January 10 to February 16, 2019
545 West 25th Street
New York City, marlboroughcontemporary.com

Davina Semo’s solo exhibition at Marlborough Contemporary, “ALL THE WORLD,” her third there, marks a shift in tone from her previous work. Although the basic constituents of her sculptures remain much the same—industrial materials, fasti craft, appropriated texts used as all-caps titles—themes of control, eroticism, and violence have been tempered. Expressions of emotion and affection have swelled, and while those elements predate this show, they are given added, moving emphasis.

The show is built around two bodies of work: cast-bronze bells and brightly colored acrylic mirrors, all dated 2019. Three early bells were shown by Semo in Marlborough’s upstairs space in the winter of 2016 and 2017, and at San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman Gallery in late 2017, though those were smaller and had other differences in their facture and hanging. Semo’s use of mirrors goes back to at least 2010, though those pieces often utilized obscuration as a tactic. Rather than those previous black or silver glass mirrors, these are bright pink, yellow, turquoise, reminiscent of mirrors by Sherrie Levine.

The five mirrors, each six-by-five feet, are embedded with two sets of radial ball bearings in overlapping constellations. One set of ball bearings is arranged in a grid; the other set is dispersed across the surface in spay-like disarray, recalling a backpack by Semo that has been repeatedly shot, shown at Marlborough in 2015. The mirrors capture, in subtly warped faces, the reflection of viewers and the bells. This is a lovely curatorial trick, reiterating and altering the perception of the work and the space. And the ball bearings take on multiple readings: the fearlessness of skateboards (they’re a part of the wheel system), the suggestion of mass anxiety signified by fidget spinners (they’re also a component of those toys), or, evading that dichotomy altogether, the cold reliability of machinery. Such allusions play up or run against the titles, which vary between grim and hopeful.

Semo’s bells, ranging from 20 to 33 inches tall, are made with a wax-casting technique that results in a bullet-shaped dome with eroded-looking rifts and drips on their thick walls. They’re tall and thin, patinated with a bituminous-colored finish and hung with chains that are powder-coated glossy black. Inside each is a wooden clapper attached to a thick, woven nylon rope. Visitors are encouraged to ring the clapper, but not touch the bronze, which, despite its robust appearance, has a very delicate patina. Each is attached at the ceiling while appearing to be slung through an eye bolt and anchored (save for one) to large bales of recyclable detritus, including aluminum and electronics cables.

Semo addresses both global and local concerns in this work. Close to home, the mirror SHE BECAME VERY SENSITIVE TO THE TASTE OF WATER FROM THE TAP reads, in its blue surface and epidemiologic red and black ball bearings, as an allusion to the ongoing Flint water crisis. A pink mirror is similarly dire, called IN THE REGION WHERE HE LIVED THERE WERE NO PLANTS AT ALL. Most frighteningly and directly, a bell in the center of the gallery held by two massive, stacked bales is called “BECAUSE WE ARE FACING AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT AND THERE IS NO TIME TO CONTINUE DOWN THIS ROAD OF MADNESS,” SHE SAID, a quote from 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (Part of the horror here is the scale: those enormous bales were selected from among God only knows how many others, impressing on viewers a fraction of the resources used and wasted by people, which is an existential crisis.) Another bell, nearer to the entrance, is titled “IT IS HARD,” SHE SAID, “TO IMAGINE THE WORLD AS IT WAS”.

The anchoring bale of that latter piece includes reptilian-looking metal scraps that resemble works in Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s show of erotic and mystical sculptures in Marlborough’s viewing room, called “Towards an End to Biological Perception,” organized by Leo Fitzpatrick. The crushed aluminum, in places, looks like the snake-skin dominatrix shoe in P-Orridge’s Shoe Horn #9 (2016). There are echoes, too, between Semo’s work and P-Orridge’s use of snake fetishes made of curled iron, scaly dessicated fishes, or, for example, the mirrors in No Mercy (2019).

The one bell not attached to a bale is instead connected to a slab of rolled steel, with the words “ALL THE WORLD” (the work’s title) embossed on it in welded block letters. Bells serve for warning and mourning. Lament and alarm for the world as it is or was runs through several of the sculptures, ringing with the kind of sentiment found in John Donne’s famous “No Man is an Island,” apt for the moment in all sorts of ways, including the analogizing of coastal erosion and human suffering on both grand and individual scales:

No man is an island
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

Mourning and heartache are, almost certainly, impossible without the kind of compassion and love Donne expresses. Despite the distress found in works here, the exhibition is nonetheless suffused with love and reassurance—something like courage and hope when held against existential threat. A bell closest to the entrance is reassuringly titled SHE CAN SQUEEZE HIS HAND WHEN PEOPLE ASK HER QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE. A mirror is called SHE LOOKED UP AT HIM, DIRECTLY, WITH TOTAL ATTENTION.

Bells also ring for celebration and contemplation. Among the people I saw tolling them, one of the gallery’s preparators was rolling the clapper gently around the lip of the bell, like a meditative singing bowl, making it hum. It’s hard to know how to address the beautiful and the horrible on Earth side by side, except perhaps to face what is awful, and to cultivate what is not.

The post A Part of the Main: Davina Semo at Marlborough Contemporary appeared first on artcritical.

March 11 to August 1, 2016
150 West 17th Street (at 7th Avenue)
New York, 212 620 5000

If one were interested in having a transformative experience through visual means, one may very well find oneself at the Rubin Museum, which houses several pieces of Himalayan art created for that exact purpose. Writing about the Rubin’s collection in the book Worlds of Transformation (1999), Robert F. Thurman states that “we can engage this extraordinary art as a vehicle of enlightenment. […] We can reach out of the planet and allow sacred and aesthetic objects such as these to lift us up into their exquisite, transcendental yet sensual visionary, transformative realms.” And it is nothing short of providence that an exhibition by renegade artist, occultist, and pandrogynous icon Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, “Try to Altar Everything,” finds itself in this context. (Breyer P-Orridge identifies as a third gender and is typically referred to as “h/er” or “s/he.”) H/er work in this show includes new pieces made in Nepal for this show, earlier work courtesy of Invisible Exports, site-specific installation made by participating visitors and staff under the guidance of Breyer P-Orridge, as well as a series of live performances.

Since the early 1970s, Breyer P-Orridge has been exercising h/er polymath powers in the fields of experimental music, performance, poetry, magic, documentary, body modification, and more. S/he’s best known for h/er music-and-performance projects, such as COUM Transmissions, Psychic TV, and Throbbing Gristle. Being interested in so many forms of art and expression, and working in a non-linear, multivalent manner opens up a breadth and depth of possibility in h/er investigations. The philosopher Herbert Marcuse once said, “One-dimensional man is the product of one-dimensional society,” and he’s right. Breyer P-Orridge’s multi-dimensional person, just like h/er work, has always revolved around collaboration, synthesis, and multichannel appropriation, making rich and complex work. H/er interpersonal and layered method of operating is a rebellion against one-dimensionality.

The title of this show is also twofold, playing on the homonyms “alter” (to change, transform) and “altar” (a pedestal for religious objects or ceremonies). In order to demonstrate a method of questioning the way we perceive ordinary, everyday things and transfigure them through religious sacrifice, Breyer P-Orridge invited the public to bring small objects to the museum in exchange for a Psychic Cross pendant (the logo of Breyer P-Orridge’s Psychic TV group). S/he ordains the objects as devotional relics, installing them in windowed containers. The donations vary greatly: hotel keys, pins, photographs, ribbons, toys, spoons, etc. The top floor of the museum dedicated solely to this show, and throughout the room many of the small objects, in metal-and-Plexiglas canisters, are conglomerated onto separate panels, serving as partitions for the other works in the show, while creating a sense of unity throughout the entire space. Every element in this project can be seen as a microcosm that contains the entirety of the installation as a whole. The groupings of these objects seem to be serving as a formal way to accent the idea that few can be many, the mundane can be holy, male can be female; and further still, that these divides can be disintegrated altogether, as Breyer P-Orridge has done personally.

One of the most moving pieces in the show, Touching of the Hands (2016), is a detailed bronze casting of Breyer P-Orridge’s right hand and arm in a clasping gesture, which the viewer is encouraged to touch. The intimacy transposed through the arm is accomplished through the gentle, inviting gesture and the ability to physically engage with the sculpture. The label explains, “The title refers to a remark made by artist and mystic Brion Gysin to Breyer P-Orridge that true wisdom can only be passed on by the ‘touching of the hands.’ […] S/he intends that the bronze will wear down over time through visitors’ touch.” Some viewers reported “getting the chills” interacting with this piece, perhaps reminded of moments of prayer or meditation where another’s touch seemed to generate a profound excitation, or even conjure a supernatural entity.

One of the earlier works in this exhibition, Blood Bunny (1997–2007), is a life-sized wooden sculpture of a rabbit, covered dried blood let from Breyer P-Orridge and h/er late partner, Lady Jaye, who died in 2007. On its head is laid a ponytail lock of Lady Jaye’s hair, bound with a scrunchie, possibly taken post-mortem. Breyer P-Orridge and Lady Jaye nicknamed one another “bunny,” and the totem serves as a symbol for the third gender literally embodied in their surgical transformation into near mirror images of one another. In making the sculpture, they ceremoniously injected themselves with the dissociative anesthetic drug ketamine in order to aid in the suspension of their physical awareness and unify in sanguineous sanctification. This act, to a certain degree absurd, sustains the paradoxical nature of Breyer P-Orridge’s work. Of course the artists cannot expel their spirits and synthesize into a third entity, such as a bunny. But at the same time they can. Is this not the undying question of art? Is something “art” because one ordains it as such, or is there a factual criteria we can hold it to?

The intensity Breyer P-Orridge brings to many media (sculpture, installation, sound, poetry, etc.) in one exhibition is a remarkable display of an ever-probing mind. S/he is abundantly generous in sharing h/er process and discoveries and for that, we may thank h/er for showing us how to yoke belief to practice and alter our perception of everything.

The post H/er Transformative Art: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge at the Rubin appeared first on artcritical.