June 21 to August 5, 2016
519 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 7100

In 1975, Bas Jan Ader disappeared while sailing the Atlantic. This sail was the second part of his trilogy In Search of the Miraculous. Part one is comprised of 18 black-and-white photographs of the artist walking through various parts of Los Angeles at night. The third part never happened. Metro Pictures’ exhibition includes several photographs, two wall-drawing installation pieces, and two short films and reveals that Ader’s work is still relevant, pointed, droll, and strange — perhaps more so now than in 1970s California. The mysterious details of his disappearance create an added allure, even over 40 years after his death. However, it’s not necessary (and perhaps impossible) to separate the details of his death from his life and work, as his work is a confluence of autobiography and conceptualism wherein the viewer follows the artist while he walks, searches, and falls. While I was in the gallery, I overheard someone ask the attendant: “So what do you think, is he dead or not?” I couldn’t make out the response.

Ader’s work edges action and inaction. He illustrates what happens when gravity takes over: the elements get free and the body falls. This might be why his work feels so natural: it feels more like a practice than a performance. In the understated photographs of documented falls, I feel as if I’m watching a person practice falling. Another way of saying this might be: I’m watching a person decide to let gravity take over. Or, finally: I’m watching a person practice dying . It’s funny. Ader’s body is lean and tree-like, making the falls comical and graceful. He falls off of a roof, off of a bridge and into water (one frame depicts only the aftermath, a splash), and he falls from a standing position to a lying down position with no middle information. We never see him get up from the fall. Instead, the photographs end at the bodiless frame — all gravity.

These understated photographs line the walls leading to Please don’t leave me (1969). In this first installation, light bulbs and wire highlight the title’s words, painted on the wall. This politely sad command reminds me that Ader is the subject of his work and he is never not alone. And it’s not only the artist who falls, it’s everything. In Untitled (Tea Party) (1972), six color photographs are aligned vertically. In this first image, Ader sits outside under a cardboard box. The box is propped up by a stick and Ader sips from a teacup. The sequence shows the box’s fall after the stick’s removal. The final photograph depicts a box in the field. The artist is presumably under the box. He makes a situation and then allows for its undoing. He sets himself up as the subject and then leaves.

The gallery’s passageway holds a monitor, which plays a short color video, Primary Time (1974). The frame holds the middle section of Ader’s body. The artist is dressed in all black, arranging a set of flowers in a vase. The flowers are red save for a few yellow and one blue. This repetitive action creates a bridge to the second installation piece, Thoughts unsaid, then forgotten (1973), where a tripod, a vase filled with flowers, and a clamp-on lamp sit around the title words. The work is melancholic but is not weighted with gravitas. Untitled (The Elements) (1971/2003), depicts a large seascape with a cliff at sunset. Ader’s body stands in the approximate middle. He faces the camera and holds a sign reading “Fire.” He is pointing to the only element not present in the photograph.

The show toggles between revealing and hiding, searching and giving up. Hollywood tropes mix with Ader’s absurdist gestures. In thinking about the aftermaths of these practices — a big splash (Ader’s body is out of the frame, in the river) or an empty roof (Ader’s body is out of the frame, on the ground) or a cardboard box (Ader’s body is inside the box), I return to the idea of practicing falling — practicing leaving — the Earth. This is maybe the most useful practice one can engage in.

The post Practicing Falling: Bas Jan Ader at Metro Pictures appeared first on artcritical.

April 3 to May 15, 2016
170 Suffolk Street (between Houston and Stanton streets)
New York, 212 274 0064

For her fourth solo show at Rachel Uffner, in the gallery’s second floor space, Sara Greenberger Rafferty has made a series of mixed media works exploring domesticity, gender, fashion, and the page/screen. The show’s title, “New Works: Dresses and Books,” creates an immediate connection between the forms and contents of two kinds of consumables. The material combination is striking; Rafferty uses a combination of acetate, Plexiglas, inkjet prints, acrylic polymer, and hardware. Hardware is necessary for holding the work to the wall and is always listed as a material. There is always more hardware than is necessary, pointing to the necessity and the décor of objects.

The 10 works are of varying sizes and most take the rectangular or square shape of the page or screen. Dress (all works 2016), is cut to the shape of a dress itself, comprised of photographic images combined with acrylic polymer. They appear worn behind the glass. The images — vintage undergarments, designer dresses, and screenshots — are simultaneously flattened and thickened (each piece of Plexiglas is a half-inch thick). Rafferty points to dresses and books as generic objects: ones that require bodies to perform them. One of the books in the show — rendered in two dimensions, like the dresses, under clear acrylic — is Recommended Reading. The outline of Dress appears on the cover. A Hélène Cixous quote repeats down the length of the dress; it begins “I am entrusted with the dress,” and ends “I slipped them on to go to war.”

An artist’s book, and Recommended Reading (2016), with a text by Melissa Huber, accompanies the show. Its contents range from advertisements (current and old) to essays to clothing catalogues to collages. Rafferty shows us where she pulls some of her sources. There are drawings of dresses and bodies inhabiting dresses. There is a dress that contains a list to be checked off, with words wrapping around the body:

How do you feel?

CONFUSED
MODERN
NATURE-LOVING
SCARED
IN LOVE
OLD FASHIONED
MOODY
FAT
EXCELLENT
SPIRITUAL
CREATIVE
RESERVED
CYBERNETIC
SICK
EXCITED
DREAMY
INTELLECTUAL
BACKWARDS
YOUNG

ALL OF THE ABOVE

The image of the dress is empty but appears to be inhabited, the way that clothes are sometimes shown in clothing catalogues. The breasts are perfectly outlined and the dress falls to the ground as though there is a small figure inside. Rafferty astutely placed the above checklist on an evening gown-type dress. We inhabit clothing similarly to the ways in which we inhabit words. We know that fashion communicates, but Rafferty allows the stark pleasure of realizing again and again the ways in which consumer culture guides taste, preferences, the ways we feel about ourselves, and therefore the outside world. We can choose any combination from the list (confused, modern, moody?) or all of the above. Conversely, those terms are probably already projected onto the body inhabiting the clothing. Definitely women. Definitely those people in dresses.

In the gallery, Rafferty shows images of dresses and pages and screens; in the accompanying text, she makes visible her thought processes. Her Recommended Reading is simultaneously fashion catalogue and critique, process clue and question mark. There are two pages taken from Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life (1863), a paean to fashion and modernity. We see highlights and underlines (presumably Rafferty’s), including this passage describing “Woman” in the abstract:

[She] is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored. Thus she has to lay all the arts under contribution for the means of lifting herself above Nature, the better to conquer hearts and rivet attention. It matters but little that the artifice and trickery are known to all, so long as their success is assured and their effect always irresistible.

Placed on the opposite page, over the text, within a yellow square matching the color of the highlighter, is an image of a young woman in a similarly yellow bikini, holding a piece of paper over her torso. The word “women” appears across her eyes, from the section entitled “Women and Prostitutes” from The Painter of Modern Life. Large text stamped beside her reads: ARE YOU OFFICE PRINTER READY?

The post Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s Dresses and Books at Rachel Uffner appeared first on artcritical.

March 3 to April 23, 2016
24 W 57th Street (between 5th and 6th avenues)
New York, 212 977 7160

Tacita Dean’s “…my English breath in foreign clouds,” at Marian Goodman, is a lofty exhibition encompassing new photo works, drawings, and three films. The first room holds A Concordance of Fifty American Clouds, a suite of photographs, slate drawings, and pieces made with spray chalk, white charcoal pencil, all created in 2015 and ’16. The titles, all containing the word cloud, are taken from William Shakespeare. In Portraits (a 16-minute film made in 2016) David Hockney smokes several cigarettes in his Los Angeles studio while we watch. The smoke rises up in front of his own series of portraits, all with blue backgrounds. The film is silent save for Hockney’s exhaling and the occasional rustling of papers. He laughs once, heartily. His sweater is blue and the couch in his studio is blue. The film is surprisingly meditative, paralleling the cloud works while grounding them in a subtly humorous way.

The viewer might travel between the large room of cloud drawings and photographs and the gallery of Hockney’s smoke. Both the film and the clouds provide the viewer with a specific kind of space in which to travel — Hockney smokes while he looks, not while he paints. And Dean looks at clouds, it seems, while painting them and photographing them. What is the space between looking, thinking, and making? The works in Concordance seem to hang the way clouds do: they are paired together, dispersed, clustered, vertically and horizontally oriented. There is an abundance of space, as in Portraits, wherein Hockney sits thinking and smoking in his studio. This is perhaps a result of big sky Los Angeles — a city known for being spread out, and bluer, too, with its intense sun and Pacific Ocean. The smoke makes visible evidence of inhalation and exhalation, while the clouds present evidence of looking. The viewer watches the watcher.

The other works in the show provide this same sense of looking at something that has been looked at in detail by Dean and others. Buon Fresco (2014) is an intimate view of Giotto di Bondone’s frescos of The Life of St. Francis (1297–1300). This allows the viewer to see into the processes of the painter — his techniques and style. The projection is small — not much larger than a sheet of paper — and unlike the other two films, does not have a separate and darkened viewing area. The projection appears as a humble surprise in the hallway between the two larger galleries. The scale of the projection, coupled with the intensely intimate up-close view of the Upper Basilica of St Francis of Assisi, makes for a visceral micro-macro looking experience. In the same way that Dean grants viewers a particular kind of access to Hockney’s process, we see Giotto’s painting anew.

After walking down the narrow hallway, GAETA, 2015 — Fifty photographs, plus one appears. These photographs are installed similarly to A Concordance of Fifty American Clouds, on the opposite end of the gallery. Dean photographed Cy Twombly’s house and studio in Gaeta, Italy in 2008. They contain intimate details of his life and work — small scribblings on Post-Its, stacked photographs, surfaces and floors. Also of varying sizes, these works provide clips of information about Twombly. Though perhaps not directly about his work, it feels natural to make connections between the chalk drawings for which Twombly is known and Dean’s chalk and slate cloud works in the adjacent room. The show makes art historical and intuitive leaps. These leaps hold poetic resonance and keys to Dean’s ways of working.

Lastly, on the third floor of the gallery, Event for a Stage (2015) is shown every 90 minutes. A 50-minute, 16mm color film, it’s completely captivating as a standalone film and also hangs contextually with the rest of the works in the show. Filmed in a theater in Sydney, Australia in 2014, Event for a Stage is not exactly a work of theater. British actor Stephen Dillane is, as he says in the film, “an actor playing the role of the ‘actor.’” The set-up is immediately recognizable as one of a small theater, with a wide white circle drawn on the stage. The first few moments present a hypnotic, swirling introduction to the piece, with the camera following Dillane as he walks the perimeter. The audience is facing the camera. We are watching the audience watch the actor. Throughout the 50 minutes, Dillane grabs pieces of paper from Dean, who is sitting in the front row, and reads/performs them. At other times, he seems to be improvising. At still other times, he seems to be rejecting whatever text Dean has handed him. He appears frustrated at times and it becomes unclear if he is “acting” or if this is a performance of the difficult methods of communication and collaboration between Dean and Dillane, between film and theater, between an artist’s vision and an actor’s carrying-out. Dillane talks to the audience about the piece, about exchanges between himself and Dean, and about self-consciousness in acting. Filmed over the course of four performances, the camera is usually visible or we are aware of it via other means (Dillane giving camera direction, for instance). Part of brilliance of this film lies in the fact that it’s difficult to distinguish whether the actor is acting or not. It’s also difficult to distinguish whether the tension between Dean and Dillane is “real.” What is written on the papers that the actor keeps grabbing from the artist and then tossing on the ground? At the end, we are left with several papers strewn about the stage. Dillane bows and the audience applauds.

At some point, near the end of the film, Dillane reads (from Dean’s text): “Art is what makes life more interesting than art.” And so, Dillane is reading from Dean who is quoting fluxus artist Robert Filliou. That quote is an apt description of Dean’s body of work, and specifically this most lofty and intricate show. Dean is adept at speaking to the viewer. She complicates the relationship between artist and viewer by placing other artists and figures in the line of communication. In this case, she places, quite directly, Shakespeare, Giotto Di Bondone, Hockney, Twombly, and Dillane. “…my English breath in foreign clouds” is crowded with works, art historical figures and lives, while still spacious — leaving room for the viewer to make her own connections.

The post Smoke, Clouds, Breath: Tacita Dean at Marian Goodman appeared first on artcritical.

November 1 to December 20, 2015
131 Bowery, 2nd floor (at Grand Street)
New York, 917 409 0612

“Very Long Fingers,” on view at Simone Subal through December 20th, is a three-person show with the figure as its central focus. The show is dreamy and portal-like in the emergence and reemergence of the figure in the form of a clown, an ampersand, a sphinx, and a bird, among others. There are 14 works, and each is screen-sized and shaped, and feels quite easy to crawl into. Or, rather: it seems as if the figures/fingers might pull the viewer into the larger and longer world inside. Julien Bismuth’s two silent videos, hanging on opposing walls, ground the show in the sad-clown-psychedelic. Tomasz Kowalski’s collages present elongated, creepy figures in funhouse positions. Autumn Ramsey explores the humanness of the animal figure — Red Sphinx (2013), Swirling Bird (2015), Conspicuous Cat (2014), Orange Shape (2014). The artists approach the figure in separate but equally creepy-enticing ways.

In the 160-minute video La Variation Continue (2013), Bismuth presents a silent application and reapplication of clownish makeup on a woman’s face. The screen hangs perpendicular to the wall at slightly below eye-level. The actress’s face is large and present and hands, which apply the makeup, appear and reappear. Across the room, Bismuth’s Willy Billy (2013), hangs on the wall. Whereas La Variation Continue has a dark, backstage-like background, Willy Billy happens outside in daylight. Two men, one in a suit and tie, one in a green jester outfit, apply makeup to one another’s faces. In both of these videos, repetitive, covering/uncovering actions feel absurd and hypnotic. A suitcase rests on a white chair from which the men pluck the makeup products. In Willy Billy, as in La Variation Continue, the figures are foregrounded and displaced. I’m not sure where I am, except that there are clown-figures. But then again, clowns are just people with clown suits/makeup on, right?

Kowalski’s collages are all untitled and all from 2015, save for & (novelty), which depicts an elongated figure stretched into an ampersand. In all of his works the figures are stretched and hypnagogic — creating a lovely tension between pained and comfortable limbs. One collage features what appears to be the same figure seen through many doorways: leg, shoulder, and head poking out. The rest of the body is hidden behind the wall. The figure becomes smaller and smaller and feels reminiscent of a funhouse mirror, only emptier and more disconcerting. The figure bent into a suspended, skinny ampersand appears in two of Kowalski’s collages. In thinking about Kowalski’s work in relation to the title of the show, a figure with very long fingers might be just as curious about the viewer as the viewer is about him. I’m thinking again about the figure in the many doorways, peering out of the paper.

Just as curious are the animal figures in Autumn Ramsey’s paintings: Red Sphinx, Swirling Bird, Little Bird, Conspicuous Cat, Orange Shape. The eyes in these five paintings appear expressive in a human-animal way. In Orange Shape, the outline of a human figure sits next to a resting animal (a cat? a rabbit?) and one human eye looks out from an orange paint cover. Are these paintings of animals or are these paintings of humans in animal suits?

“Very Long Fingers” plays with the amorphous, changing qualities of the figure — the possibilities of melding, projecting, and ongoing processes of revealing and hiding the human body. Presumably, the human body is present in Ramsey’s anthropomorphic animal paintings, Bismuth’s clowns, and Kowalski’s stretched out figures. The figures hide in plain sight, as in Joan Jonas’s Mirror Piece I (1969), where performers carry elongated mirrors in front of their bodies on stage — at times revealing their own bodies and at times flipping the mirrors so that the audience members see themselves. Bismuth, Kowalski, and Ramsey hang together in a space where double and triple takes are foundational. Things are what they seem and then they are not what they seem. Finally, they are what they seem. Repeat. There is a figure under the maquillage. This show asks questions. Or, maybe, this show presents riddles? As in the Jonas’ Mirror Piece, “Very Long Fingers” points back at us.

The post Point at Something: “Very Long Fingers” at Simone Subal appeared first on artcritical.

October 9 to November 15, 2015
106 Forsyth Street (between Grand and Broome streets)
New York, 646 484 5478

In her first solo exhibition at Lyles & King, entitled ”WHERE LIFE IS HAPPENING,” artist Davina Semo uses industrial materials, evoking facets of urban life that feel simultaneously in-progress and unchanging. Made from concrete, leather, light, and glass, the works are installed in a way that asks the viewer to make decisions about how to move through the space, move around the works, and how to interact with the lights, some of which are too bright to look at. A piece entitled THE NOISE IS PITCHED TO A LEVEL OF PAIN SHE ABSORBS AS A PERSONAL TEST (all works 2015) is broken at the edge, concrete scattered a bit. There is a visual loudness like that of walking through New York City — encountering idiosyncratic obstructions and construction sites, comfortable walking paths and strange objects to look at and walk by, which the floor of the gallery, also an industrial concrete, reinforces.

The most captivating pieces are the pegboard-like vault lights of reinforced concrete and cast glass, with the many-colored glass pieces fit into small hexagonal openings in concrete slabs. The light casts these shapes on the walls. It’s hard to tell which side is which. I’m not sure there is a “front” or a “back.” Rather, the viewer is asked to look at both the top and the bottom — accessing the surface of the city and what’s underneath. Semo expands on vault lights, which are set into pavement and traditionally used to let light into whatever’s below. By isolating these jeweled sidewalk interruptions, Semo opens the space of the gallery.

At the back wall is I AM A PATIENT GIRL; I WAIT I WAIT I WAIT, consisting of seven folding chairs held together with zip ties. Beneath five of the chairs lie what appear to be cast steel box cutters, blades exposed and pointing rightward.

The titles activate the work. The consistent use of the female pronoun narrates while also pointing to a parallel universe where the titles exist as a work in and of themselves. A row of three reinforced concrete-and-glass sculptures lie diagonally about a foot from the floor via cylindrical stands. They are severely slanted and facing a bright light. The effect that this light has on the eyes is that of a construction light at night. Merciless and austere, it casts circular shadows on the floor and illuminates the already glowy multicolored glass rivulets. These resemble amped up pegs in an amped up pegboard. These three sculptures are titled:

SHE FEELS HER SMILE FLOATING IN THE AIR ABOUT SIX INCHES FROM HER FACE

SHE TOUCHES HIM, TOUCHES HERSELF, POINTS TOWARD THE FLOOR

SHE DOES NOT SPEAK OR ACT IN A NERVOUS WAY, BUT THERE IS A VIBE OF INTENSE TENSION ABOUT HER

The title of the show, “WHERE LIFE IS HAPPENING,” is indicative of a feeling of moving through the overstimulation of the industrial zones where objects often exist in the space between useful and out-of-commission. Semo uses polarity to great effect, as the hardness of the pieces point to breakability. Similarly, Semo’s hand feels present and also not; the sculptures almost seem found. There are three wall pieces that slightly offset the concrete floor sculptures. I MAKE MYSELF STILL, TO LISTEN is a concrete-and-leather wall piece with a chain in the shape of an X hanging just below another X pressed into the surface. There are two other leather and concrete wall pieces: LOOK AT NO ONE, REVEAL NOTHING, REMAIN STILL and AFTER A WHILE THE SUN MOVES AND THE SUNLIGHT COMES RIGHT ON THE BED. These actively witness the rest of the show, their titles address stillness and listening while the other titles in the show are action points.

The only floor sculpture which lies entirely on the floor, THE NOISE IS PITCHED TO A LEVEL OF PAIN SHE ABSORBS AS A PERSONAL TEST (mentioned above), made from reinforced concrete, rock salt, and cast glass, points to a level of overstimulation to the point of breaking. One hears about the ways in which urban noises impact the nervous system. This sculpture feels the most overtly human — with an inscription on the top: 2015 and on the bottom: SEMO. Like the other concrete sculptures, this is reminiscent of a pegboard — but more deflated and tired — a board at rest and broken at the upper right corner. “WHERE LIFE IS HAPPENING” is exciting because the viewer is in the midst of it — of Semo’s industrious world between useful and out-of-commission.

The post Concrete, Leather, Light, Glass: Davina Semo at Lyles & King appeared first on artcritical.

“ONGOING DISTANT ROARS DOWN THROUGH FOREST ON FOOTPATH,

CLOSED CABIN, EDELWEISS IN LOG PLANTER, COLD SHADE”

The following conversation took place in playful and casual bursts over email between Brooklyn and Stockholm, mostly from August 18, 2015 through August 20, 2015.

EMMALEA RUSSO: Your work makes me think about the importance of place. Where are you now? What’s it like there?

HELEN MIRRA: I’m in Sweden, though only for 10 days. The August light is friendly — clear and soft, and in Tyresta National Park, lake-swimming is bright, cool, and blueberries and mushrooms are rampant.

Much of your work is process-based and comes out of walking and/or being outside — a “paced printmaking” as you’ve called it. How did this shift to the outside happen?

For seemingly a long while I had been making work about the idea of the outside, without spending much time there. A series of opportunities shifted me out, maybe starting with a year I had a residency in Berlin, with a studio in the forest on the edge of the city It crystallized during another residency year in Basel, when I was given an office rather than a studio to work in — a problem I resolved by deciding to spend the time mostly walking in the mountains, collecting rocks. That being a total pleasure; I knew I wanted to stay outside, and found a strategy for how to do that. There were a few years when the works were all a kind of printmaking. Then it drifted into other forms.

How has the work changed — how are the objects different — making work about the idea of the outside versus being actually outside while making/collecting?

Only at first it was collecting — or, better, borrowing, as I returned most of the rocks to the mountains a few years after I had taken them. When walking became central, in its moving-center kind of way, I became less attached to the so-called work, and these days it feels more like it makes itself, and I assist.

I read an interview where you described yourself as a “careful amateur.” I think of this term often and I like the vastness of it, especially in a time so concerned with specialization and expertise. How does being a careful amateur fit your work and life? What are the benefits and drawbacks?

That’s funny: I think now I’d more say a brazen amateur, trying to be less cautious. “Not-knowing is most intimate.” So much more is available when one is not focused-on, not buttoned-up. So-called mistakes are constant, and no cause for distress; the aim is simply for one’s mistakes to be harmless. Once one is really mostly practicing being a beginner, everything is easier — frustrations still come up but are briefer in duration and easier to set aside, or to flip into curiosity, and approach.

How is a walk in the city different from a walk in the country? Do you have a preference?

It has taken me a while to embrace walking in the city, and it was practicing half-smiling, as described by Thich Nhat Hanh, that has allowed me to. Cities have the disadvantage of concrete and cars, and the advantage of discernible responses to practicing half-smiling. Forests are still the easiest for me: the changing surfaces underfoot, the moving light, the multitude of sounds high and low, near and far, the palpable diversity of species, the distinctions between a wet and a dry forest, in smell and color and the feeling of the air. Mountains are the most eccentric, and object-related.

Where and how do you prefer to spend your time?

I mostly try to drop preferences about where I am, and just be where I am. Still, I do feel most in my element when walking, especially in unmanaged green space, without any need to get anywhere particular, and while standing weaving, alternating balancing on one foot and the other. There are substantial pleasures of being somewhere I altogether or mostly can’t understand the language. This is an obvious kind of not-knowing, when there is nothing to do but pay attention to small gestures and expressions. I’m content in a hammock, particularly the one in our backyard next to where we buried our longtime cat-friend, Maclow.

You have a book called Edge Habitat Materials (2014). I think of walking as an edge practice. How do you think of edges? Who are the artists/people/thinkers who engage edge-space in ways that inform your work, or feel compelling?

I think of the edge being where one thing turns into another, turns inside out, upside down, where synesthesia happens — what happens in translation or communication, looking for and not finding the exactly right word. Of course a classic edge is the one between the familiar and unfamiliar. I think the edge habitat is the territory of André Cadere and Ad Reinhardt, both keystone artists for me. Percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky. Translation work of Basho by Kazuaki Tanahashi and of Chinese Buddhist writings by Bill Porter (The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse, 2014), Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013). Forgetting is a great edge.

You have a solo exhibition that opened August 20th in Stockholm. Could you talk a little about the work in the show and the process of making it?

I’ve been weaving on a large triangle loom, with the hypotenuse set at 180, 215, or 240 cm. Each weaving has wool from two black sheep — changing from one to the other halfway through. Three blacks appear: two from the individual sheep, one of their admixture. These three blacks are barely differentiated one from another but for a delimiting colored strand, dyed from foraged mushrooms, drawn through each work. Each inexact triangle is doubled over a cedar support, or folded into an even smaller floor sculpture.

In the fall, I saw your show in New York at Peter Freeman and found myself getting very close to those woven triangles, noticing the different strands of color. Those invited very close looking. I feel this way about much of your work. For example the Quarry works (2007) — small sculptures made with folded pieces of clothing, each with a rock perched on top. I find that these and the triangles ask for a certain kind of hovering and closeness — certainly evoking Dogen’s “not-knowing is most intimate.” Can you say more about the connection between not-knowing and your practice? Zen teachings and your practice?

Hovering is a good word — the aerial equivalent of tender-footed curiosity — which is one of the ways I think of not-knowing. Like the outdoors and walking going from the theoretical to the actual, it has been the same for me with so-called secular Buddhist philosophy — while I was intellectually engaged with it when I was younger, now I’d say I’m an adherent.

The “aerial equivalent of tender-footed curiosity” is lovely. It makes me wonder about the ways you’re encountering the outside — the “unmanaged green space” — and how that might relate to the ways in which viewers encounter your work in a gallery.

It’s like walking all day in rain and then coming inside and changing into dry clothes, or sleeping and awake, or vice versa. A gallery is a temporary minimalist habitat, and sort of like an animal shelter. I’m largely in agreement with Rémy Zaugg’s charge for ideal exhibition spaces (his 1986 lecture was recently translated and published: The Art Museum of My Dreams, or, A Place for the Work and the Human Being) and it is a reminder of why, how, they can be worthwhile. Maybe an examined life is best led outdoors, constantly reminded of its interdependence, and the exhibition space is a useful temporary fiction of autonomy for artworks, for another kind of attending to.

What’s next?

Referential weaving experiments, for a pair of shows in Berlin in January with Allyson Strafella. In one space we will show works of ours from 15 to 20 years ago, that we think of as connecting from there to where we are now. In the other, we will show new works, which we consider as reiterations or paraphrases, replies or responses, to each other’s particular existing works (which might or might not be included in the early-work show). Allyson is making typewriter drawings, and I’m making tapestry weavings. We both have very particular limitations, in color for instance, because of the materials we are using (typewriter ink, carbon paper/un-dyed and plant- or mushroom-dyed yarns), and size by the respective widths of typewriter platens and loom warps.

The post “Not-knowing is most intimate”: Helen Mirra in Conversation with Emmalea Russo appeared first on artcritical.

Sophie Calle makes portraits of herself and strangers through investigative methods including surveillance, interviews, photography, and text. In Suite Vénitienne (Siglio Press, 2015) Calle follows an acquaintance, Henri B., through Venice for two weeks. Calle’s route includes systematic trailing and sporadic tracking of strangers with whom Henri B. might have some connection. Suite Vénitienne, reissued from Siglio in the form of a die-cut, hardcover artist’s book, is handsomely bound and readable. The book contains four color and 56 black-and-white illustrations and photographs accompanying plain and descriptive narratives of Henri B.’s, and therefore Calle’s, maneuverings.

The book becomes about the act of following. Through the specificity of Calle’s intention — to trail this vague acquaintance — the reader/viewer finds herself following Calle following Henri B. The text takes the form of a paced trail-making. Henri B.’s decisions set the pace. Calle’s decisions — the ways in which she describes her subject’s actions, the photographs she chooses to present — make the trail and narrate a specific version of his trip. As in much of Calle’s work, a pointed problem is worked towards or through by Calle herself and the labor overlays the life of the artist. What is uncovered is relatable and applicable. Calle is versed in getting at the universal through the acutely personal, via factual and plain observations. On the first page, she sets a tone and moves along the path accordingly:

For months I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them.

At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. I decided to follow him.

Calle is not interested in Henri B. She is interested in the investigation. Henri could be anyone. Calle becomes the subject. I became interested in her decisions and modes of framing Henri B. Immersed in her detailed and straightforward descriptions of her subject, I couldn’t help but wonder about the intricacies of her positioning. Where was she in relation to Henri B.? Calle tells us that she is in disguise — wearing a blonde wig. She carries a camera. In the charged moments when Calle reveals her proximity to Henri B., the act of following becomes a performance and the quality of the relationship between follower and followed reveals itself to be one of a high tension:

8:45pm Their legs appear on the top steps. I crouch into my hiding place. They go, turning to their left. I wait a few seconds. At the very moment I leave the alley to follow them, they turn around. She was the first to turn back. She scares me more than he does.

If the site of following is the site of performance, then Suite Vénitienne might be a document of the act, which happened under clandestine circumstances in Venice in 1980. However, this considerately designed book is a work in itself. It is a re-enlivened iteration of Calle’s two week carrying-out. Here, the performance and narrative notations are inseparable. Time stamps, detailed maps, and street photographs help situate the portrait. Calle is practical but fluid in her narrative and physical plays:

I always see the same faces, never his. I’ve come to find some consolation in knowing he’s not where I am looking for him. I know where Henri B. is not.

For a few moments, I take a different tack and absentmindedly follow a flower delivery boy — as if he might lead me to him.

The distance between what one desires (follows) and the object of one’s desire is vast and often hastily filled with projections. Once the distance is closed (Henri discovers that Calle has been following him) the elusiveness dissipates. Calle is the most interesting thing about Henri. B.:

I think about him and that phrase by Proust, ‘To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!’

I must not forget that I don’t have any amorous feelings toward Henri B. The impatience with which I await his arrival, the fear of that encounter, these symptoms aren’t really a part of me.

Those symptoms are perhaps a part of the loaded act of tracking. Calle becomes quite immersed in the object of her gaze. But, there are edges around the project. Her final entry reads: “10:10am I stop following Henri B.”

The compact intimacy of Siglio’s re-edition of Suite Vénitienne is an apt form for Calle’s discreet findings. The book form creates space for the reader to make a third trail against and through those of Henri B. and Calle.

Calle, Sophie. Suite Vénitienne. (Los Angeles: Siglio, 2015). ISBN-13:978-1-938221-09-5, 96 pages, $34.95

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February 22 to March 22, 2015
178 Norfolk Street (between Houston and Stanton)
New York, 212 227 2783

Comprised of ink drawings, a soundtrack, and several stone sculptures, Vivienne Griffin’s second solo show at Bureau, “She Said,” exists effectively in the space linking intimacy with indifference. Griffin’s past works include austere, darkly humorous text drawings, found photographs of female celebrities, and an alabaster-and-fluorescent-light floor installation. She often employs starkly gritty commentary, using simple means and careful arrangements of objects and images. “She Said” expands out from there, creating a nacreous space wherein gold chains and alabaster highlight unlikely, effective convergences.

The soundtrack — its playback devices quite present in the main gallery — is the show’s most immediately perceptible aspect. A female voice announces herself amid heavy drones and trance-like, beckoning lulls. Once in the main room, there are stones and alabaster sculptures at varying heights on steel pedestals and on the floor. India ink drawings of shiny but common objects line the walls: Standard Tap (2014), Coffee Table (2015), Gold Bracelet (2014), Bin (2015), and Pyrite Healing Crystal (2014).

The show escapes nostalgia and kitsch through Griffin’s sensitivity to the placement of materials and an air of skepticism and complication. In The Glamour of Ornament (2015), a stone rests atop a steel pedestal, punctured and strung with a gold chain. Empty pedestals are placed around the object, evoking a kind of sad gathering place. The gold chain through the rock is a humorous, jaded gesture that nods to the end of ’60s-era political optimism, underscored by an adjacent India ink drawing that reads “PEACE AND LOVE MOTHER FUCKERS.” 

The dark iridescence of “She Said” recalls Joan Didion’s The White Album (1979), in which she discusses the Manson Family murders, paranoia, and the end of the ’60s. Griffin’s work is heavy with ways in which the collective consciousness perceives a time/place, and the objects and buzz phrases that hang around after it has passed. The show is made more interesting by what appears to be the dissonance of the artist in relation to her subjects. There are three instances of doubled titles. The soundtrack, The Only Way Out is Out (2015) is a drowsy, drone-heavy shimmer punctuated by gorgeous female voices. Beside the speakers, a stone piece sits on the floor, penetrated by a silver microphone and aptly titled The Only Way Out is Through (2015). This is a slogan that seems to have been adopted by pop psychology — an urge to confront one’s feelings. Together, they raise questions about escapism, intimacy, and ‘60s leftovers. Where are we going and how are we going to get there? How do we get out of repetitious historical cycles? The titles and the pieces themselves make assertions about enclosure. The closed loop of the audio and the trapped-in-stone microphone suggest multiple viable options for moving through time and space. Intimacy (2015) and Intimacy (again) (2015), two backlit, cylindrical alabaster-and-watercolor sculptures with exposed electrical wiring, appear successively. Lastly, The Glamour of Ornament (2015) and The Glamour of Ornament 2 (2015) sit close to one other in the main gallery, both stone pieces with awkward gold adornments. They are presented monumentally and made slightly forlorn — again with a kind of dark humor – by the addition of the gold ornamentation that hangs in a way that is suggestive of the figure.

In The Nostalgia of an Object (2014-2015), alabaster sinks into a similarly sized slice of memory foam. Griffin creates an effective frustration, as I was left with the desire to see the impression of the object. A material resting on memory foam, once removed, will leave a momentary imprint. The foam returns to its original shape, no matter the duration of the object’s rest. Similarly, the works in “She Said” perform in their time and place smartly, addressing the historical frameworks of objects while pointing back to the present, where the only way out is through and the only way out is out.

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