June 8 to August 7, 2016
643 Park Avenue (between 66th and 67th streets)
New York, 212 616 3930

Middlebrow culture has long been a contentious territory: it was critically viewed by Modernists as an ineffective attempt to water down and vulgarize innovative cultural endeavors, to produce a faux intellectual lifestyle that can be mass-produced for its status and entertainment value. Post-Modernists deemed the middlebrow edgy, clever, knowing, stylish, and formally inventive in its eclectic appropriation of the pretenses of a high culture, and their insertion into the everyday world of its audience. Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed embraces middlebrow culture: his art is for those who want to be in on the joke. One painting is a joke about Jackson Pollock, a video refers to Piero Manzoni’s cans of the artist’s shit, stacked chairs and battered cardboard boxes nod to Sol LeWitt and Minimalism, his paintings in varied styles are about taste(less-ness).

“The Back Door,” now at the Park Avenue Armory, surveys work from Creed’s more than 20-year-long career. The exhibition’s title can be taken in any number of ways — servants, trades people and less than respectable visitors come to the back door. It also has some naughty sexual connotations as it refers to anal sex. While I’m sure that this title was meant to conjure up these associations, in this case it quite literally, refers to the actual rear door of the Armory, which Creed has motorized so that it continuously opens and closes. That piece is titled Shutters Opening and Closing (2016) and offers three events in one: the slow opening of the doors, the simultaneous dramatic shedding of light into the almost empty, cavernous interior of the 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, and finally a glimpse of people walking by on Lexington Ave. This brought to my mind the allegory of Plato’s Cave, in that Creed implies that we, the audience, live in a shadow world and that without his reminder, we would not be aware that just outside, real living beings go on with their lives unconcerned with what is going on in the Armory.

There are four other pieces scattered throughout that employ the on/off, open/close theme; one is in the big corridor, where a massive set of curtains, usually decorously tied back, hang loose, endlessly opening and closing. In the elaborate Veterans Room, a white grand piano on an oriental rug, slowly opens only to immediately slam shut with a resounding bang. The other is the backdoor to the Parlor Room, called A Door Opening and Closing (1995), behind which, in the Parlor, The Lights Going On and Off (1996) is enacted by two rows of white, globular lights hanging from the ceiling. In combining these two works he has synchronized the so when the door is closed the lights are on and when the door is open the lights are off.

The only thing that occupies the Drill Hall is a large screen hung from the ceiling on which six videos are screened. These three-minute-long videos play alternately with the opening and closing of the rear door. The videos are of different women of various ages and in varied settings. The camera slowly zooms in on each woman’s mouth; when it arrives at its destination she opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue to reveal half-eaten foods stuffs, then closes her mouth to swallow. The seemingly obvious reference for these benignly undignified videos are those porn films in which women showily take cum in their mouths and then swallow.

In a series of small rooms along one side of the Drill Hall, a retrospective of Creed’s videos has been installed, one to a room. In one, against an immaculate white ground, young Asian women squat to take a shit, in another video we are again given a clean, white space in which different women enter the frame to repeatedly induce vomiting so as to produce a Pollock-like “painting” on the floor. A third video gives a close-up of a single female breast as a disembodied/decontextualized sex object. As for videos of men, there is one in which a man angrily smashes bouquets of flowers against the floor and another, shot like a home movie, in which the artist in bathing trunks is shown at the beach, wiggling about striking various pin-up poses that allude to both male and female, soft-core porn. These videos, which are meant to represent Creed’s investigation into the basic tenets of human existence, though often pathetic and dehumanizing, actually verge on the banal.

Beyond the videos, Creed has painted the upper walls of the Armory’s grand corridor and staircase with a pattern of diagonal black bars, which break for the many portraits, architectural woodwork, display cases and his own paintings. In the rooms along this corridor, Creed has installed his paintings and sculptures. Subsequently, in the Colonel’s Reception Room he has installed Work No. 2497: half the air in a given space (2015). It promises to be a crowd pleaser, the room half-filled with large white balloons is a tight squeeze for visitors moving through it. The work is akin to an oversized ball pit, like those children play in at Chuck E. Cheese restaurants. In other rooms, such as the Library and the Field and Staff Rooms, he has installed sculptures made by stacking battered cardboard boxes on top of one another in descending size. Others consist of likewise stacks of secondhand furniture. Other sculptures use stacking and repetition, as with an 8 foot high stack of half-inch-thick sheets of plywood, which is as high as the sheets are long. In the Library, he has placed numerous small objects, among them a progression of potted cacti (Work No. 2376, 2016), and a nod to the days of protest against the military and war, he has installed in a display densely packed with mostly silver trophies, two small clenched fists — one gold-plated, the other bronze — as such reminding us that context is everything.

Creed is part prankster, designer, dilettante and entertainer, and he’s completely serious about the sampling of borderline banal contrasts, ludicrous situations. So much of Creed’s work refers to easy art, and to easy, tchotchke-like “folk” forms — virtuosity is antithetical to his homemade mode. Staged as a non-spectacle, this survey of new and older works is intent on engaging and potentially provoking his audience to consider each work or encounter as an act of (perhaps bad) faith. All of this is so well balanced as to be indeterminable as to whether it is implicitly culturally critical in its silliness, or if the joke’s on us for thinking so. All of this brings me to the conclusion that Creed is clever in the ways he turns the challenging endeavors of his predecessors into something accessible and playfully minor. But, then again this is part of the definition of what it is to be middlebrow.

The post Back Door Man: Martin Creed at the Park Avenue Armory appeared first on artcritical.

September 15 to October 18, 2015
33A Orchard Street (between Canal and Hester streets)
New York, 646 944 6197

There were essentially two bodies of work festively commingled in Carol Szymanski’s solo show, “My Life is an Index” at Tanja Grunert this fall — each made under different circumstances. A portion of the work was squeezed out in free moments while performing a demanding day job. The rest of it was deliberately produced as part of the artist’s recently resumed full-time studio practice, which had been set aside about a decade ago. The show makes a case for why, even if you have to keep your day job, you should find a way to keep making work. Her book of wry daily accumulations, called Cockshut Dummy Desk Version (2004-2015), was the heart of the show. Note the word play in the book’s title: “Cockshut” and “Dummy” are synonyms, albeit obscure, chosen by the artist for the words in the name of London’s The Evening Standard tabloid, which she passed on the newsstands during her workday commute. Reminiscent of an old-school library reference tool, the 12-inch stack of two-hole-punched, letter-size pages were bound by a pair of upright metal loops. 11 years in the making, the self-published tome was presented on a small vintage table with a stool in the middle of the gallery. The book’s culturally diverse, encyclopedic content has been shown previously in different forms. To support her family, Szymanski put her studio practice on pause in the early 2000s to take the aforementioned day job as an investment banker, the demands of which only left time for composing one daily email — of images, text or both. The subjects of her messages were based on free-association responses to her day’s experiences paradoxically organized around the comprehensive epistemological classes found in Roget’s Thesaurus. Hillary Clinton-style, the emails have been saved, printed and bound.

Cockshut Dummy was reformatted in two ways in the exhibition: uploaded digitally on a wall-mounted iPad installed near the front door, and edited down to a single quote in 833, Cheerfulness; “Ciao Berlusconi, Libia sta benissimo, non c’e problema” (2015), which was silk-screened on the opposite wall. The phrases in the title of the work which comprised the selected quote broadcast — in large dark blue, hand painted letters — the cheery words of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to his pal, Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi just before their respective falls from power. Szymanski selected the quote because it most perfectly represented the profoundly absurd and dangerous sphere she was privy to while working inside an established financial institution as world markets collapsed.

By presenting the book in these different ways the artist established a loose formal connection to the second, more recent body of work spilling around the space, reviving the artist’s multidisciplinary exploration of units of expression. Szymanski’s 12 tone interjection series (2015) graphs Arnold Schoenberg’s modern musical scale with involuntary vocalizations, two-letter musical alphabets, an encoding of color with different emotions, hand gestures, and composite letter forms. Framed in white, the silkscreen print presents 8 rows of text and pictograms stacked in 12 columns banded in the colors of the spectrum. In correlating these multi-sensory elements, some created by the artist and others credited to writers, scientists and musicians from the last five centuries, Szymanski offers us rudimentary tools for building new languages, presumably in order to think new thoughts. The work on paper functions as a Rosetta Stone-like key to her newest work; she has also translated its concepts into various physical forms, including here neon sculptures, shaped floating inflatables made of Mylar, abstract cibachrome photographs and flat, single-image paintings. Content from Szmanski’s two oeuvres was also intertwined in musical compositions by Betsy McClelland performed in the gallery by Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble during the run of the exhibition and in readings by Mary Ann Caws and Barry Schwabsky.

The artist’s consideration and practical application of the philosophy of knowledge is the fundamental connection between the pieces associated with the book and those related to the 12 tone series. How, as part of making our way in the world, do we make and use categories? Recent brain research shows that language, which is dependent on classification systems, is one of the drivers in the evolution of the structure of our brains; what and how we think ultimately affects what we are capable of conceiving. In a 2014 interview, Szymanski cited the work of cognitive linguist George Lakoff, author of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (1987), as one of her inspirations. Lakoff summarizes the potential for his new way of organizing our thoughts, “[We] will be considering … a shift from classical categories to prototype-based categories defined by cognitive models. It is a change that implies other changes: changes in the concepts of truth, knowledge, meaning, rationality—even grammar.” Cockshut Dummy alloys specific information Szymanski gleaned from her work in the material world with the artist’s philosophical concerns, while the 12 tone series reveals the artist’s response to related ideas made in a cloistered, open-ended context. Overall, the more recent, brightly colored work creates an upbeat, scavenger hunt aesthetic with Szymanski celebrating the freedom of her return to the studio.

As with the new research on the workings of the brain Szymanski’s more recent work overall feels bold and intriguing, but also somewhat preliminary; some of her objects suggest but don’t fully embody her ideas. Ironically, while engaging to ponder, the instructional 12- tone chart took some of the fun away from one’s own decoding of the images and materials in the show. I found myself musing about alternative installations of the exhibition where a reduced selection of work was included. The iPad, 12-tone chart, the neon and floating sculpture appear superfluous to the viewer’s explication of such engaging objects as the book on its table, the photographs, silk-screened wall text and a set of smaller paintings and photograph fragments exhibited in a cluster. Cockshut Dummy, created in a less-is-more environment feels more inherently resolved and tied to the tenor of our times; a weighty prize for the deserving winner of the show’s party game.

The post Day Jobs, Dictators and Musical Scales: Carol Szymanski at Tanja Grunert appeared first on artcritical.

Cage — a prolific avant-garde musician-composer, writer, and artist — created works that pushed at the confines of music and sound, thus redefining the medium. He was a pioneer of prepared piano compositions, where modifications were made to the instrument’s mechanisms, and he often created atonal musical works rather than using traditional Western melodic techniques. His interest in aleatory devices and Eastern philosophy, particularly the Chinese I Ching, heavily influenced his creative output, as well as music indebted to him ever since.

Diary, completed between 1965 and 1982 and printed with an IBM Selectric typewriter, also uses constraints derived from chance operations. Depending on the outcome, Cage would write a fixed number of words every day, limit the number of characters and determine the margins and indentations of each line, creating what he termed mosaics. Color figures prominently in the text, too, with lines alternating between 28 different shades of blue and red. This vacillation between typeface, colors ranging from muted gray-blues to red-browns and variance in the surrounding white space gives each page a sculptural element, a welcome counterpart to Cage’s careful attention to the rhythm of the text. At times, this renders Diary poetic and delightfully meandering.

While relying on chance operations for its form, Cage maintained a deeply personal vulnerability in the content. His ideas about a variety of global issues are punctuated with casual references to his friends, mentors, and colleagues, including Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, and Marcel Duchamp. Vignettes of domestic life — time spent with his mother or his life partner and collaborator, the choreographer Merce Cunningham — figure prominently throughout. (Cage’s father died in 1965, shortly before Diary was published and delivered in public address. His mother would die a few years later in 1969.) In one section, Cage gives a story about trying to purchase fresh coriander in Chinatown with a friend, and in another, he shares that as he was completing benefit forms after the death of his father, his mother revealed to him that she had been married twice before.

The Diary’s philosophical meditations (“The goal is not to have a goal. The new universe city will have no limits. It will not be in any special place . . . ”) and social commentary (“Act of sharing is a community act. Think of people outside the community. What do we share with them . . . ?”) provide effective contrasts to Cage’s seemingly stream of conscious musings and rant-like observations. In one instance he speculates that, “Encouraged, instead of frightened, children could learn several languages before reaching age of four, at that age engaging in the invention of their own languages. Play’d be play instead of being, as now, release of repressed anger.” In another, he observes “ . . . People ask what the avant-garde is and whether it’s finished. It isn’t. There will always be one. The avant-garde is flexibility of mind and it follows like day the night from not falling prey to government and education. Without avant-garde nothing would get invented.”

The I Ching acknowledges that life and everything in it is in a constant state of flux. Diary reveals how Cage took that philosophy to heart in his daily life. His critical, yet hopeful musings about the cultural context on which Diary reflects capture life’s impermanence as well as Cage’s personal comfort with ambiguity during a time when people around the world were desperately seeking certainty. Observations such as, “Edwin Schlossberg told me that while Fuller was writing a dedication in his book Utopia or Oblivion, he paused and said, ‘Those are not the only possibilities . . .’ ” or “New York’s the largest Puerto Rican city in the world . . . ” show Cage to be not only an artist, musician, and thinker, but also a compassionate, active citizen of the world.

Cage, John. Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse). Co-edited by Joe Biel and Richard Kraft. (New York: Siglio, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-1-938221-11-01, 176 pages, $32

The post “Paper Should Be Edible, Nutritious”: John Cage’s Diary appeared first on artcritical.

JESSICA HOLMES: Can you tell me something about the body of work in this show? Is there anything viewers might find surprising? 

BILLY CHILDISH: The paintings have been made over the last six months, so they’re very current. They are of subjects that have presented themselves and that I’ve worked through, or am still working through. People tend to have quite a lot of expectation, based on whether they are familiar with an artist or if they have ideas based on various misinformations that are available. Some people are surprised that I would work with the nudes. I painted nudes a great deal in the 1980s and 1990s and I haven’t painted them for the last five years or so — I think surprises are all down to expectations and knowledge.

I’d say that your paintings are deceptive because at first glance they are very straightforward, but there is great mystery once you really start looking. You frequently paint the natural world.

The natural world is a vibrating mystery of continual becoming and unbecoming. Within my paintings the bits that interest me are the abstracted parts. If I went round these pictures I’d say, “I like that bit.” It’s a love, an expression of my love of nature and an intense relationship with matter — vibrating, distorting matter, which is timeless and unable to be fixed in time.

I was going to ask you, since your work is so personal, how you feel when it’s released into the world, but maybe this is something that allows you to let it go.

My relationship with the art is making the picture and once that’s done, I don’t have much of a relationship afterwards. I’m not necessarily happy with my paintings when they’re finished. People hear my disregard for art and artists and they think I’m very satisfied with what I do. Not necessarily.

Does an idea ever morph into something else? Do you ever think you are going to make a painting and it becomes a poem, for example?

No, I know what I’m doing when I’m doing it. I paint on particular days of the week and I write poems in my notebook. I was in a British art show in the 1990s and they had some poems of mine painted on a wall, which is not something I would do, or which I considered to be art. And I said, “Well, I know what they are. They’re poems written on a wall.” I don’t see breaking down in categories as a freedom, I see it more as nonsense. There is nothing wrong with a poem being a poem. It doesn’t need to become a painting. I like all of my courses separate, so I don’t put my custard in with the roast beef. Not because I don’t like custard or I don’t like roast beef but because I do like custard and I do like roast beef.

Do you prefer painting to the other media?

Yes, it’s my natural ground. I’ve got works existing from when I was four or five, and I painted a great deal starting from when I was 12. I couldn’t really read and write until I was 14 [because of undiagnosed dyslexia], and I wasn’t involved with music until I was 17. Of all the other things, painting is the one where I don’t have those on/off buttons. I paint every Monday and Sunday, so I know what I am meant to be doing when I’m doing it. I had to discipline myself after I was expelled from art school, which fits my nature quite nicely. Going to art school doesn’t suit creative types.

Since you brought up your art school experience, which from what I understand was terrible, what would you say to somebody thinking of going to art school today, when there is so much emphasis placed on receiving an MFA?

When I went to art school, it wasn’t like the pressure now. Art schools these days seem to be there to try and create artists quickly, whereas I think an art school’s job is to give people stuff for their tool kit. I see it as much more craft-based or space-based. You’ve got to have quite a lot of self-will not to be run all over, or have them get rid of your real primal interests and send you on the course to being an Identi-Kit conceptual artist. What you need are the tools to actualize your vision. I’d say it might be better to be wary, ask questions, maybe not be like I was, and rather keep a bit of a low profile. I just fought with them.

What were some of the things you were made to do at St. Martin’s?

I had not been taught the type of obedience that they thought they should receive from someone as lowly as a student. I was required to take history of art and I found the person who taught it dull. You had to say things about canvas, or about art, using “art speak.” I told them I wouldn’t go, and they said I could sleep in that class if I wanted to, but I must attend it. I also refused to paint pictures at the college; I painted at home instead. I told them I didn’t want to become contaminated. I got into a lot trouble for writing what they called obscene poetry. I was talented and charismatic, which caused me more problems than if I hadn’t been. I was a good target.

You’ve stuck remarkably with your vision. How has that been beneficial, and how has it hindered you?

I think it’s in line with my nature, and it’s not an effort. I paint the pictures and, after the event, find out what psychological drive might be in there, which is far more interesting than having a prescriptive one. I just let it happen and then people can work out what fruitcake I am afterwards.

Or not!

Or not! Thank you!

[Laughter]

The thing is, there’s not many great thinkers in art. You have a few people like Picasso who always said smart stuff but you’re not going to get much intellectual stimulation from talking to artists. You can see how popular that opinion will make me! A curator asked me yesterday what I thought art was about, and I came up with a quote, and we wrote it down because I got the giggles. It was, “art is pornography and comfort food for the spiritually inept.” That doesn’t mean that’s true; that was yesterday’s definition!

Right! And what did she say?

She was in stitches!

[Laughter] 

Over the years you’ve used different names and pseudonyms. Do they represent different personalities?

In 1977, when I was 17, I was a punk rocker. I got the moniker Billy Childish from a friend of mine, which I used in bands. I didn’t like using that name in other areas so I always painted — and still paint — under my family name, William Hamper. When I was doing early exhibitions in German cooperatives, they knew I played music as Billy Childish, and it was forced onto me as a painter. Billy Childish has never made any paintings. Well, very rarely. When I was making films, I would use William Loveday. I was trying to compartmentalize so that I couldn’t be accused of trading off Billy Childish, a musician who now paints. It was self-preservation to stop people from categorizing me, but it didn’t work at all. 

I would love to hear you talk about your philosophy of Radical Traditionalism.

With Radical Tradition what I was trying to get across is that tradition, which I really like, is freeing because it is something you don’t have to invent. There’s this literal relationship with a history of painting, which used to be recognized and respected by artists as obvious. 

It’s a connection with antiquity in a way, right?

Yes. Nothing is as dated as the contemporary. Modern people want to lift the ego, but the ego is a block to creativity. Tradition is a way of subjugating the ego and allowing the thing to flow. Great artists, like Van Gogh for instance, wear their hearts on their sleeves. Van Gogh says whom he loves, and you can see whom he loves in his paintings. There’s no desperation for authorship. Really great art has got a timeless quality and it’s not narrow. You look at Van Gogh’s work, it looks contemporary, and it doesn’t look like it’s made in a mechanized age, either. When you are trying to be contemporary or relevant, to show us who we are, it’s like a rupture in time whereas if you give yourself to a tradition you dissolve time. With my music, we used to be pawned off as revivalists in the 1980s for playing guitar music and rock-‘n’-roll. Now people listen and say, “Your music doesn’t sound like any time at all.” That is what you want, for that thing to have a continued, timeless presence.

It’s got a life force.

Yeah. There’s still fight to it.

The post “The natural world is a vibrating mystery”: Billy Childish with Jessica Holmes appeared first on artcritical.

March 8 through June 7, 2015
11 West 53 St (between 5th and 6th avenues)
New York, 212 708 9400|

Stephanie Buhmann: So here we are, two longtime Björk fans, who went to MoMA with our 16-month-old daughter in tow, hoping for an incredible event. What were your first impressions after leaving the museum?

Todd Simmons: I was a little confused about what exactly the curator, Klaus Biesenbach, was hoping to accomplish with this presentation of Björk’s extraordinary audio and visual work. What kind of an expectation did you have about what a visual retrospective of her work would be?

SB: I was skeptical from the get-go, doubting that a retrospective of a musician, no matter how innovative and groundbreaking, could be pulled off by a visually focused museum. Björk certainly is an exceptionally gifted artist in her medium — which is primarily music but also extends toward digital innovation. She is, of course, famous for her costumes and makeup, but there isn’t much there in terms of sculptural objects, drawings or anything else traditionally considered fine art, even in a loose sense. I was curious to see how MoMA was going to pull that off. I was also curious whether Björk had a traditional visual oeuvre (drawings, photographs, collages, etc.) in private, something many musicians do. That doesn’t appear to be the case. I walked away thinking that this show was an artificially constructed installation of minor visual objects, failing to truly celebrate — or enlighten us about — the non-material work that makes Björk the incredible artist she is.

Some of the most interesting objects on view were largely ignored: the pipe organs, for example, were installed in the downstairs lobby. They are fantastic instruments and unusual objects so why are they not part of the main exhibit?

TS: And they were only heard intermittently and it’s very easy to miss both the objects and their sound if you enter the museum at the wrong moment. I was there for three hours that day and only heard the instruments played briefly. The Tesla coil mounted on the foyer ceiling roared so abruptly that I saw a group of people jump out of their skins. That’s actually the kind of visceral experience I’d hoped for; only it never happened again that I noticed. I wanted to walk in off the street and be immediately captivated by the dynamic sound of Björk. But I had to fight my way into a cramped wooden structure to do so. She should have been given much more space for her thrilling music to soar in. Not merely a claustrophobic fort. For the show’s subject to have her sound get lost in the overall museum chatter is a significant problem.

SB: That name of the show sounded to me like a reference to Australian Aboriginal culture. In the Aboriginal belief system, a “songline” defines a path across the land. By singing songs in the appropriate sequence, Aborigines could navigate vast distances through the desert. It’s a way to navigate and to remember and pass on history, a concept that must resonate with Björk. The fact is that we learned too little. When it presents a pop-cultural icon, the museum promises two things: to enlighten us about the work of this artist and to convey a sense of the person, the mind behind it. This show is an empty promise; neither of these tasks were accomplished.

So what’s the original intent of this show? Is it trying to get us closer and more familiar with the artist or veil her further into mystery?

TS: There were partial attempts towards the personal, by including scattered diary entries, for example.

SB: Right, but although interesting on a personal level, the diaries and notebooks are not really visually engaging.

There are some interesting things to discover, like the wall of sheet music underneath several flat screens showing her performing on stage, but this is used as a mere backdrop in the waiting area. These musical notations, which reveal how elaborately layered and carefully arranged Björk’s music is, are in themselves beautiful abstract drawings — so why are they cast to the side at MoMA?

TS: It’s a mistake to have them displayed in a corridor when you’re queuing up to get into a room where the promise of a unique experience awaits. You can’t help but feel the push of the crowd and the promise that a “real” experience is going to be around the corner. It’s a fleeting flirtation, which is frustrating when you’d like to savor these details, but you’re being pressured to advance to the next station. You couldn’t feel good about lingering because you’d be holding up the line. It made me wonder: is it ill-advised to dub this bottleneck “Songlines,” in a city as crowded and impatient as New York is, and in a museum designed to process throngs of humanity every hour?

SB: I know what MoMA can get out of this exhibit. I don’t know what Björk is gaining from the experience, as it has not been pulled off well.

TS: A deeper level of credibility or acclaim that she already has? No. She’s arguably one of the most experimental pop stars of her generation. She’s not an artist that you would think is in it for the exposure. One can only speculate what her motivation was to do this. As Biesenbach has said, the museum asked her to do something as long ago as 2000 and she declined. Then in 2012, according to him, Björk decided that she was in a place where a mid-career retrospective was more appropriate. But there’s no explanation why such a show is more justified now than in 2000 or 2030.

SB: Beyond being a let down for fans like myself, I think MoMA missed the opportunity to show a significant artist with respect to her craft and Björk’s work wasn’t able to help MoMA succeed in branching out towards new media. Björk’s work might not be your taste, but I think she is one of the first and few artists who have successfully used computer technology to talk about how human we are. This exhibition doesn’t reveal this at all. I would have liked to see an entire floor in the museum be dedicated to dark rooms and only sound.

TS: It just didn’t have a specific character to it and there were strange spaces in between the objects and galleries, such as a corridor that didn’t lead anywhere. I constantly wondered if I missed sections of the exhibit and reexamined the program to investigate. But I hadn’t. It felt both claustrophobic in the rotunda and scattered in the other parts, including the display of instruments from Biophilia, which is also the first app in MoMA’s collection. You might have noticed the instruments if they happened to be playing when you walked by, but if not, you could have easily missed them.

The show is supposed to be a “cutting edge, audio experience.” MoMA staff greeted us at the beginning of the exhibit, effectively explaining the audio device we wore on our ears and hanging around our necks. The advanced technology tracks you and senses where you are in the exhibit and triggers the audio, obviating the need to look down to device and fumble with it, which is smart.

SB: The concept sounds incredible, but in reality I found that songs and storylines were switching up too fast and unpredictably. As soon as I was getting into a song and turned, the next track started and pulled me out of the moment. It didn’t flow organically.

TS: I was confused by the narrative, which I assumed as I walked through was a story of Björk’s life as a child emerging into womanhood, only to find out later that it was actually a made up narrative made up by an Icelandic writer, one of her friends. It was simply fiction posing as an autobiography and what confuses me about that is some of the early stages in the exhibit had personal photographs, journals and writing, which made it very easy to assume that the narrative was equally autobiographical. I felt deceived afterwards. Why do we have to make up a narrative and if we have to, why don’t we take it even further? Björk’s songs always push boundaries.

But I think of Björk also as a visual artist — nearly as much a pioneer in her visual presentation as she has been in music. She has an incredible daring in her experimentation with video and certainly in her fashion sense and costuming. there is always collaboration in her projects — with Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Alexander McQueen, etc. — however, she is a visual vessel.

SB: She’s a great sourcer and channeler. She taps into a certain kind of zeitgeist and then finds very interesting collaborators to create something unique. In a way her albums can be considered curated exhibitions, not just in terms how the music unfolds from song to song, but how she goes about developing the accompanying imagery.

TS: You would never want to start one of her songs in the middle for example. You want to drop the needle at the beginning and play it all the way through. But “Songlines” only gives sporadic snippets of her music, partially drowned out by an invented narrative in voiceover, written by somebody else. And, as we were talking about earlier, there’s no complementary focus on objects. Those on display serve as mere props to her art. There’s the infamous, ridiculed swan dress she wore to the 2001 Oscars — but is that’s not what she’s really about. Things like that feel quaint. Why show her swan dress, when showing the process of creating Dancer in the Dark (2000) would be so much more enlightening?

SB: I wanted the installation to reflect what Björk is about, but also to capture some of the unique sense of spectacle she creates.

TS: It seems a jarring contrast that this inadequate presentation of her work would coincide with the release of her ninth solo record, Vulnicura (2015) which resonates with an almost painful depth of catharsis and courageous personal exploration. We understand that one of the album’s songs, “Black Lake,” is essentially an expression of the dissolution of her union with Matthew Barney and the fracturing of her family. That’s pretty much the most blatantly autobiographical Björk has ever gotten in her work. And one can only imagine the impact of the live experience of this album in concert. But the contrast between the album and “Black Lake” in particular and this cramped cluster of exhibit rooms was jarring. Two different leagues entirely.

SB: I think that “Black Lake” is incredibly moving and shows Björk at her best: A beautiful song about a heartrending story, framed by a stunningly desolate Nordic landscape, and yet with a glimpse of optimism at the end.

TS: No question in my mind that the video for “Black Lake” was the highpoint of the show, because it was an uninterrupted experience with dynamic, masterful sound design by Marco Perry, who uses 49 loudspeakers divided into groups around the room. It’s the one instance of this show utterly nailing something. Sitting through it on the floor, taking in the video amid a mind-blowing sound system, took my breath away. It was sensational. A totally immersive experience. Perry told me that the objective for him and Björk in that space was to create “a rarefied atmosphere, like walking onto the moon and hearing the sound of the stars.” Something tells me the entire exhibition would have been electric if the rest of it had honored that objective.

SB: I think that it was the only successful collaboration between Björk and MoMA. The museum commissioned it and stuck to her natural medium: music with a narrative video. I was moved by the rawness of emotion you find in the lyrics and her voice, as well as on film. In it, we see Björk age: she portrays a middle-aged woman now finds herself left vulnerable and alone, lamenting the death of her family, as she knew it. This is not a young girl or a vain attempt to cling to youth. It’s an incredibly gutsy project for that fact alone. Some people might say that some of the scenes seem melodramatic or lean towards kitsch, but those who’ve experienced a similar emotion at some time in their lives will know better. It’s a pretty sober portrayal by Björk’s standards and that was probably the most surprising discovery of the show for me.

TS: “Black Lake” succeeds on many levels. It offers a magnificent experience. We got a sustained piece of music. The sound in the room was truly immersive and powerful and detailed. They did a phenomenal job of bringing the potency of her music to vivid life without it being uncomfortably loud. Perry explained to me that it was as elaborate of a sound set-up as was possible for a room that size. The sound is literally all around you in a way that I have never experienced before.

SB: I experienced the sound very physically. It was almost as if it pulsated in my veins, as is if it infiltrated my body.

TS: Absolutely. It was such a potent sound design that even outside of the room you could still feel that whole section of the museum vibrate from the low frequency components. It rumbles the glass balcony and lends an inadvertent excitement to other sections of the exhibition without you knowing where it’s coming from.

SB: The use of two-channel projection worked well, too. You have to choose which one of the synchronized screens to watch, but the effect is that you always have a light source behind you. You are sandwiched between the content of “Black Lake,” which is inescapable.

TS: That’s a good point. It all feels very exposed. You watch an intimate scene you might rather not be witnessing, but you can’t pull yourself away from it either. It reminds me of Fassbinder or Cassavetes‘s anguished scenes of human emotional breakdown; but you also see her striving to avoid being crushed completely. For Björk to allow herself to be exposed like that is brave.

SB: And this sense of raw exposure is also reflected in the fact that her upcoming New York concerts are all being held during the day. It’s an unusually sober hour for rock n’ roll shows.

TS: Yes, one of the seven concerts is going to be at noon at Carnegie Hall, for example. You have breakfast, walk into the concert in broad daylight, and exit into daylight. That’s very unusual in rock. Her new album Vulnicura is heavily electronic and it was produced by two young London-based musicians: the Haxan Cloak and the Venezuela-born DJ Arca. It will be interesting to see if they will join Björk in concert or if these performances will reflect the stripped and raw quality we find in “Black Lake.”

SB: I wanted to see more of this raw quality at MoMA. Maybe the problem was that the bureaucracy that comes with the realization of a major museum exhibition proved stifling to Björk, for whom MoMA is not the ultimate temple for her particular craft. Maybe the problem was that MoMA mainly aimed for a blockbuster, weighing the success of David Bowie’s retrospect at the Victoria & Albert, Alexander McQueen at the Met and Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” at MoMA, along with Björk’s internationally famous name.

TS: I’m sure that this retrospective couldn’t have had Björk’s full attention. It felt like in some ways she had a hand in it, but in other ways she let them lead, and because of that it felt somewhat half-baked. The collapse of her family and the construction of a new album that documented that very painful chapter in her life must have taken up most of her attention and energy during a time when this show was coming together as well. Albums as detailed and elaborate and passionate as hers do not happen over night and it must have taken her attention away from focusing on her art museum debut and retrospective, which seems to belong more to Matthew Barney’s world than hers. It’s a strange dichotomy to present what feels like a fairly frivolous retrospective in conjunction with Björk’s most personal and gutsy album, Vulnicura. Presumably, her music will transcend MoMA’s squandered opportunity.

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Farrah Karapetian: Stagecraft at Von Lintel Gallery

2685 S La Cienega Blvd (between Alivar and Cullen streets)
January 17 to February 28, 2015
Los Angeles, 310 559 5700

When I was a child my father would delight me by playing Ken Nordine’s word jazz. We’d listen and laugh along with the absurdist poetry delivered in Nordine’s mellifluous baritone accompanied by bebop improvisations, breathy flute trills, the swish of a brush across a snare drum. I’d close my eyes and stare with my ears at the scenes Nordine sketched with words — short, jokey stories brimming with onomatopoeic ornamentation and witty little rhymes. His 1966 album, Colors, is a collection of 34 roughly one-and-a-half-minute vignettes, each characterizing a color with anthropomorphic anecdotes: ecru is a critic, for instance; burgundy is bulging and fat; lavender is an old, old, old, old, old lady.

I thought briefly of Ken Nordine after seeing Farrah Karapetian’s exhibition of new photograms and sculpture, “Stagecraft,” at Von Lintel Gallery. The comparison is perhaps a bit corny, I admit, but there is some correspondence to be found between Nordine’s evocation of colors through words and music, and Karapetian’s evocation of music through shape and color. There are shared elements of playfulness, improvisation and mood; with both, our mind fills in what the eyes do not see. While earlier works alluded to subjects with political weight (portraying riot police, protestors, guns and contraband), this series uses the accoutrements of music and performance as a vehicle to investigate the mutability of perception and the rhythmic possibilities of light, color, and space.

Karapetian began with bronzes and blues — the colors one feels listening to jazz, according to what Karapetian’s father revealed to her about his own sensations when listening to music. In Got to the Mystic (all works 2014), we see her father as a ghostly figure playing a skeleton of a drum kit, his face obscured by the hi-hat; the drum stands and rims and closures and cymbals register a stark white against the ruddy ground of the photogram.

Karapetian’s painstakingly crafted replica of her father’s drum kit — minus the skins and shells, leaving just the armature, the metal lugs, rods and stands — sits in an adjoining room. The cymbals are formed from glass, allowing light to pass through. A spotlight positioned on the floor of the gallery illuminates the sculpture from below, casting its shadow against the wall, and revealing the apparatus at play in Karapetian’s photograms. Many artists go to lengths to conceal their processes, but Karapetian, in the service of transparency, divulges her sources, shows us the “negative.”

The viewer, however, does not get the full experience, rather just a glimpse of how things work. In Three Muses one can clearly see the three bodies in space, but one can only imagine the haptic experience of three people trying to position themselves in a completely dark room, waiting for the flash of light that would inscribe their shadows on the paper. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Pause. Flash.

Karapetian spoke to me about the primacy of physical interaction in her work, from situating her subjects in the darkened space to the handling of the paper and processing. The viewer sees only the final result, limited to the perspective of the paper itself. We see only what the paper sees, as it mutely records the impression of shadow and light across its surface. It bears other marks, too, though. Around the edges, little fingerprints are indelibly smudged, and the pricks of the push pins that held the paper in place are visible. The prints hold a remarkable texture, impossible to capture in the jpegs you’d see online.

There are bronzes and blues — but also crimsons and yellows and indigos and deep, resonant greens. Yes, resonance: the colors here have it, just like sounds do. Light waves that linger. My memory of the electric greens and cyans of Kräftig — the color is so pure, so saturated and intense — challenges the colors I now see in the digital reproduction of the piece on my laptop and in the exhibition catalogue. Strange, how variable color is in real life and in reproduction. Stranger still, to think of these vibrant greens and blues produced by red and magenta lights. In the darkroom, the gap between perceived and resultant color becomes a playground of improvisation and experimentation, “a very present tense experience,” as Karapetian put it. Like a jazz musician mounting the stage, she may already know the riff, but where the song goes from there will always be a surprise.

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The room smelled like rain-softened wool and leather at Issue Project Room on Saturday September 13th. The tightly packed audience, half of them sitting and half standing — the chairs normally occupying the back of the space were cleared to allow for the performers’ mobility — waited in humming excitement for experimental composer Yoshi Wada, his son Tashi Wada, and their accompanying musicians, David Watson and Jim Pugliese. Yoshi, born in 1943 in Kyoto, Japan, studied sculpture at the Kyoto University of Fine Arts before moving to New York in the late 1960s where he joined the Fluxus art movement and studied with its founder, George Maciunas. Though Maciunas acted as a catalyst to Yoshi’s early experiments in music, Yoshi maintains that he did not carry the movement’s influence into his later career. In a 2008 interview with The Wire, Yoshi commented that Fluxus appealed to him at the time, however his independent interests in sound and music directed him elsewhere. His departure from Fluxus led him to study music composition with La Monte Young, and by extension North Indian signing with Prandit Pran Nath, and Scottish bagpipe with James McIntosh.[i] In Yoshi’s most recent work, Fluxus’ democratic consideration of the artistic potential in objects and actions, the tonal precision of North Indian singing, and the emotive qualities of Scottish bagpipes all merge into a sensory environment thickening with the sense of urgency and approaching danger.

The unnamed performance began with the sound of an alarm. Yoshi churned a low whine from a worn, metal hand siren, which grew to an anxious, undulating howl, then stopped abruptly. He then focused his concentration on a small switchboard. With each definitive press of a button he rang one of the alarm bells installed in various unidentifiable locations throughout the performance space. The warning sounds compounded further as Pugliese’s bass drum and Tashi’s organ drone joined in. Pugliese’s mallet attacked the drum in sporadic intervals while Yoshi watched avidly, waiting to ring the alarm bells precisely in or out of synch with the echoing percussion. Like the slow, elongated footsteps of a giant or an army marching in unison, the drumbeat spread ominously into the air as the shrill bells quivered erratically in sonic contrast. The hum of Tashi’s organ crept into audibility, seeming to emanate from beneath my feet. Watson exhaled a mournful note from his bloated bagpipe, which hung heavily in the air. Later in the performance, Watson and Yoshi — who began playing his own bagpipe — circled the perimeter of the space. As elongated tones followed them around the space like half-deflated balloons attached to their instruments, the growing amalgam of sounds created a formless narrative specific to the evening and location.

In addition to its inextricable link to duration — unlike static two- or three-dimensional objects that can be experienced at various points in time, we only hear sound while the sound waves vibrate — the performance of sound also greatly involves the space in which it is presented. At Issue Project Room, sounds bounced around the cavernous ceiling, and from where I sat, the reverberations created a spinning sonic halo above my head. Further amplifying the sensory experience, the room, crowded with radiating bodies, became gradually hotter and more humid as the performance went on. At the point of swampy discomfort, the climate heightened the effect of the instruments and I became acutely aware of my corporeal sensations: everything blended into a bath of perception. The bagpipe, siren, and organ combined into a polyphonic discord while the drum rumbled on the side. The tones resonated so deeply it became hard to distinguish whether they were being heard or felt.

Yoshi’s composition filled both the walls of the architecture and the bodies of the attendants as it wove periods of intensity with ones of meditative restraint. The interludes allowed my mind to calm and wander, but never for too long as Yoshi continually reintroduced the siren and the corresponding crescendo of the other instruments. The utilization of sound’s ability to resonate within the body, through both high and low frequencies, combined with sounds that connote impending danger, created a foreboding psychological event. The lack of contextualization further disconnected the audience from an opportunity to interpret the elements. The only specific information Issue Project Room gave about the nameless composition is in Yoshi’s words: “I search for deep and ringing sound that travels deep into my cells. Where does this sound exist?” The question posed by Yoshi requires a heightened awareness, not just of what we hear but how it feels to hear. By blurring the lines that distinguish individual senses, Yoshi created an open space for unadulterated sensory perception.

[i]Haynes, Jim. “Piper’s Lament.” The Wire June 2008: 20-22.

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