The New York Film Festival’s Projections series is an often-overlooked selection of the finest in recent experimental and avant-garde film. Spread over 11 programs, this year’s subjects ranged from documentary to magical realism, from fades to found footage. Aggressive editing techniques and sound collage offered some new and provocative investigations, yet it was the modest program of two seasoned filmmakers — Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler — that beamed with the liveliest verve and curiosity. Partners in love and art for over 50 years, they have earned a following of poets, philosophers and artists steeped in as much affection as respect for “Nick and Jerry.” Like their legendary at-home screenings, this was a show-and-tell of gentle, beautiful things.

The program included three short films — Dorsky’s Autumn and The Dreamer, and Hiler’s Bagatelle II (all works 2016) — each imbued with the pair’s characteristically playful and patient observations of natural and interior life. Autumn, however, stood out as Mr. Dorsky’s most transient tapestry to date, and a significant interpretation of haiku — the pure poetic form that first seized him as a youth. Shot in 2015, during the last months in that year, as California’s drought continued, the film is dedicated to all autumns and ruminates on its essence through nature, using short shots of the California countryside. Inconceivably crisp and luminous, the 16 mm film is 26 minutes long and silent, complimented by the tick-tock of the projector. Dorsky’s films do without narrative structure, allowing the images to speak directly. By such standards, Autumn is verbose.

The film opens slowly, burying us eye-deep in foliage before clearing a space for Dorsky’s found treasures: broad-eared rhododendron and butterfly bushes, wayfaring between islands of light, fade in and out of a blackness that comes to linger within an organic, oneiric, day-for-night tone. Everything seems steeped in twilight — the violet hour, the day’s autumn — where partitions blur and something slips. Flora is constant, becoming a verdant ether, occasionally contrasted by the slick hide of a building, but we are always quickly pulled back under the brush. Each image, dyed in oscuro, is kernelled and then connected by a constant flow of gaze. Vegetation, despite its thirst, pulsates and vacillates throughout while, against reason, bushes blush green. Dorsky is reflective, more mirror than director; his subjects, once pinned to celluloid, are egalitarian: the darkening bough, a sun freckled path, light smeared like jelly across a window, an ache for life.

Such is the poetry of Dorsky, and his interest in haiku has long been shared among filmmakers. In the 1929 essay “Beyond the Shot,” Sergei Eisenstein precisely correlated the natures of montage and haiku. In both practices, it is the copulation of forms to create a “representation of something that cannot be graphically represented.” He offers the Japanese lexicon as example: the combination of water and eye mean to weep, knife and heart mean sorrow. Such laconicism describes haiku as much as Dorsky’s art; to see his film is to see master poet Matsuo Bashō’s 17 syllables glowing at the edge of winter:

Autumn moonlight —
a worm digs silently
into the chestnut.

A self-proclaimed hunter of the Zen occurrence, of satori (the sudden enlightenment), Dorsky applies a number of poetic rules to the film, allowing his images to move us as consistently as Bashō’s cranes, cuckoos and moons. Vital to haiku are kigo (“season words”) — such as cicada, typhoon or grapes — that connote the time of year. Autumn is pregnant with the kigo-laden images of its namesake: rain slick streets, coy ochre moons, hexagonal light and tawny leaves glide down, across and over the screen. This is not simply a rummaging of diaphanous delicacies, however. Cutting is as essential to haiku as montage, and each cut is precise. Cutting works like a punctuation mark, and for Dorsky like a door. Throwing the juxtaposition into revelatory light, it links us to a new dimension — the moment of satori.

Such delightful turns happen throughout the film; seasoned and cut with care, Dorsky’s images become incarnations of linked verse. In one observation, light-tickled water meets a crush of velvet black reeds; the pair, now joined, transforms into an ominous sea urchin. Midway through Autumn, some late afternoon light falls yellow on the nubby back of an armchair or sofa. It glows, beginning to resemble a wheat field, but a crossfade exposes a dark landscape of whirling gears beneath: upholstery and infrastructure combine to reveal parallel universes of leisure and grind, flesh and mechanism. This all quickly falls away again, yet you can still taste a type of yellow, decidedly post-harvest.

In material as much as purpose, both film and haiku are attempts to bottle the moment of revelation, the fleeting experience. Indeed, the haiku is traditionally printed, like celluloid, as a single vertical line. Their kinship culminates towards the end of Autumn, the frame lingering on a voluptuous bit of vegetation. As Dorsky pushes and pulls us in and out by his signature dark fade, we move through a hypnagogic and hesitant collapse (or arising), towards a new vision: constellations of inestimably starry flora. In its final syllable, the film negotiates heaven and Earth: the Milky Way in milk thistle.

The post Flood of Images: Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler at the New York Film Festival appeared first on artcritical.

July 2016
Avenida Central (at Calle 11)
San José, Costa Rica

Despacio ( “slowly”) is an independent art and residency space located in the Costa Rican capital of San José. Suspended above the chaotic atmosphere of the city, Despacio highlights individual explorations of the temporary, the absent, the forgotten, the mis- or dis-translated, the transience of things. The recent appointment of curator Sandino Scheidegger, founder of the Random Institute and gleaner of time, has slowed things down even more devotedly.

Many of the previous exhibitions at Despacio — such as Julien Prévieux’s collection of obsolete books, or Diana Abi Khalil’s space-addled notebooks — were library based, and the gallery’s most recent project continues with this leitmotif. On July 26, two separate solo exhibitions opened simultaneously under Despacio’s roof: Florence Jung’s “Nadie Nada Nunca” (“nobody nothing never) and Thomas Moor’s “Herencias” (“heirlooms”).

Jung is a French artist who’s enjoyed many recent successes; currently, she is showing at Manifesta 11 in Zurich, and received the Swiss Performance Prize in 2013. These are notable accomplishments considering her principled refusal to photograph or publish the work. Jung is a conceptual extremist who handles, smuggles and muffles the media of experience and thought, pre- and post- conception, with precision. Her happenings, installations or interventions are undocumented, ensuring that they remain as transitory as they are un-tweetable. Take, for example, Jung43 (2015): exhibited this spring in a North Korean hotel room, the work — a conceptual thought alone — demanded it was not to be thought about. Upon consideration, she insisted, it would be destroyed. For the sake of art conservation, I’ll leave it at that.

In Jung’s exhibition, a pale wooden platform showcases a scatter of thick white texts. Arranged with as much care as retired phonebooks, the cover of each reads: “El presente libro recopila todos los Quijotes retirados de Costa Rica” (“This book collects all the Quijotes removed from Costa Rica”). In a mix of quixotic quest and Reconquista, Jung has traveled across Costa Rica to gather or steal every possible copy of Don Quijote from bookstores, libraries, second-hand shops and flea markets; the fruits of this labor are indexed within these unassuming books. As is characteristic of Jung, the details of each acquisition are listed, but the physical object (and its visual evidence) is missing. Despite the negating proclamation of “Nadie Nada Nunca” — perhaps notably, a title shared with a novel by the Argentinian author Juan José Saer — Jung approaches a great deal of who and what and when in these archives, be they invented or accurate.

Jung’s project seems at once like a symbolic effort to decolonize, de-tongue, and a compulsive act of love (that is, possession). It certainly echoes Francis Alÿs’s ongoing Fabiola Project — an endeavor started in the 1990s that brings together reproductions of a long-lost 1885 painting of 4th-century Roman Saint Fabiola, collected from junk shops around the world. Like Fabiola, Don Quijote is a cult figure who pursued honor and charity with charming persistence. Unlike Alÿs, Jung does not display her collection, but hides it away in a clandestine location. Knowing her past work, we could go so far as to question if it truly exists — after all, Cervantes lends Don Quijote credibility through the invented gravitas of “The Archive of La Mancha” and the bogus Moorish translator, Cide Hamete Benengeli. Is Jung pulling a Cervantes? In a favorite adaptation of the novel, Man of La Mancha, Cervantes asks: “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?” And I wonder. Across the street from Despacio, on the corner of sea foam green rooftop, lies a large box. On the side it reads: “Nadie Nada Nunca.”

Swiss artist Thomas Moor is a collector of the intangible as well. His past work includes the installation of a false Starbucks franchise (Trojan Horses, 2016), a newspaper Kiosk (2013) installed mid-air on an apartment balcony, and Touching Tangibles (2013-2014): a full body cotton suit, the same material used for art handling gloves, worn by the artist that allows him to hug valuable artwork, such as Jeff Koons sculptures.

Bubble wrap that once protected artwork, discarded carpeting from an art fair, receipts from past transactions, museum paraphernalia — Moor gathers these laminations of the art object for “Herencias” (“heirlooms”), his exhibition turned inside out. Cargo Veils, a project begun in 2015, is composed of the discarded duct tape and bubble wrap previously used by galleries to transport art. Baby blue sheaths, immortal padding and the familiar, fragrant brown tapes join to become strikingly modern works (surely every artist has admired the molted Mondrians that accompany their shipped art). Like sticky cicada shells, the works hangs with characteristic lightness, depending on namedropping titles — VonBrandenburg002, Malevich001, Weiner001 — for weight. Strangely, looking at Cargo Veils, I immediately though of Roland Barthes’s beautifully belabored description of Japanese tempura, in The Empire of Signs (1970):

“The contour is so light that it becomes abstract […] It has for its envelope nothing but time […] on the side of the light, the aerial, of the instantaneous, the fragile, the transparent, the crisp, the trifling, but whose real name would be the interstice without specific edges, or again: the empty sign.”

Yet just as Jung’s nothing is a something, Moor’s empty sign still echoes of the absent object’s dual artistic and monetary auras. Indeed, Moor is an art handler, and Cargo Veils finds the shape of value without containing it; this applies equally to the installation of “Heirlooms”: a collection of coffee mugs — filled to the brim with coins — from the world’s museum gift shops. Naturally, coffee is a major cash crop for Costa Rica, so the artist has created a connection between two economic and highly branded cultural forces.

The mugs are arranged across three low pedestals, Islas De La Felicidad (“islands of happiness,” 2016), that float in a sea of discarded and wrinkled art fair carpet (Flying Carpet, 2016). Moor, who shares his name with another maker of utopic islands, collaborated with Sabrina Röthlisberger to create the fragmented poems that line the islets. Her words are sourced from a delayed baggage receipt — American Airlines had lost, or stolen, the original bag of coins intended to fill Moor’s mugs. The vinyl letters stutter: “We sincerely apologize everything possible.”

When reading up on Despacio, I came across an old Spanish proverb: “Vísteme despacio que tengo prisa.” In unforgiving English this advises to do things carefully even when hurried — “make haste, not waste,” and the like. It has been attributed to Napoleon, Emperor Augustus, Charles III and even — according to the tangential wanderings of the Internet — Don Quixote. “Nadie Nada Nunca” and “Herencias” beg the same, asking us to consume them slowly, like a beloved novel. And like good writers, these artists think in circles, following the natural shape of time: Jung tilting at windmills, Moor tracing their movements.

The post Not for Nothing: Two Exhibitions at Despacio appeared first on artcritical.

April 9 to 12, 2016
Pyongyang, NK, +850 2 381 2134

In April of 2016, there was a sudden flurry of banal images across my Instagram — a fluorescent train interior, a bleached highway, a public monument — that would not have garnered further attention were it not for the accompanying hashtags: #northkorea, #pyongyang, #exhibition. These may well have been tagged #mars, but such is the reveled territory of Zurich’s Random Institute, an enigmatic art project by Sandino Scheidegger and Luca Müller. The Institute often holds exhibitions within such inaccessible areas of no-place (the transliteration of utopia): places of the virtual, the impermanent. Using the artist and the exhibition as medium, each project imagines new borders to trace the untraceable elements of our world through art, and even exhibition, as idea, challenging the viewer’s belief that the show happened at all. Pairing with curator Anna Hugo, Random Institute’s most recent project, “All the Lights We Cannot See,” is perhaps their most pioneering trek into such intangible terrain.

“All the Lights We Cannot See” exhibited the work of nine international artists in Pyongyang, North Korea from April 9 to 12, on the 23rd floor of the Yanggakdo International Hotel. The show was not discussed in North Korean news, or anywhere at all. According to the omnipotence of Google, this exhibition is virtually nonexistent and yet, virtually, it is: a slick photo stream on Random Institute’s website reveals the chalk pinks and cheap lacquer of a vaguely Asian, two-bed hotel room. The photos seems a bit like an Airbnb ad, yet within the normality, punctuations: Ragnheidur Karadottir’s bubblegum-pink ball sporting cheerful streamers, Birdie (2016), balances on the edge of the nightstand; a jacket called Naked Bombers (2016), by Simon Mullan, hangs from the wall like the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew in Michaelangelo’s Last Judgement (1536–41), turned inside-out and molting its flocked flesh. There is an iPhone or two pictured that are deceptively mundane, but then a levitating fork pricks the wall, Juan Betancurth’s Movement No.6 (2016); an ominous chocolate bar rests on the velour settee in Alison Kuo’s Personal Chocolate (2016); and a row of paradisiacal beach towels, Sulking Souvenir,(2013) by Clifford E. Bruckmann, bear the names of imaginary getaways as seemingly inaccessible as this clandestine art project.

Bruckmann’s sculptures are a poignant centerpiece to the exhibit as utopia. The no-place seems to be the non-existent ideal that Random Istitute is frequently tracing: just as Bruckmann creates a souvenir from the paradise he never saw, RI has created an exhibition that, according to them, “went virtually unnoticed.” “All the Lights We Cannot See” directly injected the intangible ideals of utopia into the dystopic reality of North Korea, and most covertly: even the black sheets of the poorly made hotel beds are the work of French artist Achraf Touloub, highlighting the demand for secrecy on the part of both the art and its environment. Indeed, these objects are as careful as they should be, all falling within the limits of allowance when traveling to North Korea (e.g. visitors are advised that chocolates make a lovely gift for North Korean women). Thankfully, definitions of contemporary art are more generous than state security.

The artists of the North Korean exhibit are contractually obligated to silence by the Institute, their only legal response to questions about it being: “I’m not supposed to talk about it.” Outside of Random Institute’s website, searching online for “All the Lights We Cannot See” will only direct you to a New York Times best-selling novel of the same name (the proverbial red herring), or a few of the participating artists’ CVs. So we are presented with the shell of an exhibition, the lamination of an event, but also the muffled experience of non-experience; only Scheidegger and Hugo, and perhaps a North Korean maid or minder, bore witness to this show. Random Institute has archived “All the Lights We Cannot See” and moved on (though they recently released their exhibition catalog: a limited edition of the Pyongyang Times that has been implanted with a mocked-up review of the show).

Other Random Institute projects have occurred within similarly remote contexts of the no-place: furniture catalogs, a transatlantic Filipino boat, in a book buried underground, or traced — by rock, dream or GIF — within a barren patch of Iceland the RI has named Kunsthalle Tropical. A “non-profit exhibition field that does not belong to anyone,” Kunsthalle Tropical examines the immaterial and the ephemeral or, as filmmaker Chris Marker describes such phenomena, “the impermanence of things”: museums that will melt under the rare rains of the Icelandic desert, remains of hovering helium from a 1969 exhibition by Robert Barry, and verbal artworks to be shouted, via megaphone, from the sky (attempted and failed five times). The insistence is a detachment of the art from its physical audience, isolating — or even disappearing — the art(ist) to the essential element of idea.

This is a far cry from the heavy-handed, wine-fueled mobs of the typical gallery scene: these exhibitions ask for silence and faith over networks and market values. Being of absence and no-place, this is a new approach to the art space that materializes that virtual space we are all too familiar with. They redefine the gallery, the museum and the library as physical spaces newly transformed (updated) by their virtual counterparts. It is a grand and impressive effort to materialize nascent philosophies of the virtual world physically, to weigh that which is hanging in the air.

There is little difference between “All the Lights We Cannot See” and a missed exhibition caught up with online. Having stared across so many white walls, the audience may be just as keen to stare into the MacBook’s own rare rectangle. Perhaps what Random Institute understands so well in its utopic tracing, better than many post-Internet artists, is the definition of virtual: not physically existing but made to appear.

The post No-Place: A Clandestine Exhibition in North Korea appeared first on artcritical.

March 11 to June 12, 2016
333 E 47th Street (between 1st and 2nd avenues)
New York, 212 832 1155

In his seminal treatise on photography, Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes presents two qualities he believes are found in photographs: the studium (the photo’s general, cultural context) and the punctum (the picture’s pointed, personally significant moment). Barthes defines a photograph’s punctum as “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” The latter quality provokes the viewer, presenting “a tiny shock, a satori, the passage of a void […] close to the Haiku.” Indifference to the image is therein disturbed. Like the photograph, the haiku presents the moment directly, as wholly present, brief and marking. Barthes often describes this phenomenon as a seism — an earthquake.

It is easy to locate such rushing poignancy in The Japan Society’s latest exhibition, “In the Wake: Japanese Photographer Respond to 3/11.” Marking the fifth anniversary of the catastrophic Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, the exhibition’s 17 photographers are handlers of so much puncta. Their extended interactions with the photograph, by hand or hard drive, find fresh and dynamic potential for Barthes’s punctum beyond the personal; as images by seism and of seism, many of these photographs are both puncturing and physically punctured. In choosing work that is not purely documentary or of studium, this exhibition presents 3/11 in a context larger than a single day.

For many of these artists, such a monumental natural and nuclear disaster can only be quantified or documented; they try to capture, as Barthes tried to understand, “what cannot be transformed but only repeated.” Takashi Arai documents sites of atomic disaster by daguerreotype, a sensitive medium of silver plate burned by the subject’s reflection. His blown-out daguerreotypes from Hiroshima, Fukushima and Nagasaki are equated, across time and place, in his series “Exposed in a Hundred Suns.” As details are over-exposed and flushed from photographs of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial or a family of Fukushima survivors, viewers are bruised by the blue-black event horizon beyond which history’s details are not visible. Arai’s A Maquette for a Multiple Monument for Wristwatch Dug Up from Uenomachi (2014) is a literal reversal of time as he horizontally flips an iconic World War II image: a wristwatch, found in Nagasaki, which was stopped at 11:02 on August 9, 1945 by the second atomic bomb, “Fat Man.” This simple and punctal detail, not immediately noticed, collapses the time and distances between these disasters, speaking to how progress can often seem futile.

The most stunning representation of this catharsis in counting is realized in the Lost and Found Project. Organized by Munemasa Takahashi and other residents of Tohoku (the northern region which bore the brunt of the disaster’s devastation, and for which it is named), the Project has been collecting and cleaning thousands of photographs remaining in the tsunami’s wake. Under the banner of “Memory Salvage,” they have recovered, cleaned and digitized over 750,000 photos (returning an incredible 400,000 to their owners). Water-damaged and sun-bleached, the photographs’ erasure of faces, hands and landscapes are unsettlingly beautiful: here is memory undone, the photograph un-developed. Indeed, the punctum is carried in the actual bruising of these images, evidence of the physical damage against the subjects’ homes, their visages and too often their person.

Nobuyoshi Araki’s work is similarly marking and marked by both time (being date-stamped) and experience (in the mutilation of the negatives). In Untitled (2011), Araki has scratched and gouged at a bright little cloud in the sunny sky of March 11th. Nearby, the scratches, vertical daggers — like black rain — puncture urbanite umbrellas. As in the bleached wounds of Takahashi’s images or Arai’s stopped watch, the implementation of a date-stamp is that forceful punctum that marks time and marks the viewer. The date-stamp is found in most of Araki’s oeuvre and yet it has never been so jarring. Like a time loop, the moment wounds the artist and the artist wounds the moment — however futilely. Here is punctal, and punctual, revenge.

As time is a flexible material for these artists, it is important to note Lieko Shiga’s work, as much of it was created previous to the disaster at hand. In 2008, Shiga moved to Kitahama — a serene and isolated town in the Miyagi prefecture of Tohoku. In Japan, Miyagi is famous for its mysterious and timeless spirit, making the destruction of its scenic coast especially devastating. Shiga has an oneiric aesthetic; she often manipulates photographs digitally or in cross-processing (using the wrong chemicals to develop film in unique and unexpected ways) to glaze them with new narrative. Framing her floating subjects with blown-out nightscapes, she presents something like nuclear fallout, post-apocalyptic ceremony, or perhaps prophecy. For instance, Mother’s Gentle Hands (2009) shows an elderly woman, eyes closed, resting just off-center against a glittering and cosmic wall, her arms seemingly doubled into two pairs of clasped hands. Like much of Shiga’s work, it takes a great deal of looking to decipher the discomfort of this arrangement. And just as Barthes was taken with the clasped hands in a Mapplethorpe photograph, this image “holds me, but I cannot say why.” Shiga loves multiplicity in metaphor and timelines, so the viewer may see a mutated resident of the evacuation zone as easily as Shinto’s wrathful four-armed deity of fire, Sanbō Kōjin. The hands are perhaps not the punctum, but they do restrain the viewer, doubly so by their abstrusity to hold us inside that world of horror and wonder, the artificial stars blinking behind. (Perhaps it is in the stars.)

Shimpei Takeda’s “Traces” also resemble scattered cosmic galaxies; in actuality, these are the photographs produced by the radioactive particles contaminating Fukushima’s soil. Trace #7, taken in 2012 from Fukushima’s Nihonmatsu Castle, is the most aggressively galactic. Other Traces, sampled from the soil around hospitals or shrines, are less crowded — safer — and yet uneasy. This leaves the viewer with a disturbing desire to see more of these “hot spots” in a temporary confusion of pollution mistaken for cosmic dust. To see the stars in the soil captures that feeling many humans have towards the cosmos: hopeful, yet hypoxic. Time is lost in such a space — it becomes theoretical, measured in half-lives. Staring at these images one wonders at the government’s method of handling such insurmountable contamination, as expansive as these universes, with little more than spades and trash bags.

Barthes was a philosopher who loved Japan. His Empire of Signs (1970) celebrates the beauty and intelligence of the island nation, and he often weighed the simplicity and spark of the haiku against his burden of Western philosophy and semiotics, traditions that labored the past into the future. His study of the haiku colored his understanding of photography as the moment’s twin but not its copy; the actual moment, temporally and physically, is ineffable. So too, he writes, the “the notation of a haiku […] undevelopable […] might (we must) speak of an intense immobility, linked to a detail (to a detonator), an explosion makes a little star on the pane of the text or of the photograph: neither the Haiku nor the Photograph makes us ‘dream.’” As with the haiku or the photographic punctum, so with tragedy: we can only know of the experience, not experience it; even still, it pierces us.

The post Intense Immobility: “In the Wake” at Japan Society appeared first on artcritical.

January 7 to February 6, 2016
530 W 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 924 2178

“Noah Becker Presents… Something” is a New Yorker’s show. As children of glam, gold, glitter and garbage, much of the 26 artworks dance at the shiny-dusty feet of Andy Warhol, the city’s veritable king of things. These could easily turn trite as riffs on the classics of Pop and abstraction, mixed media and montage; however, curator Noah Becker has thoughtfully gathered the artists by their more subtle connections of something or another.

On entering the gallery, one steps directly into Marc Dennis’s Out of this World (2015), a painting of a woman contemplating Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866). Skillfully rendered, the infamously provocative artwork is presented — frame and all — within Dennis’s picture plane. The observer’s long hair strategically obstructs the very thing she is contemplating. Lovers of Shakespearean punning might be brought to the wordplay of “nothing in Hamlet:

Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.

For Dennis to so strategically censor this nothing, and for Mr. Becker to juxtapose his own painting, Something (2015), right next to it, makes for a playful introduction to the show.

Irena Jurek, an artist of boundless energy and glitter, presents her iconic, anthropomorphic cat people in Something to Talk About (2015). The cats, considered intrinsically female by the artist, stand, crawl and strut across the canvas in velvety purples, blue highlights and metallic pen. Cartoonishly grotesque and yet powerfully present, these sex kittens celebrate the fuzziness of their eroticism, and even of their species, within city life.

Aaron Michael Skolnick’s watercolor series, Choking on the Ashes of a Memory (2015), reference Warhol’s images of “nothing” as depicted in his late, fairly vapid shadow paintings. On a smaller scale (11 x 8 1/2 inches each) and with a decidedly more delicate medium than Warhol’s, Skolnick’s work presents the shadow-bearing image of something rather than nothing: a burning cross, repeated 24 times. The pages, loosely arranged, are jarring as they jump from matte blacks to milky bright blues and reds. This use of such a disturbingly American symbol transcends the clear act of appropriation to highlight the persistently long shadow of racial injustice across the decades.

Something is largely a show of painters, but a few sculptural pieces are to be found in the coy ceramics of John LaMacchia — a New York artist known for his street-wise ability to artfully utilize the trash of a city. Sporting images of Smucker’s jars, coffee filters, and ads for transgender escorts, LaMacchia’s vases are decorative, blue-and-white ware containing nothing. But they’re also disruptive artifacts of pop culture (viewers should note the lovingly aligned cigarette butts).

One of the most familiar explorations of something may be found in the gold sheen of Nir Hod’s Fame (2015). Composed of oil and acid on an oxidized chromed canvas, Fame, captures the blues of living in New York — a city as acidic as it is gilded. Certainly after the recent passing of David Bowie (an idol, like Warhol, of shifting ambiguity), this work hangs heavier against the wall. Through the small and personal scale of the piece, and its visual spareness, Hod warily approaches the realities of fame: the something and the nothing that makes up lonely glamour.

In a calculated yet celebratory balance of joy and nihilism, something and nothing, precedent and pop, this group exhibition of “Something” feels as bright as it is deep. Though the past looms large in some of the flagrant appropriations, there is still a strong and genuine sense of the present by the close curation of the artwork. The range of style, the varied handling of paint and the seemingly disparate subjects all fall comfortably into that field of glittered something that New York loves. Separated, it is not certain that these artworks would be as powerful. However, like Jurek’s gang of cats, when put together really they’re something else.

The post Something Old, Something New: Glitter and Glam at Berry Campbell appeared first on artcritical.

November 19 to December 24, 2015
516 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 229-1088

The title of Zieher Smith & Horton’s two-man exhibition of David Byrd and Peter Gallo, “The Patients and the Doctors,” is taken from a fiery 1947 work by the poet-mental patient Antonin Artaud. The artists paired together for this exhibition both worked a number of years in mental health centers. Gathering from their experiences within modern medicine conceived as a kind of Ship of Fools run aground, their art documents the disfiguring pressures of contemporary psychological space on the body and the mind—thin skinned and gray mattered.

Raised in foster homes in Illinois, the late David Byrd (1926-2013) escaped to Brooklyn, NY at the age of 16. After serving in World War II, the G.I. Bill brought him to art school. Byrd balanced his art practice alongside a career at the Veteran’s Administration Medical Hospital in Montrose, NY where, as an orderly, he cared for psychiatric patients. It is as if his paintings reiterate that care in terms of palette and rendering—the touch is light, even delicate, and the tone softly cajoling. The emaciated bodies of his subjects wander halls, slump in corridors and fall into lines. Their heads, shrunken by disease, rarely present their features, hanging heavy between shoulders or hands. Byrd’s paintings seem rich with reference to madness and art—from the deranged eyes of Goya’s Saturn peeking from the shadows of Alcove, to his own antipodal “Venus rising” in the frail, pitiful body of the nude man in Arising.

Byrd’s paintings consistently employ a mix of the social and magical realism popular in the early to mid-20th Century. New York artists like George Tooker also dealt with the complexities of psychological space, though from within the urban space. However, the horror of Byrd’s figures’ physical agony is in continual contrast to the sugar glass palette that models his institutional spaces. The figures of Waiting and Aging, arranged across the canvas in various states of pain and boredom, are flooded with a fleshy peach light. Like the faded underpainting of a Morandi or De Chirico still life, the careful placement of these patients—paralyzed yet wilting—distills them in their communal isolation. The interiors of this psychiatric ward are startling calm in their malt pastel, fleecy geometry and impressionistic light. Indeed, in Byrd’s compositions there is a great abundance of windowless light; just as there is a great abundance of mindless bodies—the window, seemingly, is closed. What remains is the body—emptied and organized by vacuum, by number.

Peter Gallo, born 1959, lives and works in Hyde Park, Vermont. In a similar way to Byrd, he has synthesized his art practice (and an art history PhD) with many years of experience as a case manager at a mental health center. However, where Byrd explored the interior of the institution and the exterior of the body, Gallo presents just the opposite through a practice he defines as “bio-aesthetics.” In his doctoral thesis, “Bio-Aesthetics and The Artist as Case History,” Gallo offers a bio-political lens through which to understand the various divides and –isms of modern art history. He locates the drive of Modernism and material specificity—movements “toward embodiment, toward the referent … toward the real”—in 18th–century clinical revelations of the body and later ideas on artistic subjectivity and pathology.

To look at Gallo’s work, seemingly of an outsider aesthetic, against his doctoral history brings one to wonder if he is playing patient instead of doctor. Channeling Artaud, his work often gathers what material is immediately available to him; pencil and wine make desperate letters, illegible yet sobering in their urgency. However, to take the paintings as embodiments, as subjects themselves, is vital; they are skin and bone, skeletons etched with psychic charts. His supports—bedsheets, denim and burlaps—are stretched with an aching, poignant negligence across their makeshift frames. Works such as Glanz, der nicht trösten will, Glanz. Die Toten —sie betteln noch, Franz. (Celan) employ his body’s own shape as templates stitched in blue—truly, these are blueprints to the mind of the poet-patient, struggling to remain against the pressures of the panopticon, the pill and the practitioner. Comprised of two loosely-joined canvases, Guyotat is both the most unassuming and utterly corporeal piece of the exhibition, and named for the writer Pierre Guyotat’s inter-sanitarium “anti-memoir”, Coma. The sedate body of stretched and stained burlap skin, lightly scarred by thread, is crowned with the muslin canvas of red and rising COMA, reversed and restricted—the hot head, the fevered mind. Balancing allegory, politics and a love of text, Gallo tugs his Ship of Fools, seen in Blood Drive and Blood Galaxy, through such historical and philosophical explorations (and implications) of the artistic body and experience or, more closely, of the body as experience.

After decades of working in isolation, Byrd’s work was only discovered at 87 years of age. Just days before his first exhibition, Byrd was diagnosed with lung cancer; he passed away just shortly after the show closed. Perhaps the late artist related, throughout most of his life, to those patients’ distilled bodies, to that well-lit yet windowless space. It is also clear that Gallo traces not only history’s mad poets and the oil slicks of Foucault, but his own mind’s stretched and pinned divination, his psyche’s sextant. The pairing of Gallo and Byrd thoughtfully explores their shared understanding of the body and mind: how they find that the embodiment of one is the emptying of the other, and how their experiences color between the sanguine light, the blood-drawn lines.

The post The Panopticon, The Pill and The Practitioner: David Byrd and Peter Gallo appeared first on artcritical.

September 12 to October 11, 2015
179 East Broadway (between Rutgers and Jefferson streets)
New York City, 917 463 3901

The work of Roland Flexner is deep in conversation with traditional vanitas paintings that convey the impermanence of existence and the futility of earthly pursuits. Amidst the familiar symbolism of skulls, decaying fruit, smoke and other ephemera in 17th-century Dutch painting, for instance, is the motif of a young boy, gleeful and naive, blowing soap bubbles. But in his striking exhibition of bubble ink drawings, shown at Sargent’s Daughters alongside a selection of Japanese bronze vases (from the Edo period of the 18th and 19th Centuries), Flexner moves beyond the security of the intact bubble. The burst, remnant stains of the artist’s breath — reaffirmed by the adjacent hollow bronze vessels — provide a meditative glimpse into the composition of emptiness.

Born into the volatility of 1944 France, Flexner spent his first 30 years in the vibrant city of Nice where he was associated with the Nouveaux Réalistes and the Supports/Surfaces artists of the 1960s. In 1981 he moved to New York City on a scholarship, with a one-year workshop with PS1.

Monochrome prevails through much of his oeuvre and his theme has indeed predominately been one of vanitas — smoking skulls, agonizing visages, mourning clothes, decaying landscapes. These ideas underwent a certain condensation in 1996 when, while playing with his daughter, the bubble drawings emerged. Flexner began to study sumi-e (ink painting), and made multiple trips to Japan to learn sumi-nagashi (floating ink) painting — an ancient technique of paper marbling. In Flexner’s modified approach, the ink is mixed with soap and water, passed through a hollow brush, and burst against the paper. The result is a record not only of impermanence, but also of the artist’s breath.

The bubble drawings in this exhibition are all from 2001, on pages that uniformly measure 12¾ x 11½ inches. Though they are all untitled, each is unique. Some resemble onionskin marbles, pathogens or inkblots while many bring to mind alien planets — entire worlds, condensed. A couple of particularly vivid pieces have a ring of droplets dancing along the perimeter of the bubble — as these have been imbued with alcohol, Flexner likes to call them “drunken bubbles.” The forms of a few are disconcertingly ovoid, and others carry little dark tails — a sudden reminder of the artist’s haphazard process.

Considering Flexner’s other work, the understanding of these bubble drawings would cease to develop beyond his preoccupation with vanitas were it not for the thoughtful pairing of them with the five bronze futabana (two-flower) vases. Selected by the gallery’s curators — Allegra LaViola and Meredith Rosen — these late Edo vases were originally created for the Buddhist ritual of flower arrangement. The practice is extremely intuitive, and demands the artist’s patience and meditation. To see these vessels empty highlights the absence of those flowers and the artists that handled them. The mind immediately stretches towards the absence in Flexner’s own work — the product of a void, of dissipated breath.

Sunyata, the Buddhist meditative concept of emptiness, is often translated as the not-self and, indeed, the Sutras refer to foam, bubbles and drops of dew to illustrate that emptiness. Unified in this exhibition, these two records of absence bring the audience gently through the geographies of philosophy, West to East — from the weight of vanitas towards the zero gravity of nothingness. Flexner’s bubbles may be an impressive handling, and manipulation, of sumi-e. The vases may reveal Japan’s incredible early influence on Art Nouveau. However, this show is asking us to suspend our attention to such artistic achievements, to forget titles, dates or bitter lemon peels, to contemplate that old understanding of what we will all soon become. It asks us to consider nothing.

The post Drunken Bubbles: The Sumi-e Spray Drawings of Roland Flexner appeared first on artcritical.