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)

The post Karen Yasinsky at Mireille Mosler, Alex McQuilkin at Marvelli, Isaac Julien at Metro Pictures appeared first on artcritical.

RE:LOCATION
Alexander & Bonin through July 28
132 Tenth Avenue at 19 Street, 212 367 7474

A BRIGHTER DAY
James Cohan Gallery through July 14
533 West 26 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 714 9500

Summer is for group shows in art galleries and innocent family fun on the beach. Right? Not on the second count, if you believe what a slew of group shows in New York have to say.

Marvelli even title their seasonal grouping “Nightmares of Summer.”  It is co-curated by Marcello Marvelli and his collector friend George Robertson.  An earlier summer presentation at the gallery in 2004, “Black Milk, Theories on Suicide” curated by Monica Espinel, suggests that a sombre, if not sinister worldview might reflect the gallery’s sensibility as much as a war and terror-torn zeitgeist.  Mr. Marvelli and Mr.  Robertson have gathered images that reflect “the darkness inherent in all paradigms of light, the dark cloud contained by every silver lining.”  Rather than a gothic horror fest, however, this strange gathering is characterized by a perverse good cheer.

Barnaby Furnas sets the tone with “Holiday” (2005), an angel of the apocalypse masquerading as a kid on the beach.  Mr. Furnas has made the terrifying exhilerations of battle his distinctive theme in images, often in watercolor, that at first read as joyous explosions of beauty, and only yield their awesome portents on closer examination.  Here a young, fleshly beauty with golden wings wears a gormless, demented expression on her face and splatters what could be blood in all directions.  A second image by him in the show is a red glowing composition that looks a bit like a close-up of a molten oil rig: the image itself isn’t as sinister as the title and the medium: “Dead Red” (2005), dispersed pigment in urethane and ink on bald calf skin.

This keeps company with a pair of nautical drawings by Francesca DiMattio of Nineteenth Century battleships caught in distress.  These crackle with a sense of danger in the way that recalls David Fertig’s neo-romantic Napoleonic battlescenes.  The DiMattios in turn flank a dense, brooding charcoal drawing, “Untitled (Situation with Octopus)” (1998-2004),  As with the second Furnas, context is all: the octopus looks like he is having a whale of a time.

Several collages by Nils Karsten have a maccabre humor: he gives spiky body hairs to the smooth legs of the appropriated little Victorian girls who populate his ghoulish compositions.  A theme running through this show is the ickiness and unappeal of sweating limbs, parched throats, and exposed body parts.  Several historic photographers induce degrees of alienation at the thought of nakedness: Diane Arbus with her loadedly, unconvincingly non-judgemental view of “A Family One Evening at a Nudist Camp, PA” (1965) with ill-at-ease looking corpulent couple and their child under an ominous sky; an André Kertesz distortion; a Hans Bellmer puppet.  Bellmer’s awkwardly thrust together mannequin parts and prothetic limbs find echo in a pair of poignant collages by Robert Beck that focus on press photos of the naked corpse of a murder victim at a gay pickup beach.

Michael St. John brings an “In Cold Blood” meets the Mansons sensibility to his nighmarish evocations of murder.  One canvas, “Dead Body Inside” (2006) scrawls the words of the title in a demented scrawl next to photograph of a forlorn cabin.  Marilyn Minter (of Whitney Biennial poster fame) takes body squalor to Dantean depths in her blown up C-Print deconstructions of the beauty myth: “Soiled” (2000) has copious dirt between a cropped image of lurid, green-painted toe nails, while “Drool” (2004) focuses on a menacing, saliva-filled mouth animated by a vampire-like grin.

Then there is guilt by association for some of the remaining images: Ann Craven’s saccherine Hallmark Card-like portrait of two pink birds in a tree and Stuart Elster’s dense, sickly monochromatic seascape at dawn become convincingly nightmarish for keeping natural company with overt horrors.

The miserablism of “Re:Location” is neither fantastic nor seasonal—it derives from the alienations and privations of exile and war.  Some are overt in their politics, others more oblique, but all are pervaded by a sense of frustration and fear.

Willie Doherty shows three sets of five c-prints laminated on aluminum from the larger “Apparatus” (2005) series which dwell on scenes of grim decay in Northern Ireland: boarded up houses, tattered flags, graffitied projects.  “The Troubles” has been Mr. Doherty’s career theme.  Previously he has dwelt on such issues as surveillance, or riot control; these images concern the banal, day-to-day squalors of a divided society.  Somehow he finds hidden poetry in his hideous landscapes, creating constructivist patterns, for instance, in the way he crops a bird’s eye view of hemmed-in, barricaded walkways.

Cages and barrier are often Mona Hatoum’s metaphor of choice for oppression, alienation and exile.  In superficially lighter mode, her work here is a curtain on which a newspaper article has been printed.  The title, however, hints at political portend: “Every door a wall” (2003).

The visitor passes through this curtain/door/wall to the back gallery where an intriguing object by another artist of Palestinian extraction, Emily Jacir, takes on added meaning from its placement and company.  “Embrace” (2005) is a pointlessly mini-luggage carousel, around six foot in diameter, motion sensor activated by the viewer—a complex metaphor perhaps for exile and the frustrations of reconcilliation.

I preferred the poignant little paintings after emails from Gaza residents that she last showed at this gallery, but the cool meanness of this object sits well with other exhibitors: Diango Hernández’s “The underdevelopment is a long game, do you want to play” (2005) which has the words of the title in shiny little letters along a rusty pipe that is placed within an oval toy train track; and an inscrutable 1970s-style hexagonal brass architectural fixtures of unspecified usage by Rita McBride installed at ceiling level.  Relief from such pretense and tedium comes in the form of an untitled Doris Salcedo sculpture, as ever poetic and enigmatic in its melancholy description of the human condition.

No one would accuse “Re:Location” of being laugh a minute.  If you prefer your nihilism with a smile James Cohan has a group show titled “A Brighter Day,” a hint of Monty Python sarcasm in the title.

It’s a sprawling show of eighteen artist united in their chirpy interpretations of apocalypse, oppression and decay.  Several artists bombard the viewer with despondent or desparate verbal messages delivered with beguiling visual upbeat: Jenny Holtzer inscribed “What urge will save us now that sex won’t” onto a white marble footstall; McDermott & McGough emblazon the sadomasochistic song lyric, “Violate me/ in violent times/ The vilest way/ that you know/ Ruin me ravage me/ Utterly savage me/ On me no mercy/ Bestow” in multicolored letterpress fonts on a torquoise ground; Alejandro Cesarco prints “When I am happy I won’t have time to make these anymore” in pretty colors on a page; Trenton Doyle Hancock compulsively scrawls “You deserve less” like schoolboy lines to fill a whole wall with designer intensity.

Other exhibits render the macabre in saccherine colors and delectible surfaces.  Folkert de Jong’s Polyurethane, silicone rubber and styrofoam sculpture “Dust” (2004) has a survivalist sitting astride oil barrels and supplies with guns, megaphones and a kerosene lamp to hand in nursery pink and blue.  David Altmejd renders a cadavre in an advanced state of decay amidst cracked mirrors and neon lights in “The Settler” (2005), a work of weird beauty.  The marquetry compositions of Alison Elizabeth Taylor of survivalist girls in a bombed out wilderness, and Eric Swenson’s meticulous rendering of the hideous decapitated head of hybrid animal similarly collide luxurious craft and dark message.

There are pleasurable surprises in this studiedly strange show: The tight, anachronistic realism of Michaël Borremans enigmatic miniature “Flattening of a Hellhound” (2000), the collage of a cellphone transmogrifying into a ghoul in the lotus position on William Morris wallpaper of Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, “Dread Medley (Sapphire version)” (2004), and above all, the exquisite 11 minute video installation, “Bellona (after Samuel R. Delany)” (2005) which quotes a passage from the cult sci-fi writer on an imaginary city where subterranean motors rearrange the streets after visitors have passed through them and then segues into gorgeous video animation of rooms melting into color-coded reconfigurations.  Emerging from the subdued mystery of Ms. Lislegaard’s installation, it really is a brighter day.

A version of this article first appeared in The New York Sun, June 8, 2006

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 8, 2006.

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