July 30, 2016 to February 12, 2017
11 West 53rd Street (between 5th and 6th avenues)
New York, 212 708 9400

In a small, square room that branches diagonally from MoMA’s second-floor hallway, Teiji Furuhashi’s 1994 installation, Lovers, projects mutely dancing figures as dusky light onto gallery walls. Glistening like ice or the slick sterility of hospital vinyl floors, a white expanse of Marley unfurls across the gallery to meet black walls. Eyes adjusting to the low illumination, the glossy surface’s glare dominates vision, creating a sense of strange suspension. In the room’s center, the apertures of seven projectors, stacked in a spine-like tower, trace beams of light across the room’s varied contours. The hum of these machines is background and breath to the chirping pulse of the installation’s accompanying audio.

With steps that drag over the resistant surface, my motions are a material echo to the pale shadows that sidle over the surrounding walls. Starched white by the projectors’ thin lights, the dancers of Dumb Type — the artist collective that Teiji helped found in 1984 — patrol the room’s perimeter, moving along the screen-like walls. The nude figures of men and women move in synchronicity or lethargic pursuit of each other through the room’s corners and planes. One man dashes with long, dramatic strides through the rectangular frames of the walls, trailing a woman who, like Daphne to this young Apollo, is ever just beyond reach. Her short hair alive with the staccato of hurried steps, she moves counter-clockwise through the encircling walls to fade out, eroded by the harsher light of the exit. Following and overtaking the nude figures, vertical lines inscribed “limit” and “fear” rove the space, mapping the geographies of bodies and walls alike as though scanning barcodes.

As the room grows close with people, these specters move through their choreographies on a stage of flesh, illuminating viewers in a fluid projection whose bare feet are just visible through the legs of onlookers.  This shifting crowd dances with the flickering lights, which hurry the periphery to catch intimate movements even as the audience reciprocally turns to trace their gleaming paths. To enter the space is to join in the motions of the work. A man exits the room and a luminous dancer hastens to follow. I am looking down at my notebook when a figure passes over me and through me.

The installation’s austere design recalls an early ‘90s vision of futurity, imagined by one who would never get to see it; Teiji passed from AIDS-related illness in the month following the work’s original installation at MoMA in 1995. The barren simplicity of the installation hosts cruel contrasts: alive with motion and sound, but grave-like in darkness and intimacy, playing across viewers’ bodies, but aloof in the hollowness of its engagement. There is a sense of having entered someone, only to be confronted by the loneliness of fear, vulnerability, and unrequited desire. A man and woman are projected to overlap, bending towards one another, arms cradling air. The Venn diagram of their intersecting bodies is a thin, elongated silhouette, a symbolic convergence that only approximates union.

In spite of the title and the dancers’ nudity, Lovers does not emphasize romance or physical closeness, but rather the uncomfortable coupling of loving and dying, the intoxicating terror of the “little death.” Tracing their movements like memories repeated over and again, the dancers pass through the installation without leaving impressions, ghosts as ineffectual as they are impotent. Do their fleeting pursuits seek the comfort of touch or flee the realization of solitude? However, the desolate fear of abandonment is overshadowed by hints of a more final end; in prone bodies and flat horizontals, reminiscent of the flat line of a cardiograph gone flat, is the recognition not of losing but of being lost. Musing on the hope of forever that is implicit in the creative act, Lovers asks what our gestures — in life and in love — amount to when all is said and done? Despite, and perhaps because of, these grim indications of mortality, Teiji dances on in this cyclical video work, a dream ever in danger of obsolescence. We see him moving alongside his fellow dancers. Flickering into sight, he stands crucified with arms outstretched at the crosshairs of intersecting vertical and horizontal lines. Wavering in and out of focus, he hesitates before falling away with the grace and control of a diver, passing into nothingness beyond museum walls.

The post So Slow It Stopped: Teiji Furuhashi at MoMA appeared first on artcritical.

June 21 to August 5, 2016
519 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 7100

In 1975, Bas Jan Ader disappeared while sailing the Atlantic. This sail was the second part of his trilogy In Search of the Miraculous. Part one is comprised of 18 black-and-white photographs of the artist walking through various parts of Los Angeles at night. The third part never happened. Metro Pictures’ exhibition includes several photographs, two wall-drawing installation pieces, and two short films and reveals that Ader’s work is still relevant, pointed, droll, and strange — perhaps more so now than in 1970s California. The mysterious details of his disappearance create an added allure, even over 40 years after his death. However, it’s not necessary (and perhaps impossible) to separate the details of his death from his life and work, as his work is a confluence of autobiography and conceptualism wherein the viewer follows the artist while he walks, searches, and falls. While I was in the gallery, I overheard someone ask the attendant: “So what do you think, is he dead or not?” I couldn’t make out the response.

Ader’s work edges action and inaction. He illustrates what happens when gravity takes over: the elements get free and the body falls. This might be why his work feels so natural: it feels more like a practice than a performance. In the understated photographs of documented falls, I feel as if I’m watching a person practice falling. Another way of saying this might be: I’m watching a person decide to let gravity take over. Or, finally: I’m watching a person practice dying . It’s funny. Ader’s body is lean and tree-like, making the falls comical and graceful. He falls off of a roof, off of a bridge and into water (one frame depicts only the aftermath, a splash), and he falls from a standing position to a lying down position with no middle information. We never see him get up from the fall. Instead, the photographs end at the bodiless frame — all gravity.

These understated photographs line the walls leading to Please don’t leave me (1969). In this first installation, light bulbs and wire highlight the title’s words, painted on the wall. This politely sad command reminds me that Ader is the subject of his work and he is never not alone. And it’s not only the artist who falls, it’s everything. In Untitled (Tea Party) (1972), six color photographs are aligned vertically. In this first image, Ader sits outside under a cardboard box. The box is propped up by a stick and Ader sips from a teacup. The sequence shows the box’s fall after the stick’s removal. The final photograph depicts a box in the field. The artist is presumably under the box. He makes a situation and then allows for its undoing. He sets himself up as the subject and then leaves.

The gallery’s passageway holds a monitor, which plays a short color video, Primary Time (1974). The frame holds the middle section of Ader’s body. The artist is dressed in all black, arranging a set of flowers in a vase. The flowers are red save for a few yellow and one blue. This repetitive action creates a bridge to the second installation piece, Thoughts unsaid, then forgotten (1973), where a tripod, a vase filled with flowers, and a clamp-on lamp sit around the title words. The work is melancholic but is not weighted with gravitas. Untitled (The Elements) (1971/2003), depicts a large seascape with a cliff at sunset. Ader’s body stands in the approximate middle. He faces the camera and holds a sign reading “Fire.” He is pointing to the only element not present in the photograph.

The show toggles between revealing and hiding, searching and giving up. Hollywood tropes mix with Ader’s absurdist gestures. In thinking about the aftermaths of these practices — a big splash (Ader’s body is out of the frame, in the river) or an empty roof (Ader’s body is out of the frame, on the ground) or a cardboard box (Ader’s body is inside the box), I return to the idea of practicing falling — practicing leaving — the Earth. This is maybe the most useful practice one can engage in.

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June 24 to August 26, 2016
12 Berkeley Street (between Stratton Street and Mayfair Place)
London W1J 8DT, +44 20 7491 0100

The distinguishing feature of Bas Jan Ader is the way he brings personal feeling and its hinterland of autobiography into a conceptual practice. That’s what makes him a “Romantic,” topped off by the mysterious manner of his death. Add the counter-intuitive combination of Modernist art history (with Piet Mondrian as focal point) and slapstick à la Buster Keaton, and you have much of Ader’s context. That dovetails with both his Dutch origins and his American residence from 1963, including the final five years which yielded his oeuvre. That consists of just 35 mature works, so it’s unsurprising that Simon Lee has not unearthed the previously overlooked — indeed, the content here is close to Camden Arts Centre’s 2006 retrospective — but the gallery does make an exemplary presentation of seminal pieces, supported by still photographs which acted as studies towards the films.

The most potent biographical interpretation takes us back to the Nazi execution of Ader’s father, who harbored Jews. I’m Too Sad To Tell You (1970–71), the film in which Ader cries, gains from the possibility — but not necessity — that he might be recalling that event and what it says about humanity. Here, the silent black-and-white image is presented on 16mm through a clattering projector with the artist’s head projected to triple life size — factors which undercut the immediacy of the emotion. We’re reminded of the gap between art and life.

Ader’s famous “falling” films are presented as a continuous loop, again on the original 16mm, allowing their similarities and differences to come to the fore. Five times a fall occurs, and in each case the artist disappears from view as a result: in Fall 1, Los Angeles (1970), he tumbles from a chair on an LA roof and into the garden’s bushes; Fall 2, Amsterdam (1970) sees him vanish beneath the water after he and his bicycle tumble into a canal; in Broken fall (geometric) (1971), he ends up in a ditch at the side of the road following the failure of what look far from determined efforts to remain upright. Broken fall (organic) (1971), opens with Ader hanging to a tree, until he loses his grip — like a leaf in autumn — and again vanishes into a canal beneath. Nightfall (1971), not only introduces a pun but applies the process to an object, a stone which Ader drops onto the scene’s lighting, so plunging him into the invisibility of darkness. Ader is often seen as relinquishing control to gravity in these films, but his agency is clear enough in the action of Nightfall, and arguably in Broken Fall (geometric) as well. Moreover, he has set up the effects of gravity in the other three films. The more consistent themes in this set of works are absurdity (again emphasising the gap between art and life) and, given the final vanishing enacted in each, the implication of death. That makes it equally feasible to read them as versions of the fall of Ader’s father, shot in the woods; as plays on the biblical fall from grace; or as existentialist commentaries inspired by Ader’s favourite author, Albert Camus, and in particular his Amsterdam-set novel The Fall (1956).

Broken Fall (geometric) also reflects on Mondrian: the road, we can see, leads to a windmill which features in several of his early paintings. And Ader’s thin form, dressed in black, makes the vertical line Mondrian would have approved — before Ader falls into the diagonal apostolically introduced by Theo van Doesberg. And Mondrian takes centre stage in the remaining works. On the road to a new Neo-Plasticism, Westkapelle, Holland (1971) also shows Ader before “Mondrian’s windmill,” but this time imitating the structure of his classic abstract compositions as he lies— playing dead, perhaps — on a blanket on the ground. In the film Primary Time (1971), we see the black-clothed Ader successively rearrange a multi-colored vase of flowers by adding and removing blooms so that exclusively red, yellow and blue bouquets remain. This, too, is somewhat absurd, and a potentially Sisyphean task is implied. Primary Time could be regarded as a painting reversed into its constituent colors to underline the clichés in the traditions of Dutch floral art, or as a claim that nature can provide a purer outcome than Mondrian’s more artificial reductions.

This grouping of work brings Beckett to mind as much as Camus: Ader performs pointless tasks and sets himself up for failure. Yet the sense is that attempting the apparently pointless is better than giving up, and when he cedes control it comes across as a strategic decision, not a lack of engagement. In his last act, he ceded considerable control to the elements by taking on the Atlantic crossing in a smaller boat than had anyone before him — not fatefully, the rest of his work suggests to me, but experimentally.

All of which is to say: Ader remains poignant and relevant. And if this show fitted a little too well with the air of gloom which descended on London following the decision to leave the European Union, perhaps Ader’s embrace of the ridiculous could be read a message of hope.

The post The Fall: Bas Jan Ader at Simon Lee, London appeared first on artcritical.

Dia: Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, NY, 845 440 0100

“Isn’t she so kind and warm?” Dia’s PR staff swooned as they took turns leaning into me. I watched the artist and host Isabel Lewis float past her guests while circling her wrists into widening arcs. “Hi, welcome.” Lewis cooed as she spun around and drifted through the clusters of curious people sipping their Summer Ale, lovingly provided by Brooklyn Brewery. I myself held an eco-friendly carton of water, which I had plucked out from one of the ice buckets scattered around the back of the immense space.

I was at Dia: Chelsea’s garage party loft, like one of those factory-turned-nightclubs in Williamsburg where you are a minority if you don’t have a tattoo. The music, interior, and vibes felt hip, too. Chic white couches were scattered throughout the space where exotic plants (Spanish moss and air plants) hung from the ceiling or sat on top of the furniture. Some visitors clutched their beers around the round tables with wiry legs. Mysterious speaker-like boxes emitted a faint scent concocted by the artist’s collaborator Sissel Tolaas, a Norwegian chemist and olfactory researcher. The bass-heavy music (composed by Lewis herself) began as quiet pulses and escalated into mobilizing booms. A few couples got up from the long white couches to step to increasingly dance-friendly beats. I declined to take from a plate of vegan hors d’oeuvres; pickled vegetables, said one of the PR staff flanking me. The air felt sultry after the rainstorm had passed — the lingering humidity fit the environment created by the artist.

Berlin-based artist Isabel Lewis comes from a background in choreography and literary criticism. While she lived in New York City from 2004 to 2009, she presented her dance works at major hot spots such as Dance Theater Workshop, the Kitchen, and New Museum. She has created and presented site-specific “occasions,” such as this one commissioned by Dia, to choreograph not just the movements of people’s bodies, but also their olfactory, visual, auditory, and gustatory experiences.

At first I was skeptical. Wasn’t this just another party with some pretentious art people? The hostess and DJ happened to be an artist, but this Friday night “occurrence” didn’t seem so different from other exhibition openings, aside from the original music and some interrupting philosophical lectures. Surely this work is a reference to the happenings of the 1950s and ‘60s. But Allan Kaprow did weird things like throw tires; nothing seemed weird in Lewis’s occurrence at all.

Shortsighted judgment. Nothing weird is precisely the point of Lewis’s work. The artist had created a modern-day happening in a way that addressed our contemporary climate and needs. In the late 1950s and ‘60s, throwing hundreds of tires into a room made sense because it radically merged mundane everyday life with so-called elevated art. On the other hand, strange acts now do not merge the everyday and “high” art, but rather create a greater disparity between real life and the mysterious luxury called art. This is now truer than ever with the post-1980s art market and celebrity culture surrounding a select number of big-shot artists. Art is an inaccessible luxury of the 1% who can afford to visit a gallery or museum during work hours. Art is an inaccessible language spoken and understood by a select few — the more cryptic and exclusive that language, the better and truer the art it refers to.

Lewis brings art back to the rest of us. She understands the function and purpose of art to be a connector — among ourselves and between us and the cosmos. I agree. Art was once a practical necessity for survival. Art not only helped the people of the pre-writing age pass down wisdom, but also brought a community together through collective sensory experience.

During one of her lecture interruptions on the Friday night occasion, Lewis spoke of “erotic sociability,” a concept articulated by scholar Roslyn W. Bologh in Love or Greatness (1990). To the artist, erotic sociability can guide us back to where art should take us, but often no longer does. She invites the rest of us — the ones with full-time jobs to support ourselves and our families — to unwind after another day when we had to sacrifice true connection in the name of practical survival. She invites the rest of us to follow her on a short escape from the city to a languid waterside upstate, where we are allowed quiet contemplation and a return to the larger universe where we all belong.

The artist prepared an aperitif for our one-and-a-half-hour trip to Beacon. On the way to the occasion, Lewis primed us with a streamable mixtape with tracks that correspond with each stop, beginning at Grand Central Terminal. The mixtape is meant to be a companion to her occasions, and was a collaboration between the artist, Dia, and the MTA. The tracks begin with voices and familiar sounds of the city but slowly ease into a gentle rhythmic beat that continues at the site up north. At Scenic Hudson’s Long Dock Park in Beacon, the host didn’t work the room like on Friday, but stepped back after providing the tools for each of us to fulfill our private but neglected tasks of connecting to the cosmos, the natural world.

Lewis, leading us from the city to upstate, brings us back to where we must return, a place to meditate and to connect back to each other and the world. In the midst of human priorities, we often forget the importance of true connection to each other and to the natural world, so much that we become blind to the destruction that our oblivion and negligence has caused to ourselves. In a contemporary society in which screens and devices increasingly distance us from each other, feigned connections destroy genuine empathy and lead to destructive hatred. Lewis — as host, as choreographer — directed us to that place where she waited with music that beat to the splash of waves. She directed us to a place where 15 dancers came and went, swaying with their eyes closed as though they were intoxicated from the salty air and regular beat under the sound of water.

Lewis’s background as a choreographer is clear in her latest work at Dia: her aim is to direct people’s movements into a carefully drafted trajectory. And she succeeds. She does for us what we need from art. We often forget one of art’s most important functions, which is to unite us through a collective sensory experience. She provides us this platform, not through years of expensive art education or through knowing all the right people, but through something all of us do — eat, drink, dance, talk, and play — at a time when most of us can be there to do it together. Lewis gives us what is usually a luxury for the few who can afford not to work during gallery or museum hours: art that the rest of us can partake in too.

The post Back to the Rest of Us: Isabel Lewis at Dia appeared first on artcritical.

June 2 to June 4, 2016
512 W 19th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 255 5793

What is dust but history settling itself? Yvonne Rainer’s latest permutation of the ongoing project, The Concept of Dust, performed at The Kitchen, began quite literally with the death of an author. The stage was empty save for a white towel, pillow, and grey folding chair. The dancers, as they walked on stage, appeared not serious but devastated. Rainer began to speak: “I have a sad announcement to make tonight. One of our members won’t be here; Pat Catterson died last night.” Before the audience could react, a voice yelled from offstage, “No, what the fuck, Yvonne? What are you trying to do, get rid of me?” The forced farce — Catterson’s response sounded like that of an overly dramatic television actress — triggered first nervous, then genuine laughter from the audience as Catterson and Rainer eyed each other warily in the center of the floor. Though as the dance progressed this beginning increasingly faded from memory, the concept of lost, disembodied, or assumed voices became the spine of the piece.

Catterson soon, again, became the central figure as she began to tap dance, explaining as she danced:

During the voyage from Africa, slaves were occasionally brought up from the ship’s hull and made to dance. They were worth money now, and the physical exercise helped keep them alive. Imagine what this meant: they did routines that a month or two earlier had been part of the observance of their religion, or the celebration of a feast day, or the expression of their relationship with their grandparents. Anyone who hears this story will feel the burden of reconciliation built into tap.

With this speech — which was likely found text, as indicated by Rainer in her text on the piece — Catterson turns the once-comic atmosphere shades darker. While some of the dancers’ ensuing movements are intentionally stilted and quotidian, they can no longer be quite as amusing as much of the audience seemed to believe, laughing along. Instead, the movements and voices begin to feel hysterical. As slow violin music plays, a low and incoherent woman’s voice is subtly woven into the soundscape as if it were a subconscious murmur conducting the dancers, who improvisationally iterate small, choreographed passage of movement. Their imperfect coordination conveys informality reminiscent of rehearsal. Combined with the hysterical impulses woven into the choreography, this informality surfaces Rainer’s concern for the elemental chaos within the apparent order of daily life, which also comes through in her chosen texts. Dust is the ultimate mark of quotidian life, for it can only exist among whatever has become so routine as to be neglected.

The informality and familiarity of the dancers’ motions also allows each dancer to communicate their personality; with time, one notices how the same move looks different across bodies. Fifth position arms look best on the dancer who moves most lightly and elegantly. In ballet, the merging of body with gesture may be desirable, but in this choreography Rainer seems more interested in pointing to the citation of movement, paralleling the citation of text. Here, the same move looks best on the body that performs it most unnaturally, thus highlighting the difference between a routine and learned movement. And again, given the forced look of these movements on the dancers’ bodies,Catterson’s mention of being “made to dance” boils to the surface.

Rainer’s quoted texts are compiled in a stapled packet of papers, which she flips through during the performance, first while sitting in a chair at the edge of the stage, and then while running to the side of a dancer to ask them to read an excerpt. Most of them do so willingly, but some run away as Rainer approaches. When she finally catches up, she captures in her microphone only a gasp or guttural sound. But that appears satisfactory, as if “gasp” were part of the text. Though largely disconnected, and from sources including the Metropolitan Museum and New York Times, some texts are identified, such as excerpts from Kingsley Amis and from Maureen N McLane’s My Poets (2012). Rainer may introduce these partly for amusement, but also because they seem to be neglected stories: later in the dance, she reads a story about a young black man who was wrongly arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia, beaten up in jail, and later released but with permanently damaged eyes. By blowing the dust off of these stories, one brings them back into the present, calls attention to their contemporary relevance.

Citations are defined by their removal from an original context. Because the performers may rearrange the phrases of the dance as they perform — and presumably Rainer may rearrange the order of the spoken texts — it is not their sequence or trajectory but rather their similarities that reveal Rainer’s intentions. In one phrase of the dance, the lights turn off completely. A voice speaks, that of an invisible narrator. She recites the history of a fossil. As she reads, one can hear that she is reading from a printed text, for she repeats some words and mispronounces others. Stumbling over words and imperfectly miming movements are both acts of citation. They also allow the voices and motions of history to become personalized, no longer omnipotent and objective. History is defined by its belonging to the past; it is made visible only in its residues, its accumulation of context: references, citations and dust.

The post Dust Settling: Yvonne Rainer Choreographs History at The Kitchen 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.

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February 5 to April 27, 2016
1071 5th Avenue (at 88th Street)
New York, 212 423 3500

Lying limp on the Guggenheim Museum’s lower landing, Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s empty rat and panda costumes nicely encapsulate the pathetic silliness found in much of their work. The title of this retrospective, “How to Work Better,” encompasses the kind of sly, self-deprecating humor about everyday activity for which the pair became known through their 33-year collaboration. In the presences of the empty costumes, it has an air of regret about it — as a driver cursing her broken down car: “maybe next time you’ll learn ‘how to work better.’”

Most notably, “How to Work Better” is a statement about the artists’ decades-long “learning by doing” approach to making art, in which self-study leads to aesthetic wholeness. Their approach echoes the position taken by John Dewey and his Pragmatist cohort — in opposition to René Descartes — that thinking can never be divorced from being. To know the truth of a proposition, we need to test it out in the real world.

The pair began investigating the stuff of everyday life in their 1979 Sausage series. This collection of photos shows amateurish dioramas of ordinary situations, often with sausage as a building material. The Accident, for example, depicts a collision of sausage cars, while The Carpet Shop uses sliced lunchmeat to represent stacked rugs. Fischli and Weiss’s supermarket creations are a deflating tweak to the self-important abstraction and high conceptualism that was the hallmark of that era.

The artists take another poke at profundity in Order and Cleanliness (1981). Consisting of a series of hand-lettered sheets, this work is a taxonomy of opposed but not fully opposite ideas, laid out in every type of graphic format: Venn diagrams, figure eights, Möbius strips. The pages of this textbook of higher truths are, on closer inspection, full of digressions and non-sequiturs. “Cops,” “students,” and “musicians,” lie on a continuum from stupidity to light, while a tree of technological innovations appears inexplicably next to a smaller tree of love. Mildly entertaining though it is, this presentation is neither orderly nor clean. It effectively dismisses the idea that separating information into pure categories has any purpose.

The attempt to systematize knowledge results in full-blown chaos in Suddenly this Overview (1981/2006). With its 200 unfired clay vignettes, mostly rendered in a child-like way, this sprawling work is like one person’s random perusal of Wikipedia. Subjects include zoology (“Hippopotamus,” “Rhizome”), history (“The Landing of the Allies in Normandy“), moments ascribed to historical figures (“Nero Enjoying the View of Rome Burning”) or to prehistoric ones (“Dog of the Inventor of the Wheel Feels the Enjoyment of his Master”), or to proverbial ones (“Strangers in the Night Exchanging Glances”). There is the occasional mathematical abstraction (“Endless Loop”), which gets equal billing with the expression of childish contempt for learning (“Hooray the School is Burning”).

Casting the artists in their own nonsensical vignette is the 1980-81 video The Least Resistance, in which the pair makes a whirlwind tour of Los Angeles on a quest to make a movie. The video’s high drama, which includes a helicopter flight accompanied by triumphant music, is undercut by the fact that the two are donning the same rat and panda costumes on display at the beginning of the exhibition.

In spite of the riotous fun these artists make of the self-consciously profound, there is a seriousness to this work and a visual quietude to its outward appearance. The bulk of the exhibition is in black, white and gray, and many of the works are very unfunny copies of mundane objects. Walls, Corners, Tubes (2009-12) consists of large-scale three-dimensional forms in black rubber and gray unfired clay, which resemble the pieces used to build a sewer. These are displayed next to a video of a seemingly endless journey through just such a place, Kanal Video (1992), which was shot in the Zürich sewer system. Works like these are as focused as Suddenly this Overview is distracting. It’s not so much that Fischli and Weiss are on a hunt for the chaotically absurd, it’s that they encounter it as a matter of course during their trip through the everyday.

In a world where one has to travel to the sewer to experience mathematically perfect forms, Fischli and Weiss’s investigations make a lot of sense. Their dogged insistence on repeating what is in front of them, coupled with their contempt for the certainties of black-and-white thinking, makes for a truthful depiction of the world. As John Dewey notes, “compartmentalization of occupations and interests brings about separation of that mode of activity commonly called ‘practice’ from insight, of imagination from executive doing, of significant purpose from work, of emotion from thought and doing. “How to Work Better” exhibits the artists’ decades-long laboratory of real-world testing — and their discovery that levity and profundity are not so far apart.

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February 18 to February 20, 2016
512 West 19th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 255 5793

In the tradition of Trisha Brown’s dance diagrams, Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard presented an intricate work at The Kitchen, called For Claude Shannon, with its own palette of densities, gestures, and articulations. Each performance is individually coded “using the syntactic structure of a sentence by Claude Shannon,” the influential founder of information theory, which is translated into a combination of movement “atoms,” forming a kind of algorithmic lexicon.

As I entered the black box theatre, speakers emitted sounds like air vents blowing in an airplane, always too cold. My “vent” turns closed; my hearing shifts to another aisle.

After awhile, I begin to wonder if this performance will ever start, if the lights will ever dim, if the audience will begin to check their watches and then realize, half an hour into the performance, that it had already begun before they walked into the room. “The dancers begin to learn this particular choreographic sequence two hours before the public enters the space,” we have been told, “and continue this learning process during the performance.” We watch them learn.

The fans all close. Four bodies turn to face us.

One of the three female dancers lifts her arms, holding an expanding bubble. Her male partner’s left leg rises imperceptibly, then again more pointedly as hers lifts, too. Another female dancer’s torso turns. I concentrate on the small sound of a shoe’s sole — with tiny, pebbled bumps, it seems — lifting off a flat floor, as if adhesive.

They move so slowly that if I stop to trace one, as I would like to do, I miss the subtlety of the others’ movements. An arm held perpendicular or parallel to the floor, a leg either supporting or extending diagonally away from the body — these are the movements to which I become attuned, looking for symmetry or failure.

The farthest female dancer’s eyes blink rapidly, like shutters, as all turn to face each other. They are suddenly, now, in coordination, at least for a moment. Their slipper shoes create a soundscape, within which they weave closer together, folding their arms like leaves of creased paper to create an origami box. I feel tension, can’t breathe too hard for fear of coughing and interrupting the intensity of their concentrated gazes.

Closer, nearly intersecting, then apart, one movement at a time, they drift. The dance becomes a waiting game.

Then, a prick of disbelief: two touch! And one goes still. I read in her immobility the shock of having been interrupted during a mechanical sequence. Yet this is not an inhuman dance; if it were, we would not sense their effort and uncertainties, hesitations and unravelings.

Why these “atoms” of movement? Never two arms up together, never two legs straddled apart. Is the sequence there, written on the floor like Braille or Morse code in black strips of alternating lengths and positions? Is Shannon’s phrase a chain link through their limbs?

They dance in dress clothes. The lights never change. How are the pauses, turns, positions, and relative durations of each movement determined? What portion of sequences are repeated? Does a choreography determined by a form of speech count as one of chance? What was the phrase that we now must exhaust?

Eventually they return again to their original positions. They pause, then begin to move in synchrony. Gradually, the air pressure changes, which we experience as shifts in pitch, crackles like static in the soundscape, and popping ears in a disjointed physicality. One dancer breaks out of line and another follows, then returns. Was that a mistake? A moment of learning?

The sound is now regular, having incorporated the static clicks into a new beat. Each body moves in sync, but each turns individually until none face forward.

A word is uttered. Was it from the audience?

Again. No, it came from the stage.

“Either”
“Accidentally”
“Passage”

They are revealing the phrase.

“Selecting”

But this is too easy, too obvious, for them to expose the mechanism behind the dance.

“Use”
“One”
“Wait”
“A”
(“Minute”?)

I want to think. But the phrase is incomplete.
The clicks pick up, coordinating time and dictating movement.

“Point,” spoken all together. They move quite quickly now, nearly fluidly. The clicks sound like two blocks clacked together, as in Joan Jonas’s Song Delay (1973). The spatiality of sound seems important but does not clearly correspond to their configurations on stage. The words come too quickly to record now, and I wonder when the sound will mark a tempo too fast for them to follow. Who will collapse? Which atoms will be sacrificed?

Then, the dancers are still. Can they not continue? Has the phrase ended?

One dances again, so quickly, as if tap dancing. Another begins, too. The clicks pick up again to the point of becoming static, so loud that they obscure the sound of the dancers’ voices. Sometimes a body will pause, as if to remember its place in the sequence. Is this learning? What are the stakes? How can we know when they have failed?

Static turns to hail. They speak louder but move elegantly. They must fight their inertia.

New movements emerge out of transitory positions: a leg raised too high, a jump kick, a sideways stance, a lunge.

Then a diagonal movement by one dancer across the floor— there have been none thus far — and the heaviness of the bass begins to parallel the new heaviness of their bodies.

Yet this improvisational segment lasts too long; rather than demonstrating a collapse of the code or a fracture, it becomes a new segment in itself, forcing me to lose my hold on the atoms that seemed so clearly defined from the start. Or was that the intention, for us to unlearn what the dancers had learned only “two hours before the public enters the space”? The chance of subjective improvisation has trumped the chance of an atomic composition.

Finally, the beat slows. The bass fades and the clicks return to irregular taps. Jostling bodies move but without grandiose gestures.

All face the front.

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Erika Blair: This is Only A Test at Rope
February 20, 2016
508 W. Franklin Street (between N. Pace Street and Pennsylvania Avenue)
Baltimore, MD

Erika Blair’s “This is Only A Test” was staged at Baltimore’s Rope Gallery the same week that a much-publicized legal battle between Apple and the Federal Bureau of Investigation intensified. Apple rejected the FBI’s demand that the computer company develop a method to hack its own phones so that the Bureau could glean data about Islamist mass murderers in San Bernardino, California. Apple rightly pointed out that the Bureau basically wants access to everyone’s phone. All this comes in the wake of previous failures by Apple to secure its users’ data, and 15+ years of government imperiously sucking up as much private information about citizens as possible.

At Rope, Blair presented a stark scene. Within the small gallery’s main space a short plinth supported a desktop HP printer. Three surveillance cameras were mounted around the room and the printer would regularly spit out photos selected by the artist from each camera’s live stream. Blair was sequestered in the basement, monitoring the scene on three laptops, a bit like the stereotypical spook from movies: slightly hunched in an industrial space repurposed as clandestine surveillance HQ.

At regular intervals, sound from massive speakers positioned next to Blair would rumble out a message appropriated from Chicago’s 1990s-era Emergency Broadcast System: “The Chicago broadcasters are participating in a required monthly testing of the Chicago emergency broadcast system. This system was developed to provide information to the public during an emergency. This is only a test.” It was deafening above, through the floorboards, and even more brutal below. The show ended up as a kind of three-hour performance — the artist enduring against extremely loud noise, against cramped quarters and discomfort, against the dreary monotony of a stakeout.

The EBS was developed so that the president (starting with Kennedy) could quickly reach the American public in the event of an emergency, presumably nuclear war or apocalyptic crisis. Although it now seems antiquated, other, less visible systems have usurped it. In May 2009, the Sri Lankan government announced a final victory over the insurgent Tamil Tigers by sending a text message to all of the nation’s civilians. And the Amber Alerts that pop up on cell phones are not only indicative of public concern for kidnapping victims, but also of the power of government and telecommunications firms to collude in both gathering information from and disseminating information to citizens, which is creepy. The feeling of benignity that attends the EBS system is actually a desensitization to the intrusion of power into private spaces, one now heightened by our habituation to even more intrusive mechanisms, including the proliferation of surveillance cameras and the legally sanctioned collection of data.

Viewers walked through the gallery, socializing and drinking beer, but eventually most of them ended up in the small storefront space near the entrance, standing or seated on the floor and windowsill, talking. This is probably in part because of the assaultive noise and the storefront’s greater seating opportunities, but one might also wonder if having your photo taken semi-surreptitiously over and over, and seeing it printed out in the middle of a room, have something to do with the main gallery’s emptiness. Given the opportunity, people probably want to avoid being spied on. Without explicit prodding, their behavior changed merely by the inhibitive coercion of inspection.

The forces shaping the battle between Apple and the FBI — and, more importantly, a broader conflict between the American people and their government — have also formed the nexus that Blair is exploiting. What she calls “surveillance capitalism” comes in seemingly greater quantities from the longstanding military-industrial complex, trickling down into regular civil life. You can buy surveillance cameras cheaply, and access them from afar. The technology that inspired Blair’s use of sound, long-range acoustic devices, has moved from battlefields to urban crowd control and dispersal, such as at several Occupy encampments during 2011. And LRAD operate by principles similar to the parabolic loudspeakers now sometimes found in galleries or museums trying to minimize sound bleed in exhibitions.

The fallout of the Kennedy assassination (another of Blair’s favorite subjects) culminated, in part, in the Church Committee of 1975 and the House Select Committee on Assassinations of 1976, which reinvestigated many of the preceding decades’ most infamous state crimes, and seriously discredited the legitimacy of the US government, starting with the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI. People had known that covert surveillance had gone on, but the vast and intrusive extent of it was made plainly clear for the first time. Perhaps we’re seeing a replay of those same reconsiderations of federal power, 40 years later, as we remember that intrusion into the lives of private citizens is actually completely corrosive to democracy, even if, at the outset, the oversight seems restricted and beneficent. There is an opportunity coming, possibly, for people to reevaluate their relationship to political and policing authority, if it is felt and understood with the urgency one experiences as blaring sound waves rattle one’s skull. Each small intrusion is a test of what limits a community places on power. What’s the current threshold?

The post “The object of power is power”: Erika Blair at Rope Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

Curated by Carl E. Hazlewood
January 23 through February 21, 2016
558 St Johns Place (between Classon and Franklin avenues)
Brooklyn, 718 783 4438

To walk through FiveMyles Gallery is to wade through a room thick with a palpable scent, spiced like cinnamon with the strength of musk. The space feels eerily empty, save for three spotlit works. They rest, silent and static, waiting to be activated. Amanda Turner Pohan’s solo show, “Desiring to be Data for Others,” is charged.

On the left, 18 bottles of Pulsating (2016) is affixed to the wall — clear Plexiglas shelves surrounding a medicine cabinet mirror. An uncomfortably rigid metal chair awaits a subject to be reflected. 15 glass bottles, symmetrically displayed along the shelves, surround the mirror. Each bottle is wrapped in a semi-transparent label resembling standardized nutrition facts for foodstuffs. But where “nutrition facts” would have been written, the text instead reads “Pulsating.” “Shower Fluid (8 oz)” replaces “Serving Size.” “Bodies” replaces “Amount per Serving.” Duration, Element, Time in seconds, Pulse in heartbeats, and Breath in ppm of CO2 are the new indices with which we are concerned. Instead of corresponding percentages of recommended daily values, corresponding essences (in drops of essential oils) have been recorded: cypress, parsley, and fir needle. The lighting of this dramatic scene further replicates each bottle into three shadows (or additional bottles in the case of those set in front of the mirror).

To understand the content of these bottles, a viewer must take in the rest of the scene. Behind the chair, closer to the opposite wall, a corner shower has been installed to stand with its back exposed so that the piping mechanism is visible. The shower is illuminated from within; the effect resembles a halo. While condensation obscures the view into the shower from the front doors, the side panels are clearer. A brown pool of viscous fluid gels around the drain with seemingly clear water dripping from the showerhead above. Walking behind the shower, one can understand this closed loop: an opaque plastic container, like a gasoline jug, both feeds the water supply and retains waste liquid from the drain. Input becomes output becomes input, changing simply by being processed by the system. But where did this fluid originate? Return to the glass bottles and the apparently closed loop of the shower expands to include the mirror scene; what once seemed like a sparse room immediately feels as dense as its pervading scent.

The shower fluid has then gone through several stages. In order to create this melange of essential oils, the artist broke down the human breathing mechanism into measurable elements. Pohan then translated those recorded quantities into scents. The number of bottles implies a repeated procedure, though it is unclear if each bottle contains a different scent from a different human given the obscurity of their labels. Finally, Pohan returned the fluid to a zone of intimacy and human “waste” (like CO2) in the shower.

If this intricate system requires such significant labor from the artist, why does it feel as though the artist had no part in this installation, as though these scenes simply exist? The impersonality of each component — rigid chair, sterile shower, and uniform medicinal bottles corresponding to nameless bodies — lends an institutionalized quality to the work. There is little inherent humanness to these mass-produced products despite their latent sexuality (in this room, or in the context of their domestic purpose) and relation to an individual human body performing a ritualistic exercise.

The third piece in the room, Remnants and residues from my deceased mothers rug (2016), appears distant from the others — a mat of many-colored fibers pasted to a clear material hangs horizontally on the far wall. This mat, we read, is an imprint of the artist’s late grandmother’s carpet, which has accumulated such debris as hair, threads, crumbs and dirt over time. The seemingly abstract composition is then in fact the residue of the remains of a chance performance (presumably by several people) of daily rituals and relationships. While this work relates to the shower and mirror scenes by virtue of its interest in the relationship between intimacy and institutional frameworks, its process reveals an unravelling of the artist’s control over performance and representation. While a series of procedures distanced the shower scene from the original “performers” of the work (the work being the creation of the breathing measurements that became the fluid), the carpet fiber imprint is forensically related to specific bodies and actions. The artist’s (and viewer’s) desire to quantify, sterilize, and reflect on the body from a distance falls apart in the realization that none of these works severs its tie to embodiment; instead, we are made nauseous by the presence of absent bodies.

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