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.

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Jake & Dinos Chapman: ‘The Realm of the Unmentionable’ at the Jerwood Gallery

October 25, 2014 to January 7, 2015
Rock-a-Nore Road, Hastings, East Sussex
www.jerwoodgallery.org

Just a few months after taking over London’s Serpentine Gallery, Jake and Dinos Chapman have another large-scale outing. The brothers spent their teenage years in Hastings, on the south coast, and most of The Realm of the Unmentionable is an enjoyably mischievous reprisal of the greatest hits you’d expect from the local boys made bad. That’s ideal for anaudience who may not have seen much of their work before. For those more familiar with it, the obvious focus is on the show’s relationship to place, and on the newer streams of work, which push forward the Chapmans’ interest in value, originality and fame in art.

It’s relevant that Hastings, which has important historical associations and was a fashionable tourist destination in the 19th Century, had become one of the least salubrious towns in the south of England by the 1980s: the Chapman view of existence, brutal to the point of satire, had to come from somewhere.  Of less relevance is the fact that this author went to Hastings Grammar School, which became William Parker Comprehensive by the time the Chapmans attended. Appropriately there’s an Archive Cloud of 79 drawings, gathered in 2012 but dating back to school and college days and demonstrating that the Chapmans were just as juvenile when they were juveniles. The Sum of All Evil, 2012-13, is a version of the original Hell, destroyed in the MOMART art warehouse fire in 2004. It features not just thousands of individual figures at 35:1 scale, but also one god-like pair of feet at full human size, dressed in locally sourced rainbow socks. There are a couple of the brain machine sculptures, one expanded by the addition of three spectating mannequins from Hastings junk shops. Each member of this nuclear family holds a pair of eyeballs, as if to emphasise their failed striving for true vision, and the head of each contains a radio blaring out. The competing channels yield a cacophonous clash of cultures which infects the whole show. There’s also a new set of repurposed Victorian / Edwardian portrait paintings from the series One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved, 2014.  Not significantly different for some of the originating canvases, these are again sourced locally.  The show’s site specificity, then, is weak: we have work made in Hastings, and material sourced in Hastings. What we don’t have is any work about Hastings or explicitly derived from experiences in Hastings.

There are new works of known types. Sturm und Drang, 2014, a grotesque bronze version of an old Chapman favourite, Goya’s Great Deeds – Against the Dead; a naughty boy defacement of Los Caprichos, all phallically elongated noses and tongues; and hand-coloured etchings (Human Rainbow II, 2014) which exploit the imaginative use of rainbows in dark settings.  There re also new examples of Living with Dead Art, 2014: small views of designer interiors featuring classic masterpieces alongside the Chapmans’ own work; Twombly and sex dolls; Rothko and mutants; Guston and Ronald McDonald; and so on.

Two new work types, however, advance the bothers’ interest in originality and fame in art as a way of challenging the value ascribed to it and hence – by implication – value systems as a whole.

First, they have remade Tracey Emin’s tent of everyone she slept with, which their fellow White Cube artist has steadfastly refused to recreate following its destruction in the said MOMART fire. Resisting the temptation to stick themselves in, the only apparent differences from the original are blank panels where no photo documentation was available. The title makes the risibly false claim that this is The Same Only Better, 2012. It hasn’t gone down well with Emin, but I guess the Chapmans would be disappointed if it had. Here it reads as a run-down seaside parallel – her Margate, their Hastings – as well as a way of questioning the primacy of the original and the fetishizing of the lost.

Second, they reboot their serial use of Hitler, the artist. There’s no doubting how notoriety affects the attention paid to his dull paintings.  A muddy still life attributed to him is installed – unmarked, for a change – in its own reverential space, but with the ceiling lowered to less than five feet. That undercuts the reverence, but also forces the adult viewer to bend down in front of the Führer’s art. Then again, the ceiling is also a child friendly nod to the ‘join the dots’ drawings installed nearby – under an ironically full height ceiling – which evidently plays on the reactions Jake recently provoked by saying that it was a waste of time to take children to art galleries.

So Goya, Hitler, Twombly, Emin, children’s book illustrators and their own past and present are all reduced / elevated to the same level. What, then, is the Chapman “realm of the unmentionable”? Perhaps the point is that the realm is unpopulated: nothing is too tasteless, immoral or cheap to be included. The world is so wicked, in their vision, that cynical laughter is the only response.

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If walls could speak they would make great art market chroniclers.

As gallery goers will have noticed, Yvon Lambert has shut up shop in New York.  When the venerable 75-year-old French dealer retired earlier this year direction of his Paris flagship gallery was handed to Olivier Bélot, who had been managing the New York space.  Running both ventures was too great a strain: that, rather than diminished market, is the given reason for the retreat.

The old space at 550 West 21st Street has a new tenant: Haunch of Venison New York.  They inaugurate their new space Friday September 24 with a group show, Boundaries Obscured, featuring ten artists or artist-partnerships they work with, including Jake & Dinos Chapman, Peter Saul, Gunther Uecker and Ahmed Alsoudani.

Itself a US outpost of a European venture, a coincidence with Lambert for the gallery walls to savor, Haunch of Venison takes its meaty name from the back alley in London’s West End where it started its operation in 2002.  That time, the inaugural show, organized by gallery founders Harry Blain and Graham Southern, was a Rachel Whiteread survey that filled many floors of its sprawling mansion premises.  Since 2007 it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Christie’s and, in addition to London and New York, also has a space in Berlin.

Their first New York quarters were on two floors of the Rockefeller Center, home of their auctioneer parent, but as director Emilio Steinberger explains, the restricted size of the freight elevator, not to mention the low ceilings of the office premises, limited them in scale.  They also wanted the greater foot traffic for the artists they represent.

There are other connections between the old and new tenants at 550: Steinberger worked for Lambert before moving to Haunch of Venison.  Bettina Prentice, the PR consultant for Haunch at Prentice Art Communications, dealt with press at Lambert.

To some, a launch with a group show might indicate tentativeness and excessive diplomacy.  But Boundaries Obscured, a thoughtful selection made by Steinberger, is not simply a cross-section of stable and stock.  For a start, there are is an abundance of critters as befits the gallery name, from the bronze gargoyles crowning Jitish Kallat’s canvases to the gelatinous, bottom-feeding blob fish (platypus) in Patricia Piccinini’s Eulogy (2011) or the stuffed toy animals in Joana Vaconcelos’s War Games (2011).  There is such an abundance of taxidermy in the Chapman’s Fucking with Nature (2009), a see-saw with copulating wild animals at one end and domesticated creatures at the other, with mice running along the middle and tipping the balance, that the piece has been held up at Customs.

The other theme is memorial, which is apropos of our ominous times but perhaps inauspicious for a launch?  The Piccinini fits this theme as the man bewails the imminent extinction of the newly discovered fish.  Kevin Francis Gray’s The Temporal Sitter (2011) is a Job-like marble monument to a homeless man.  Uecker’s Aschemensch (Ash Man) (1986), is the only known figurative work by the op artist famed for his abstractions in nails.  It was made in the wake of Chernobyl by the artist covering himself in ash and rolling on a canvas, a gesture reminiscent of the athropometries of Yves Klein.

When I shared this observation with Steinberger at the press preview he retorted that Klein was Uecker’s brother-in-law, which I had not known.  That is the kind of art historical details walls can’t share.

Boundaries Obscured, September 23 to November 5, 2011. 550 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, 212 259 0000.

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