October 9, 2015 – January 31, 2016

ARC (the Contemporary Art Department of the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris)

“Co-workers: Network as Artist” is a large and inclusive exhibition of digital art, and perhaps the first one to focus on the network, the internet, or the web as the creator of aesthetic experience. At this point digital works and web based works reach out into multiple arenas of the social and aesthetic worlds, in different voices with separate emotions, discrete social connections, and particular perceptions. The primary three impressions given by this survey of works made by this network and the people using it are that the works first of all are resolutely diverse and even individualistic, second reassert the presence the body as a social and physical source, and third reflect social concerns related to digital networks.

The first room confronts you immediately with the body as social media and personal event, through the Los Angeles artist Parker Ito’s 2015 work PBBvx.12345678910111213_son_of_cheeto_1415161718192021222324 . The images presented like posters around the walls are gathered from the screens computers and phones, and altered to speak for the artist and his body, as in the repeated phrase, “The inside of my balls is a network of some sorts.” However in Ito’s work, as in many of the others, images are repositioned, juxtaposed, printed over each other, seemingly both eventfully but obscure, immediately available through the digital imaging and complex printing systems, yet also obscure in terms of locations, references and meanings, which are not absent or absurdist, so much as mixed, mixed up and multiply connected.

The virtual and the photographed body, its locations, shells, processes, social activities, and networks, appear throughout the exhibit in the works of Ito, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Aude Pariset with Juliette Bonneviot, Cecile Evans, None Futbol Club, Ryan Trecartin, David Douard, Hito Steyerl, GCC, DIS and Shawn Maximo. Roadmaps and ideas that run through this exhibition include the body and its locations as well as social structures as imagined in different visual regimes. Aude Pariset uses reformulated printing processes to create three-dimensional sheets of color, line, and hanging materials that are as much from the world of advertising images as from social media—perhaps advertising as social media and designed communication. Like Ito the digital network is involved, but the images are reprocessed through a lens of aesthetic and documentary processes. In Aude’s works reformulated printing processes and digital processes extend each other’s ideas and meanings

Groups and collectives are represented, including GCC, None Futbol Club and DIS, the latter, known through the online DIS magazine, designed the show. The DIS work in the exhibition, The Kitchen (KEN), locates us and our bodies in front of computer screens, head-phones and photos of an array of futurisitic latrines around a pool.   Bodily functions, social relations and digital engagement are mixed and reshuffled. Throughout the exhibition the viewer is drawn into relations re-established and redefined through both technologies and our social uses of them.

The reflections on human nature, social control and functioning, and narrative power are drawn from the interactions of the body, its locations, and its desires for connections and displays. Work no. 2B by None Futbol Club equates identity and haircuts between Marcel Duchamp and athletes, using neon, photographs, and stylish gym bags. The location is the locker room, but the function is social identity and branding. On another spectrum and from another visual regime, David Douard’s We’ve Ne’er Gotten shows an image of an individual turned in on his own world in a backlight photo-box. The world is drawn-in and located through psychological isolation. The image is powerful through its multiple references to public and private space, recognizable from older mass medias and sensationalized journalism, as well as newer transformations of this such as YouTube and Facebook, here repositioned as personal insight into a human condition.

The idea of media is still present in these works, but recedes into the background of the technological handling of the media. Photography, film, installation, sculpture, video, painting, and printing are present, but augmented, manipulated, and engaged with the means provided by digital media and the internet. To be clear, in the end here it is not clear if the network of the title is the digital network, meaning the network within a computer, or the network of the internet, the network between computers. In the final consideration, I think it is fair to say that this distinction is blurred, if not erased. It is easy to forget—even for people who have lived through the change in the last thirty or forty years—how quickly and decisively we’ve moved from the now archaic world of personal computing, to a digital network in which a separate computer or phone is an outmoded device, barely usable and impoverished, if unconnected or un-connectable to a network.

The post Network as Artist: The Web as Creator of Aesthetic Experience appeared first on artcritical.

Sonia Delaunay: Les Couleurs de l’Abstraction at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

October 17, 2014 through February 22, 2015
11 Avenue de Président Wilson
Paris, +33 1 53 67 40 00

A blanket stitched by Sonia Delaunay for her baby Charles in 1911 is the most evocative piece in the exhibition “Les Couleurs de l’Abstraction” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (on display through the 22^nd of February and then at the Tate Modern from the 15^th of April through the 9^th of August). That is not to say that Delaunay’s ferocious output and creativity ended there — it was only the beginning. The blanket, crafted of 70 roughly rectangular and triangular pieces of shimmery cloth, placed in relation to each other based on principles of color resonance and harmony that were an obsession of her husband Robert (he drew his theories from the French chemist and color theorist Michel Eugene Chevreul), stands as an epic transition in the history of early abstraction. It also embodies the pragmatism in her approach to her work: she soon stretched and exhibited the blanket as her first work of pure abstraction. One may surmise she did this once the baby had outgrown his blanket.

Delaunay mixed the applied arts with “pure” painting throughout her career. This duality lies at the literal and metaphorical center of the exhibition where a gallery of coats and textiles, and even a promotional film she made in the 1920s, runs on an endless loop. The clothing, furniture and costume design do not have the same vibrancy or theoretical insistence as the paintings. Her striking Manteau pour Gloria Swanson (1925), with radiating rectangular bands, is a dazzling cross between a Russian soldier’s bulky overcoat and early Atari graphics — a bit of Delaunay’s Russian roots with some Aztec thrown in. It lacks the encompassing throbbing exhilaration of Le Bal Bullier of 1913, given pride of place a few rooms earlier.

Posed in counterpoint to the fashion film, which features models lounging in Delaunay fabrics in front of her paintings, is a mighty textile display machine on the opposite wall that the curators have conjured up. Beneath the word “Simultané” four bolts of fabric roll up or down constantly, contrasting the artist’s seemingly endless fountain of design ingenuity. Along the walls are swatches, sketches, kerchiefs and ties reinforcing this point. Unfortunately, it comes across as a bit crass — the same sinking feeling one got on seeing the Louis Vuitton shop placed smack in the center of the 2008 Murakami exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum.

But the baby blanket is not crass, and the clothing designs and the costumes for productions by Tristan Tszara and Sergei Diaghilev are full of the colorful and garish enthusiasm of post-WWI experimentation. They are wild deco colonialist interpretations of Ancient Egypt, for the ballets Cleopatra and Aida (1918). Does this interdisciplinary existence make Delaunay a feminist icon because she straddles both the at-the-time male dominated world of painting and the perceived woman’s sphere of sewing and clothing production? Perhaps her claim to icon status, beyond her talent as a painter, should be her very asexual approach to her practice, a personality trait that presaged later art/entrepreneurial giants such as Warhol, Koons and Hirst. Delaunay had a very sanguine relationship with her clothing and costume design — it was a career that only really took shape after the Russian revolution took place and the money from home (St. Petersburg) ran out. She adroitly hired Russian seamstresses to make her clothing and weave her textiles (the Delaunay sweatshop?) and felt liberated from her commercial responsibilities after the 1929 market crash for all intents and purposes put an end to her fashion business.

“Les Couleurs De l’Abstraction” shows Delaunay at her strongest at the beginning and the end. The exhibition begins with juvenilia — portraits of peasants and friends made on vacation in Finland with her aunt and uncle, then student work heavily influenced by Gauguin and the Fauves. This is followed by the strange process of mutual assimilation that was the marriage of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, one that birthed the Orphism movement (a term coined by Apollinaire), which set up a category of pure abstraction utilizing the methodological approaches of Cubism. Along with Le Bal Bullier is the illustration to accompany Blaise Cendrars’s travelogue poem “La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France,” probably the most successful evocation of the Delaunay’s concept of Simultaneity — a confusing theory based around a fascination with technology, applied color theory and interdisciplinary collaboration among the arts. The series “Prismes Electriques” was started in 1913 and became the defining image of both Sonia and Robert Delaunay’s careers — beacons of light with radiating waves or shells of colors.

After the stock market crash, Delaunay returned to painting with renewed vigor. Her most successful series of applied works, though, was a cycle of illustrative murals for the 1937 aerospace pavilion for the “Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques dans la Vie Moderne.” In these she isolates technological objects — the propeller, the cockpit, the dashboard, gears and sparkplugs — and renders them as symbols within a context aesthetically redolent of Orozco and Rivera’s great murals of a the early ‘30s.   The cycle achieves its goal of aggrandizing contemporary technology by injecting the Delaunays’ brand of radiating circles (now neatened up) into a well-crafted layout that has the punch, poignancy and mystique of an engineering blueprint. It is a design sensibility that wouldn’t be surprising on a website in 2015.

The exhibition is vast, as was Delaunay’s output. She remained active, painting and designing rugs and fabrics, well into the late 1970s: she died in 1979 at the age of 94.   Over that very long period she still focused on the circles that had so fascinated her and Robert in the teens — hybrid symbols of electric light-cum-wheel-cum-human head, an all-in-one beacon. Robert died in 1941, and perhaps freed from his influence, Sonia’s beacons become more introspective, as with L’Affereux Jojo (1947) which is less bright and less color-theory obsessed and overwhelmingly gray, the circle also becoming a half-circle now. Maybe the artist is blinking here and catching her breadth. Triptyque (1963) finds her even less obsessed with the ideology of the long-dusty Orphism; the forms are more distinct and freer, and again there are more blacks, ochres and slate colors, the paintings are less optimistic and more worldly. At the heart of the exhibition is the feat that Delaunay took an abstract trope that began with a baby blanket in 1911 and expanded and elaborated on it for almost seven decades, generating a visual/personal timeline that narrates the history of abstraction in the 20^th century.

The post Sonia Delaunay in Paris and London appeared first on artcritical.

In side by side exhibitions this summer at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, the reputations of two painters who have come out of a British context were aired before a French audience.  Despite the considerable difference in age and ‘genre’ between Riley and Doig, their juxtaposition fruitful.

Riley, the older artist of the two, has achieved a central status not only as an abstract painter but as one who is identified as the op artist of post war pop culture.  Black and white works such as Fall and Metamorphosis from the mid sixties use shape and line to create kinetic optical illusions. The picture plane is not a flat, stable, surface here but is curved and undulates in an illusion of movement as the eye moves across the canvas. Even though, at least to a British audience, the later colour work is familiar and highly acclaimed, the inclusion of her student work throws up some surprises. Post-Impressionism rather than Cubism engineered her relationship to abstraction.  A group of early drawings are marked by the influence of Seurat, not as a pointillist but for his graphic chiaroscuro. The palpable product of this influence was her classic black and white optical paintings of the 1960s.  The presence of Cézanne and Pissarro are also felt in the early paintings, particularly in the proto-divisionist brush work of landscapes made as a student which look forward to the later colour paintings like  in the High Sky series. Riley’s link to Seurat bought to mind Duchamp’s interest in the same artist.  For Duchamp, the pointillist project created a circuit of spectatorship where the viewer activates the work, with the final mix made in the eye and in the act of beholding the work so that the spectator puts the painting to work.

A sense of profound relationship to several modernist challenges was the overwhelming impact of this exhibition.  That she has been able to sustain an engagement with painting in terms of particular objectives and limits is the major achievement here.  Subsequent series maintained her ambition, looking fresh today, not only as paintings but as conceptual devices.  A room of preparatory sketches and drawings was very informative as to how the works are produced (or performed) in their transitions from schematic ideas, on ruled paper, to robust painterly objects where the optical phenomena are integrated into a relationship with the painting’s physical structure.

Peter Doig’s engagement with painting appears to be very different. From an early image of a long distance truck traversing a landscape to images of paradise in the later paintings, it is possible to tick the boxes that set up Doig as a latter-day romantic negotiating an ever-shifting relationship between the figure and landscape.  Yet this seems to be just half the story and at times even a subtext. The snow paintings like ‘Blotter’ in the middle section of the exhibition tend toward a lyricism which feel somewhat simplistic, in contrast to the work in the opening and later sections in which a conjunction of painterly qualities and their impact as images saw Doig at his best.  The series of paintings made after a visit to Le Corbusier’s  Unité d’Habitation apartments in Briey-en-Forêt in France  is an intriguing set of images producing readings that for me, mark Doig out as having invented within a genre.Here, he is not just simply carrying the transcendental flag to the next post.Concrete Cabin I and Concrete Cabi II from 1991-1992 foreground a forest. The eye moves through the dark traceries of branches and foliage to the white façade of the Unité in the background, reflecting bright sunlight in its woodland clearing.  Qualities of light and dark transform into shifts of readings across an axis of nature and culture.  Nature here is not a simplistic trope  but is put into tension with the Unité.  The forest does not overcome the ‘cabin’, or vice-versa, instead they both find their place in the compostion.  Similarly the later works show a spareness of execution and a sense of image that pulls him clear of the clichés he was slipping into in the mid nineties.  The ghosts that haunt Doig’s work , besidesVuillard and Bonnard who are obvious touchstones, include Gauguin and Matisse.  Matisse comes through particularly in the lightness of touch of works such as ‘Man dressed as a Bat’ where countless erasures linger under the surface and where there is a hard-won graphic resolution.

Seeing these two painters successfully sustaining the echoes of a modernity marked by Post-Impressionism, yet with such dramatically different results, was both surprising and instructive, coming as they do,  from opposite poles of representation and abstraction. Doig as the younger artist  potentially has much time before him to develop and transform this already impressive body of work.  However with Riley there is in addition, the sense that she may astound us with something more – as unexpected and yet as conclusive as the late works of Monet or Matisse who like her, gradually built up a body of work reflecting a life time of research and application to a practice.

The post Bridget Riley and Peter Doig at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris appeared first on artcritical.