September 6 to October 27, 2012
533 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212.714.9500

When it comes to word count, literature hosts such extremes as Marcel Proust, notoriously, on the high end, and Yasunari Kawabata on the opposite end.  The pithy vignettes of the latter, written as early as 1923 and collected in the volume Palm of the Hand Stories, possess a concise, subtle profundity beyond what ordinary structured storytelling can often deliver.  It was Kawabata’s impressionistic economy and his gift for poeticizing the unexceptional that came to my mind while watching Jesper Just’s three recent videos on view at James Cohan.

Just has also been compared to some of cinema’s mood masters from Alain Resnais to David Lynch, and these influences are still present but less obviously. Many New Yorkers may have been introduced to Just’s work in 2008 with his four-video exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. For the Cohan show, however, Just has ditched the highly theatrical, daddy-complex-noir of earlier works for a more naturalistic and therefore, for me, far stranger vision of ordinary weirdness. Fittingly, the exhibition’s title, This Nameless Spectacle, is a line pulled from a poem by William Carlos Williams. The quiver of a lip, a glance, the color of a dress; for Just, these nuances carry weight.

So too do each of Just’s locations. The New York-based Dane chose two American and one French site to serve as more than mere backdrops. A fan of the anticipatory tracking shot, Just picks up the action in Sirens of Chrome (2010) with a clunker cruising through a desolate Detroit. But this is no slick advertisement (I had the contrasting memory of Josephine Meckseper’s 0% Down (2008)), no Hollywood chase scene. Having witnessed the passage of its Motor City glory days, everything associated with America’s love affair with the automobile, our historical move out of the industrial age, and the socio-economic reverberations of these phenomena are insinuated here.

This kind of cyclical shift in an area’s function is also found in the other two videos. This Nameless Spectacle (2011) begins in Parc des Buttes Chaumont, which was part of Haussmann’s transformation of Paris from a medieval city into a modern one. An attractive, put together, middle-aged woman (whom some might call a cougar) travels by wheelchair through the park’s grotto, which was once a quarry mined for building materials. After being followed by a monkish hipster, she returns home to one of many sterile contemporary apartment buildings. Conversely, the camera roams the decrepit California desert remnants of a failed, early twentieth-century Socialist colony in Llano (2012) seemingly ‘kept alive’ by a fake rain machine—filmic artifice unveiled.

And what happens in these loaded landscapes? In keeping with his love of the erotic undertone, Just includes quite a bit of writhing. In the car in Detroit, four African-America women take a slow drive to an indoor parking lot where a fifth rolls around on their hood. At first it seems she’s pretending to be hit, but the mood changes from concern to jouissance. This feeling is mirrored in Paris, when the woman rises from her wheelchair only to have what appears to be an epileptic fit. Induced by light flashes from the stalker/hipster’s window, this writhing feels like religious ecstasy. The light’s downward angle and the woman’s open-mouthed smile suggest Bernini’s swooning, sculptural nun in Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1645 –1652). And so what happens in these videos? Not much, and certainly no dialogue or Just’s signature off-kilter crooning. The pleasure is in associations, conjecture, curious details, and loose conclusions.

All this tantalizing, plotless ambiguity is brought to life by Just’s usual technical virtuosity in run-times—ranging from seven to thirteen minutes—perfect for standing in an art gallery. In the case of the Paris video, This Nameless Spectacle, viewers are sandwiched in the midst of the action by Just placing two projection screens facing one another on opposite sides of the gallery’s main space. You can situate yourself in the center or on the sidelines catching simultaneous glimpses of a character’s point of view as well as her face or a wide shot. Throughout the show, Just’s camera lingers lovingly on fingers and toes, rusty tin cans and wet rocks, on emotions born of wondering what is going on and what is to come.

The post Nuances That Carry Weight: Jesper Just at James Cohan appeared first on artcritical.

JESPER JUST: It Will All End In Tears
Perry Rubenstein Gallery

A version of this article appeared in the New York Sun, October 19, 2006

Swiss-born, Dusseldorf-based artist Beat Streuli rose to prominence in the early 1990s for his work in color photography and video. Mr. Streuli’s abiding theme is the candid portrayal of sophisticated strangers who move about in far-flung, cosmopolitan cities. His distinctive portfolios ingeniously combine contemporary modes of urban advertising and photographic portraiture with traditions of street photography. Mr. Streuli’s strong international record of museum exhibitions and major architectural commissions attests to a widespread interest in increasingly sensitive subjects such the changing demographics of the public sphere and personal privacy within it. But his work is also at home in intimate gallery spaces, such as Murray Guy Gallery.

“Bruxelles Midi” (2006), as installed there, consists of two related projects in still imagery and video. The sun-drenched pedestrians featured in the work passed through a predominantly immigrant Muslim neighborhood of Brussels, Belgium sometime in 2005 (presumably at mid-day, as “midi” means noon.) The almost full-figure, larger than life-size portraits are rendered with great clarity in a shallow depth of field. The 40-foot-long installation, comprised of inkjet prints on paper, wraps around most of the south gallery. The gallery describes the medium as “photographic wallpaper.” True enough, the printed panels are unframed and glued directly to the gallery walls.

If this frieze-like crowd advancing toward the viewer recalls mass media images of sports figures or runway models, that impression may be due to Mr. Streuli’s telephoto lens. A photo-journalist’s use of a telephoto lens within a predominantly Muslim community could evoke strong reactions; but even the artistic use of such equipment implies commentary on surveillance practices in contemporary society. Like a photo-journalist, Mr. Streuli comments upon the photographer’s potential to witness, interpret, and even shape actual events at the time of the shoot. Yet these are not documentary images tied to time and place, but rather artistic images that mimic documentary forms. The artist’s editing of this project was consistent with his work in Sydney, Bangkok, and other cities, as viewers familiar with his previous projects will immediately recognize. Mr. Streuli’s method is to make repeated visits to a specific location in a city and shoot, from a discrete distance, people who pass in front of his fixed camera. From these multiple shoots, he edits a portfolio. He has said that he tends to depict youngish, often stylish urbanites. They often appear as isolated figures set within strong contrasts of light and shadow, shallow focus, and intense color.

A three-screen video projection, “Porte de Flandre” (2006), is projected on three walls of the north gallery. For this project, video cameras fitted with telephoto lenses were trained on a Brussels tram stop. Pedestrians linger, then disappear. The camera never moves, and as its focus remains fixed upon the human subjects, the motion of cars and trucks introduces soft-edged sliding screens behind and in front of them. At times, these shapes are allowed create full-frame abstract compositions. Traffic sounds and sirens are occasionally interspersed with snippets of pop music, and sometimes with complete silence. One may not immediately notice that time has been slowed down in the video projection, or that fade-overs and other types of cinematic transitions were introduced. The play of movement often seems to flow from one wall to another. A deft coordination of editorial and aesthetic artifice belies the apparent spontaneity of “Porte de Flandre.”

Three horizontally formatted color prints measuring about 23” x 33” showcase Mr. Streuli’s skill as a portraitist. In one of them, a beautiful young woman in crisp white clothing stands in brilliant sunlight, casting a doubtful glance outside the frame. She appears to be almost spot-lit against deep shadows tinged with red; her head and shoulders anchor the vertical axis of the image. Behind her, a vivid green bar races horizontally between two other figures whose vague torsos are barely distinguishable. Mr. Streuli’s emphasis on the urban individual who is unaware of the camera has been compared to Walker Evans’s famous series of subway riders. At the same time, his preference for stylish individuals isolated within the picture plane brings to mind portraitists such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. Mr. Streuli confers a kind of celebrity status on the 21st century figure of Anonymous.

At first glance, the oeuvres of Beat Streuli and the acclaimed Danish artist Jesper Just could hardly be more different. Yet, like Mr. Streuli, Mr. Just has established rather exact stylistic parameters for his single-themed practice. That theme, intergenerational love between two men, is one that he works out in short cinematic projects of great invention. The medium is identified as anamorphic 35-mm, and Mr. Just ’s  richly-layered films are presented in darkened galleries fitted for large-screen film projection.

Mr. Just’s films to date have always featured two protagonists, one a young adult (consistenly performed by the actor Johannes Lilleøre) and the other an older man. How much older varies, but always at least 20 years. “It Will All End in Tears” (2006), now on view at Perry Rubenstein Gallery, is a trilogy whose sections are titled “A Little Fall of Rain,” set in a misty botanical garden; “And Dreaming is Nursed in Darkness,” set in a dimly-lit wood-paneled courtroom; and “It Will All End in Tears,” set on a rooftop overlooking the Manhattan skyline at night while fireworks burst above the city. The trilogy features a team of supporting characters who are a performance group known as the Finnish Screaming Men’s Choir. In the first part of the trilogy, they play the part of leering onlookers when the protagonists first meet; in the second, they portray shouting jurors; by the third, their ominous presence has created such tension that a sense of relief combines with alarm as they leap off the roof in one final, stiff gesture. Their dramatic function is reminiscent of the chorus in ancient greek tragedy, and gives “It will All End in Tears” a poignant edginess.

Mr. Just is known for making films about films. He employs cinematic conventions from multiple eras to explore the male psyche — to mold it into new forms, in a sense — while challenging masculine stereotypes. Through his exacting vision as artist, editor, and director of the films’ surreal vignettes, his and his actors’ combined powers unfold together in a memorable tangle of truth and artifice. Although Mr. Just works exclusively with male performers and masculine themes, his films may contribute to a new archetype for the collective unconscious, whose gender is indeterminate.

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