Lee Ann Norman: I think I ask everyone this question firstly (laughter): When did you decide you would be an artist?

Jennifer Packer: I was born in Philly on a naval base that is now closed. I lived with my grandparents for most of my life in South Jersey. I went to Tyler [School of Art] and stayed in Philly a few years before going to graduate school. It’s a weird question for me, “When did I choose to be an artist?” I was coy about it. People would ask me what I do, and I would try to deflect and say, “I’m a painter,” rather than an artist. (laughter) I didn’t know what an artist was for me, yet. I just thought I had some things I needed to sort out and that I could maybe do it with painting.

How did you decide that art would be the way that you could sort those things out?

I realized that I can make a painting of anything—a fantasy, a question, a sadness—and based on the choices I’d make and my attention to what is cared for in the image, I could learn about how I feel and where my genuine concerns lay.

My first painting class was sophomore year with Stanley Whitney. There are many professors who have no shame about tying your achievements to their approval. But with Stan, it was like his disapproval became the most significant part of the class (laughter). A friend of mine, Susannah Habecker, would come in, and he would love her paintings, and the rest of ours would be disappointments. In that atmosphere, it was hard for me to distinguish between what was mine and what was his in terms of the concerns [in the work] then. Toward the end, I started making a couple of things that were my own. He also pushed me to go to Rome, which changed my life.

Are there things you can look back on from that time that define you now as a painter?

It was important for me to feel like I was butting heads with someone who had as strong of a personality as I did. But I try to keep my students from having that kind of relationship with me now. I tell them, “You gotta figure out your own thing, and we can talk about it, but I’m not here to give you a personal stamp of approval.”

Yes, I think that can be a more productive challenge than simply making someone say they like your work. You mentioned that Rome really changed you. When did you go?

In 2006. Stanley told me I needed to go to Rome and learn what it’s like to be a black person abroad. Rome was so complicated . . . . I experienced some really unique kinds of racism and isolation that threw me off my game entirely. I tried to get ready—I even took Italian before I left. (laughter) When I got there, I felt completely alone. I had physical exchanges that were really unpleasant. I was kicked by a woman multiple times in the cafe at the end of Via Flaminia in Rome. I thought I understood what racism looked like, but I was surprised that I couldn’t combat it with my intelligence, my dress—

—Or when you spoke English.

That’s the thing that makes it more complicated! I refused to speak English when I travelled. I think people made assumptions about who I was and what I was doing, or they didn’t care. After I got kicked, the other students in the program were in disbelief that it actually happened to me. Those kind of experiences can cause you to draw inward. One day, I walked into San Luigi dei Francesi, and I saw Caravaggio’s St. Matthew paintings. I got chills. Typically, Italian painting is [presented as] this vibrant, bloodless affair, but Caravaggio’s [paintings] are like: No. This is dirty, it’s nasty, it’s lonely, it’s hard. When I saw the paintings I felt like I was in the presence of family. I connected with the images immediately and felt changed. If these paintings—I felt like they were left for me—if these paintings could make me feel that life is worth living, then perhaps I might make something that could affect someone else in the same way. It’s rare [for me] to feel like there’s a haven in painting where I am fully recognized as an artist, a queer woman of color . . . I don’t usually look at paintings and feel like they acknowledge me, but as a painter, I can connect with other concerns. We grab on to what we can. Caravaggio seemed dejected and I thought: I know what that’s like. (laughter)

How did you try to work through that problem you’d given yourself of creating images that might resonate with someone else?

I had a copy of “Letters to a Young Poet” that I took to Rome with me. [In the letters] Rilke is very clear about the necessity of solitude for individual growth, regardless of difficulty and loss. It was good for me to read, but painful to experience (laughter). I’d already started to make things that were intimate and introspective. I had made a really dark painting that was about my parents and how their choices affected my life. I want to make paintings that needed to be there, paintings that I can’t make again.

How does your relationship to literature, storytelling, and writing relate to painting?

I enjoy the fact that painting, like writing, is a language, and one can become more fluent over time. Writing can inhabit places where painting can’t and vice versa. I’ve been thinking a lot about the translatability of works of art and emotional experience. I’ve been keeping journals for years, and it has become really important for holding myself accountable to my vision and my personal growth.

A lot of the new work has a discernible image, but I can see where things aren’t totally filled in—they are more like a sketch of an idea, or they add and subtract information.

I’ve been interested for a long time in how I present or protect humans in the work. It’s not figures, not bodies, but humans I am painting. I want to know how to present a personal relationship without damaging the individual or putting them in harm’s way.

I read commentary about your work that described this process as you trying to present relationships in the paintings. You might know the people who sit for you, for example, but you want to reveal something more about them than their figure.

I thought if I filled the painting with distracting information, that people would turn away from the person and toward a kind of fantasy. But I saw Nicole Eisenman’s shows at the New Museum and Anton Kern and felt like I was in the presence of someone who was engaging unapologetically with their own pleasure. I wanted that for myself. I think for a while, my process simply became too rigid and overly severe. Now, I want to be able to ask many different questions and find various and unexpected answers, which requires more flexibility.

What kind of questions are you interested in asking?

I’m working on two paintings where I’m trying to figure out how to make logical decisions that are also deeply emotional. I’m looking for opportunities to describe how I think and feel, without breaking away from realism to do it.

I’ve been painting flowers on and off for about five years. When I first started painting them, I didn’t know why I was interested. There’s no singular stylistic intention. It’s not the image that moves me so much as the touch, color, light, and the movement of the image. I was painting them at first from observation as a way of grounding myself in the studio. Now they usually address a specific loss, which to me, requires time and deviation. I wanted to make a bouquet dedicated to Sandra Bland, but I didn’t feel I had the right to use her name or say it was for her, However, I know how traumatic experiencing her death through the media was for me. If you google a lot of the young black and brown people who have been killed by police, you can see images of their funeral, but not Sandra’s. You can see a stuffed animal, the burial, or a rose on her casket, but you don’t get to see images of the service. I started the painting this year thinking I would make a glorious funerary bouquet, but because I was so upset [about her death], still, it became this other charged thing. I wanted real justice for her . . . but there are some things painting can’t do. I didn’t know when I started the painting that I could use the process to move through my grief. But after I finished the painting, I felt differently, more in control, and less burdened. I feel comfortable now having difficult questions, and earning the answers.

Jennifer Packer: Tenderheaded at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, September 9 to November 5, 2017. 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Cobb Hall, 4th Floor, Chicago, Illinois 60637. renaissancesociety.org

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The Propeller Group: The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music at James Cohan Gallery
April 8 to May 15, 2016
291 Grand Street (at Eldridge Street)
New York, 212 714 9500

In the West, many people are privileged to maintain a distance from the visceral effects of economic and social inequalities. The Propeller Group, however, wants us to confront them. Their work around branding and marketing strategies, notions of nation building, propaganda, and the collective vs. individual, will help viewers consider those systems and recognize how we might be complicit in them and, perhaps, undo them.

Their collective — comprised of core members Phunam, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, and Matt Lucero — began working together officially in 2006, but had met and worked together in graduate school at CalArts (Nguyen and Lucero) and upon meeting back to their home country of Vietnam (Phunam and Nguyen in 2005). The members, each an artist in his own right, formed the collective to realize ambitious art projects and large-scale productions with Vietnamese artists. Their first solo museum exhibition, featuring seven videos and installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, highlight the importance of the convergence of the fine and commercial art worlds in their practice. The group’s ability to shape shift and code switch among genres, traditions, and cultures from the East and West helps them make meaningful critiques of consumer culture, politics and the effects on the human condition.

As young men coming of age in the ’90s — all three cite hip-hop and graffiti culture as important to their mode — The Propeller Group carry the residue of the social and cultural context of the time. In art schools, scholars tended to focus more on theories like deconstructionism, institutional critique, and identity politics over examinations of the discrete art object. During their time at CalArts, Lucero and Nguyen were students of Daniel Joseph Martinez, whose installation at the controversial 1993 Whitney Biennial included distributing admission buttons spelling out “I CAN’T EVER IMAGINE WANTING TO BE WHITE.” Migration is an important influence too: All identify as people of color, Lucero a California native, and Nguyen and Phunam as refugees whose families fled Vietnam during the war.

Guns serve as an important motif in their work, particularly Cold War-era Russian and American assault rifles: the AK-47 and M16. (They’ve even made a feature length film out of montaged YouTube clips, Hollywood films, documentaries, and promotional video about the firearms.) A 21-minute video, The AK-47 vs. The M16 (2015), most recently on view at James Cohan’s Lower East Side location and originally conceived for the 56th Venice Biennale, features a series of blocks made of ballistics gelatin embedded with discharges from each rifle fired simultaneously, and a video of the blast. The video captures the bullets penetrating the gel blocks and colliding with each other. At one point a gun misfires and the discharge creates a smooth trajectory; in another, both guns fire on each other, creating a collision manifesting like ink blots or paint pours. The gel blocks, sealed in resin under vitrines, are often used in ballistics tests and are designed to mimic the qualities of human flesh. While the blocks capture the violence of the blasts and freeze it in time, the effect is diminished after watching the live firing in the video, making the sculptures feel like a redundant let-down. But this can be a shortfall of overtly political art: how to create effective — not overwrought — affect. Works like the sculptures of The AK-47 vs. The M16 or Television Commercial for Communism (2011) fall into such didactic trappings, but that cannot be attributed to the fact that The Propeller Group also has another life in commercial art and advertising. Their work is simply more effective when they collapse the distance between the politics and the person.

Collateral Damage (2015), for example, also mines the theme of guns and violence, but the simple gesture of capturing the pattern of stippling and bullet fragments skipping and tearing across black paper is haunting in its austerity. The Guerrillas of Cu Chi (2012), which uses a propaganda film as part of the installation, is very successful at underscoring the human costs of war. In a darkened room, two videos on opposite walls depict scenes from the Cu Chi district in Ho Chi Minh City where Viet Cong fighters built a complex of tunnels — critical to defeating the US military in spite of its technological superiority. In the black-and-white propaganda film, the narrator describes how the people enjoyed picnicking in Cu Chi, “Until the merciless Americans began dropping their bombs […] on it.” Facing this film, modern day tourists are shown taking photos and selfies at the shooting range that currently stands on the site as captions from the black-and-white film flash across the bottom. The juxtaposition, while seemingly moralistic on the surface, highlights the differences in the way histories are remembered depending on who remembers them.

The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music (2014) is perhaps the group’s most lyrical statement to explore the central concerns of their work. Part of this lies in the aesthetic: The Propeller Group used an “overcrank” technique to shoot frames at a higher rate than normal, allowing the footage to appear like slow motion when played back at standard speed. If you’ve ever seen the movie Chariots of Fire (1981) or nearly any shampoo commercial ever, you are familiar with this technique and know that if done poorly, overcrank can appear hokey and amateurish. The film was originally created for Prospect.3, the third Prospect New Orleans biennial, held from 2014 to 2015, and one wonders: is it the film’s focus on funerary practices in Vietnam and their echoes to those specific to New Orleans, the abundant images of water, references to mysticism, transformation, and change that make it effective, or something else? The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music leaves room for the consideration and contemplation, the joy and sadness — the range of human emotions the world often asks us to elide. Facing the feeling, sitting with the rage, discomfort, confusion or sadness, however, is exactly what The Propeller Group may intend for viewers. These are not the cynical acts of ad men, but the hopeful ones that only artists make.

The post Guns, Guerrillas, Music Videos: The Propeller Group at the MCA Chicago and James Cohan appeared first on artcritical.

Fusco considers performances by artists such as Angel Delgado, El Sexto (Danilo Maldonado Machado), Sandra Ceballos, and collectives such as Omni Zona Franca, the Department of Public Interventions and Enema in light of how their work addresses the Cuban political context. While she discusses artistic censorship and the rules of conduct specific to the island, she compares Cuba’s situation with social and political restrictions in other contexts, including countries widely perceived as “free.” I recently spoke with Fusco about Dangerous Moves, and she expanded on these ideas and more.

LEE ANN NORMAN: In the book, you speak specifically about the unique political situation that gave rise to public performance practices in Cuba. Can you talk a bit more about that?

COCO FUSCO: I grew up during the Cold War, and at that time Fidel Castro was public enemy number one, spoken of publicly the way that Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden are today. Every news story about Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s underscored that there was no freedom there. It’s true that political culture on the island is more centralized and authoritarian than in the US, but it’s also true that in the US, for all the rhetoric about freedom, the art world is run by a very small elite, and artists who do not produce work that is in fashion have a hard time securing a place for themselves professionally. Just because we don’t talk about this situation as representative of a lack of freedom, it doesn’t mean that there is no policing of culture here.

Right. I think as Americans, we tend to accept popular media narratives that show our society as the ideal liberal one, and everything else as repressive…

Americans don’t think about the rules of behavior that they conform to because they’re socialized not to see them. We do have very strong codes of conduct here, though. We tend to focus on controls relating to obscenity and sexuality, but think about social codes that are imposed in public spaces like shopping malls or schools. Let’s not forget the recent news story that went viral about Black women who visited a winery and were thrown off a train because they were laughing “too loudly,” whatever that means.

When looking at codes of conduct in Cuba, we have to understand the role they play in the shaping of political behavior. One of the articles of the Cuban penal code refers to social dangerousness, a term that includes public drunkenness and modes of behavior determined to run counter to socialist morality. There are Communist party officials and divisions within the Cuba police whose duty is to identity those engaging in these modes of conduct. There are also socially and politically unacceptable behaviors in the United States. The main difference is that in Cuba, power is centralized, which makes the repercussions for engaging in potentially criminal behavior more draconian. People operate with a clear sense of what is and what is not permitted. If they don’t know, someone will remind them very quickly.

How did performance emerge as a public action? What is that history in this context?

Performance produced self-consciously as art begins in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with a generation of young artists who wanted to shake things up. Their first forays were not so confrontational. Art students staged interventions in their classes because they felt the Soviet pedagogy being imposed on them was retrograde. Some of the artists who spearheaded the renaissance of the early 1980s in Cuba would stage performances privately for friends so they could experiment and not be interrupted. Some of their performances were about policing, state security, excessive bureaucratic control of culture, or the poor food that was being rationed to the population.

Things changed in the mid-’80s when artists such as Juan Sí González and Arte Calle (a group that tried to be clandestine but was “outed” very quickly) began creating street interventions without permission. The reactions varied. Some thought the work was too hot to handle. Others decried that it was not really art, but only a political provocation. There were other people who silently approved, but a sector of the art community expressed the fear that the more politically edgy artists were taking risks that would provoke negative reactions to young artists as a whole, and because of this they rejected their aesthetic proposals entirely.

How were these artists and their performances received? Were critics and historians dismissive, thinking of them like fame seekers?

Some art historians and critics were dismissive of those artists at the time, but I don’t think anyone was saying that they were seeking fame. That wasn’t the language being used. You don’t get famous in Cuba by getting arrested. Many of the artists faced negative judgment by their peers. State bureaucrats said they were provocateurs, but the worst accusation that could be levied against them was that they were “dissidents” because it meant they would lose any protections they might have as artists. Their work would be reconfigured as political provocation, and it is the police’s job to handle that. I remember the time when critics and curators ignored performance art in New York. The commercial art world thought it was a joke. I certainly wouldn’t single Cuba out as being more opposed to performance than other countries, but the centralization of power in the state is special. The Cuban state has the power to determine an artist’s life in a manner that is not very different from the way that the art market wields power over artists in the United States.

What changes, if any, have you seen in Cuban performance art now that the US and Cuba are re-engaging diplomatically?

The rapprochement between the governments of Cuba and the United States in the past year has not produced a change that would conform to any notion of liberalization. On the contrary, what we’ve seen in the last year has been a rise in the detention of people doing street actions. Cuban culture is changing, though, in two ways.

First, the Ministry of Culture is, like all state entities, losing much of its state funding. Administrators are being encouraged to seek alternative sources of financing. The cultural ministry is getting more involved in joint ventures with private investors, both Cuban and foreign. For example, La Fábrica in Havana, a hybrid nightclub, bar, and exhibition and performance space in an old factory, opened not that long ago. It’s a joint venture between the Ministry of Culture, music promoters, and local musicians. The bars are run by private entities, and local designers have display stands throughout. This kind of public-private endeavor is happening more and more in Cuba.

The pursuit of hard currency has completely transformed the Cuban art sector in the past 25 years. Events such as the Havana Biennial rely on money from tourists — not only for funding the event, but also because the back room sales of Cuban artworks allow many artists to live comfortably for months, even years after the exhibition. As the public sector shrinks and the value of Cuban salaries declines, artists become more dependent on the sale of their work. The Ministry of Culture continues to wield power as the broker between artists and foreign collectors, dealers and curators. There have been a lot of articles in foreign press recently suggesting that Cuba has a treasure trove of great cheap art, so this is the moment for foreign collectors to get in and invest. That actually drove a lot of people to go to the last Havana Biennial. What we’re talking about here is economic change, not political change.

Fusco, Coco. Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba. (London: Tate, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-1849763264, 192 pages, $27.8

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Cage — a prolific avant-garde musician-composer, writer, and artist — created works that pushed at the confines of music and sound, thus redefining the medium. He was a pioneer of prepared piano compositions, where modifications were made to the instrument’s mechanisms, and he often created atonal musical works rather than using traditional Western melodic techniques. His interest in aleatory devices and Eastern philosophy, particularly the Chinese I Ching, heavily influenced his creative output, as well as music indebted to him ever since.

Diary, completed between 1965 and 1982 and printed with an IBM Selectric typewriter, also uses constraints derived from chance operations. Depending on the outcome, Cage would write a fixed number of words every day, limit the number of characters and determine the margins and indentations of each line, creating what he termed mosaics. Color figures prominently in the text, too, with lines alternating between 28 different shades of blue and red. This vacillation between typeface, colors ranging from muted gray-blues to red-browns and variance in the surrounding white space gives each page a sculptural element, a welcome counterpart to Cage’s careful attention to the rhythm of the text. At times, this renders Diary poetic and delightfully meandering.

While relying on chance operations for its form, Cage maintained a deeply personal vulnerability in the content. His ideas about a variety of global issues are punctuated with casual references to his friends, mentors, and colleagues, including Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, and Marcel Duchamp. Vignettes of domestic life — time spent with his mother or his life partner and collaborator, the choreographer Merce Cunningham — figure prominently throughout. (Cage’s father died in 1965, shortly before Diary was published and delivered in public address. His mother would die a few years later in 1969.) In one section, Cage gives a story about trying to purchase fresh coriander in Chinatown with a friend, and in another, he shares that as he was completing benefit forms after the death of his father, his mother revealed to him that she had been married twice before.

The Diary’s philosophical meditations (“The goal is not to have a goal. The new universe city will have no limits. It will not be in any special place . . . ”) and social commentary (“Act of sharing is a community act. Think of people outside the community. What do we share with them . . . ?”) provide effective contrasts to Cage’s seemingly stream of conscious musings and rant-like observations. In one instance he speculates that, “Encouraged, instead of frightened, children could learn several languages before reaching age of four, at that age engaging in the invention of their own languages. Play’d be play instead of being, as now, release of repressed anger.” In another, he observes “ . . . People ask what the avant-garde is and whether it’s finished. It isn’t. There will always be one. The avant-garde is flexibility of mind and it follows like day the night from not falling prey to government and education. Without avant-garde nothing would get invented.”

The I Ching acknowledges that life and everything in it is in a constant state of flux. Diary reveals how Cage took that philosophy to heart in his daily life. His critical, yet hopeful musings about the cultural context on which Diary reflects capture life’s impermanence as well as Cage’s personal comfort with ambiguity during a time when people around the world were desperately seeking certainty. Observations such as, “Edwin Schlossberg told me that while Fuller was writing a dedication in his book Utopia or Oblivion, he paused and said, ‘Those are not the only possibilities . . .’ ” or “New York’s the largest Puerto Rican city in the world . . . ” show Cage to be not only an artist, musician, and thinker, but also a compassionate, active citizen of the world.

Cage, John. Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse). Co-edited by Joe Biel and Richard Kraft. (New York: Siglio, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-1-938221-11-01, 176 pages, $32

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Mar 27, 2015 – Apr 25, 2015
508 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 989 4258

Lee Ann Norman: There are a few different things happening here in this exhibition: the bronzes that you fabricated at the Walla Walla Foundry, the bamboo works on the wall and on pedestals, and the smaller toothpick and grape stem works, but I think most people know you as a painter. What prompted you to gather these sculptures together and show them now?

James Siena: I’ve been talking about doing this for a long time, but when the technology came along to scan and print the small works on a larger scale, I really started thinking more seriously about it. That was about two years ago. I remember saying back in the 80s when I was making the smaller ones — all of which are destroyed now — that it would be really nice to make these in metal so that they would be more permanent. The technology wasn’t there in ’85, ’86 when I was gluing toothpicks to grape stems.

In the paintings, prints, and drawings, you tend to give yourself certain constraints as part of the process. Did that way of working having any effect on these sculptures?

I did follow certain procedures specific to the grape stem structures. The bamboo sculptures, which I started making in the last year and half, are more related to my painting procedures. They are rigorously geometric. In the bamboo ones, I tend to work from the outside in, like I do in a painting. The non-stem toothpick works used various means to create volume and structure: Villa Aurelia (one and two) were built around sticks, Margaret Atwood, Charles Babbage, and Dan Schmidt were built around chopstick sections, and Dorothy Vogel, Anthony Braxton, J.D. Bernal, and Eschatologist were all toothpick, made initially in plane geometry mode and built up from that condition.

Of the bamboo ones displayed here, did one give you particular trouble as you made it? When I look at them, I see the geometric precision alongside the presence of your hand in their free form structure. I have a friend who is a sculptor, but has a background in urban planning. I’ve always admired the freehand straight lines he draws in this nerdy kind of way (laughter). I guess I appreciate precision that is not machined.

There is a little bit of slippage that has to do with the inherent qualities of the bamboo. Some of the sticks are severely warped, so I choose the ones that are the straightest to put into the sculptures. I think Morthanveld: Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown (2014-15) was one of the most challenging ones to make. It wasn’t based on right angles, and I was pleased, as I built it, to find a second pentagon being iterated by the outer one and then the smaller pentagons alternating internally, creating a decahedron. I used a process that I employ in other works, which is dividing a surface again and again and again in different ways. In this sculpture, volume is divided.

You were talking about surprises that come up, and yet you give yourself constraints . . . in some ways, that sets you into a direction, but you don’t ever really have an end goal when you make the work.

No. With this one, I was just trying to make a column out of shifted pentagons. Freeman Dyson (2014) came out of these two smaller works, Katherine Dalsimer, and Just the Washing Instructions on Life’s Rich Tapestry, and a motif I used in a painting called Conversation from ’93. It’s one that I’ve worked with and distorted over the years. I thought I could do it in three dimensions, and I think it’s pretty successful. On this larger scale, it reached a level of intensity that I did not anticipate.

Sculpture is not painting, but what do I know about sculpture…? In painting, your eye can take a walk, but in sculpture, your eye has to climb around. Or it has to fly. In a painting, I’m often worried about leaving empty or open space, but in a sculpture it seems to make sense. The density or compression I put into my paintings — that desire can be satisfied with these tight areas in the sculptures where the knots coincide. The openness of these sculptures surprised me despite the fact that they are relatively complex.

I think that’s part of their beauty and appeal. The sculptures are dense but there are these areas of space and lightness within them. As we think through the progress of the sculptures, should we sequence them as first the toothpick and grape stem works, then to the bamboo, and then the bronzes?

I started working on the bronzes in the fall of 2013. I made five trips to Walla Walla. I started the bamboo sculptures when I was doing a residency at the American Academy in Rome. I was working on toothpick things, and we would buy our own groceries, so I would go into the grocery stores and hunt for toothpicks. I never liked the round toothpicks, which was all they had. I had to have flat, tapered ones sent over from the States. But what I did find at the supermarket were bamboo skewers for the barbecue. Knotting the joints with string was born of necessity.

Were you in Rome specifically to work though that idea?

No, it was just an open residency and I wanted to work on light things. I was in the mood to draw. Rome didn’t influence me directly, but I like to think it seeped into my bones. The Baroque in particular — Rome is a Baroque city in spite of its ancient past. The Baroque is ecstatic, broad, and architectural. Perhaps there’s a little Bernini in the bamboo works, come to think of it. Particularly Morthanveld…

Tell me about deciding to work in bronze. That seems like a big step away from the other materials.

I’ve always liked the notion of permanence. I try to make things that last a long time, and the bronzes would survive a fire as long as it didn’t get too hot (laughter). I also just wanted to see what would happen. I still want to see what happens if I make a small work in bronze…just how that would feel in the hand. After awhile, it became more and more necessary for me to include the toothpick works because they inform the process of how these were made. I want to take the clothes off the process. The bronzes are mysterious, and the toothpick works mitigate that.

Contents May Differ (2014) in particular was made in the same way as the smaller sculptures. We scanned and cast toothpicks for me to weld together. I cut them to the right length and worked with a master welder to make the welds. I polished and ground away all of these joints to make them smooth There’s no patina on this one — it’s just sanded, polished, and waxed so it has a different presence than the others, although I really like the outcome of the 3-D printing process. The striations on the bronze — they’re all a result of the printing process.

How long did it take to print them?

Printing the plastic-wax from which the bronze was cast? Many hours, depending on the complexity. I would only go to the foundry once the casting was done to work on the patina. I tend to embrace labor in the work. There is labor in making the original, and there’s labor in doing the patina, but it’s unusual for me to just watch this whole process happen.

Right. This kind of going away and coming back to work on something…

And there’s the leaving it to others. But I love making prints with master printers, and Walla Walla Foundry presents similar opportunities and challenges. The metalsmiths and woodworkers are collaborators more than fabricators. They made suggestions that I really responded to, like how much metal I needed to put on a joint and introducing me to new tools and techniques.

The work titles are unusual. It seems like a lot of different influences and interests inform them.

Most of the works are titled after people, places, or enigmatic word combinations. For example, Mark Strand was a friend of mine and a great poet. There are also historical figures. Barbara Tuchman is a very important historian. She wrote about the First World War, and reading The Guns of August got me started on studying that conflict. It’s an important subject of mine…does it make its way into the work? I’d like to think that it does…strategic geometry, perhaps? R.D. Laing is known for a book from the ‘70s called Knots, which is about psychological conundrums and people getting stuck in cycles of confusion. Anthony Braxton is an experimental musician who occasionally writes compositions using very unconventional notation. I think codifying thought through improvisational form is a very fertile field. In some ways I’m talking about neural connections and using the grape stem as a metaphor for that, but it also has to do with homage and pointing to the fact that abstraction doesn’t really exist.

Yes. I think we’re all trying to find some sort of signifier for “things,” but there are only so many “things” (laughter). We can shuffle them around a little bit, but…

There are many combinations, and I think that’s what makes it so interesting. For quite some time, I did not have any titles for these works, but then I started assigning names to them — invented or real — and thinking about how that could nudge the viewer towards my mind. It’s not just naming them Julius Caesar or Martin Luther King though. I thought about what might happen if someone finds a sculpture named Richard Fynman (2014), and they wonder who that is. There’s a little bit of perversity in that kind of misdirection…

What really moves us leads us to other things. It’s the good kind of rabbit hole to go down.

I really like the trestle tables and pedestals that you used to display the work. Was that your idea to install the work on them?

In my studio, I like to work standing up, so my tables are pretty high. As these began to accumulate, I needed more table space so I bought a hollow core door that I put up on some carts, but they were a little low. Then I went to an estate sale for Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof. There were four sawhorses, but I only bought two because I thought I didn’t have that much space and because I’m an idiot.(laughter) They were a perfect height with the door set on them. Having the air underneath the sculptures felt necessary. These pedestals aren’t standard — they’re two different colors, the base and the top, and there’s an overhang. I think these could be installed in a different way, and I wouldn’t have any requirements.

Now that you have a group done, do you feel like this is something you will continue to do?

I’ve been working on this show for such a long while. I need some time to reflect. I’ve been working on some ink drawings lately, and I have an ongoing group of typewriter drawings I started when I was in Rome. I have about 10 other sculptures I didn’t include in this show, so I will continue with those, and I have a painting that’s in the works… I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place like this: a new show of completely new work that almost nobody saw prior…

This idea of transformation through technology is really exciting, but it’s almost too soon to talk about. We’re entering a time where 3-D printing is really in its infancy. When this technology gets ubiquitous, stuff is going to happen that we can’t predict.

The post “A little bit of slippage”: The Sculptures of Painter James Siena appeared first on artcritical.

February 13, 2015
235 W 23rd St (between 7th and 8th avenues)
New York, 646 862 0833

What does it mean to be woman? Is the divine purpose of our lives tied to marriage and everything that accompanies? Will our “mission be complete” once a man chooses us as his bride?

Is marriage all there is?

Over the course of nine years, performance artist Maria Yoon explored ideas and a range of attitudes toward marriage. Her journey to knowing and unknowing is recorded in Maria the Korean Bride (2013), a 75-minute documentary-style film Yoon directs and stars in. The film, which screened in collaboration with Baang + Burne Contemporary for Valentines Day, features Yoon as Maria the Korean Bride (MtKB) traveling across the country on two-day trips to marry someone — and sometimes something — in each of the 50 states, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. After 50 marriages and thousands of miles zig-zagging across the United States, Yoon didn’t find any definitive answers to these questions about women and marriage, but her quest did lead to provocative questioning and unexpected answers.

Yoon is a first-generation Korean-American and the eldest daughter, born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in New York City. Although much of Yoon’s childhood was spent like a typical American youth, her parents made it clear that they expected their daughters to marry a Korean man, but even more importantly, marry to prove themselves good daughters and honorable women. The film shows how Yoon seems to disappoint time and again — her youngest sister was wed before Yoon began the project, and her father frequently refuses to discuss how he feels about marriage, his daughter’s project, or even to be filmed. Without a serious romantic relationship happening in her life, let alone marriage prospects, Yoon felt increasingly burdened with unfulfilled responsibility and obligation. To highlight the gravity of these expectations, Yoon’s mother gave her a wedding Hanbok, a traditional formal Korean skirt and shirt outfit worn for special occasions, for her 30th birthday. Receiving her wedding Hanbok started Yoon on a journey to explore the differing meanings of marriage around the country; Maria the Korean Bride was born.

Getting married became a well-run production: finding volunteers to assist (coordinating with photographers, finding “husbands ” on Craigslist or through friends and other connections), locating ministers to perform the ceremony, creating vows and rituals specific to the location and situation, getting waivers and paperwork to ensure that the marriages weren’t legally binding. Finally, MtKB’s first wedding to a Diana Ross impersonator took place in Las Vegas in 2002.

Yoon married men, women, a racehorse, an oil pump, a public park, statues and more during her nine-year performance as MtKB. She began to marry inanimate objects after an especially trying trip to the Milwaukee Brewing Company in Wisconsin. A weekend tour manager asked Yoon to “leave” and told her “go back to where you came from” after seeing her wearing the traditional Korean dress. Yoon admits to feeling confused and hurt by the assumptions the tour manager made about her, but determined to have a ceremony in Milwaukee anyway. The incident prompted her to buy a shirt from the gift shop and marry it in lieu of an actual man, freeing up her thinking around what it means to be in union with another.

As Yoon traveled, she spoke to people along the way, asking them to tell her about their own marriage or their choices not to marry. Interviews in the film include a polygamist household that spoke on the benefit of having someone else there to balance things out, while also admitting that this kind of arrangement certainly would not work for everyone. Gay and lesbian couples discussed their appreciation of matrimony because it gives their families and spouses practical legal protections, but questioned the reasoning of tying marriage to the administration of things like healthcare, death benefits and social security to the institution. A minister who performed one of Yoon’s ceremonies admitted to questioning her own marriage as she began to prepare vows for MtKB. This soul searching and consideration of marriage’s meaning led her realize that she should probably get a divorce. Yoon’s mother is featured frequently, with the artist calling her “the glue” for the film. Her mother states that she was proud of her daughter for making a film that made her and others think about what it means to marry.

MtKB’s final wedding took place in Times Square in May 2011. To mark the occasion, Yoon organized a raffle drawing to choose her final husband. She had a cake made, and engaged Jimmy McMillian, leader of The Rent is Too Damn High political party, to officiate. During the Q&A after the screening, Yoon said she was happy when the project ended and grateful that she only had to do it 50 times. She didn’t come away from the project with any greater perspective on actually being married; she realized that one could only know its value once one has actually experienced it.

For Yoon, MtKB began as an act of defiance, an action to prove her worthiness and ability to find a husband — or 50 — whenever she wanted. Rather than a simple voyage of personal discovery, Maria the Korean Bride grew into a journey of understanding that led Yoon to a greater appreciation for the lives and hearts of a range of people also seeking to understand for themselves love, partnership, and union outside of traditional notions of marriage for themselves.

The post Always the Bride: Maria Yoon’s Marriage Experiment appeared first on artcritical.

Decades before Tracey Emin showed the world her messy bed, and made confessional art a “thing,” Dorothy Iannone was quietly making work about sex, love, friends, and the mundane tasks of our everyday. Iannone’s work (which was often censored over the years and dismissed for its simple, comic book-like style and graphic sexual content) has received renewed interest from the art world recently. In 2009, the New Museum presented her first solo exhibition at a US art venue, which was followed by wide-ranging gallery exhibitions and additional museum shows in Paris, London, and Berlin. A new publication, You Who Read Me with Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends (Siglio Press, 2014) builds on that interest. The book assembles rare and out-of-print artist books, drawings, etchings, and unpublished texts spanning Iannone’s more than 40-year career, and reproduces many of them in their entirety. Included also are a number familiar works like On+On (1979), A Cookbook (1969), and I Was Thinking of You (1975), along with excerpts of a 2011 interview with artist Maurizio Cattelan, as well as conversations with critic Trinie Dalton (who also contributes an essay), and writer Noa Jones.

Born in 1933 in a multigenerational Catholic household, Iannone studied literature at Boston and Brandeis Universities before marrying painter James Upham in 1958. They traveled frequently to Asia, North Africa, and Europe, and she began to incorporate into her paintings the artistic styles from art she had seen during her travels: Japanese woodcuts, Indian erotica and paintings from Mughal Empire, Greek and Egyptian sculpture. Together, she and Upham opened Stryker Gallery in the heart of New York’s vibrant downtown art scene in 1963, and Iannone befriended several European and American ex-pat artists such as Robert Fillou and George Brecht. Soon, a trip to Iceland with another friend, the Fluxus artist and poet Emmett Williams, would forever change her life. She met and fell in love with artist Dieter Roth and after a brief return trip to New York, Iannone left her husband to move back to Reykjavík. She lived and worked with Roth there and in London, Basel and Düsseldorf until their relationship ended in 1974.

Iannone’s work evokes a youthful simplicity. Her images are filled with colorful decorative motifs like stars, flowers, rosebuds, and teardrop-like doodles that complement an abundance of florid texts that frequently accompany the explicit illustrations. While there are crude drawings of genitals on all of the figures whether they are clothed or not, the work isn’t necessarily just about sex. Iannone seems much more interested in exploring what it means to be devoted to someone or something. Flora and Fauna (1973), a drawing on Bristol board with felt pen, is a brilliantly colored scene featuring the mythical Dorothy and Dieter figures surrounded by a lush landscape. Dieter’s and Dorothy’s arms are covered in black patterned tattoo-like sleeves, and Dieter wears black “pants” with white, yellow, and crimson heart shaped figures containing text reflecting on deep commitment to another:

“I am your deepest lover
You cannot resist me
You cover my body with kisses
You touch me as often as possible. I am infinitely adorable
My face is bright and wise and intelligent and beautiful.
I am the only one . . . ”

In an interview with critic Trinie Dalton, Iannone says that when she spoke of “ecstatic unity” in the past, she thought that such a total union between oneself and the other could only happen erotically, but later realized that wasn’t true. “Much later, I glimpsed that this sense of completion was already within myself waiting to be realized […] When I read more recently that in Tibetan Buddhism, another word for enlightenment is ‘ecstatic unity,’ I was still as I let the pleasure of that knowledge silently and without thoughts spread through me,” she said.

Iannone’s art should be read neither as simple memoirs nor as mere erotica despite their frank references to sex and her personal life. The best art always begins with what we know and then expands — a concept Iannone seems to understand well. Although deeply personal, disquieting, and revealing, Iannone’s work somehow manages to make room for the universals in life: the sex, love, “death and taxes” of life. You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends helps provide context and unifying arc to Iannone’s oeuvre, one focused on personal growth and discovery revealed through a blurring of public and private worlds.

Trinie Dalton and Dorothy Iannone, Dorothy Iannone: You Who Read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends (New York: Siglio, 2014). Ed. Lisa Pearson. ISBN 978-1938221071, 320 pages, $31.30

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It’s been more than 100 days since most of America learned about a small town outside of St. Louis, MO called Ferguson, and many more since a cell phone video went viral of a man dying from having his throat and chest crushed while being restrained by police on Staten Island. While Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s names have received the most attention in the popular press, there were many more Black people killed by law enforcement officials this year, a phenomenon that is not new or that unusual. It wasn’t just that “the block was hot” this summer, but it seemed like the entire nation suddenly felt the heat. Each time another racial injustice was revealed this year, it became more difficult to claim with sincerity that we are living in a post-racial America, or that race doesn’t have as much impact in daily life as it once did.

I know in the art world, it can feel like we aren’t really supposed to talk about this race stuff, but in 2014, it’s been really difficult to avoid the topic. There was the YAMS Collective controversy during the Whitney Biennial, discussions of how to critique the new Latin American wunderkind without bringing up Basquiat, a questionable exhibition in London, and an art dealer defending the exploitative work of an artist by saying there are worse things to be upset over… like global warming. Was it easier to report on and critique those and similar incidents because they were such blatant examples of racism? Why has finding words to discuss the aftermath and recent “non-indictment indictments” in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown been more difficult?

I’ve struggled with writing something that said everything I wanted to say about the images the media used to tell the story of Michael Brown’s death and its aftermath too. How do art critics talk about the framing of all Ferguson protesters as rioters and looters, the visual absence of Officer Wilson, the ghost of the deceased Brown, and the use of racially coded language like “thug”? Why do we even need to speak up? In art, we critics — unless our last names are Davis, Cotter, or Saltz — don’t always have the freedom to talk about race in concrete terms for fear of accusations that we lack objectivity or may be employing our “race card” — whatever that is — or worse. None of us want to be dismissed as crazy or hysterical, people who have nothing better to do than stir up the pot and keep sleeping dogs from lying down. Besides, isn’t art free from all of those social constructs like race and gender or economic limitations…?

Lived experience tells me that we have a lot of work to do, and that there is much at stake. Responses to the media treatment of Brown like #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, where social media users paired photographs of flattering images like a yearbook portrait with something fault-finding, such as an impulsively misguided selfie to highlight the news media’s polarizing and oversimplified portrayal of black youths, is devastatingly real. If one of the roles of criticism is to reflect on the contemporary cultural moment and spark thoughtful conversations about how we experience the world, examining the visual culture associated with current events matters. Imagine how the language of critique might shift or how the range of voices and topics heard might expand if more art critics didn’t consider their primary role as that of quality control for good taste. Art objects and images have value in the world beyond their aesthetics. Objects and images help us interpret the world and give it meaning. The things we make reflect the way we see. What if we spoke of the visual language of respectability politics in these officer-involved shootings? What if we critiqued that?

There is a long and sordid history of tension between police and Black communities, a history that stretches back to the plantation overseer. So much of law enforcement practice in the U.S. has been about managing the autonomy, self-determination, and individual freedoms in a society; so much about Black community life in the U.S. has been about fighting to reclaim those same rights from those who would like to take them.

The most morally repressed and vile among us maintain the belief that people are generally hard-wired to do good. Police are supposed to protect and help the citizenry, and each time one of their number does something to shatter that assumption, most of us are still taken aback. Overgrown bullies and would-be sociopaths do not become police officers, right? Is that why CNN looped that video of Mike Brown at the corner store allegedly stealing even though the video had not yet been authenticated? It is sadly ironic that 2014 is the 50th anniversary of the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, during which the police and local Klu Klux Klan members colluded to cover up the murder of three Civil Rights workers, two of whom were White northerners.

Art critics are preoccupied with the connections between words and images and their connotations. We study, research, posit, analyze, reflect, and conjure, all in search of meaning. We know that while images are visual, they are emotive. We also understand that the way we see is different depending on how we feel or what’s happening around us. The events that seemed to culminate around Ferguson appeared so ripe for our critical eyes, but it’s been hard to fix our gaze there. Some of us may think it doesn’t concern us — that this isn’t about art — but we’re wrong.

Something about this cultural moment jolted our collective “we” to action. Americans are talking with strangers about the way they live their lives and we’re struggling to understand how others might experience the world. Art is a powerful tool for increasing understanding and bridging seemingly “un-bridgeable” gaps. As protests across the country continue, I’m hoping the art world isn’t caught sleeping again, but instead, makes room for more of its practitioners and participants to add critical perspective to the tidal change the entire world seeks. If art is who we are when no one else is looking, perhaps criticism can help reveal even more of what’s been hidden in the dark.

The post The Critic as Activist: Thoughts on Race, Voice, and Agency in the Art World appeared first on artcritical.

Robert Gober’s work calls for spare words to match its minimalist form, quiet contemplation to match its understated yet striking affect. “The Heart is Not a Metaphor” is the artist’s first large-scale career survey in the U.S. It includes about 130 objects spanning mediums, including drawing and photography, and features a small selection of work by artists with whom he has worked or collaborated with as a curator. The exhibition is loosely chronological, following Gober’s development of ideas around home, the quotidian, violence and sex, faith, purification and ritual. And like the work, the exhibition design is didactically understated — there is only one panel in each gallery for general context — while the walls are unpainted, and in some cases unfinished, with panel beams exposed on one side making everything look and feel generic, like a television playing mindlessly in the background.

Gober’s meticulously crafted sculptures of common objects like paint cans, ice skates, or cribs are familiar, even though something is always a little bit off about them. These are things we use, things we have, things that are a part of us. But his limbs never seem to connect to complete bodies: they jut out from walls, contain odd protrusions and indentations, or end up where they normally would not be, such as a fireplace. The cribs are dangerously slanted, oddly shaped, and “butter” sometimes “sleeps” in them; the sinks cannot function, and closets are surprisingly shallow. He places us in the familiarity of the home — our private spaces, places where we cleanse, rejuvenate, define and refine ourselves. Through his work, Gober wants us to learn about the places where our hearts truly live.

Well, maybe not our hearts, but certainly his. The sculptures and environments as signifiers of origin and daily living are meant to be familiar, but too much of it feels willfully insular and self-focused. In Gober’s world, everything looks like a neutral, but not too much seems to match.

Gober came to prominence in New York during the 1980s when the city was being ravaged by the AIDS crisis. Much of his work responds to and comments on that moment. Two of his wallpaper installations are on view, and Untitled (1989 – 1996) still unsettles me years later upon viewing it in person again. A sketch of a sleeping man with brown hair alternates with the image of a man with dark brown skin and white knee-length pants hanging from a tree by a noose, over and over again from floor to ceiling. A white wedding gown hanging on a chicken-wire-frame seamstress’s mannequin in the middle of the room would seem to signify purity, promise, hope, passion, and violence. Sculptures of bags of cat litter are placed here and there against the walls. Gober has talked about this installation being inspired by the collision of our country’s shadowy past and present: the domestic terrorism of lynching and the denial of rights to same sex marriage. The work highlights the lengths to which we go to sanitize situations and make something undesirable tolerable and tame.

But I find it difficult to take these juxtapositions seriously as provocation. It feels like a curious “default” representation of queer history, which is often depicted through the experience of white gay men. I was much too young to really understand what was happening socially then, but I imagine that in the mid-1980s and early ’90s — the height of the American AIDS crisis — the right to marry was not the most pressing issue on anyone’s LGBTQ agenda, although it appears the issue was important for Gober. His environments created for the Dia Chelsea in 1992 that featured sinks with working plumbing, sculptures of rat poison boxes also included bundled stacks of photolithograph print newspapers interspersed with advertisements of him wearing a wedding dress. But while too many people were unable to share their last moments with their loved ones at this time, to compare the ban on same-sex marriage to the terrorism of lynchings doesn’t feel right. In fact it feels like privileged, self-referential navel gazing.

A response to the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks, Untitled (2003-2005) features a headless Jesus-like fountain from which cleansing water flows from the nipples into a gaping hole in the floor. Framed photolithographs of the September 12, 2001 edition of The New York Times line the walls, the pages having been overlaid with pastel drawings of humans embracing, and pallets aligned to recall church pews complete the space. If we are to seek comfort in times of sorrow, be washed by the holy water, and covered and cleansed by the blood of the lamb, why does this installation feel so cheeky? Gober was raised Catholic, but later left the church, disillusioned. Nonetheless he says he created this environment as a place for contemplation in a time of tragedy. This installation doesn’t offer comfort, however, but seems to provoke. This work isn’t about a collective spiritual crisis of “we,” but about something very specific to Gober’s experience.

As I wandered through the exhibition studying the early paintings, reference drawings, sinks, and other sculpted objects, I sighed deeply and repeatedly. Gober’s visual insistence on bland universal definitions of roots, home, values and mores, and even faith is exhausting. I can sense that the work is about him, that it is specific, but everything I see tries so hard to fade into the proverbial woodwork while coyly inviting me to acknowledge and congratulate its difference.

The post Nixed Metaphors: Lee Ann Norman on Robert Gober appeared first on artcritical.

Good exhibitions are designed to create a visual program of content and experiences that communicate affect most effectively. Curators and designers consider a number of factors to ensure that the visual experience — the look and feel — of the space accurately conveys the story they want to tell about the work: What if the art is lighted from below or above? How might the object look hanging from the rafters or on the floor? What if the walls aren’t white? What if the physical environment is not rectinlinear?

In March 1947, renowned dealer Alexander Iolas — then director of Hugo Gallery — sought to push the boundaries of curatorial license through a breathtaking environment for modern art in the exhibition “Bloodflames.” The show featured art curated by Nicolas Calas installed in the unconventional Fredrick Kiesler-designed environment filled with bright, bold colors and sloping walls. Works by Gorky, Noguchi, Lam, and Matta among others lay propped against walls, hanging from the ceiling, and jutting out at odd angles. Paul Kasmin, in collaboration with Rail Curatorial Projects, revisited this seminal exhibition through “Bloodflames Revisited,” curated by artist, writer, and Brooklyn Rail publisher Phong Bui.

Filling the expanse of both Kasmin galleries, “Bloodflames Revisited” features work from more than 20 artists, including Will Ryman, Cindy Sherman, Chris Martin, and Roxy Paine. While certainly not as radical and disruptive to the senses as the original — you’ll find no sloping exhibition walls or amorphous blobs interspersed between works of art at Kasmin — this contemporary response to “Bloodflames” presents an effective and thoughtful alternative to the traditional white-cube exhibition as we know it. Upon entering the galleries, viewers are jarred by Crayola-colored walls that stretch from the hay-covered floor to the ceiling. “Bloodflames Revisited” is filled with artwork, although the orange-yellow of the walls and the earthy smell of hay trigger the senses to conclude the opposite. Walking into the exhibit spaces takes a bit of re-orientation that immediately calls into question the visual cues we associate with the display of cultural objects. Is it the color on the walls the risers or the hay beneath our feet that suggests everything we experience and see in this space can be questioned?

I walked through the 27^th Street gallery as if down a pirate’s gangplank and felt a relationship to the artworks that unsettled me. When we go the gallery or the museum, we stand apart from the art and typically view it from eye level. Standing on the riser, I looked down on Tunga’s sculptural assemblages, and my eyes rested on the top third of Deborah Kass’s and Alex Katz’s paintings. I decided to surrender to the moment, realizing that the exhibition was successful in its premise: it had indeed forced me to interrogate ideas I had internalized about what my relationship to the art should be as a viewer.

Glenn Ligon’s electric blue and neon green Niggers Ain’t Scared (1996), from the Richard Pryor joke paintings series is still jarring, even when viewed from above. “Alot of niggers ain’t scared, youknowwhatImean?” the text begins in Ligon’s signature stenciling style of imperfection. “I mean like when the Martians landed and shit white folks got all scared.” In an additional act of visual violence, the stenciled words smear down the canvas drawing more attention to the textual dissonance. “Nothing can scare a nigger after 400 years of this shit,” the joke concludes.

Nearby, Lynda Benglis’s giant half sphere of red-orange tinted polyurethane protrudes off of the wall as if floating in space.Benglis developed the brain matter-like forms of her metal and polyurethane half-spheres after combining elements from her work with knotted metal in the 1970s and glass in the 1980s. After discovering she could make knots of glass with her hands using technology, she gained a greater understanding of the material’s properties and began casting concave and convex forms. D’Arrest (2009) is mesmerizing, due in part to its relationship to light. The pigmented polyurethane seems to absorb light while reflecting it, causing it to act like a proprioceptor. The form appears to change as its jelly-like squiggles catch the light from various angles.

On Tenth Avenue, my viewing experience was altered still. The exhibition continued to use bold colors and elevated platforms, but the limitations of the physical space were brought into view more sharply. The snaking riser connecting the two viewing spaces here felt especially distracting, which encouraged me to step down and freely traipse around through the hay. As I examined Do Ho Suh’s stove from the Specimens series, I was reminded of the relationship between belonging and assimilation. In the series, the artist explores his own relationship to cultural displacement and belonging by making scale replicas of items from his New York apartment using only polyester fitted over wire armatures. The translucent material reveals while it conceals, showing some of the internal structure of the object yet protecting the vulnerable insides.

Much of our visual viewing experience is guided by subtle contextual clues: the height of the walls, the lighting, the props on which art objects reside, etc. What other stories do cultural objects reveal through the environment in which they are presented? How can altering the visual context of an artwork allow us to see it fully? The ideas presented in “Bloodflames” and its modern-day re-imagining emphasize the possibilities in disrupting how we relate to art through the physical space where it is presented. Bui fiddles with some of the contemporary conventions of exhibition design by swapping out sterile white walls and employing our other five senses in the viewing experience. It is a welcomed disturbance. Though Kasmin’s gallery spaces will return to their familiar spotless white and polished concrete in a few weeks, “Bloodflames Revisited” serves as a reminder that the relationship between viewer and art object can — and should be — personal and visceral.

The post Burning Inside: Passion, Politics, and Disruption at Paul Kasmin appeared first on artcritical.