October 26, 2016 to January 15, 2017
235 Bowery, New York City, newmuseum.org

At the press preview for “Pixel Forest” at the New Museum, just days before the U.S. elections, Pipilotti Rist happened to mention that most of her staff is female. In view of who won, this has become especially meaningful.

In “Gravity and Grace”, Simone Weil writes: “The cause of war: there is in every man and in every group of men a feeling that they have a just and legitimate claim to be the masters of the universe – to posses it. But this possession is not rightly understood because they do not know that each one has access to it…through his own body.” In this show Rist offers a gateway to the intimacy of being in a body: the experience of “being inside” is prominent. What does it mean to be inside? How can it be described? And what does it reflect?

Starting from the museum’s second floor it is all about the senses: Administrating Eternity, 2011, is an installation containing thin transparent-white curtains that you can touch, while they hang from the ceiling and down to the floor. Oval-shaped nature films are projected freely in the space: a green field with sheep, as well as close-ups of flowers, trees and fruits. With soft, nurturing music in the background, there are six cone-shaped hubs that viewers can enter, watching video up-close and in solitude. The proximity is challenging, as you cannot escape the imagery. Six of Rist’s early works are presented this way, one in each hub. In one of them, When My Mother’s Brother Was Born It Smelled Like Wild Pear Blossom in Front of the Brown Burnt Sill, 1992, a woman is giving birth. The footage includes the cutting with scissors of the mother’s vagina, as well as the newborn’s first appearance. Although framed by blissful snowy mountains and clear blue sky, this is not easy viewing. But it carries with it great strength and something so real it hurts, while it also generates wonder and joy.

Pixel Forest, 2016, one flight up, is a beautiful LED-lights-installation that spills out across much of that floor. The soft pastel illumination is something you can almost literally touch in an area where a large rug with pillows is set on the floor to allow viewers to lounge, be immersed in, and dive into music and nature in two large projections (Mercy Garden, 2014, and Worry Will Vanish Horizon, 2014). The videos consist of close-up footage of body parts gently and passionately touching flowers, plants, and water. The grand finale of the exhibition takes place on the fourth floor. Here it is as if the viewer is inside a pond looking up, seeing the water, plants, and sunlight from the inside out through two moss-holes in the ceiling above, while lying on a bed, intimately, with others you may or may not know.

This combination of atmospheres creates a supporting space, as place where you are embraced and accepted. This womb-like interiority is quite the opposite of the outside perspective that is apparent today in the political realm. In a time when a president-elect seems driven to make judgments of people on the basis of their external features, encouraging atavistic male chauvinism, and public figures are striving to limit acceptance of women and sexual minorities, this show reclaims the body (female and male), its loving sexuality and its beauty in the most organic way. As the comedian Louis C.K. put it just before the November election on the Conan O’Brien show: “…to me it’s really exciting to have a first mother in the white house… because a mother she’s got it. She feeds you, and teaches you, protects you, she takes care of your shit.” Although Rist is not an American her show seems to offer a critical perspective on what we have missed by failing to choose a female president.

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June 14 to July 2, 2015
334 Broome Street (between Chystie and Bowery)
New York, 212 334 5200

An illuminated metal sign that spells the word “CHANGE” hangs in the K. storefront. K., the alter ego of the P! exhibition space, has taken over the gallery from March through July of 2015. K., which stands for the first letter of the gallerist’s last name (Krishnamurthy), as well as the value of a thousand (in dollars), presents a series of shows that focus on critical questions in economics, art, and the production of value.

The fifth exhibition in this series, titled “I’m so broke I can’t pay attention,” was Michal Helfman’s debut solo show in NYC. Helfman, an Israeli multidisciplinary artist based in Tel Aviv, is known for creating works that involve dance as well as stage design, symbolically using the stage as a way to reveal what occurs behind it, in the backstage.

Here, the front space acts as a money exchange. The clerk (Mr. Krishnamurthy or other representatives of the gallery), greets visitors from behind a glass window. The visitor is obliged to interact with the designated clerk, who explains the exchange rates: only Iraqi, Syrian, Afghan, and Lebanese currencies are available for exchange in the rate of one to one. Any individual paper bill is exchanged for another paper bill, regardless of currency rates.

A beaded curtain — made of metal piping, Mediterranean shells, ceramic prayer beads, Hebron glass beads, plastic skulls, and walnut shells — connects the front space and the back of the gallery. In the rear, an entire wall is covered with a Jordanian woven black-and-white mat, while nearby hangs an acrylic-and-oil-pastel drawing on paper, titled One Dollar (2013). The drawing depicts an image of the pyramid that decorates the American one-dollar bill. This iconic symbol, adapted from ancient Egypt, traces the transition of empires. Egypt, one of the first nation-states is now a third-world country suffused with conflict and uprisings, while the U.S., a relatively new nation, is currently a powerful country that has great impact on the destiny of Egypt and other Middle East countries.

In the center of the room, two stools and a small table are a setting for a backgammon game, which includes dice that were created in Syria using a 3D printer. In conversation with an Israeli humanitarian who smuggles aid to Syria, the artist was able to secretly import these objects into Israel. Apparently, it is common that the back of exchange bureaus around the world is used as a smuggling point. Backgammon, a popular game played in almost every household in Israel and in surrounding Arab countries, was developed from one of the oldest games discovered in the city of Ur (in modern day Iraq). Similar games were common and identified in Egyptian pyramid drawings and from archeological relics of the area. On these Syrian dice the artist engraved the rephrased sentence “we will not forgive we will not forget” which is connected to the Jewish Holocaust and currently very much identified as the slogan for the hacktivist entities Anonymous. This game of luck and tactics correlates to the fortune of so many people, including refugees in the Middle East today. Supporting this notion is % (2013), an eight-minute choreographed video in which five dancers perform a recurring routine and represent the fact that one out of five people in the world today is displaced.

Finally, an abstract metal sculpture titled Attention (2015) is a human-size Minimalist depiction of a man with a rifle. The weapon points towards the glass window that connects between the front and the back of the gallery, and it is “charged” by a rubber band. Underneath one of the sculpture’s legs is a fold of stacked $100 bills, tempting the viewer to lean down and grab the cash. However, once the money is removed the sculpture loses its balance and the gunman shoots. This temptation is of course a trap as well as an allusion to the money at stake in politics and in the relationships between the U.S. and the Middle East. There is a constant flow of events that influence the future of war and peace in the region, many of which may occur off of our radar, and most of which involve the confluence of money and power.

The show’s title contains a cautionary alert: “I’m so broke I can’t pay attention,” brings these objects together to emphasize our personal responsibility. The title points at the economic crisis in the area due to ongoing conflicts — hence a struggle to survive. According to Abraham Maslow’s psychological pyramid theory, most fundamental levels of needs are at the base and include physical requirements for human survival (as food, water and shelter), while self-actualization is at the top of the pyramid and is achieved only after all other needs are fulfilled. As residents of today’s “empire” we have the capacity to pay attention and to make significant changes in the world. What is then our moral responsibility towards the various conflicts in the Middle East? What is our role, and what do we choose to give our attention to?

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Inspired by Marx’s Communist Manifesto, and bringing in elements from Russian Constructivism as well as Modernism, Ohad Meromi ignites a passion much needed in today’s commercialized art scene. In his current solo show at Nathalie Karg Gallery on Great Jones street, Meromi presents works in mediums such as sculpture, installation, and video, creating a space oriented towards participation and gathering.

When entering, the gallery’s raw space seems quasi-empty. In the center of the room a 75-inch totem titled Grave Digger #23 (Primitive B, 2014) stands solitary. The totem is a gray primitivist female figure made of cast aluminum and mixed media, sitting on top of a plinth made of carved wood. The figure is in a squatting position; its eyes, brows, mouth, and nose are painted black, as well as its nipples and genitalia.

Meromi’s series of figurative “Grave Digger” sculptures was initially presented in 2010 at Gallery Diet in Miami, and was inspired by Andrei Platonov’s novel The Foundation Pit (finalized in 1930 but published only in 1987 due to censorship). The iconic novel traces a group of workers who are digging a foundation for an ideal building that epitomizes a picture-perfect future. In the novel, the pit becomes a political commentary towards the brutalities of Stalin’s collectivization of Russian agriculture, and is eventually revealed to be a grave for the diggers themselves. According to Marx and Lenin, the term “grave diggers” refers to a rising revolutionary class that will overthrow the ruling bourgeois order. The symbolic sculpture stands silent and erect and serves as guidance for the possible revolution of the proletariat, or as we will soon recognize — of the cultural producers in contemporary capitalist society.

Further in the gallery is Half Modular Dome (2010) made of wood, industrial paint, and concrete. The structure appears as a behind-the-scenes theatre construction. On its backside (facing the viewer entering the gallery) are yellow stickers of numbers and letters as well as assembly and re-assembly instructions that trace the dome’s previous functions. When built a few years ago, the dome was designed to transform Meromi’s studio into a rehearsal space, and to adapt to different venues to create a performative stage. Here, the dome divides the gallery space in two: a primitivist presence on one side and an improvised amphitheatre on the other. The centerpiece of the show, a 20-minute-long single-channel video called Worker! Smoker! Actor! (2010-2013), is situated behind the dome. The video combines stop-motion animation with recorded participatory performances from workshops held at Meromi’s 2010 solo show, “Rehearsal Sculpture,” at NYC’s Art in General. Meromi meticulously created all the elements in the film: the props, the architectural models of the protagonist’s hangouts, and even the complementing electronic video-game music and graphic intertitles. The story is pretty simple: a factory worker (performed by Jessica Lin Cox) wakes up in the morning, goes to the factory to produce American Spirit cigarettes, goes to the supermarket to get groceries, and then goes home to rest. The cycle of “production” is completed when the worker finds out she has lung cancer and is sent to a healing facility.

The notion of “work” and “rest” preoccupies Meromi and is addressed in a theatrical manner in this video in the form of the worker’s cigarette breaks. The cigarettes themselves then play various roles: they are the central element in the “working” process, they are the “resting” tools, and they are the toxic hazard that leads the worker to the resting resort. Meromi also uses text in the film in the form of placards based on Vsevolod Meyerhold’s actors-training method, called “Biomechanics.” These short texts, rewritten by Meromi to suit his narrative, raise questions regarding the existing division between labor and rest, and whether this division can be transformed. In one of the placards Meromi writes: “Every worker tries to expend as few hours as possible on labour and as many as possible on rest.”

House of Culture (2010), a 15-by-14-inch architectural model made of glass, concrete, and mixed media, is situated in the front gallery’s windowsill. The miniature building’s colorful stained-glass windows bring transcendent light into the gallery and a glow of utopian idealism into the exhibition space. In the last scene of the featured video, the worker gazes at the House of Culture from afar, and Meromi writes: “The very craft of the actor in an industrial society will be regarded as a means of production,” bringing the show’s vision to a final conclusion.

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