevator panels comparatively racing up and down is corrupting to almost comical effect. They are literally taken out of context. The work could be in place for a year and maintenance on such a long-term installation is important — peeling, bubbled panels cheapen the impression dreadfully. These points may seem like trifles, but collectively they undermine the work’s coherence and precision, separating it from the immense detail and quality that epitomize the artifacts from which Finch draws.

A larger question here is whether or not it is advisable in every instance for modern artists to reference as they please from art history just because they can or a site lends itself to it. When done with wit or social perspicacity it can initiate progressive dialog and render art valuable beyond economic worth elevating it into the canon. Grayson Perry, Kehinde Wiley, and Francis Bacon all engaged with art of the past to make fascinating cultural commentary. Alternatively, the Chapman Brothers’ smug, petulant vandalism of a series of Goya prints serves only to highlight their own vacuous posturing and artistic bankruptcy.

In selecting to operate between past and present, don’t contemporary artists have a responsibility to themselves, and their audience, to forge a meaningful relationship between eras, and excavate significant reason for doing so, or risk exposing their efforts as lackluster and flimsy in the face of the reverence bestowed upon art that has withstood the mercurial tastes of ages? Technical and visual execution must also uphold the artist’s intent.

Finch’s installation lacks the emotive capacity to fuel as much interest or controversy as some of the above-mentioned artists did, and while he was not trying to recreate an extant book of hours, that doesn’t absolve him of responsibility to the vast gravity of his source. “A Certain Slant of Light” siphons the language and culture of the masters who created such tomes, and that it draws any lineage with those treasures is to its grievous detriment.

The post Lite Installation: Spencer Finch at The Morgan appeared first on artcritical.

Born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1920, Lygia Clark was deeply influential in her native country, but remains lesser known internationally. Trained under the modernist landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, Clark’s early abstract, geometric paintings plot a trajectory that increasingly corrupts the unity of two-dimensional imagery. The 1960s saw her producing sculptures aligned with Neo-Concretist and empiric principles, and her later output coincided with a period of psychoanalysis, focusing on various objects intended as conductors of direct experience with participants, as well as the performative application of materials directly to the body. MoMA’s current exhibition, “Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988,” is organized around these themes.

1952 marks a rapid progression from Clark’s heavier Cubist tendencies — seen in the comparatively cumbrous Composição (“Composition,” 1952) — to a more precise approach, employed in a series of gouache works on cardboard and paper and an oil on canvas, including Composição, versão 01 (1953). The latter consists of layered triangular planes in greens, blues and oranges, bisecting each other in a multiplicity of harmonious shards that bristle with dynamism, leading the eye beyond the edge of the work. The balanced, interlocking grids of Composição no. 2 (1954), and the spectral grace of Composição 1 (1954), illustrate the subsumption of Clark’s architectural influences, and the legacy of her modern predecessors, such as Malevich, Tatlin, Mondrian and Braque, within the concerns of her own emerging visual language.

In her series Quebra da moldura (“Breaking the Frame”), Clark eschewed structural standards by including the frame as an element of the painting, at once collapsing and revealing the space between them — what she called the “organic line” — by breaching it with abstract motifs extended across the gap. In doing so Clark achieved a kind of pictorial hydrostatic equilibrium exemplified in the stark joists of Quebra da moldura (P x B), versão 01 (“Breaking the Frame [P x B], version 01,” 1954).

The remainder of the ‘50s was largely devoted to the series Superfície moduladas (“Modulated Surfaces”)and Planos em superfície moduladas (“Planes on Modulated Surfaces”). Through the use of juxtaposed geometrical forms and the constancy of the organic line, these works further rupture the flat surface. Several pieces of the former series depict jagged patterns of industrial paint on wood, tightly set against each other like a puzzle. Typically in blues, greens and black, they are redolent of the dazzle camouflage found in naval deception, with Superfície modulada no. 20 (1956) being a particularly compelling example.

The latter series consists primarily of black-and-white paintings and studies, often formed by cutting and pasting larger paper elements onto paper backgrounds. Optically, these works appear wholly three-dimensional, while their unfolding angles can be seen as predecessors of her later Neo-Concretist sculptures. Several pieces from 1957 are presented in Plexiglas mounts perpendicular to the wall, so that both sides can be viewed. Noteworthy is a suite of similar works called Study for Espaço modulado (“Study for Modulated Space”), collages that are totemic in nature, emanating spiritual gravitas through the confident simplicity of their design.

In 1959, Clark was a signatory of the Neo-Concretist Manifesto, published in the Jornal do Brasil newspaper, which rejected the mathematical Concretist principles of non-referential abstraction, denial of the natural world, and machine-like detachment from sentiment. The Neo-Concretists claimed instead that the art object could only be fully understood by a tactile, phenomenological approach and a relationship with the audience. Her Bichos (“Critters”) from the early 1960s were her invitation for the viewer to engage directly with her work. Dozens of these aluminum sculptures are assembled, often evoking animal or plant forms. Each piece consists of multiple reflective shields, hinged across the still-present organic lines between them and capable of being manipulated into different iterations. Relógio de sol (“Sundial,” 1960), with its eons-evoking gold patina, and Projeto para um planeta (“Project for a Planet,” 1963) are standouts.

From the mid-sixties, coinciding with an increasing interest in psychotherapy, Clark rejected the effectiveness of conventional artworks as modes of expression, radically relocating her intellectual focus toward the dissolution of emotional and actual space between sensorial vessels and the human body, through what Clark termed “Propositions.” They include Diálogo: óculos (“Dialogue: Goggles,” 1968), a pair of connected goggles for two people, with reflective surfaces causing an altered sense of surrounding and connection, and A casa é o corpo: penetração, ovulação, germinação, expulsão (“The House is the Body: Penetration, Ovulation, Germination, Expulsion,” 1968), a thrilling and consuming fusion of Clark’s aims, in which visitors pass through various chambers — including darkened sections where one initially cannot see — furnished variously with balloons, soft fabrics, blown air and rubber balls, in a manner intended to evoke the birthing process. Baba antropofágica (“Anthropophagic slobber,” 1973) is one of several works recreated by facilitators, here involving reels of thread unraveled from their mouths and dropped upon a near-naked decumbant participant. The resultant cobweb is then torn up in an act of physical separation and social conjoining.

By her transference from the individual object, to public, emotive connectivity between multiple participants, Clark can be seen as a progenitor of the shared feelings, reactions and perceptions of reality, disseminated today through social media. A difference is that the bodily locus of her interactive works ensures that their experiential efficacy cannot yet be imitated by the immaterial nature of Internet-based relationships as one sits alone at a computer. Clark retains profound resonance, in part because the intimacy and physicality through which she operated speak to opposing concerns about detachment and isolation, allied with loss of control and privacy over ourselves, in an increasingly virtual arena.

While the title of the show is dramatic, it would be unrealistic to say that artistic production was absent entirely from Clark’s later endeavors; rather her practice evolved drastically upon the shifting emotional sands of her personal experiences, to a point where in her words, “The work is the act.” Also, without any works originating after 1976 — only a couple are listed as “1976-1988” — the neat 40-year span of this exhibition seems a stretch. Either Clark abandoned art making as she claimed, or she did not. The organizers’ position on this is confusing. Almost 300 works, in combination with the immense breadth and scope of Clark’s oeuvre, make this retrospective an enlightening trove, but its presentation is exceedingly dense and would have benefitted from more space. Constraining an artistic legacy as abundant as Clark’s, within such modest volume, underserves this riveting artist.

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