January 10 to February 16, 2019
545 West 25th Street
New York City, marlboroughcontemporary.com

Davina Semo’s solo exhibition at Marlborough Contemporary, “ALL THE WORLD,” her third there, marks a shift in tone from her previous work. Although the basic constituents of her sculptures remain much the same—industrial materials, fasti craft, appropriated texts used as all-caps titles—themes of control, eroticism, and violence have been tempered. Expressions of emotion and affection have swelled, and while those elements predate this show, they are given added, moving emphasis.

The show is built around two bodies of work: cast-bronze bells and brightly colored acrylic mirrors, all dated 2019. Three early bells were shown by Semo in Marlborough’s upstairs space in the winter of 2016 and 2017, and at San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman Gallery in late 2017, though those were smaller and had other differences in their facture and hanging. Semo’s use of mirrors goes back to at least 2010, though those pieces often utilized obscuration as a tactic. Rather than those previous black or silver glass mirrors, these are bright pink, yellow, turquoise, reminiscent of mirrors by Sherrie Levine.

The five mirrors, each six-by-five feet, are embedded with two sets of radial ball bearings in overlapping constellations. One set of ball bearings is arranged in a grid; the other set is dispersed across the surface in spay-like disarray, recalling a backpack by Semo that has been repeatedly shot, shown at Marlborough in 2015. The mirrors capture, in subtly warped faces, the reflection of viewers and the bells. This is a lovely curatorial trick, reiterating and altering the perception of the work and the space. And the ball bearings take on multiple readings: the fearlessness of skateboards (they’re a part of the wheel system), the suggestion of mass anxiety signified by fidget spinners (they’re also a component of those toys), or, evading that dichotomy altogether, the cold reliability of machinery. Such allusions play up or run against the titles, which vary between grim and hopeful.

Semo’s bells, ranging from 20 to 33 inches tall, are made with a wax-casting technique that results in a bullet-shaped dome with eroded-looking rifts and drips on their thick walls. They’re tall and thin, patinated with a bituminous-colored finish and hung with chains that are powder-coated glossy black. Inside each is a wooden clapper attached to a thick, woven nylon rope. Visitors are encouraged to ring the clapper, but not touch the bronze, which, despite its robust appearance, has a very delicate patina. Each is attached at the ceiling while appearing to be slung through an eye bolt and anchored (save for one) to large bales of recyclable detritus, including aluminum and electronics cables.

Semo addresses both global and local concerns in this work. Close to home, the mirror SHE BECAME VERY SENSITIVE TO THE TASTE OF WATER FROM THE TAP reads, in its blue surface and epidemiologic red and black ball bearings, as an allusion to the ongoing Flint water crisis. A pink mirror is similarly dire, called IN THE REGION WHERE HE LIVED THERE WERE NO PLANTS AT ALL. Most frighteningly and directly, a bell in the center of the gallery held by two massive, stacked bales is called “BECAUSE WE ARE FACING AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT AND THERE IS NO TIME TO CONTINUE DOWN THIS ROAD OF MADNESS,” SHE SAID, a quote from 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (Part of the horror here is the scale: those enormous bales were selected from among God only knows how many others, impressing on viewers a fraction of the resources used and wasted by people, which is an existential crisis.) Another bell, nearer to the entrance, is titled “IT IS HARD,” SHE SAID, “TO IMAGINE THE WORLD AS IT WAS”.

The anchoring bale of that latter piece includes reptilian-looking metal scraps that resemble works in Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s show of erotic and mystical sculptures in Marlborough’s viewing room, called “Towards an End to Biological Perception,” organized by Leo Fitzpatrick. The crushed aluminum, in places, looks like the snake-skin dominatrix shoe in P-Orridge’s Shoe Horn #9 (2016). There are echoes, too, between Semo’s work and P-Orridge’s use of snake fetishes made of curled iron, scaly dessicated fishes, or, for example, the mirrors in No Mercy (2019).

The one bell not attached to a bale is instead connected to a slab of rolled steel, with the words “ALL THE WORLD” (the work’s title) embossed on it in welded block letters. Bells serve for warning and mourning. Lament and alarm for the world as it is or was runs through several of the sculptures, ringing with the kind of sentiment found in John Donne’s famous “No Man is an Island,” apt for the moment in all sorts of ways, including the analogizing of coastal erosion and human suffering on both grand and individual scales:

No man is an island
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

Mourning and heartache are, almost certainly, impossible without the kind of compassion and love Donne expresses. Despite the distress found in works here, the exhibition is nonetheless suffused with love and reassurance—something like courage and hope when held against existential threat. A bell closest to the entrance is reassuringly titled SHE CAN SQUEEZE HIS HAND WHEN PEOPLE ASK HER QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE. A mirror is called SHE LOOKED UP AT HIM, DIRECTLY, WITH TOTAL ATTENTION.

Bells also ring for celebration and contemplation. Among the people I saw tolling them, one of the gallery’s preparators was rolling the clapper gently around the lip of the bell, like a meditative singing bowl, making it hum. It’s hard to know how to address the beautiful and the horrible on Earth side by side, except perhaps to face what is awful, and to cultivate what is not.

The post A Part of the Main: Davina Semo at Marlborough Contemporary appeared first on artcritical.

September 8 – October 14, 2018
132 Delancey St, 2nd Floor, Norfolk Street at Delancey
New York City, mitchellalgusgallery.com

In June, the European Union began deliberations on the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, a proposal to unify EU laws regarding copyrighted material online. It has alarmed Internet activists because Article 13 of the Directive apparently suggests that memes using copyrighted material could be outlawed. How this could be enforced is really a headscratcher, and protesters have posted many clever, teasing examples of how, using Photoshop filters or the like to slightly alter pictures, predicted regulatory mechanisms might be circumvented.

People like to copy familiar pictures, to take in hand the fruits of culture, even if they had no part in creating the original.

So now at Mitchell Algus is a show of work by the Swiss photographer Hannes Schmid, “American Myth: Paintings and Photographs,” in which the artist has stolen his own memes. Schmid is best known for his iconic photos of heroic figures: arena rock musicians such as ZZ Top, David Lee Roth, Cheap Trick etc., and cowboys used in Marlboro Man cigarette ads between 1992 and 2002, shot with a memetic template established in the ‘50s. Those cowboy pictures were some of many (by various photographers) appropriated by Richard Prince, whose oeuvre entails rephotographing existing images. While Schmid is largely unrecognized by the general public, Prince is the art world’s notorious prankster/villain/thief. In “American Myth,” Schmid reclaims his own work, presenting four small black-and-white photographs, and four large hyperrealist paintings by Schmid of his own cowboys.

Of the photographs, made between 1998 and 2002, the one I find most interesting is Walk in the Woods (1998). It’s curious, as all of the photos show ranchers in rugged wilderness, the infinity of the mythical American West. Walk… shows its cowboy subject riding through forest accessible to probably teenagers, who’ve carved their initials into several tree trunks. The pictures have the kind of archetypal and repetitious western imagery that has been familiar since at least Frederic Remington, and have similarly romantic names: e.g. Long Shadows of Rest (2000), A Drag Moment (2002), punning a cigarette jutting from the creased lips of a drover.

Schmid’s a capable enough painter. Although the canvases reach for and don’t accomplish, say, Richard Estes, they’re good—the best being the dusty Cowboy #230 (2017). (They’re more technically adept than Prince’s own paintings, for what it’s worth.) The images are bromidically heroic and familiar. One, Cowboy #1 (Round ‘em up), from 2007, shows a group of ranchers driving cattle through Monument Valley. It’s an ur-Western image, recalling, for instance, John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). Cowboy #5 (Tailgate) (2007), features a man laying erotically on his side, in the bed of an old pickup, leaning forward to light his cigarette, Stetson obscuring his chiseled face. I can’t tell if these are paradigmatic because they refer to the characteristics that define masculinity in the west, or because these familiar images helped define exactly what those characteristics are.

This move of Schmid painting his own photos is presented as triumphant and pugilistic, though it’s very little of a victory to reiterate the same photographic meme. The philosopher Vilém Flusser bleakly described, in his 1983 monograph Towards a Philosophy of Photography, the tendent entropy of images, that many are reproduced over and over into cultural background noise, such as cowboys, for instance. Schmid’s tactic is shrewd, and so is claiming agency pitted against the villain Prince. But one might ask: what else are we supposed to do with these pictures?

I think there’s a divide between how art-worlders and lay people perceive the morality of artistic copying and appropriation—that the latter thinks it’s illegitimate. But more and more I imagine a contingency. A few years ago, trolls berated Prince on social media when he showed a body of work made by printing other people’s Instagram selfies on canvas. Many of the aggrieved, if you looked at their social media, also traffic in memes appropriating copyrighted content, making their outrage look confected and hypocritical. The qualifier I think is the belief that copying and appropriation should be reserved for regular Joes as forms of folk art, opposed to both the professionalism of the international art market and large corporations. (There are obviously caveats here: both small-time artists and, say, huge movie franchises can win plaudits for basically being hacks.)

When I told a friend I was going to see a show of Schmid’s work, explaining that his pictures had been appropriated by Prince, my friend declared, “Fuck Richard Prince,” citing Prince as a larcener of vulnerable artists. Schmid is a photographer who has hung around the upper echelons of entertainment and was paid to continue an iconic campaign glorifying a food industry that is objectively bad for people and the planet, used to market a product designed to addict and kill users, but he’s one of the hoi polloi trampled by a corporation like Prince. There’s the old adage, paraphrasing T.S. Eliot, that good artists borrow, great artists steal. And perhaps in the arts, most of the looting actually resembles petty theft at a chain store: calculated into the business model, with no apparent victim, and being of little consequence.

The post “Fuck Richard Prince”: The Stolen Memes of Hannes Schmid appeared first on artcritical.

November 9 to December 23, 2017
83 Grand Street, between Greene and Wooster streets
New York City, teamgal.com

In a cliché of the desire for art objects, sometimes found in the critical literature, the beholder wants to touch or caress or lick the work, especially if it is a painting. This lust is often mentioned with erotic fervor (or its pretense) as if describing some profound, taboo-breaking magnetism. After all, contact with artworks is prohibited: they are too sacred or fragile for such casual molestation or frottage, even by a, like, serious admirer. We police ourselves against such fantasies, desires, but that physical and moral defacement of the image also seems to be the greatest compliment that can be given. At Team, the recent exhibition of paintings by London-based artist Dawn Mellor confuses these responses.

Called “Sirens,” the show is Mellor’s first solo with the gallery since 2008, and consists of 20 oil paintings, all made in 2016, each 32 x 24 inches and depicting a policewoman from a British TV series, such as Gillian Anderson playing Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson on The Fall (2013 – 16). Almost all of them are named for the character they depict, with the actor noted parenthetically. (Two are simply called Unnamed Extra.) Consequently, the exhibition’s title cleverly refers to both the bleating of alarms and the dangerously seductive allure of Mellor’s subjects. She is also working on an artist’s book by the same name.

Mellor’s painting moves between delicate and crude, depending on her need. In places, her affection for these characters is fraught. Their images are defaced—erotically, absurdly. Mellor’s career has included a lot of juvenilia, such as drawings made of the Jacksons when she was a teenager, and stiff paintings of celebrities that have been zealously roughed up with smeared paint and obscene personal notes. The paintings in this show follow a few patterns of disfigurement: each character reduced to a bust immersed in something resembling an apocalyptic flood, brightly colored lingerie-like coverings stretched over her head. The paint is candy-ish, often bright and smirking. The veils in Police Constable Donna Windsor (Verity Rushworth) and Detective Superintendent Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) both echo the subjects’ high-visibility safety-yellow jackets. Police Constable Ruby Buxton (Nicola Alexis) has its heroine with pink fishnet over her head, purple lipstick, and similar colors reflecting, sunset-like, in the deluge around her.

The protagonist is nearly untouched in Police Constable Jamilla Blake (Lolita Chakrabarti), leaning hard against a blue brick wall as icy water rises against her. Her face is a little reddened, but otherwise she is untouched by the growths, injuries, hallucinations, and other violations to the fantasy world Mellor uses.

These characters don’t menace. Cops are embodiments of abstract state authority still sometimes referred to with the colloquial metonym “The Man.” Mellor’s policewomen are pretty acutely objects of desire, whatever their demeanor in the original shows. Here, with a deluge rising, icicles forming, bodies defaced by scribbles and scrawls and suggestions of bondage, they’re threatened, vulnerable. They invite TV spectation’s secret thrill in watching the attractive and imperiled heroine skillfully turn the tables, a recurring trope of many police dramas, giving an audience all sorts of satisfaction in seeing archetypal fantasies play out: of female empowerment, female endangerment, of good’s triumph over evil only after struggle, of the rhetorical power/authority of truth and justice over chaos and irrational violence.

A queer woman, Mellor’s relationship with her subjects assumes suggestive valence, a desirous gaze. But it’s a conflicted one, as well: In this era when the social gap between the police and the policed is so visibly vast, expressing desire for a cop is a loaded act. For Mellor it has always been, not only for the erotics. She has described ways that police and military recruiters would trawl working class schools in Manchester during her youth. “Often it was those who did not expect high level academic achievements who would abandon study for job security, a pension and a civil service role,” Mellor says. It was a good job with benefits for working people.

“People in the police, though,” she continues, “would often hide the fact they were police officers from neighbors and, for example, not go home in uniform, because other working class people also condemned police.” And now her work arrives at a time well suited to be seen, as police, and the sexual dynamics of those with power and those without, and racism have all come under intense scrutiny, and the public is hot to have some real and/or symbolic comeuppance, and maybe some role reversal, too, on the way to greater parity.

“Defacement works on objects the way jokes work on language, bringing out their inherent magic,” writes Michael Taussig, in the introduction to his book Defacement (1999). It flatters the subject by paying regard with violation, as Mellor does by her adoring vandalism, or her vandalism of adored subjects. It emphasizes both terrifying power and absurdity, earnestly recognizing authority by trying to negate that authority, or to cast it out. It attempts to drive the cop out of one’s head, or into one’s arms and mouth.

The post The Policewoman Inside Our Heads: Dawn Mellor at Team appeared first on artcritical.

Bill Jacobson: figure, ground at Julie Saul
March 16 to May 26, 2017
535 W 22nd St #6F (between 10th and 11th)
New York, NY, 212 627-2410

Two current gallery shows in New York neatly draw upon the Romantic tradition in ways that raise questions about the place of Romanticism in contemporary culture. Soulful encounters of the individual with the immensity of the world is a theme explored variously by Susan Bee in “Pow! New Paintings” at A.I.R. Gallery, and Bill Jacobson in his show of new photographs, “figure, ground,” at Julie Saul. Each approaches, whether intentionally or contingently, and from different angles, aspects of the Romantic legacy. As the natural world, where encounters with the sublime were previously staged (and thus was, historically, one site for reverent awe at man’s place in the moral and material universe), comes under ever-greater threat, and as new ideological perspectives have come to dominate thinking about the self, one might wonder what Romanticism means today.

Bee’s exhibition at A.I.R., the non-profit cooperative gallery for art by women founded in 1972, refers explicitly to imagery in the early art of the Romantic canon, paying homage to paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and Edvard Munch. Works such as Melancholy and Blooms Day (both 2016) borrow directly from those artists — from Munch’s Melancholy (1894) and from Friedrich’s Woman at a Window (1822), respectively. Here, people lose themselves, wonder at powers larger than themselves. That adoration is further heightened by Bee’s use of emotive, expressionistic paint handling and high-intensity color.

Likewise, in paintings based loosely on film stills, couples kiss and cuddle. The brightly colorful patterning Bee applies to her appropriated images becomes, in this suite, cosmic and psychedelic, as if each person is fully becoming one with the other in a trippy union, fulgent with emotional outpouring radiating in colorful waves. Although elements of narrative remain encoded in the gestures and poses of those intimates, it largely gives way to deep absorption in their unifying admiration.

A formalist experimenter, Jacobson has previously constrained his pictures in blurred black-and-white portraits of lone men, and in pictures of large, colorful sheets of paper staged in various natural and man-made sites, resembling misplaced monochrome paintings or Suprematist compositions. Like Bee, at Julie Saul, Jacobson produces images of people with their back to the viewer — another apparent reference to painters such as Friedrich, Thomas Fearnly, or John Constable. Staged in natural settings, they experience the landscape while tacitly inviting us to look at the same view. Unlike Friedrich, though, who often used this same device, Jacobson’s shallow depth of field focuses on the figure and leaves the natural setting in which they stand blurred and hazy.

Another series, called Lines in My Eyes, also relays, obliquely, the interiority of his subjects in photos that closely isolate bare body parts: a collarbone and shoulder in Lines in My Eyes #7219 (2017), for example. Like figure, ground, Jacobson switches between color and black-and-white photography as needed. Each model’s full body is unrevealed, and often even their gender remains unknown. The viewer is invited to reckon with them intimately, scrutinizing skin and joints, as if familiar with the sitter.

One thing that Romanticism emphasized was individualism, the experience of being a small human in a large world. In contemporary America, individualism invariably verges upon the solipsism of self-improvement, self-affirmation, self-love, self-definition. Such values seem to be emphasized in every magazine, newspaper, and blog in the English-speaking world but they often overlook the need to universalize and think beyond one’s own interests. The way such Romantics as Friedrich emphasized the emotional state of the individual was to paint them with their back turned, as here, too, Bee and Jacobson depict their subjects. The viewer’s perspective is not preeminent, but neither is the subject’s fully understood. Instead, both are left in a state of compromise, but in a way that opens up possibilities for community and, indeed, communion. One hopes that this facet of Romanticism might find greater purchase, as it would seem that deep and resonant empathic responses to the world may be essential, if mankind is to continue.

Note: A book of Jacobson’s figure, ground series accompanies the exhibition, with texts by Bill Arning, Robert Glück, and Barbara Stehle, and another, 945 Madison Avenue, with photographs from the Breuer building cleared during the Whitney Museum’s departure from the site, is due later in the spring.

The post Back Turned: The Romanticism of Susan Bee and Bill Jacobson appeared first on artcritical.

September 9 to November 6, 2016
396 Johnson Avenue (at Morgan Avenue)
Brooklyn, 718 456 0396

There is, of course, something exciting about corpses. The fascination is often puerile in the contemporary world, centering on death’s foreignness, emphasizing gore and horror, rather than, like, the ontology of permanent lifelessness. Probably a lot of people in developed nations encounter (human) death most in mediated depictions, as in violent video games, movies, TV, and the arts, such as, famously, Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–20), John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (1918–19), or the Chapman brothers’ Hell (1999). Calvin Marcus’s exhibition of new paintings at Clearing Gallery, “Were Good Men,” his third solo show there, employs similar imagery, with nonchalance.

Marcus is 28 years old, working in Los Angeles, and the show suffers from some of the problems that appear common to young painters hailing from that city: here are 39 repetitious paintings; each 101 1/2 by 79 inches and called either Dead Soldier or Grass (all 2016); blandly and proudly derivative, especially of Expressionist and Abstract Expressionist imagery; and hung way too close. On uniformly ochre backgrounds, smears of green grass blades loll in flat clusters and fields. On some lay the mangled carcasses of decorated soldiers, each in a casually rendered uniform. Their tongues fall from gaping mouths. Their skin is mottled and discolored; blood seeps from bullet wounds, crushed skulls, peeling flesh.

Marcus has something of Michael Krebber’s wan touch and Sue Williams’s garish caricature. The dead’s rendering is nearly goofy: their decrepit stillness, open eyes, approach something like black comedy. Under the show’s somber title, honoring the dignity of fallen men who’ve worked to kill, their grimaces can be spooky.

Curiously, the paintings suggest, but subordinate, the realities of war and violence. The wounds are cartoonish. The caricatures are called men, but boys typically form the bulk of military personnel, and, increasingly, drones. The paintings represent conflict generally, without particular political or social ideas. Even if Marcus grimly needles platitudes about soldiers and sacrifice, the imagery nonetheless upholds the mythology of grown men dressed brilliantly, fighting bravely, and dying valiantly in combat — a display of masculinity rather than a dead kid whose body is ornamented by 60–100 pounds of gadgetry. One might wonder why most of the canvases are abstract gashes of green oil stick, or why multiple panels are not combined into a few mural-sized artworks. They’re very quiet images, both visually and ethically.

In February 2015, the death squad ISIS released a video that mimics and exceeds images of war that we encounter in all kinds of media (both fiction and non-). It shows the execution of a 26-year-old Jordanian pilot, Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, whose plane crashed in Syria. The video employs sophisticated production and a high-concept narrative structure, asserting that Jordan is a US-puppeted religious apostate, and therefore the pilot must be righteously murdered. Al-Kaseasbeh gives a coerced statement and is taken to buildings allegedly bombed by Jordanian pilots like himself. Intercut footage shows local first responders pulling civilians from a similarly demolished building. At the ruins, al-Kaseasbeh is put in a cage and burned to death, extinguished by a backhoe dumping the building’s rubble on his char. The video closes with a computer-animated dossier of further targets comprising a hit list of Royal Jordanian Air Force pilots.

Apart from its artfully staged and layered signifiers, the ISIS video shows actual war, in extremis. Unlike a lot of famous Western depictions, such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Slaughterhouse Five (1969), The Things They Carried (1990), which portray battle as a dignified, contemplative and tragic space, with men dying for causes that are both noble and questionable, the ISIS video shows, abysmally, what war is, aside from rules of conduct and myths of heroism. It is blood and death in search of political and economic advantage. Although some are very gruesome, few of Marcus’s cartoonish figures ever have the horror of a figure being perceptible as an actual dead person.

It’s worth noting, however, that there may be some benefit to depicting war distantly and mythologically. During the current election, Americans have been bombarded with messages that our military must be “stronger” against enemies, including vows to murder families, to use torture for the purpose of causing horror, to indiscriminately bomb civilians, to expand authoritarian controls on travel and constitutional rights, celebrations of extrajudicial executions, and other incitements to cruelty. More than assuming America in the role of global policeman, they show America claiming the executioner’s mantle. It may be hypocritical or unrealistic, but declaring an interest in fantasies like restraint and justice in war, or, in this case, who wages war and how, provides us with an ethical line against which we can judge — probably condemn — the implementation of power, can hold it accountable. Paintings of dead men might raise the question: Why then are wars fought by indigent kids and robots on behalf of elders? Why are good men dead men? Why are soldiers’ sacrifices repaid with banalities and substandard medical care?

It is vital, though, that such a fantasy be held against the truth, for comparison, to retain the hypocritical gap in order to maintain the taboo against violence. The multivalent clusterfuck called the War on Terror was heralded with a spectacle so viscerally grim that it has become a presiding trope for American viewers. The image has not been supplanted, in part, because of the refusal (and sometimes inability) on the part of the government and media to show exactly what the war consists of: through the practice of embedding journalists; the Pentagon’s ban on photographs of military coffins; few outlets show what it looks like in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan; a recent statute in the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual gives latitude to the military to treat journalists as “unprivileged belligerents,” a class similar to spies; and various media having legitimate concerns about showing snuff videos, like that of al-Kaseasbeh’s murder. The contrast between the fantasy of war’s glory and the reality of its indignity is, perhaps, necessary, but their gulf is filled with a river of gore.

The post Spilled Blood: Calvin Marcus at Clearing appeared first on artcritical.

Although he’s previously worked with Marlborough Chelsea, notably in their “Broadway Morey Boogie” installation along Broadway between 59th and 166th streets in 2014 and ’15, “MR. SOFTEE” is Lars Fisk’s first solo show with the gallery. Fisk formerly worked with the trippy jam band Phish, doing stage design, and his work here is definitely psychedelic, taking portions of the world and warping them into globes reminiscent of M.C. Escher’s Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935). Cobblestone streets with a manhole, the façade of a self-storage building, pencils, and, gigantically, a floor-to-ceiling parking lot globe. The show is paired with equally hypnagogic solos by Joe Roberts, in the viewing room, and, upstairs, the text-based group show “SMS SOS,” with work by Tony Matelli, Davina Semo, Aida Ruilova, Devin Troy Strother, and others.

Through October 15, 2016. 545 West 25th Street, New York, 212 463 8634

The post Lars Fisk at Marlborough appeared first on artcritical.

May to October, 2016
941 North Street (at Hurlingham Drive)
Greenwich, CT, 203 869 0611

“My body will not be a tomb for other creatures.”
-Leonardo da Vinci

Guests to the opening of Jonathan Horowitz’s “Occupy Greenwich,” at the Brant Foundation, may have been very surprised: whereas the multimillionaire paper magnate Peter Brant and his wife, Stephanie, typically open the spring exhibition at their art and study center with a pig roast, the carcasses of dead animals forced open and staked on the grounds, this year’s attendees were greeted with vegan catering. Horowitz is vegan, and dressing as a slaughterhouse the beautiful Connecticut estate surrounding his show seems likely to have undermined his work, some which speaks to the politics of what people eat and why.

Even before it opened, the show embraced some surprising contradictions. It runs the gamut, in a way, speaking to a number of social and political problems. It was promoted with a full-page ad, reproducing Horowitz’s print Go Vegan! (Stephanie) (2016), with the slogan underscoring the portrait of a seductive young woman. Horowitz is gay, but he also understands that pretty girls sell better than pictures of cute animals, which are often paired with that exhortation. (Though women are also often referred to with metaphors for penned animals, obviously.) At the bottom was the show’s sardonic title, equating the carefully executed exhibition of expensive collectibles with an anarchist takeover of the exurban enclave.

“Occupy Greenwich” touches on a number of seemingly partisan themes, often with messages that are superficially evangelist but which also include a subtext of uncertainty or perhaps even irony. That’s especially useful as America’s political discourse has grown increasingly polarized, in spite of the fact that people don’t lead polar lives and usually have beliefs and practices that differ radically from common stereotypes about, say, vegans, Republicans, working class voters, queer people, gun owners and so on.

Hillary Clinton is a Person Too (2008), staged in one early room, is a cartooned, life-sized bronze sculpture of a woman being crowned by a small boy standing on a chair, with the sculpture’s title cast into the base, in a corny comic font. Next to it, a whole wall of similar figurines — the size of paperweights and cast in the style of 1970s Sillisculpt statues, titled We the People are People Too (2008) — are marked with affirmations that “Young Mothers Are People Too,” “Socialist Medics Are People Too,” “Donald Rumsfeld Is A Person Too,” “Ellen And Portia Are People Too,” “Fetuses Are People Too,” and others. It’s not at all obvious how sincere Horowitz is being in his parodic coronation of Mrs. Clinton and the insistence on a common humanity shared alike by working people and Rumsfeld et al. It is absolutely essential to remember that everyone is a person, but it’s also important to recall that both of those politicians were managers of massive death, and putting them on the same scale as mothers, doctors, and embryos, etc., is discomfiting.

A stairway leading to galleries downstairs is lined with Go Vegan! (200 Celebrity Vegetarians Downloaded from the Internet) (2002/10). Each low-resolution-pictured person eats (currently, formerly, occasionally) a vegan or vegetarian diet, including Vincent van Gogh, Prince and Franz Kafka, among many others. Similar mosaics are found in vegan restaurants, online, and on posters produced by PETA. But they’re also dubious; Horowitz commends the plea and also slyly digs at its cheesy, superfluous celebrity endorsements, which seem to put animal-cruelty-free eating in the same basket as Coca-Cola and Nike.

Downstairs, a large room recapitulates Horowitz’s November 4, 2008 (2008) installation, originally staged at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, wherein viewers watched live election returns in a room divided between red and blue, FOX News and CNN, on back-to-back LCD screens. Here is the same set up, balloons poised to drop from the ceiling. The TV monitors are still playing the ‘08 election, and all of 24-hour cable news’ on-screen signs of urgent immediacy — rapidly moving graphics, breaking updates, a scrolling crawl at the bottom, and more — all this stuff that’s meant to convey nowness, is, eight years later, manic, diminutive, impotent.

The last installation, I, Hillary (2016), is a room empty save for a spare white bench, desk and chair, and an ink-jet printed and framed low-res portrait of Mrs. Clinton. From a small PA system comes Horowitz’s voice, giving a meandering, rational and sort of defensive account of the show and his support for Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. He describes how capable she is, and that her policy aims seem pragmatic and reasonable. Although Horowitz sounds like he’s speaking extemporaneously, if haltingly, his remarks also seem canned, robotically parroted from Clinton surrogates, partisans and pundits. Many of the same claims were repeated at the Democratic National Convention in July and have been found in the opinion media for the past year — the thrust being basically that he’s not crazy about her, but thinks she’s capable and will do a good job and have you seen how insane the alternative is? Horowitz’s minimizations of Clinton’s closeness to Wall Street money and influence are followed by preemptive defenses about working with the Brants at their ostentatious estate, drawing a sharp parallel between her compromises and his own.

“I guess I am not a big proponent in general of supposed ideological purity,” says Horowitz in his monologue. Probably few people are. More than that, though, Horowitz seems deeply interested in apparent contradiction, performativity, appropriation and allusion, both in politics and culture, and in his own life. One can hope that poking at those conflicts and misconceptions might lead to better elections, or maybe more civility. Or perhaps even just a few more vegans.

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Nicole Wermers’s sculptures operate both as clever art-historical jibes and contemporary political satire. Their ergonomic and utilitarian construction, using industrially produced materials, continues a kind of mainline homage to Marcel Duchamp, staging objects in ways that highlight their alien nature. Her Vertical Awnings series (rolled-up awnings with colored stripes) is coyly reminiscent of Daniel Buren’s stripes and Nancy Shaver’s towering assemblages. Givers & Takers is a series of upturned restroom hand dryers whose blowers have been turned to jet air into stove exhaust fans with bowed glass hoods. The small differences between each iteration points to the constricted range of options that typify “consumer choice.” They resemble the caricature of jowly, top-hatted capitalists, and pricks at the rhetoric of entitlement that has dominated American politics for the last six plus years.

“Nicole Wermers: Givers & Takers” continues at Tanya Bonakdar through July 29, 521 West 21st Street, New York, 212 414 4144

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June 23 to August 5, 2016
83 Grand Street (between Wooster and Greene streets)
New York, 212 279 9219

The same day “Golden Eggs” opened at Team Gallery, the UK voted for the economic insanity of leaving the European Union, following on another economic insanity of austerity, privatization, and cheerful steroidal encouragement of the financial sector. The vote to leave was, in part, a severely misguided reaction against wealth concentration and the technocratic institutions of Brussels, Frankfurt and London, which have for decades segregated citizens and underserved them, or even put a boot to their neck. “Golden Eggs,” with work by 10 artists organized by Alissa Bennett, performs a similar kind of disaffection as those referendum voters, though framed by the analytic reflectivity of Marxism (probably at least a little sardonically) instead of the reactionary know-nothing populism that just made a basket case of Britain, that has threatened other European nations for almost a decade, and which is threatening the US election.

Bennett described the show to me as a kind of answer to Art Basel, which had concluded five days earlier. That fair was, this year, seen as something of a test of the market’s continuing hypertrophy, coming on the heels of an apparently lackluster run of auctions. And the outlook was judged to be good. Wasn’t everyone very glad that the party is likely to continue?

A large red-and-white painting by Gardar Eide Einarsson, The Next Recession and Where to Hide (2016), summed up the mood of the show succinctly: a giant arrow hurtling toward the lower right corner, imitating a graph of a crashing global market. It’s a brusque, cool image that invites both terror and dispassionate admiration. It’s appropriated from a January 2016 cover of Time Magazine, headlined with the painting’s title in fearful, capitalized letters. Einarsson’s painting excludes the original text, which had also ominously crowed about China and boasted a clever report from Davos, meaning the World Economic Forum, another Swiss confab for market makers, then congregating leaders and representatives of the most powerful businesses and nations on Earth to discuss economic policy, as they’ve done for 45 years. Although the meeting intends to help guide capitalism toward the benefit of all, it has prevented neither the greatest worldwide consolidation of wealth in almost 100 years, nor the costly, global, economic supercatastrophe that’s been playing out since 2007. In fact, it’s probably done a great deal to enable those twin phenomena. Einarsson’s bolting arrow isn’t predicted by or aimed at Davos, but is cast by Davos; it’s everyone else trying to find where to hide.

The people at Basel and Davos can be seen as the market’s invisible hands, though perhaps “occluded hands” would be a better name, since although many of the participants at each conference are certainly recognizable, there’s almost zero transparency in what they do. Hans Haacke’s kinetic sculpture, The Invisible Hand of The Market (2009), anoints the whole show, hanging high on one wall. It’s a large box, with the title written out like a billboard. In the center, a large, open hand tilts from side to side, its innards ticking metronomically. The disembodied hand greets, waves, grabs, swats, remains out of reach, and dominates. It quotes Adam Smith, capitalism’s godfather, and his proposition that the private vices of individuals can, in their self-interest, invisibly, almost magically, develop into public benefits. However, Smith was speculating about the disembodied power of crowds, not the secret pillaging of oligarchs. And what is the social benefit of a global art-as-investment frenzy remains unclear, even more so when vast quantities of artworks bought in Switzerland remain there, sealed in indefinite storage at the Geneva Freeport, constructed to sequester collections and avoid taxes, and maybe trade and deal and hide. Given bad incentives — such as those that reward opacity in the art market, or that repay, with taxpayer money, dumb, massively over-leveraged financial bets — private vices may instead yield results which are simply vicious, yield a market whose aims and procedures are warped to favor wealth accumulation rather than innovative cultural production or social good. Karl Marx asserts that this is capitalism’s inevitable trajectory, not merely an accidental flaw.

Alex Bag, in Coven Services (2004), shows what such market forces look like as products for ordinary consumers (not citizens). Her video strings together several ad parodies, with interludes consisting of segments from a published sex tape starring the heiress Paris Hilton, shot in infrared, so that she and her paramour are rendered in green and black. This is riffed on by Bag, in clips where she plays PFC Jessica Lynch in green Army fatigues, selling Halliburton; a green witch named Eli Lilly dosing nubile children with Prozac and Satanism; and by a guy in a night-vision segment pimping the “warm, sticky infojaculate” pumped to consumers by AOL-Time Warner. She weaves a narrative of the interconnectedness (read: “collusion”) of the military, politics, capital, and entertainment in the construction of a totalizing ideology of consumption and obeisance.

Three text-based works — by Barbara Kruger, Jessica Diamond and Bjarne Melgaard — sneer at the developed world’s socioeconomic turmoil, bringing to the surface a primary contradiction. Diamond’s wall drawing declares “I HATE BUSINESS,” which is the product of her own business. Two prints by Kruger, wonder, respectively, about the relationship between being successful and feeling “FAKE,” and “IS BLIND IDEALISM REACTIONARY?” Melgaard snipes, “THE WORLD iS FULL OF RiCH CORRUPT CUNTS.” But his oeuvre is known for its ostentatious kind of cuntiness and opulence, and here is also included one of his sculptures, mounted with beauty products and a Brioni jacket. Embroidery over the interior breast pocket, conspicuously visible, indicates that it was made specially for Melgaard; I have no clue what a bespoke coat costs, but suffice to say its retail price is at least several thousand dollars. None of these artists would be considered rich from the vantage of patrons in the transnational capitalist class who fund so much of the art market. But, looking upward, they seem rich, and it can feel really impossible for emerging artists to gain purchase among such established figures. The art market, like other markets for other labors, is built in such a way as to suppress or exclude the emergent and retain the privileges of the already established, even the blasphemous establishment.

It’s tempting (and probably necessary) to extend this kind of critique, but it also smacks of the same myopia that always infects dogmatic demands for ideological rigor, or at least for the appearance of absolutism. In 2011, during the Occupy protests, TV personalities jeered at the protesters for leaving rallies to withdraw cash from Bank of America ATMs for lunch or whatever, as if the protesters’ coerced interaction with corporate behemoths was in some way hypocritical to that movement’s purpose. Einarsson, Haacke, Bag, Melgaard, Kruger, Diamond, and other artists here, as well as Bennett, have a license to criticize money and power. The meaning of their work, as pointed as it may be, is often secondary to its value for collectors. If the insults lobbed at capitalism provide good return on investment, then the market will reward its hecklers. These artists didn’t choose this, but they are illustrative. They’re collected at Basel by the kinds of people meeting at Davos, and they make a living. But Davos and Basel have true power, not them.

Marx, elaborated by ideologists such as Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, wrote of sharpening contradictions as a propulsion towards the collapse of capitalism (a longtime fantasy not likely to be realized anytime soon). As can be expected, those forces and contradictions play themselves out in every aspect of culture, from factories to studios. The depredation of middle and working class nest eggs, combined with the distribution of golden parachutes to speculators who were supposed to lose under the economic laws they had championed, has driven the contradictions to extremes. Will they crack? What happens then?

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It can be curious to find digital images in video: Jurassic Park (1993) still looks pretty sharp, while pixelated objects in more recent monster or action movies can stick out like a sore thumb. David Claerbout’s current show at Sean Kelly, his first at the gallery and his first in New York in eight years, plays both. His 2015–16 video, KING (after Alfred Wertheimer’s 1956 picture of a young man named Elvis Presley), digitally reconstructs, in the round, a 1956 photo of Elvis at home. The detail, while startling, in many places comes off as rubbery, like a video game. Nonetheless, it’s a wonder to have long-gone artifacts revivified, to walk through a still image. Even more striking is Oil Workers (from the Shell company of Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain (2013), another digital reconstruction, which inhabits the other end of the spectrum: of completely convincing virtual detail. As the camera pans through a picture of laborers sheltering under a flooded overpass, one is challenged to distinguish between Bill Viola-like slow motion and uncanny, still reproduction. Claerbout’s careful vision allows us to revel in still images precisely because he makes them almost live.

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