September 7 to October 20, 2016
909 Madison Avenue (at 93rd Street)
New York, 212 772 2004

Layer by layer, with a mixture of Mars Black and cobalt blue, the surfaces of Karin Schneider’s paintings are built up until the matte black surface is rendered saturated yet delicate, revealing brushstrokes or internal compositions only when the light falls a certain way. Squint and bend down: these are not by Ad Reinhardt. The stenciled words “Poland,” “Syria,” or “Serbia” replace Reinhardt’s crosses on three of the canvases. Simultaneously challenging and perpetuating the notion that art must build upon a lineage of art history, Schneider’s works in “Situational Diagram” at Dominique Lévy reactivate the works of Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Tarsila do Amaral, and Mark Rothko.

The downstairs gallery is a visual matrix. A metal armature stretching from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall occupies most of the floor (with the three-dimensional form of a trisected square, as in Reinhardt’s works). Canvases are hung from its bars so that their midpoints match those of the steel frames. Each has been painted in that same Reinhardt-like method. Though the light is generally even due to the semi-opaque glass of the gallery’s windows, one’s eyes must adjust to appreciate how the works vibrate between inner and outer squares, painted in slightly different hues. From the four swatches of black used in all works, each of these (O) paintings was made in one combination of a color pair.

Those four swatches are exercised again in Schneider’s Index series upstairs. In oil, petroleum, and coal on canvas, the paintings infuse Reinhardt’s aesthetics with media that are undeniably subject to the pressures of geopolitical conflicts and depletion. The same materials are in V (MR/RC#1473) (Void) (2016), a centerpiece of stretched canvas laying horizontally in the gallery so that it seems to sink into itself. Void alludes to Newman and Rothko, whose Pagan Void (1946) and Rothko Chapel paintings, respectively, captured for Schneider those artists’ styles. If her Void collapses those styles into a single work, a black lusterless pit, its triteness is not insignificant. “Style,” Schneider writes in the exhibition’s catalogue, “has the function of transforming single ‘useless’ repetitive actions into objects of common desire.” Part of that desire comes from the pull of recognition; the works shy away from discernibility in their low lighting, but maintain an uncanny familiarity. Yet the act of tugging historical works back into the present is not simply an aesthetic decision — to shift those works into the present is to require that the works read within context of contemporary art. By overlaying puritanical monochromes with the names of countries undergoing immense civil and territorial changes and using materials that have caused political turmoil on their lands, Schneider challenges the separation of art from sociopolitical life that was implied by the introduction of Reinhardt’s original monochromes. An edition of Artforum lying on the gallery floor is opened to an advertisement for this show alongside an image of a toddler refugee, explicitly pinpointing that this work exists now, in this gallery, in our media, and in this global context.

The intricacies of each split, void, extraction, cancellation, index, floating, naming, and situation in “Situational Diagram” are explained in Schneider’s accompanying text, a detailed account of terms and formal histories with formulas of initials and mathematical symbols that explain who the artist referred to in each work and how. These accounts function as supplementary reading, with forays into justice systems, linguistics, subject formation, and style. Though they initially read as quite sincere, the equations as titles seem to mock contemporary art that gives formulaic responses to art history; even the works’ alphabetization in the catalogue by title (I for Index, N for Naming), complete with pronunciation guides, reads less as a linguistic or conceptual move than a jab at simple appendages. The formulas necessarily live on the same pages as Schneider’s texts; the explanations alone risk being overly conjectural to the point of overwhelming the artwork while the equations alone risk being reductively structured, obliterating nuances. Can any artist working today claim without humor that their work, from its conception to execution and display, draws solely on a handful of artists’ works? How significant must a reference be to make it into the equation?

Perhaps the best metaphor for the effect of this exhibition is one of the works itself: a wall drawing, WD#SD (@DL/NY, 2016), captures the title of the exhibition and diagrams a geometry of telescoping squares connected via a diagonal line through their top left corners. At the intersections of black lines, white dots seem to appear peripherally but disappear thereafter in an inversion of the famous Hermann grid illusion. Like that illusion, these works exhibit a fleeting visibility. Askance, they seem to be canonical, but en face they reveal themselves to be acutely contemporary. The black paintings’ visibility is also fleeting in a more literal sense: Schneider has specified that any collector purchasing the works must allow another unspecified artist to paint over the canvas after acquisition. And so the cannibalization continues.

The post “Objects of common desire”: Karin Schneider at Dominique Lévy appeared first on artcritical.

April 21 to August 2, 2016
317 Dundas Street West (at McCaul Street)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 416 979 6648

Visitors to Thomas Ruff’s last exhibition at David Zwirner in New York this past spring may have been surprised by the latest exhibition of his press++ (2015) print series at the Art Gallery of Ontario. When presented independently, the series was a bit bewildering, but there was some sense of delayed gratification once one understood that they were enlarged, notated press photographs on the subject of space. As part of “Thomas Ruff: Object Relations,” however, the press++ series was preceded by several of his other bodies of work, so that this experimental approach to photography lost its novelty.

That loss would not have felt substantial had the introductory series been stronger. On display in the first gallery were several works that Ruff created upon the museum’s invitation to examine their collection and use it as a source for his process of altering found or appropriated photographic materials. For the photographs in Negative (2014–ongoing), Ruff inverted the light and dark areas of each historical photograph so that the new works appeared to be negatives. The series was effective in framing reversal as a key process for the rest of the show, but the works were otherwise unremarkable, feeling more like a reluctant answer to an uninteresting invitation.

That the prints in the press++ series were made from found newspaper clippings manipulated by Ruff comes as no surprise. Though the show’s curation reduced the novelty of this approach, it also allowed more interesting observations to emerge. In the series of “negatives,” for example, one noticed how Ruff’s manipulations flattened space and disrupted one’s ability to perceive animation (the artist’s body versus a statue). Similarly, in the press++ photographs, one may now notice how the superficial marks on the photographs (such as handwriting, copyright stamps, and remnants of glued paper) stand out as more “real” than the people depicted in the images.

In the next room, the ties between works were far more compelling. The series of inverted photographs continued, but here the original photographs were more visually dense, representing the interior of an artist’s studio. In neg◊artist_01 (2014), for example, an artist rests his right leg on the pedestal of a statue of a female body, whose original white color has been reversed into a deep navy. Her pose mimics his, as her right leg also rests on some other object formed as part of the statue. Additional portraits framed on the studio walls hover around them like ghostly presences. Somehow in these inverted images it is far more difficult to ascertain which bodies are real: the artist gets lost in his studio and becomes an object himself while those statues are imbued with life.

In the center of this room, a display case held several found photographs and objects from Ruff’s collection. Bowers and Lough’s 1909 gelatin silver print Electrocardiograms shows measurements of “fatigue of muscle from repeated single contractions” and “tetanic muscular contractions.” Their wavering lines are scientific graphs, but they appear abstract, as if they were studio drawings in ink made to illustrate how line density could convey the progression of light to dark. Opposite these hung Lucien Walery’s photogravures published in a book, Nus (1923). A naked woman holds several different poses as she lies on carpet; however, the carpet is not a floor but a backdrop, hung from an invisible ceiling and run into the foreground. After noticing this optical shift, one can sense the weight of the model’s body resting on the ball of her raised foot. This is another kind of inversion. In their high contrast of white subject (her skin could be polished marble) with dark ground (the Oriental rug was woven with deep hues), these photogravures are reminiscent of Susan Weil and Robert Rauschenberg’s photograms, which were, in another parallel, long “buried, filed under the generic heading ‘Nudes'” in Chicago, according to Michael Lobel, writing in Artforum in February. Other photograms appeared in this show, too, on the wall next to the display case: two of Arthur Siegel’s 1944 works. They do not depict bodies, but as photograms, none have any compositional negative. They relate well to Ruff’s inverted photo series, in which a false negative is created in lieu of the original.

The tension between surface and depth continues in the next room with Ruff’s Sterne (“stars,” 1989–92) series. Each print is an enlarged section of a negative from the European Southern Observatory in Chile depicting clusters of stars. Made larger than a human body, they echo the vastness of the galaxy. In their black depths, the viewer can see herself as well as the other galaxies hung on the opposite wall. Any artist who has dabbled in film photography or paid attention to the show’s thread of negatives might connect these images with dust on a negative. In any case, Ruff’s evident interest in revealing the apparatus behind photographic prints seems to be what links the Sterne series to the 2003 series Maschinen (“machines”) also occupying this room; all images are product photography from 1930s Germany in which, as the didactic asserts, the “close relationship between functional and artistic photography” is highlighted. In each image, a background curtain or veil of smoke focuses the viewer’s attention on the pastel machine to be sold. As with most advertising strategies, the function of these machines becomes less important than the fact that one should want them.

Indeed, Ruff mimics the product photographer’s intent to remove “extraneous” information when he attempts to remove the context from press photographs or re-display found objects. If Ruff is right, the most effective contemporary veils are those that separate image from text, art from media, and object from time.

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June 2 to June 4, 2016
512 W 19th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 255 5793

What is dust but history settling itself? Yvonne Rainer’s latest permutation of the ongoing project, The Concept of Dust, performed at The Kitchen, began quite literally with the death of an author. The stage was empty save for a white towel, pillow, and grey folding chair. The dancers, as they walked on stage, appeared not serious but devastated. Rainer began to speak: “I have a sad announcement to make tonight. One of our members won’t be here; Pat Catterson died last night.” Before the audience could react, a voice yelled from offstage, “No, what the fuck, Yvonne? What are you trying to do, get rid of me?” The forced farce — Catterson’s response sounded like that of an overly dramatic television actress — triggered first nervous, then genuine laughter from the audience as Catterson and Rainer eyed each other warily in the center of the floor. Though as the dance progressed this beginning increasingly faded from memory, the concept of lost, disembodied, or assumed voices became the spine of the piece.

Catterson soon, again, became the central figure as she began to tap dance, explaining as she danced:

During the voyage from Africa, slaves were occasionally brought up from the ship’s hull and made to dance. They were worth money now, and the physical exercise helped keep them alive. Imagine what this meant: they did routines that a month or two earlier had been part of the observance of their religion, or the celebration of a feast day, or the expression of their relationship with their grandparents. Anyone who hears this story will feel the burden of reconciliation built into tap.

With this speech — which was likely found text, as indicated by Rainer in her text on the piece — Catterson turns the once-comic atmosphere shades darker. While some of the dancers’ ensuing movements are intentionally stilted and quotidian, they can no longer be quite as amusing as much of the audience seemed to believe, laughing along. Instead, the movements and voices begin to feel hysterical. As slow violin music plays, a low and incoherent woman’s voice is subtly woven into the soundscape as if it were a subconscious murmur conducting the dancers, who improvisationally iterate small, choreographed passage of movement. Their imperfect coordination conveys informality reminiscent of rehearsal. Combined with the hysterical impulses woven into the choreography, this informality surfaces Rainer’s concern for the elemental chaos within the apparent order of daily life, which also comes through in her chosen texts. Dust is the ultimate mark of quotidian life, for it can only exist among whatever has become so routine as to be neglected.

The informality and familiarity of the dancers’ motions also allows each dancer to communicate their personality; with time, one notices how the same move looks different across bodies. Fifth position arms look best on the dancer who moves most lightly and elegantly. In ballet, the merging of body with gesture may be desirable, but in this choreography Rainer seems more interested in pointing to the citation of movement, paralleling the citation of text. Here, the same move looks best on the body that performs it most unnaturally, thus highlighting the difference between a routine and learned movement. And again, given the forced look of these movements on the dancers’ bodies,Catterson’s mention of being “made to dance” boils to the surface.

Rainer’s quoted texts are compiled in a stapled packet of papers, which she flips through during the performance, first while sitting in a chair at the edge of the stage, and then while running to the side of a dancer to ask them to read an excerpt. Most of them do so willingly, but some run away as Rainer approaches. When she finally catches up, she captures in her microphone only a gasp or guttural sound. But that appears satisfactory, as if “gasp” were part of the text. Though largely disconnected, and from sources including the Metropolitan Museum and New York Times, some texts are identified, such as excerpts from Kingsley Amis and from Maureen N McLane’s My Poets (2012). Rainer may introduce these partly for amusement, but also because they seem to be neglected stories: later in the dance, she reads a story about a young black man who was wrongly arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia, beaten up in jail, and later released but with permanently damaged eyes. By blowing the dust off of these stories, one brings them back into the present, calls attention to their contemporary relevance.

Citations are defined by their removal from an original context. Because the performers may rearrange the phrases of the dance as they perform — and presumably Rainer may rearrange the order of the spoken texts — it is not their sequence or trajectory but rather their similarities that reveal Rainer’s intentions. In one phrase of the dance, the lights turn off completely. A voice speaks, that of an invisible narrator. She recites the history of a fossil. As she reads, one can hear that she is reading from a printed text, for she repeats some words and mispronounces others. Stumbling over words and imperfectly miming movements are both acts of citation. They also allow the voices and motions of history to become personalized, no longer omnipotent and objective. History is defined by its belonging to the past; it is made visible only in its residues, its accumulation of context: references, citations and dust.

The post Dust Settling: Yvonne Rainer Choreographs History at The Kitchen appeared first on artcritical.

April 19 to May 22, 2016
Wiesner Building, 20 Ames Street (at Amherst Street)
Cambridge, MA, 617 253 4680

At the List Visual Arts Center’s exhibition “Narrative Color,” the first phrase that came to me while watching KP Brehmer’s three-minute film Ideale Lanschaft (Ideal Landscape) (1970), was “schizophrenic gardens,” but I corrected myself. The depicted gardens themselves were not disorderly — in fact, as English gardens, they were the pure image of order, “the triumph of sovereignty over nature,” as the narrator acutely described them. It was only their representations within the film that seemed fleeting, vibrant, paranoia-inducing. This, in itself, becomes a sort of theme within the show, where each of the five films, made by seven artists since the 1970s, deliberately refuses to be structured by a traditional narrative arc, instead using color to explore the construction and deconstruction of language. The show includes work by Brehmer, Bernadette Corporation, Mareike Bernien and Kerstin Schroedinger, Derek Jarman, and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.

Scenes in Ideale Lanschaft move quickly: only a few scenes of some garden somewhere at a time, occasionally with a dancing man intervening, at first with German dialogue and captions, then interspersed with color blocks and corresponding names of colors. In a seconds-long take, a flowerbed is briefly framed and the camera moves on to a wall of foliage, which becomes a green streak across the screen. A man dancing in the garden appears as a vision when the camera quickly swoops away, as if running away from the image. The scenes become more like color fields, of skies and gardens, largely static but slightly wavering.

Fortuitously, the first headphones I used were apparently broken: the only soundtrack was heavy breathing in my left ear, which narrowed my focus to the film’s frantic visual scape and heightened the unsettling affect of the film. Watching again, this time with functioning headphones, I followed the dialogue more closely to understand how and why flashes of lush estates and near-stills of tonal skies were woven together. In German, with English subtitles, a male narrator argues quite calmly that we learn how to see, order, and assign color socially and that “Nature’s sphere of influence is determined by society.” The technical necessity of using subtitles for both spoken and unspoken text conveniently enhances the film’s argument that color is learned, for HORIZON BLUE reads as the consequence of “the desire to return to… nature.” The colors’ given names become more and more arcane, and because the subtitles labeling colors do not correspond to speech, the film becomes an exercise in divorcing visual from written and spoken languages. As curator Alise Upitis writes, how might color depend on language?

As the first film in the exhibition, Ideale Lanschaft necessarily colors the others, its arguments influencing the viewer’s impressions of the remaining films. “Narrative Color” must grapple with the very formation of human societies, some long event of conquering. The imposition of language upon color (and all else) is an imposition of power, just as (according to Ideale Lanschaft’s narrator) in Europe, “the ruling classes used laid-out greeneries to demonstrate their power.”

Another exploration of how color operates within society, Rainbow’s Gravity also complicates the plot of human conquest presented in Ideale Lanschaft. The film, directed and produced by Bernien and Schroedinger, is set around an Agfacolor Neu factory, where Nazi concentration camp workers produced color film. The title, Rainbow’s Gravity, alludes to Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel, also set during World War II. As the film opens, a woman narrates what one sees on screen: several women sitting in a dark room where the only light source is a projector that begins to play a film. The speaking woman sits in this room, her voice wavering and self-conscious. Until now, it has not been clear what this projected film is, but as the camera shifts to show a scene of several women dancing, it is revealed as Veit Harlan’s propagandizing Opfergang (The Great Sacrifice) (1944). “Do you remember the colors?” another woman asks in the dark. “My memory is in black and white,” the first answers. “Spielberg said, ‘I think black and white stands for reality. I don’t think color is real,'” she continues. “I think certainly color is certainly to the people who survived the Holocaust.” The women, actors, describe what it must have been like to manufacture color film during the Holocaust, when film was used to propagandize on behalf of the regime that enslaved them.

Bernadette Corporation’s Hell Frozen Over (2001) delves deeper into the linguistic complexities of negation — where the negation of color might be black and white or the active addition and removal of colors. The film opens with several scenes shot against the sublime white of a frozen lake, showing the semiotician Sylvère Lotringer giving an excursus on poet Stéphane Mallarmé, explaining that “‘nothing’ for Mallarmé is very positive… there are four different ways of saying nothing. Each word is saying something.” Interspersed with sparse shots of Lotringer are complex scenes of female models posing for an invisible camera alongside props and backdrops. The negation and assembling of color relationships are haltingly connected to fashion through this footage, as the models move, hide, or otherwise rearrange brightly colored consumer goods. In one segment, for example, a woman removes a red suitcase from underneath a couch and reaches for a series of thermoses perched on a reflective table. As she puts these yellow, blue, white, and black thermoses into the suitcase, one-by-one, the visual appeal of the scene incrementally melts away.

The post Chromatic Chronicles: “Narrative Color” at List appeared first on artcritical.

November 12, 2015 to March 6, 2016
144 W 125th Street (at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard)
New York, 212 864 4500

“A Constellation,” which recently closed at the Studio Museum in Harlem, presented a series of works selected to juxtapose established artists’ work with newer work, disparate in media but engaged in similar themes. Differences between elements of the show reveal that opposing signs — rather than repeated signs — may be more effective in signifying an idea.

From Al Loving’s Variations on a Six Sided Object (1967), the eye bounces back to Cameron Rowland’s Pass-Thru (2013). The latter title conveys an idea of access or transfer of an object. Yet the plastic sculpture, a replica of mechanisms used at bodegas or liquor stores, seems more interested in refusing access. A transparent rectangular box sits on a Lazy Susan within a larger rectangular box. The nails used to construct each box visibly protrude and lend a sense of danger. More obviously, there is only one open side to the larger box, meaning there is no through. An object placed in the pass-thru would only go round and end up exiting the same side. This refusal of use value is reflected in Loving’s painting which, with its solid and dotted lines, is reminiscent of an origami pattern or instructions for constructing a cube. However, the distortion and extension of “sides” beyond the pictorial frame frustrate any attempt to imagine its construction. While Rowland is described as more explicitly interested in social relations, both artists negotiate the viewer’s access to space.

Moving into more specific sites than spaces, Sondra Perry and Nona Faustine ask where a black body has been/is now situated. This is an intentionally objectifying statement; Faustine’s photograph From Her Body Sprang Their Greatest Wealth (2013) explicitly places a body (the artist’s own) at an intersection in the financial district, standing naked on a wooden box with shackled wrists, on display. The viewer is conscious of their gaze. The choice of site does not immediately carry meaning, as the sign for a Tumi store and AT&T kiosk indicate that this is a relatively contemporary scene in New York’s Financial District. We learn from the text that this is the site of a former slave market, where countless bodies would have been examined, objectified, and evaluated as property that could be transplanted into the white space of a stranger’s home. The evident comparison of black bodies across time is eerie, and the fact that the viewer is still in a position of examination is troubling. This perhaps is why Faustine chose to reveal the significance of the site only in the text: the distinct experience of realizing its meaning is important. Perry reconstructs the white space Faustine problematizes (the space of a stranger or white master) as one of torment with Double, Quadruple, Etcetera, Etcetera I (2013). Photoshopped (objectified and deconstructed) dancers move desperately, emphatically within the confines of a corner in a blank room. Few architectural details reveal the nature of the space, yet it is clear that these bodies are supposed to disappear within it. Instead of arms, legs, and torsos, the viewer sees a grey blur occasionally interrupted by the misplaced line of floor meeting wall. (Architectural space is displaced onto the body just as the body experiences displacement in space.) Our only indication of the identity of the dancers is in the signification of their race — their hair — which in turn becomes the reason that they must disappear, the reason they must move so frantically through space. The trauma of their confinement in this space parallels Faustine’s refusal to belong in a slave market.

Specific to the site of the gallery itself is Torkwase Dyson’s 2015 wall painting, Strange Fruit (Dignity in Hand), which relates to the geometry of Loving and Rowland but seems more interested in conveying meaning. Representations of demographic statistics first come to mind when taking in Torkwase’s grid of painted dots. Again, the viewer only understands its meaning through the exhibition text. We learn that the painting on the wall commemorates “a fraction of the nearly 4,000 lynchings recorded in American history.” Structure communicates the presence of a narrative, but the narrative only unfolds through text.

Narrative is again constructed with ruby onyinyechi amanze’s that low hanging kind of sun… (2015), where the spacing of mixed media elements relates to the layers of that narrative. Here, not even the text reveals what the drawing must contain for the artist. The exquisitely rendered face of a woman kisses the masked face of another body melting into a mermaid’s tail. Three motorcycles drift into the web of a flock of birds nestling into the charcoal hair of another woman, drawn diagonally opposite from the first.

More explicit in creating a narrative, Talwst’s jewelry boxes encouraged the viewer to hold contemporary memories of racial violence close. The miniature scale of depiction should not be confused with scarcity of detail or meaning. In Por Qué? (2014), the killing of Eric Garner is recreated in front of a white American flag, reminiscent of flags by Jasper Johns. Within our culture of wealth and privilege, jewelry and commitments, what cases of cultural violence do we snap shut and hide away?

A literary mind could draw proximate parallels between titles: Jack Whitten’s Psychic Intersection becomes Billie Zangewa’s Divine Intervention (2015), or Andy Robert’s After Mass (2015) transmutes into the aftermath of Talwst’s Por Qué?, and from there into the math of Perry’s Double, Quadruple, Etcetera, Etcetera I. A visual mind may find representational rhymes: a wooden sculpture, Mother and Child (1993) by Elizabeth Catlett, stands in front of a silk tapestry of another mother and child by Billie Zangewa. The arrangement of elements in Troy Michie’s STRAND, CABLE, TWINE (2015) seems tied to the spatial arrangement of drawings in amanze’s work. Money transfers invoked by Pass-Thru relate to David Hammons’s piggy bank, Too Obvious (1996). Adrian Piper’s thought-bubble portrait painting hangs near Tony Lewis’ speech bubble Make His Mouth Bigger, Angrier (2015). Melvin Edwards’s Working Thought (1985) concretizes the slave shackles depicted in Faustine’s photograph.

This is not to say that these works are unproductive in and of themselves. A constellation is about the larger picture, but the curation of the show focused too narrowly on connecting dots based on narrative and representation.

The post Drawing a Line: “A Constellation” at the Studio Museum in Harlem appeared first on artcritical.

February 18 to March 3, 2016
132 West 21st Street, 10th floor (between 6th and 7th avenues)
New York, 212 592 2274

All white, all pure, all waste obscured: “Duplicates, Dummies & Dolls” is a show of textured casts, molds, and repurposed materials by Sara Mejia Kriendler, curated by Becky Nahom at CP Projects Space. The venue serves as a site for experimental programming by the School of Visual Arts’ Curatorial Practice students, and typically shows the work of SVA students, including Kriendler, an MFA alumna.

Mother of Pearl (2015) leads viewers into the space. Clumpy striations of plaster cross the surface of the square composition, which seems to incorporate found elements into a thick slab of Hydrocal mounted on the wall. The surface marks read simultaneously as circuitry, rail system, aerial view, and microscopic ground. As the eye traverses this expanse, it lingers at intersections where recognizable elements emerge — a sliver of corrugated cardboard creates an accordion fold there, a crusty circle morphs into a flower here, and a snaking shard of another unidentifiable found material breaks the circuitry there. At last, with enough looking, you see it: hovering somewhere above this ground is a small angel. Delicate and hovering, the figurine is also half-buried in the landscape, physically connected to the Styrofoam board by superficial plaster. With its visual complexity in a white expanse, the piece feels quiet and knowing, deserving of your eye, something you might return to each morning.

Nearby, a curved wall, called Defense Mechanism (2010), claims the floor. At a height of five feet, it feels anthropomorphic. Composed of 330 plaster-cast Mardi gras masks stacked like bricks, the wall seems to gaze outward with vacant eyes. One can peer through them, calling up the sensation of watching while being watched. At first imposing, the wall stands in front of the gallery wall with a gap of nearly a foot, allowing the viewer to access (or at least see) its verso. The masks aim to defend some face behind them, but given this gap they cannot protect what they shield, even en masse; this defense mechanism is a futile, fragile structure.

Turning to face what those 660 eyes would watch, one finds 2014 (2015) a floating white rectangle: a Styrofoam tray with raised segments arranged like beams radiating out from a Venus-like figure at the center.  A plate of glass hung before the relief establishes some protective distance between the sculpture and the viewer, but the work’s enticement draws the viewer in. The Venus is an empty space shaped like a small female body, apparently the packaging left over from a doll. Stamped with a code of letters and numbers, she appears mass-produced, but her gently molded curves and fragmented limbs speak the language of Neoclassical sculpture.

Plasticulture (2016), an L-shaped installation on the floor composed of domed humps in groups of four, each covered with plastic bags stamped “THANK YOU.” The plastic clings to the breast-like humps, amalgamated with heat. From the crowning nipple of each breast, rather violently, grows a single palm leaf. This is growth from waste. Plasticulture is a common set of agricultural practices, such as using polyethylene sheeting to protect against weeds. It is here rendered strangely corporeal, as a stifling and painful mechanism aiding technological reproduction.

How might contemporary secular art such as Kriendler’s contain the ritualistic and historical overtones of religion? Kriendler has recycled an answer: commodities are the new religion, stores our centers of worship. Yet here, in this room, we have no commodities, only their remains. The minor fetishes of this contemporary religion are objects receiving the excess of our worship, of our gaze, our attention. They pose as invisible and unnecessary, easily discarded, yet their omnipresent necessity is inescapable. Commodity packaging fills our dumpsters as perhaps the only item more pervasive than the commodities they swaddle. What to do with them?

Our waste haunts us, returning to inflict harm on air, oceans and wilderness. The polymers used in plasticulture can be reused, but of course no recycling eliminates the original negative impacts of production. Molded Venuses and plastered angels serve as a warning: we are defenseless from ourselves.

The post Purity or Pollution: Protection, Plastics and Religion in the Work of Sara Mejia Kriendler appeared first on artcritical.

February 18 to February 20, 2016
512 West 19th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 255 5793

In the tradition of Trisha Brown’s dance diagrams, Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard presented an intricate work at The Kitchen, called For Claude Shannon, with its own palette of densities, gestures, and articulations. Each performance is individually coded “using the syntactic structure of a sentence by Claude Shannon,” the influential founder of information theory, which is translated into a combination of movement “atoms,” forming a kind of algorithmic lexicon.

As I entered the black box theatre, speakers emitted sounds like air vents blowing in an airplane, always too cold. My “vent” turns closed; my hearing shifts to another aisle.

After awhile, I begin to wonder if this performance will ever start, if the lights will ever dim, if the audience will begin to check their watches and then realize, half an hour into the performance, that it had already begun before they walked into the room. “The dancers begin to learn this particular choreographic sequence two hours before the public enters the space,” we have been told, “and continue this learning process during the performance.” We watch them learn.

The fans all close. Four bodies turn to face us.

One of the three female dancers lifts her arms, holding an expanding bubble. Her male partner’s left leg rises imperceptibly, then again more pointedly as hers lifts, too. Another female dancer’s torso turns. I concentrate on the small sound of a shoe’s sole — with tiny, pebbled bumps, it seems — lifting off a flat floor, as if adhesive.

They move so slowly that if I stop to trace one, as I would like to do, I miss the subtlety of the others’ movements. An arm held perpendicular or parallel to the floor, a leg either supporting or extending diagonally away from the body — these are the movements to which I become attuned, looking for symmetry or failure.

The farthest female dancer’s eyes blink rapidly, like shutters, as all turn to face each other. They are suddenly, now, in coordination, at least for a moment. Their slipper shoes create a soundscape, within which they weave closer together, folding their arms like leaves of creased paper to create an origami box. I feel tension, can’t breathe too hard for fear of coughing and interrupting the intensity of their concentrated gazes.

Closer, nearly intersecting, then apart, one movement at a time, they drift. The dance becomes a waiting game.

Then, a prick of disbelief: two touch! And one goes still. I read in her immobility the shock of having been interrupted during a mechanical sequence. Yet this is not an inhuman dance; if it were, we would not sense their effort and uncertainties, hesitations and unravelings.

Why these “atoms” of movement? Never two arms up together, never two legs straddled apart. Is the sequence there, written on the floor like Braille or Morse code in black strips of alternating lengths and positions? Is Shannon’s phrase a chain link through their limbs?

They dance in dress clothes. The lights never change. How are the pauses, turns, positions, and relative durations of each movement determined? What portion of sequences are repeated? Does a choreography determined by a form of speech count as one of chance? What was the phrase that we now must exhaust?

Eventually they return again to their original positions. They pause, then begin to move in synchrony. Gradually, the air pressure changes, which we experience as shifts in pitch, crackles like static in the soundscape, and popping ears in a disjointed physicality. One dancer breaks out of line and another follows, then returns. Was that a mistake? A moment of learning?

The sound is now regular, having incorporated the static clicks into a new beat. Each body moves in sync, but each turns individually until none face forward.

A word is uttered. Was it from the audience?

Again. No, it came from the stage.

“Either”
“Accidentally”
“Passage”

They are revealing the phrase.

“Selecting”

But this is too easy, too obvious, for them to expose the mechanism behind the dance.

“Use”
“One”
“Wait”
“A”
(“Minute”?)

I want to think. But the phrase is incomplete.
The clicks pick up, coordinating time and dictating movement.

“Point,” spoken all together. They move quite quickly now, nearly fluidly. The clicks sound like two blocks clacked together, as in Joan Jonas’s Song Delay (1973). The spatiality of sound seems important but does not clearly correspond to their configurations on stage. The words come too quickly to record now, and I wonder when the sound will mark a tempo too fast for them to follow. Who will collapse? Which atoms will be sacrificed?

Then, the dancers are still. Can they not continue? Has the phrase ended?

One dances again, so quickly, as if tap dancing. Another begins, too. The clicks pick up again to the point of becoming static, so loud that they obscure the sound of the dancers’ voices. Sometimes a body will pause, as if to remember its place in the sequence. Is this learning? What are the stakes? How can we know when they have failed?

Static turns to hail. They speak louder but move elegantly. They must fight their inertia.

New movements emerge out of transitory positions: a leg raised too high, a jump kick, a sideways stance, a lunge.

Then a diagonal movement by one dancer across the floor— there have been none thus far — and the heaviness of the bass begins to parallel the new heaviness of their bodies.

Yet this improvisational segment lasts too long; rather than demonstrating a collapse of the code or a fracture, it becomes a new segment in itself, forcing me to lose my hold on the atoms that seemed so clearly defined from the start. Or was that the intention, for us to unlearn what the dancers had learned only “two hours before the public enters the space”? The chance of subjective improvisation has trumped the chance of an atomic composition.

Finally, the beat slows. The bass fades and the clicks return to irregular taps. Jostling bodies move but without grandiose gestures.

All face the front.

The post Data Dance: Ode to an Information Theorist at The Kitchen appeared first on artcritical.

Curated by Carl E. Hazlewood
January 23 through February 21, 2016
558 St Johns Place (between Classon and Franklin avenues)
Brooklyn, 718 783 4438

To walk through FiveMyles Gallery is to wade through a room thick with a palpable scent, spiced like cinnamon with the strength of musk. The space feels eerily empty, save for three spotlit works. They rest, silent and static, waiting to be activated. Amanda Turner Pohan’s solo show, “Desiring to be Data for Others,” is charged.

On the left, 18 bottles of Pulsating (2016) is affixed to the wall — clear Plexiglas shelves surrounding a medicine cabinet mirror. An uncomfortably rigid metal chair awaits a subject to be reflected. 15 glass bottles, symmetrically displayed along the shelves, surround the mirror. Each bottle is wrapped in a semi-transparent label resembling standardized nutrition facts for foodstuffs. But where “nutrition facts” would have been written, the text instead reads “Pulsating.” “Shower Fluid (8 oz)” replaces “Serving Size.” “Bodies” replaces “Amount per Serving.” Duration, Element, Time in seconds, Pulse in heartbeats, and Breath in ppm of CO2 are the new indices with which we are concerned. Instead of corresponding percentages of recommended daily values, corresponding essences (in drops of essential oils) have been recorded: cypress, parsley, and fir needle. The lighting of this dramatic scene further replicates each bottle into three shadows (or additional bottles in the case of those set in front of the mirror).

To understand the content of these bottles, a viewer must take in the rest of the scene. Behind the chair, closer to the opposite wall, a corner shower has been installed to stand with its back exposed so that the piping mechanism is visible. The shower is illuminated from within; the effect resembles a halo. While condensation obscures the view into the shower from the front doors, the side panels are clearer. A brown pool of viscous fluid gels around the drain with seemingly clear water dripping from the showerhead above. Walking behind the shower, one can understand this closed loop: an opaque plastic container, like a gasoline jug, both feeds the water supply and retains waste liquid from the drain. Input becomes output becomes input, changing simply by being processed by the system. But where did this fluid originate? Return to the glass bottles and the apparently closed loop of the shower expands to include the mirror scene; what once seemed like a sparse room immediately feels as dense as its pervading scent.

The shower fluid has then gone through several stages. In order to create this melange of essential oils, the artist broke down the human breathing mechanism into measurable elements. Pohan then translated those recorded quantities into scents. The number of bottles implies a repeated procedure, though it is unclear if each bottle contains a different scent from a different human given the obscurity of their labels. Finally, Pohan returned the fluid to a zone of intimacy and human “waste” (like CO2) in the shower.

If this intricate system requires such significant labor from the artist, why does it feel as though the artist had no part in this installation, as though these scenes simply exist? The impersonality of each component — rigid chair, sterile shower, and uniform medicinal bottles corresponding to nameless bodies — lends an institutionalized quality to the work. There is little inherent humanness to these mass-produced products despite their latent sexuality (in this room, or in the context of their domestic purpose) and relation to an individual human body performing a ritualistic exercise.

The third piece in the room, Remnants and residues from my deceased mothers rug (2016), appears distant from the others — a mat of many-colored fibers pasted to a clear material hangs horizontally on the far wall. This mat, we read, is an imprint of the artist’s late grandmother’s carpet, which has accumulated such debris as hair, threads, crumbs and dirt over time. The seemingly abstract composition is then in fact the residue of the remains of a chance performance (presumably by several people) of daily rituals and relationships. While this work relates to the shower and mirror scenes by virtue of its interest in the relationship between intimacy and institutional frameworks, its process reveals an unravelling of the artist’s control over performance and representation. While a series of procedures distanced the shower scene from the original “performers” of the work (the work being the creation of the breathing measurements that became the fluid), the carpet fiber imprint is forensically related to specific bodies and actions. The artist’s (and viewer’s) desire to quantify, sterilize, and reflect on the body from a distance falls apart in the realization that none of these works severs its tie to embodiment; instead, we are made nauseous by the presence of absent bodies.

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