Artists: Sarah Braman, Maurizio Cattelan, Olafur Eliasson, Luigi Ghirri, Barbara Kasten, Christian Marclay, Adrian Meraz, Abelardo Morell, Heather Rowe, Jean-Pierre Roy, Hiraki Sawa, Superstudio, Jeff Wall, and Louise & Jane Wilson

June 15 to July 31, 2018
88 Eldridge Street, between Hester and Grand streets
New York CIty, /601artspace.org

Many works in this summer group show at 601Artspace deal with distortion. Upon entering the gallery, circular mirrors in Christian Marclay’s Feedback (1994) reflect visitors in endless repetition. Mirrors appear again in Heather Rowe’s mixed media sculpture, The Entity (Red Mirror) (2017). With other artists, mirrors play a part in images construction. In a work titled Niagara o l’architettua riflessa (Niagara or the Reflected Architecture) (1970), the collective Superstudio depicts that natural landmark walled-in by a reflection of the sky, placing clouds parallel with the cascading water. Alberado Morrell inverts the city in Camera Obscura: Manhattan View Looking West in an Empty Room (1996). “You Stand on the Ground Floor,” curated by Jesse Penridge and artist Harriet Salmon,  variously confuse, intrigue, and invite us in through acts of re-imagining. Turning familiar objects and places on their head (sometimes literally), the artists in this group show  ask why t“impossible architectures” are indeed impossible. The viewer sometimes slips into a work by catching a glimpse of herself, or by self-projection into the setting of an image, blurring boundaries between artist and viewer, artwork and life beyond the gallery walls.

The curators artfully exploit the space to orchestrate conversations between works. A set of photographs in the main room is a good example of this. Luigi Ghirri’s Parigi (1978) is an intimately-sized image of a greenhouse taken through a window, a bleary view reminiscent of rubbing sleep from one’s eyes in the morning, as vestiges of dream slip into the pool of sheets. Across the gallery, Louise & Jane Wilson’s much larger Biville (2006) gives off an apocalyptic rather than nostalgic vibe: the low angle, black and white photograph features a large, industrial object partially sunk into sand in an abandoned landscape, resulting in an unsettling picture that is nonetheless slick enough for the set of Star Wars or the pages of Vogue.

The final room of the show features a projected video and a light installation. To the right, Olafur Eliasson’s toxic-feeling Yellow Double Hung Windows (1999) creates the illusion of such convincing depth that you wouldn’t be surprised if someone passed through the light-turned-building at any moment. On the left wall is a projection of Hiraki Sawa’s Dwelling (2002). In this charming nine-minute video, toy planes take off and land throughout a furnished but uninhabited house. It is child’s play come to life; a hypnotic, domestic fleet that exists in a fantasy somewhere between the actuality of nap time and a post-human future.

The gallery’s press release describes the artworks as “constructions born from the attempt to make the visions in our head external,” often “utopian in nature,” though with the potential to be adapted by viewers into narratives and meanings that verge on the dystopian. Has, in fact, the sky fallen in Superstudio’s image, rather than being some convergence of heaven and Earth? Have viewers gotten some version of themselves stuck in the universe of Marclay’s mirrors?

Through juxtaposition, Salmon and Penridge deftly suggest a darker narrative than the airy and playful works they’ve assembled might individually intend – especially with the help of that chemical glow in Eliasson’s installation. But to me the exhibition still manages to read as a funhouse of intersections where tender memories of the past and radical visions of the future can touch, ignoring the reality of the present. If this is the ground floor, as the show’s title implies, the elevator is going up.

The post “Utopian in Nature”: A group show at 601Artspace appeared first on artcritical.

September 23 to November 5, 2017
92 Plymouth Street at Washington Street
Brooklyn (DUMBO), smackmellon.org

Ron Baron’s installation Beyond-Beyond is centered in Smack Mellon’s completely darkened main space, where nearly a hundred ghostly ceramic casts of shoes, boots and other footwear are delicately placed in small islands of light on the concrete floor. Facing forward in pairs or combinations, the ensemble suggests a vaporized march of refugees –– with overtones, resonating in the cavernous darkness, of both the Holocaust and the Rapture. On entering the space, the vibe is forbidding, but approaching closely one sees that each unglazed white sculpture is nuanced and inventive, even playful in a biting Surrealist way, as in weird meltings, slicings, piercings, and fetish-style nailings. At the same time, Baron’s finely expressive casting lends each leathery rumple and untied shoelace the quality of portraiture, so that a neatly sliced pair of loafers with baby shoes nestled inside becomes tenderly tragic.

In some cases the crucifixion-size nails pin shoes through, unambiguously evoking the Passion, which seems either heavy-handed or, given the Surrealist context, too glib, but the lack of tact is clearly intended. Certainly it distinguishes this work from the generally chilly use of casting in contemporary art, as with Christian Marclay’s 1990 Boneyard (to take an example currently on view, at Paula Cooper), in which hundreds of white Hydrocal clones of an old telephone receiver (the corded kind, but dis-corded), scatter across a gallery floor, perhaps evoking –– despite accidental couplings and menages –– the death of communication. Baron’s work is far from being dispassionate in this conceptual manner. Even aside from the nails, his investment of sculptural curiosity and skill in individual pieces raises the temperature –– which is, however, modulated overall by the spectral restraint and gravity of the installation, the uniqueness of each piece taking its place within a larger fate. The empty shoes, of course, imply the people imprinted in them, and Beyond-Beyond is eloquent about the pain of absence; that is, personally mournful and also universally elegiac about what might be the vanishing footprint of the entire family of man.

In the small gallery, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky’s film The Perilous Journey of María Rosa Palacios re-enacts the artist’s great-grandmother’s migration, at the age of 14 and mostly on foot, from the interior to the coast of Ecuador in 1906. The 30-minute video is paced meditatively, assembled from extended shots that give just the right amount of information and which unfold with a kind of grandeur that stays with you. Early on we see a close up of the artist’s hair, a living emblem of her Afro-Ecuadoran heritage, as it is painfully combed out and knotted into traditional braids. These she wears, along with traditional dress and gear, for the remainder of her journey on foot, mule, train and boat. An expository conversation with an elderly relative whom the artist had never met is compelling and bittersweet. A patient vista of a train winding around the flank of a mountain, distorted by the Andean distance, imparts the illusion of the train cars bending like a caterpillar. One long take involves an unseen man directing the artist as she walks up a stony village street. It declares, with cinematic deliberation, that we are not watching a documentary –– no matter how moving the personal story and fascinating the travelogue. A final handheld shot accompanies the artist as she arrives at the thriving fish market of her port city destination. It is impoverished by first world standards, but at the end of this compressed, somewhat cryptic epic, the place seems more civilized, the people more decent than in any city in America.

The post Perilous Journeys: Ron Baron and Karina Aguilera Skvirsky at Smack Mellon appeared first on artcritical.

March 25 to May 7, 2016
533 West 26 Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 714 9500

It requires at least two hours of lurking in darkened spaces on less than comfortable seats to really appreciate 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011), Continuity (2012), and Spring (2016), the three films by Omer Fast at James Cohan. It is definitely worth the effort. But this show also raises important questions about the changing role of art galleries and viewers, and the accessibility of art when most video is just a click away. These three projections in three separate rooms are digitally produced, at obviously great expense, with professional actors and cinematography. Though the term film seems archaic, they have a richness that is closer to the cinematic experience of movie theaters, than a DIY video installation by a lone artist in a gallery.

This exhibition offers a jarring experience, both intellectually and emotionally. Intellectually, because these films are all open and circular narratives — events occur, but there is no definitive dramatic arc, more like dramatic waves. There are climaxes, but they reoccur from different points of view. Each projection can be entered at any time, and the sequence of events initiated by one’s particular time of entry will influence their emotional impact. There is no resolution in these, questions are raised and not answered. But their content is thrillingly political, psychological, sexual, racial, and resolutely contemporary. We get involved, because the ambiguities Fast creates contain intriguing mysteries that are never explained.

And emotionally. At two separate times in Spring, we see a bicyclist very suddenly plowed into by a black Porsche from two different points of view, from both distanced overview and driver perspective. And it is shocking both times, even when you know it’s going to happen. We watch a middle class white family taking a road trip, which the narration makes clear, is really taking place in an occupied foreign country in Asia. They suddenly become collateral damage from an unexpected drone missile strike, and bloodied, they get out of their vacation stuffed station wagon and walk away holding hands, though the narration states that, “their bodies are never found.” The father of a young man on leave from the military, sticks his finger in his grown son’s mouth. A mother turns an affectionate kiss with the same son into a make-out session at the dinner table. An incongruous camel ambles down the middle of the road in the German countryside, approaches a suburban couple in a car and leads them to a scene of horrifying devastation.

All of these videos contain stories within stories, a postmodern gambit with narrative roots as far back as Don Quijote. 5,000 Feet is the Best concerns an interview in a hotel room with a troubled drone operator stationed in Las Vegas and blowing up people in Afghanistan. He relates stories that then become the visual reality of the film. Apparently it is based on an interview Fast made with an actual drone pilot. In the film, Denis O’Hare, an actor from True Blood, portrays the pilot while another actor plays the interviewer. But we also get narration from a digitally blurred face — the real pilot, or just another actor whose blurred face is used to make it seem like actual documentary footage? Instead of being shown drone tapes from Afghanistan, we are shown elevated shots of American suburbs to bridge the mental distance between what we do here, and what it might feel like over there.

What kind of cultural arena does an art gallery provide, and to whom? Who are these cultural experiences for, how are they financed? These films are all produced in editions of six. We know that multimedia art, and even performance art can be owned like a painting or sculpture. But we are also used to the platform fluidity and accessibility of cinematic experiences from movie theatre to home TV screen to laptop and tablet. The profitability and accessibility of this populist medium require millions of paying customers. Going to art galleries on the other hand is a privileged social activity, which, though free, requires arranging one’s time — in this case, as noted, at least two hours. And Fast’s films need to be seen more than once. Someone will buy it and then it will disappear. It won’t be available on Netflix. This question of privilege is exactly what Fast’s work seems to investigate.

Fast is now producing a feature length film, Remainder, based on a Tom McCarthy novel. Remainder will probably be seen in theaters, for the normal price of a movie ticket. In interviews Fast has bemoaned the loss of freedom required to answer the constraints of producers of a feature length film. “Can you make this character more sympathetic?” is not his usual concern.

So this is the conundrum. Fast is an important artist whose work contributes complex thinking to a range of intellectual and cultural issues. But it is not for the fans of the Marvel franchise. Go see this at Cohan Gallery. But this work also needs to find an available outlet for the huge number of sophisticated viewers who might not have access to it, though they easily could. We have experienced this phenomenon before with Christian Marclay’s The Clock. But in that case, the spectacular nature of the appropriated content led to huge public screenings. This is art that is more modest, but more disturbing, and certainly no less compelling. The transition from elitist high culture to more accessible but still elevated culture is a pressing issue that artists of the caliber of Omer Fast must address.

This exhibition was discussed at The Review Panel, Brooklyn Public Library, April 2016

The post At a Safe Remove: Omer Fast at James Cohan appeared first on artcritical.

Locations:
534 West 21st Street
521 West 21st Street
197 Tenth Avenue

192 Books:
190 Tenth Avenue

David Cohen on Christian Marclay, 2011
The Review Panel, November 2010
David Cohen on Mark di Suvero, 2010
Deven Golden on Robert Grosvenor, 2010
The Review Panel, March 2008
Jonathan Goodman on Jackie Winsor, 2008
The Review Panel, February 2006
David Cohen on Carl Andre, 2004
David Cohen on Mark di Suvero, 2003

More information can be found at Paula Cooper.

Full index entry for “Paula Cooper” at artcritical

The post Paula Cooper Gallery on artcritical appeared first on artcritical.

The 24-hour montage of clock, watch and other timepiece film clips screens at the Museum of Modern Art through January 21, both during regular museum hours and also, at special screenings, including one on New Year’s Eve, in the original synchronized day-long version.

Click the clock to read the review.

Details of screenings of The Clock at the Museum of Modern Art this coming month.

The post Onward Christian Marclay: “The Clock” at MoMA, New Year’s Eve appeared first on artcritical.

February 17-April 21, 2012
Curated by Joachim Pissaro, with Bibi Calderaro, Julio Grinblatt and Michelle Yun
450 West 42nd Street, between Dyer and 10th avenue

John Cage would have considered the location of this show a work of art in itself:  a thoroughly chaotic intersection with buses zooming out of the Port Authority, obstructed sidewalks, a construction site, scaffolding everywhere, and above all, the thrum of noise—or, as Cage would have called it, sound.

Trained as a composer, and notorious for composing a piece consisting of “silence” (4’ 33”), Cage, more than anyone, established sound as an artistic discipline beyond the walls of the concert hall.  “Notations” takes its name from the title of a book in which Cage compiled experimental musical scores, including some of his own but mostly those of others; it is thus a fitting title for a show that celebrates the centennial of his birth by showcasing twenty-eight international artists whose work reflects his sweeping influence.  As parsed by Joachim Pissaro’s erudite essay and the entries in the fine exhibition catalogue—written by Pissaro’s students—this legacy centers around the location of art in natural and “empty” space (as in ambient sound);  the blurring of distinctions between conventional categories of artistic practice (as in the famous “prepared” pianos);  and most importantly, the invitation of indeterminacy (as in what he called “chance operations”) into art.

“Notations” is housed in the Hunter College’s labyrinthine Times Square Gallery, vast enough to dedicate some of its spacious rooms to just one or two pieces, and conveying the feel of an honorific museum, rather than a temporary exhibition.  The first work viewed is One, a subtle, contemplative 90” film by Cage of roving spots of white light.  (The austere soundtrack, 103, is an independently composed work for orchestra.)  Made near the end of its Cage’s career, One is a symbolic as well as a literal “beginning” of this ambitious homage.

The Fluxus movement of the 1960s was a direct extension of Cage’s multi-media performances, and is represented here by Telepathic Music #5, Robert Filliou’s witty Dada-like ensemble of folding music stands that display playing cards and notes inscribed with enigmatic directions.  Contrasting with this silently orchestrated play on “play” are assemblages for the making and/or hearing of sound. Edgardo Rudnitzky’s brilliant Octopus is a retrofitted turntable with four arms that simultaneously play individual instrumental performances recorded on four separate tracks of a vinyl record.   In true Cageian fashion, its automated start and stop play generates continuous reassortments of musical fragments, redefining the concept of the “string quartet”.  In Ears with Chair, Yukio Fujimoto brings attention to ambient sound by using long tubes to amplify and deliver it, in stereo, to the listener’s ears.  Another interactive piece, Leon Ferrari’s Colgante Escultura Sonora/Hanging Sound Instrument, is a curtain of hanging metal rods which, when disturbed, emit a palpable harmonic buzz.

Others translate Cage’s exploration of sound and silence into visual studies of negative and positive space;  for example, Fred Sandback’s familiar yarn sculpture (Untitled), and Waltercio Caldas’s O transparente (da serie Veneza)/The Transparent (from the Veneza Series), a disorienting exploration of the outlines of everyday forms.  Some works channel Cage via Raushenberg (Liz Deschenes’ Tilt/Swing, reflective photograms of darkness); Warhol (Kaz Oshioro’s Orange Speaker Cabinets and Gray Scale Boxes, an auditory twist on Warhol’s Brillo Boxes); or both (Ushio Shinohara’s Coca Cola Plans, replications of the eponymous Rauschenberg combine).

There are ample videos, including Christian Marclay’s Indian Point Road, visually minimal but with a lush backdrop of natural sound; Felipe Dulzaides’ humorous, inventive short films; and filmed interviews of Cage by Frank Scheffer (From Zero:  Four Films on John Cage).  Embodying Cage’s notion of “instantaneous ecstasy” is Daniel Wurtzel’s marvelous Pas des Deux. In this videotaped performance, a ring of fans propel two lengths of diaphanous, colorful fabric into mid-air.  Minute variations in flow cause the material to twirl and billow, coming together and apart in an exquisitely (un)choreographed dance—an allusion, perhaps, to Cage’s long artistic and personal relationship to the dancer and choreographer, Merce Cunningham.

Seemingly intended to fill out the margins of Cage’s reach is more conceptual work, such as the blank full-page ad taken out in Artforum magazine by Nicolas Guagnini and Gareth James, but its connection to Cage is less compelling.  Similarly, in contrast to Cage’s anarchist allegiance—resolutely couched in the aesthetic—one imagines that an sociopolitical comment is being made by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s amalgam of “prepared” piano and ticker tape, indexes (v. 1), in which software transforms a live feed of international financial information into notes played on a grand piano, but it remains unspecified.

One theme that emerges from “Notations” is the transformation of daily practice—to which Cage was devoted, and related to his deep immersion in Zen Buddhism—into art itself.  A perpetual work-in-progress, William Anastasi’s Sink is a flat steel slab that is “watered” every day, allowing the complex patina to evolve in its unpredictable way. (One of the edition of four belonged to John Cage’s own collection.)  In Window Project, Reiner List creates a light box grid of serial daily photographs of the same Eighth Avenue view from his studio.  And in her moving installation, O trabalho dos dias/Day’s Work, Rivane Neuenschwander covers the walls and floor of a room with sheets of adhesive film, each one stuck with the debris collected from her home in one day;  en masse, this has the strangely elegant effect of travertine marble.  The tension evident in these and other works results from the contrast between their strict rhythmic order and the chance events they document—illustrating just how hard it is to resist our natural resistance to disorder.

Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physics was given to astronomers who determined that there is no such thing as a vacuum:  even in supposedly “empty” space, forces acting to expand the universe.  Famous for finding art in “empty” space, John Cage was ahead of his time, and remains vital still.

The post Finding Art in Empty Space: Responses to John Cage appeared first on artcritical.

January 21 to February 19, 2011
534 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 255-1105

The proverbial sign of a good movie is that you don’t notice time going by.  In the sublimely bizarre cinematic experience that is Christian Marclay’s The Clock such obliviousness is, literally, impossible.  Time is omnipresent. The entire conceit of this 24-hour video sampling is that the passage of time, recorded in myriad timepieces, constitutes the narrative thrust in every filmic moment. And in the 24-hour screenings that take place weekends through the video’s run at Paula Cooper Gallery, the time on screen is the actual time.

The gallery has been transformed to an approximation of a classic movie theater, sans smoke and cigarette girls (though Paula Cooper herself served as usherette during my visit), with plush sofas for the stalls and pleated drapes insulating the sound and isolating the big screen.  It was the first time in quite a while that this viewer stood in line for 40 minutes to see a film, free or otherwise.  I arrived at 11.15 last night in the company of fellow Review Panelists Blake Gopnik, Elisabeth Kley, and Carol Diehl, making our way from the National Academy where Diehl had mentioned Marclay in connection with the sampling piece in Tracey Moffatt’s show at Tyler Rollins, unflatteringly contrasting Moffatt’s skill, complexity, and profundity to Marclay’s

A platoon of interns culled potential clock face moments from their allotted viewing materials (not a bad way to spend a summer) allowing the director/editor, Marclay, to splice together thousands of film clips that occur in specific minutes of a day or night.   Every genre is represented, different historic periods depicted, footage of contrastive vintages (color, black & white, silents) rendered seamless.  Although the films are mostly Hollywood, other languages are spoken, too.  Movie buffs will recognize many a star and scene (I yearned for a playlist that would magically feed into my Netflix account) but there was little anxious sucking-in of air to be heard in the gallery/auditorium as spectators tried to remember the what or who of each cinematic remembrance. Instead, the montage established its own rhythm, and acceptance set in.  And yet, as with any good collage, each element retained the integrity of its appropriated source while learning to operate within its new constituent body.

The reason we had such a wait to get in probably had to do with the fact that, once in at 11.15 pm, few would tear themselves away before midnight, as if waiting for an eclipse.  That, however, imposes the logic of a narrative arc, of a climax, on what is, instead, an epic of irresolution.  The whole movie has you at the edge of your seat in expectation of what you soon realize is not going to happen, the completion of a phrase.  Another thought as to what kept the crowd, keeping us out, in, is that up to midnight the genres would likely entail much eschatological sci-fi, albeit it melded with Cinderella romances; we did get in at 12.05 am in time for pumpkin hour, as lovers begin to wilt, serial killers strike, and late-night heists get underway.  I sat it out until 2.05 am, by which time insomnia and conjugality were beginning to take over (on screen only alas), although genre eclecticism was still the order of the day (night.)

There were plenty of moments of humor, some pristine and others contrived via juxtaposition.  Woody Allen made hourly wisecracks, telling a countess in Love and Death who congratulates him on his lovemaking skills that he gets to practice a lot on his own, and later, in Manhattan Murder Mystery, complaining to an anti-social telephone caller that not everyone is up at 1am watching the porn channel. But the mood is more often somber or sinister, with stirring music, sometimes dialog too, carrying from one clip to its muted successor.

Telephones, incidentally, are the second subject of The Clock, constantly ringing, at least in my two nocturnal hours, understandably as characters would be trying to sleep, and would need to be rudely awoken lest viewers do the same, as one might in Warhol’s Sleep for instance.  Telephones were also, however, the motif in his similarly sampled 2007 video of that title, so maybe he had some left over footage on his digital equivalent of the cutting room floor.

It is weird to stick around wondering what is going to happen next when you know what will happen next—it will be a minute later.  That happens in all movies, you might say, only in two senses it doesn’t.  Firstly, your mind is on better things than time.  Secondly, in “real” movies time jumps all over the place, lurching forward, flashing back, ever subservient to narrative.  This Frankenstein monster of a movie (and two versions of Frankenstein clipped their ways into my two hours) is fanatically scrupulous in its minute-by-minute progression, a paean to pace.   Correction: not pace, beat.  And Marclay doesn’t miss a beat.  In instants where it seems he has gone back a minute it is in fact to show the passage on a given clock to the next (we can allow a clock to be seconds late in a movie which isn’t).  As a character in a vintage British labor-relations comedy tells his already despondent apprentice, “You can’t beat the clock.”

Marclay’s marathon is a merciless object lesson in Henri Bergson’s distinction of real time and duration.  In non-Marclay circumstances, there is an acute difference between time as experienced by moviegoers and time as depicted (compressed, manipulated) by moviemakers.  Narrative and mood and investment in the fate of characters and the desire to stay with the stars you love keep you in a place and state where time stands still.  Or rather, to avoid clichés as one ought when philosophizing, where time has its own logic – reel time, let’s call it.  In Marclay, you lose the actual narratives from which his wrested clips are bleeding chunks.  Although unexpected delights of surrogate narrative do offer themselves in fractional compensation, the conceptual purpose of challenging unexamined expectations of time seems the primary purpose of Marclay’s project.

Adopting Bergson, the great if forbidding philosopher of cinema Gilles Deleuze drew a distinction between two temporal conceptions of movement in time, what he calls privileged instants and any-instants-whatever.  The bizarre thing in Marclay is that the epitome of the latter, arbitrary but relentless markers of time, become exemplars of the former, moments of poise, drama, accent and focus. The Clock is a minute-by-minute speedball of enervating expectation. Despite its relentlessly cruel denial of narrative satisfaction, the fact that you can only endure it, you get hooked in the moment, as you watch, craving to know, if not what will happen next then at least what will be used next, and how it might relate or contrast with what has happened just before. A door is opened.  Which other building will it lead into, and which other character will walk through?

The post “You Can’t Beat The Clock”: Christian Marclay at Paula Cooper appeared first on artcritical.