Marvelli Gallery
526 West 26th Street
Second Floor
New York City
212 627 3363

Alex Mcquilkin’s new two-screen projection film is ironic, sincere, casual, rigorous, knowing, adolescent, narcissistic, and emotionally generous.  It is a small masterpiece about another masterpiece.

For most of its five minutes and eighteen seconds the artist is present in full color in the right frame, approximating short fragments from Carl Dreyer’s black and white silent film, “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928) that is projected on the left.  In it, Mcquilkin wears a gray t-shirt that says “OK” in white letters while her occasional voice-over mumbles about how she couldn’t get the film out of her head.

In one of the many ways that the original film was radical was in its use of close-ups, which Mcquilkin matches with tight blocking (a common attribute of many of her films) of her torso and face. Mournful music (medieval) by The Anonymous Four is the soundtrack.

By the (very short) time she begins to cut her long, strawberry blonde hair, Mcquilkin’s film has matched the emotional climate of the original.  Her body shifts within the frame to reveal an electrical outlet behind her and an electric razor appears to finish the job. It has the power of a grim intruder.

In the original film, according to French film theorist Andre Bazin, when Dreyer ordered the actor in the executioner role to cut the Maria Falconetti’s (Joan of Arc) hair the film crew began to cry.

Like Dreyer, Mcquilkin is interested in how the film medium can be used to reveal authentic emotion. As Oscar Wilde said “A mask tells us more than a face.”

Joan of Arc, the artist narrates, was put to death at age nineteen.  Several underlying themes intersect: adolescence as state of spiritual purity and the adolescent desire to be a religious martyr. Contemporarily, it begs the question as to what constitutes martyrdom.

Towards the end of the film, Mcquilkin shorn head appears, matching the tilted angle of Falconetti’s shorn head. Here the use of highly definitive color film and the subtle detail of Mcquilkin’s gold nose pin contrasts with the filmed black and white rawness of Joan of Arc’s face. (Dreyer insisted against makeup on his actors.)

Mcquilkin’s film and Dreyer’s (observed Bazin) aspire towards a state of emotional dignity that is found in religious painting. The actor’s filmed visage becomes the equivalent of an icon.

The film closes with the artist’s observation that Joan of Arc was the only figure in history that the church both put to death and canonized as a saint, using her for their own symbolic purposes not just once, but twice.

Of related interest: DAVID COHEN on Karen Yasinsky, Alex McQuilkin, Isaac Julien

The post Alex Mcquilkin: “Joan of Arc” appeared first on artcritical.

ALEX MCQUILKIN: Joan of Arc
Marvelli until November 24
526 West 26th Street Second Floor between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 627 3363

ISAAC JULIEN: “Western Union: Small Boats”
Metro Pictures until November 17
519 West 24th Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 206 7100

What are the chances of two concurrent shows of emerging artists both being based directly on classic French movies?  About the same, you could say, as the rival magazines Art Forum and Art in America running the same artist on their cover – which happened in November for abstract painter Mary Heilman.

Karen Yasinksy is an animator whose practice grew out of drawing.  Eschewing new technologies that enable swiftly produced, fluent computer animation, she retains her distinctive line and touch through the arduous, labor intensive processes as drawing animation and stop-motion animation.  The artist Laurie Simmons, writing in a brochure that accompanied Ms. Yasinsky’s 2002 exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, described the way in her awkward and anatomically wayward figures that “their arms and legs twitch restlessly, and then suddenly stand up and twirl like jewelry-box ballerinas.”  She has an exquisite touch that offers a kind of girly aesthetic – cramped and cloying in equal measure – with edge.  Ms. Yasinsky shares with Ms. Simmons a feminist-informed admiration for the Surrealist puppeteer Hans Bellmer.

Her first exhibition at Mireille Mosler, “L’Atalante,” offers reworkings in drawing, collage, and animation of Jean Vigo’s 1934 movie of the same title. “La Nuit,” (2007) a six minute stop-motion video installation, uses puppets to depict an alienated, loveless first night of newly-weds on board the barge that gives the movie its name.  As if taking their cues from the titles, “Le Matin” (2007) an animation made from 2000 individually drawn frames, and screened on a vintage television set, is as light, whimsical and optimistic as its pendant is dark and uncomfortable.  This four-and-a-half minute video is based on the opening sequence of Vigo’s movie in which the happy couple leave the village church and walk through fields to their barge.  The drawing has a fey simplicity that recalls Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s illustrations for his own “Le Petit Prince” (1943).  Ms. Yasinsky interpolates whimsical, unscripted flourishes: an individual within the crowd of onlookers, for instance, stands apart from his fellows and transforms momentarily into a donkey; or bursts of psychedelic color emenate from Juliette, the heroine, as she encounters the barge that is to be her new home.

Alex McQuilkin, showing in the project room at Marvelli, bases her piece on Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Joan of Arc” (1928).  The installation uses two-channel projection, allowing for images of Maria Falconetti burning at the stake, of crows flying ominously overhead, of the martyr’s head being shaved to be juxtaposed with color frames of the artist herself cutting her long hair and shaving her head.  While Dreyer’s silent movie is accompanied by stirring liturgical music, Ms. McQuilkin adds verbal commentary that borders on banality.  She opens with the statement that, although there are no photographs of her, Joan did exist, but concludes more interestingly with the observation that Joan was the only woman both canonized and burned at the stake by the Catholic church.

While the production values of this work moves Ms. McQuilkin’s video up a notch, in other respects it is of a piece with her earlier works, which include shorts of herself applying make up as impassively as possible while being sexually penetrated from behind; of her and a girlfriend enacting the death scene of Romeo and Juliet, to the soundtrack of Wagner’s Liedestod from Tristan und Isolde, both wearing her trademark plain T-shirt with lettering (in “Joan of Arc” her T says “OK,” enigmatically); and of her holding her breath under water nearly to the point of drowning.  Wrist cutting is also a persistent theme in her work.

Where Ms. Yasinsky (born 1965) accesses early girlhood through dolls and dinky illustration technique, Ms. McQuilkin (born 1980) seems dedicated to a perpetual state of teenage angst in her self-presentation and thematic explorations.  The specific identification of both with early cinema relates to a broader trend in feminist-influenced art, from the work of Cindy Sherman through — in recently seen exhibitions in New York –Georgina Starr reenacting Theda Bara silent movies (Tracy Williams) and Dawn Clements fusing drawings of her own living space with elaborately reconstructed movie stage sets (Pierogi).

For a further cinematic reference in a contemporary video, consider Isaac Julien’s “Western Union: Small Boats” and its nod to Visconti. This rich, lyrical if problematic video installation is the final installment of a trilogy by the British artist exploring issues of migration.

It claims as its specific point of departure the tragedy of impoverished Africans risking the treacherous 100 mile crossing from West Africa to Sicily on small fishing boats, though it is dealt with in mythopoeic fashion.  In the first gallery the viewer is confronted by a screen hanging at a diagonal on both sides of which is projected a slowly panning shot of a picturesquely decripit vessel marooned on a Mediterranean shore.

In the next space, the crux of the exhibition, has a film playing on three screens arranged in the corner of the room.  This juxtaposes scenes of beautiful women – one black, one white – wandering around the Palazzo Gangi (familiar from Luchino Visconti’s classic movie, The Leopard), balletic enactments of death throes by drowning, shots of despondent Africans adrift at sea, and scenes in a poor African village.  Minor key African music provides a suitably somber, elegaic sound track.

Like much of his work, Mr. Julien’s film exudes profound feeling, an impeccable sense of timing, and a sumptuous palette.  Incidents segue with great finesse from screen to screen, with suggestive contrasts of scale, color and locale.  But ultimately, there is – for so harrowing a subject – perhaps a little too much craft.  The migrations have been dubbed the “Sicilian Holocaust.”  The use of all-too artfully choreographed dancers and tourist board-worthy locations seems dubious, although the intention of universalizing a current event, of making a timeless, classical memorial for these poor people, is laudable.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 1, 2007 under the heading “Double Dose of French Film” (Yasinky and McQuilkin) and November 16, “Tragic Love” (Julien)

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A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 20, 2006.

If you missed “the body” as the de rigeur theme of artists at the “transgressive” cutting edge of avant garde art between, say, 1985 and 2000 then clearly your mind was on better things.  But don’t despair: There is a recap of everything you will soon realise you were glad to miss at PS1 in Queens.

“Into Me / Out of Me” is a sprawling 132-artist, encylopedic survey of work whose subject—and frequently its material, too—involves two-way traffic of the human body, as often as not the artist’s own.  For once, four letter words that spring to a critic’s mind aren’t crude putdowns but literal descriptions.

It is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, the PS1 Chief Curator who is also a curator of film and media at MoMA, of which PS1 is an affiliate. Like Winston Churchill, Mr. Biesenbach’s show offers “blood, sweat, toil and tears”.  There are rooms devoted to everything or anything that can go into or out of or swill around in the body, from any of its entries or exits (designated by nature or not).  The installation is strictly anatomical: one room deals with the bowel, another the bladder, another the uterus, and so on.

It is claimed that the show arose from conversations with the late Susan Sontag, although how much credit or blame she deserves for the results is left unclear.

What is ironic is that an exhibition so concerned with expulsions of bodily fluids should be so anal retentive in its organization. The experience, in fact, of this bizzarely methodical exhibition recalls the Musée d’Anatomie in Montpellier, with its graphic waxwork displays of the different stages of diseases.  Established by the Directory in 1794, the museum is now a period piece of logical positivism at its most kinky. Although based on material that was prevalent in the 1980s, therefore, “Into Me / Out of Me” is old news by more than a mere decade.

The Viennese “Actionists” are a starting point for Mr. Biesenbach.  These were the Wagnerian performance artists of the 1960s like Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl, Otmar Bauer, and Rudolph Schwarzkogler who would dismember sacraficial animals and fling their entrails about, or lacerate themselves or each other.  “By cutting the body, dousing it with blood and excrement, and arranging it in compositions suggesting surgery, the Actionists treated these primal fears in the most unabashed manner” a wall text explains. “Into Me / Out of Me” opened the same day as the Pride rally: You have Pride, said PS1, but we have Abjection.

Few of the artists in this show match the trippy, hippy primitivism of the Actionists.  More usual is the hospital aesthetic that comes across in Damien Hirst’s “Each Day as it Comes” (2005), a vitrine filled neatly with pharmaceuticals.  A natural for the show, of  course, is Matthew Barney, who has both an installation and an excerpt from “Cremaster 3” (2002) in which Freemasons in the top of the Chrysler Building perform elaborate surgery to induce glandular excretions from a strapped in Mr. Barney—a fusion of Actionism and Mr. Hirst, of weird, gooey biology and hard-edged, heraldic minimalism.

Laceration, self-mutilation, and puncture has a couple of gallery of its own (or should that be ward?)  Chris Burden is acknowledged as a father figure in the tradition of the art of self-injury: There is documentation of the Californian having himself crucified on a VW Beatle, and a DVD of his being shot.  These keep company with Marina Abramovic’s “Rest Energy,” a 1980 video of a performance in which her partner suspends a taut crossbow at her breast. Both these artists are represented by grainy old films which are mere souvenirs of performances where the true drama occurred: There are plenty of exhibits elsewhere, however, which give you blood and guts in technicolor.  Mat Collishaw’s “Bullet Hole” (1988-93) blows up a wound to a multipanel, 7 by 10 foot photograph. Sigalit Landau performs on DVD a hoola hoop dance with a barbed wire ring.

There are rooms for each substance the body expels.  Semen, for instance, is represented by documentation of Vito Acconci’s 1972 performance, “Seedbed,” in which the artist masterbated under the raised floorboards of a gallery, his panting voice amplified for the visitor, along with a tasteful, blow up photograph by Andres Serrano of the trajectory of an ejaculation.  (He could also, of course, have sent his notorious “Piss Christ” though Mr. Biesenbach would have agonized as to whether to hang that as a Crufixion or a urine sample.)  Urine is represented by Andy Warhol’s “Oxidation” (1978) and several other works.  There is a vomitarium presided over by Sue Williams’s self-portrait cast from her own puke, “Vomithead” (1990). Mike Parr’s “The Emetics [Primary Vomit] I am Sick of Art [Red, Yellow and Blue] (1977) documents the artist throwing up primary color dyes in a pristine white cube art gallery.  And there is extensive representation of faeces. Walter de Maria’s “Rome Eats Shit” (1970) is a placard containing these words; Tom Friedman’s “Untitled” (1992) is a turd on a pedestal; Piero Manzoni’s “Merda Artista” (1961) is a labelled can ostensibly of the artist’s own excrement. Welcome to Pooh Corner.

What comes out must go in, so there are rooms devoted to eating.  Rather than showing any contemporary representation of one of the most timeless theme in art, the pleasures of the table, however, Mr. Biesenbach prefers that we contemplate Mona Hatoum’s “Deep Throat” (1996) a sculpture in which the plate contains a TV monitor relays an endoscope of the artist’s digestive system.

There are sections dealing with pregnancy, crying, breathing, screaming, putting things into and pulling them out of one’s body (the vagina being a favorite egress: pace Carolee Schneeman ‘s”Interior Scroll,” 1975), and bleeding. All of these, however, are solitary pursuits.  Intrusions and extrusions which involve two or more people (sex, in other words) are consigned by Chief Curator/Medical Examiner Biesenbach to an old boiler room in the bowels of the building.  Here the emphasis is on anal penetration, with highly graphic portfolios of gay sex by photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar.  Other works in this dimly lit, packed display include Alex McQuilkin’s breakthrough 2000 DVD “Fucked,” a headshot in which she heroically attempts to apply lipstick while, off camera, being entered from behind.

The sex gallery is ostensibly devoted to voyeurism—that’s to say, visual penetration.  It is ironic, however, that in such a hot, sticky exhibition (literally, as PS1 is severally challenged in climate control, making the show a dubious summer destination) the cummulative effect of looking at so much biology is ultimately so unvisceral.  This has to do with the fact that so many works are dreary black and white photographs and texts.  There is barely any painting in the show, and what there is is limp illustration.

The thought I had, on leaving this exhausting, puerile display, is that a single painting by Francis Bacon would metaphorically fuse every sensation laid out so literally by the photographers, performers and video makers in this show, and penetrate the viewer where virtually nothing in this show does—the solar plexus.  But metaphor, depictive relish and the catharsis of painting are obviously too trangressive for some.

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