February 14 to March 28, 2015
528 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 315 0470

You need to know this: some parts of the Cold War are remembered, others are not. One particularly brutal episode that has been mostly forgotten is the Nicaraguan Civil War, which spanned about 30 years. During the 1980s, the US government funneled weapons and money into the hands of the Contras, an array of right wing paramilitary organizations opposing the leftist Sandinistas, who had deposed the American-installed Samoza dictatorship in 1979. The support provided to the Contras by the Reagan administration briefly blew up into a fiasco in 1986, when it was revealed that US Marine Corps Lt. Oliver North had been funding such groups via proceeds of illegal arms sales to Iran, laundering of federal money, and by protecting (or possibly aiding) the Contras’ manufacture and distribution of cocaine. The Contras systematically attacked civilians and aid workers, and used torture, assassination, terrorism, and rape to suppress leftist insurrection. The same tactics were, at that time, being taught to rightist soldiers from several Latin American countries at the US-based and government-funded School of the Americas (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). The civil war was horrific, resulting in the deaths of up to 50,000 people, including a lot of civilians. But that conflict is largely eclipsed by other more optimistic events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification of Germany, the ejection of the Soviets from Afghanistan, the Polish Solidarity movement, and Glasnost and Perestroika. Nonetheless, the Cold War’s aftereffects on several nations in the region are still festering, as seen in the immigration crisis of this past summer.

Alfredo Jaar’s exhibition, “Shadows,” now at Galerie Lelong, includes four photographs from the early stages of that war, taken in 1978 by documentarian Koen Wessing (1942-2011). The show is introduced by a short video interview with Wessing, who describes the incident shown in his pictures, which are displayed as 12-by-13-inch lightboxes with black-and-white transparencies. A campesino was executed by the Samoza regime, his body dumped by a rural road. Wessing doesn’t spare any of the violence: the man’s head wound is plainly visible in several pictures, as his neighbors collect his body. The first image one encounters is of soldiers inspecting a bus at a checkpoint, giving some sense of the violent intimidation used on the populace, which had seen inequality skyrocket and their lives abused and threatened.

The primary focus of the exhibition is the overwhelming grief shown by two young women for their father, the slain campesino. After being told of the murder, they arrive at the scene crying, clutching their heads and covering their mouths at the roadside. The lightboxes are hung in a small, darkened corridor, given several feet of space so that their impact is acute and dramatic, unfolding the narrative slowly in discrete pictures. Turning a corner in the hallway, a large room opens with an enormous installation: a photo of the daughters wailing, projected onto the wall, which is covered with an aluminum panel cut around their bodies. Slowly, the rest of the scene fades into blackness, leaving the two girls, torqued by anguish, in empty space. Then, the girls themselves fade into bright white light, backlit LEDs shining in the metal panel’s cutout. They become sharp, blazing white silhouettes in the darkness. And when the light suddenly ceases for a few moments, their afterimage is seared into the retinas until the cycle begins again.

Other photographs in the suite depict the young women at home, crying over the laid-out body of their father, his fatal injury wrapped and his corpse set on a cot. They fold themselves over to weep on the patio, while others stand, stone-faced. They mourn on the grass in front, collapsed.

Jaar’s previous work has used similar image sets to light otherwise undiscussed tragedies, and to navigate what is seen and what is not, whether by suppression or by forgetting horror. Jaar has employed documentary photographs of the Rwandan Genocide and, in a 2009 collaboration with critic and poet David Levi Strauss, substituted black boxes for photos of atrocities in the Iraq and Afghan wars that had been withheld from the public by the US government. Instead, Jaar and Strauss described what the images show, including a caption under each picture. Wessing has presented his own images with little or no commentary, intending that they speak for themselves.

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March 20, 2009 at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, New York

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Michael Brenson, Carol Diehl, and David Ebony joined David Cohen to review Kamrooz Aram at Perry Rubinstein, Siah Armajani at Max Protetch, Alfredo Jaar at Galerie Lelong, and Susan Rothenberg at Sperone Westwater.

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November 20 – January 30, 2006

Immediately to the left as one enters the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City is a hypnotic carnival-like mirror made by the French artist Philippe Ramette. Punctuated within Its bent polished surface are several protrusions, which on closer inspection create perfect miniature reflections while the rest of the object dramatically distorts the entire space in front of it.

These precise reflections within Ramette’s piece are a fitting metaphor for the carefully articulated themes of the mirror in this exhibition titled Beyond Narcissus.The show’s French curator Soko Phay-Vakalis has been working on the mirror in contemporary art for almost a decade and this exhibition for over two years. Her focus is specific: “non-narcissistic” mirrors that attempt to move beyond mimetic illusion. She describes the goal of the exhibition: “…to reveal the different uses of the mirror in private spaces and public places, explore new reflections (silver paint, sheet metal), and reconsider the issue of identity in new approaches to the world and to memory.”

Phay-Vakalis establishes four thematic categories into which she places the work:the mirror in contemporary vanities, mirrors and displacements, empty mirrors, and abyssal mirrors. These categories become the lens with which to understand the individual works and thus the entire show. As a result of this very specific approach great care went into choosing each work. The outcome is an exciting combination of New York based artists like John L. Moore, Dennis Adams and Alfredo Jaar and French artists like Ramette, Pascal Pinaud, and Philippe Segond, who have rarely been seen in the US.

Both Adams and Jaar’s work are used to illustrate the theme of “the mirror in contemporary vanities.” Adams piece titled Vanity for Patty Hearst (1997) replicates the kind of vanity found in a dressing room. It has a shelf and two vertical rows of four spherical light bulbs on either side of a mirror, except here the mirror is darkened glass making the reflected image distant and ghostly. The title connects to a shared memory of someone who was once visible but who now is absent. The faintness of the image in the fake mirror evokes the distance of this memory and places the viewer within its history.

Similarly, Jaar in his work simply titled Mirror (2004) addresses the viewers’ conscience and self-awareness. At first glance his piece looks like an ordinary mirror in an aluminum frame, but at close distance the viewer’s self-image shifts to an image of a dirty mine worker. It’s a shocking reversal from an image of the self to an image of the other, of someone not considered, of someone forgotten, who represents the invisible production of the disenfranchised populations of the world.

Ferran Martin, a Spanish artist now living in New York, presents three performances displayed on video titled El Modular. These works represent the theme of mirrors and displacement. In the performances Martin wears a mirrored cube on his head and wanders around the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and the Queens Museum of Art. While wearing this custom headgear the artist cannot see. He essentially becomes blind, but yet reflects everything around him. There is a sadness and contradiction in seeing so many images created on the artists head but knowing he can see none of them. There is also a sense of fear that at any moment the artist in his blindness might smash his perfect headgear into hundreds of little pieces.

The richly hued blue painting of John L. Moore is positioned in the theme ofEmpty Mirrors. At first appearance it looks like a completely abstract composition, but soon one notices that the space within the large vertical oval shape just off-center to the right appears to subtly reflect some other part of the blue field. This oval becomes a separate space connected to but distinct from the rest of the image. As a result it appears as a void within the composition and amid the blue field it carries with it a feeling of loss and loneliness.

Abyssal Mirrors is the last of Phay-Vakalis’ categories and it includes the paintings of Pascal Pinaud and Philippe Segond. Pinaud for his work titled Blanc Perle Chrysler, 01A14 Juillet-Octobre (2001) uses automotive paint on sheet metal for his monochromatic vertical image. This painting, with its shiny white surface and curious random white and brown accumulations, he describes as a Chrysler parked under a tree with bird droppings. Here the gallery recontextualizes this work and the specific subject vanishes. The effect is a simulation, a kind of mirroring of reality through the work of art.

Segond’s painting titled Detail 29 “Miroir”(2001) is a haunting double abstraction made with silvery metallic pigment and other industrial paints that don’t easily mix together. Segond made these paintings in a matter of minutes by applying the paint and allowing the various pigments to react on the surface. He accepts the basic fact that paintings become visible only as a result of reflected light. Thus Segond paints the idea of the mirror, it’s shimmering surface and radiant glow. His paintings are a surrogate for the real mirror and ultimately they suggest its disappearance.

In 1936 Jacques Lacan presented his concept of the mirror stage. This established the fundamental importance of the mirror in defining the ego through its dependence on an image of the self in relation to external objects or the other.Phay-Vakalis acknowledges this seminal psychoanalytic proposition, but outlines her own thesis. She addresses the specific experience of the mirror in our current moment in history: “The disappearance of the world’s clarity goes hand in hand with the loss of the subject.”  She accepts that mirroring is no longer strictly mimetic—it is a constant simultaneous experience of our technological age and occurs so frequently it often goes unnoticed.

As a whole the show hinges on Phay-Vakalis’ rigorous approach to the subject. If all of the work and the related texts were studied carefully it would be hard for anyone to look at a mirror the same way again. There is no question that this is excellent scholarship, but sometimes it places too much pressure on the individual works and feels like a level of mediation, particularly with this installation, that diminishes a greater potential interaction between the different pieces. Yet here it is worthwhile to consider that this is a long-term project—a website has just been launched () and future exhibitions are planned. With this in mind the show feels like a beginning, the first exhibition of something much bigger still to come that will extend beyond the walls of the Dorsky Gallery into undiscovered territory.

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