September 6 – November 2, 2019
22 Cortland Alley, between White and Walker streets
New York City, andrewkreps.com

The Roe Ethridge exhibition, Sanctuary 2, that inaugurates Andrew Kreps new Tribeca gallery space sent me right back to that creepy, troubling feeling of nearly 20 years ago when I first experienced a photograph by this artist.

It was in 2000 at PS1’s Greater New York survey exhibition. The medium-sized, close-cropped color portrait of an attractive smiling young woman seemed initially unremarkable. But what was this lone photo doing in the context of such provocative young art? With her flawless skin, perfect hair and make-up, she could possibly be a model. Indeed, the photograph’s title was Ford Model Kathryn Neal (1999). Was it appropriation art, or a found rejected headshot? It was puzzling because although it seemed slickly banal like a commercial photo, there was something weird about it. Her expertly painted meticulously lipsticked crimson mouth was outsized, completely taking over the lower half of her face. There were dull reflections on her pupils that gave her eyes an unfocused quality, and the otherwise perfection of her look made her frozen smile seem increasingly, hideously, grimace-like, as if she had been produced in an android factory. What was the point here? And failing to be able to reach a conclusion, was that the point? Though we probably encounter hundreds of photographs per day, so few of them make us question their very purpose. I had never heard of the artist, but I remembered his fish eggs first name.

A challenging sense of disorientation links his uncanny disparate seeming photographs across years and motifs. Sanctuary 2 is a large show, extending to the scale of the works within it: Some of the 17 dye sublimation prints on aluminum extend six feet. So the fact that Ethridge has no signature style can be daunting. Even though the artist is a straight white, cis-male, these photographic works are genre fluid. It isn’t simply that Ethridge blurs the lines between art, fashion, and editorial but that he questions what constitutes the boundaries between those categories in the first place. There is, however, a precise subversion of the way we are accustomed to responding to photography.

Verrazano Bridge (2019), typically doesn’t seem particularly special at first, except for one detail that grows increasingly startling. In this almost, but not quite colorless, large photo (there is a little patch of green grass on the left and a small blue sign on the right), the bridge arcs distantly in from the left past a London plane tree, whose trunk and network of bare branches frame the picture. Every detail seems precisely, formally placed, from the way the end of the bridge disappears into a line of fog just past the midpoint, to the way the rectangle and arched hole of one of its towers is located almost in the center of the picture. Our view is from a sidewalk, separated from the water of the Narrows Strait by a parallel fence decorated with metal cutouts of sea creatures. The manufactured regularity of the fence bars stands in contrast to the organic expansion of tree branches at the top.

All this ordinarily might make for a nice but unremarkable picture, but right smack between branches and water, exactly even with the tower of the bridge, is a little dark pigeon in midflight. Not blurred but highly defined, it is so disconcerting because of its perfection and stillness both in clarity and placement. The picture is so formally calibrated it seems staged, or photoshopped. But no, the gallery informs us Ethridge simply waited, taking hundreds of photos, until that particular breathtakingly banal moment occurred.

In contrast to the too perfect natural moment photos (like the almost six-by-four foot White Duck (2014), whose titular occupant floats in a pond with exactingly even wavelets interrupting its reflection), are the ‘flawed beauty’ pieces such as Oslo Grace at Willets Point (2019). What appears to be an attractive young woman with a long dark braid wearing either a pink flight attendant’s uniform and hat or a high fashion outfit, poses on an orange plastic tarp next to a still life of fruits and a soda can, right in the muddiest possible rutted parking lot leading to CitiField, its bullpen gate in the background. There are large pools of stagnant water, parked cars, and a random guy in a red hat walking away in the distance.

Gender and racial subtexts abound in Ethridge works. The name Oslo Grace may be familiar as the famous trans, non-binary model, which makes the gender of the person posing suddenly an additional ambiguity. One of their hands is buried in the still life and the other seems to be holding a wineglass filled with, of course, rosé, adding to the litany of red accents in the photo. Everything except Oslo Grace is relentlessly squalid, and yet there they sit protected from the mud on this orange tarp in their pristine outfit sipping wine. Though Grace is the ostensible subject of the photo they are rather dwarfed by the landscape. Is this an outtake from a bizarre fashion or ad shoot? Despite the strangeness of the scene, what is disconcerting is our inability to classify the function of the photograph.

Or you could simply think of these disconnects as dryly humorous. There is the picture of detritus, wilted flower petals, a tennis ball and cigarette stub, which may for some recall Irving Penn’s still lives, and sure enough, from the brand emblazoned on the tennis ball, the title is, Penn and Wet Butt (2019). Or the one-liner of a photo of a half empty ketchup bottle, which at quick glance seems to have strands of French fries shooting in from the side, a view belied by the title, White Asparagus and Ketchup (2019).

There is almost always a telling detail, which serves to derail the meaning train of the photos. The almost six-foot-long Nathalie with Hot Dog and Flag, 2014, while straight out surreal (she is wearing a pea coat sitting on a pale, (Caucasian) flesh-colored personified hot dog squirting ketchup and mustard on its head in front of an American flag), really goes off the tracks when you notice the bruise on one of Nathalie’s alabaster naked legs. Chin resting on fist, wearing a crystal necklace, red hair flowing like the flag stripes, coat buttons echoing flag stars, Nathalie dangles her left hand strangely provocatively between her parted legs. The gallery informs us that, five years later, Nathalie is now Nathan, for whatever that tells us.

And when you see a photograph like Mehdi on a Motorcycle (2019), that is entirely shades of white, silver, and gray from the fresh-off-the-assembly-line motorcycle to the futuristic, blindingly white sneakers worn by the male model with long wavy hair, whose smooth brownish skin becomes the only thing of color in the photo, is there a racial subtext or is that just in my white head? Probably that deadpan ambiguity, like in most Ethridge photos, is exactly the idea.

What artworks have to say about the nature of artistic control and how that control can be used to affect a viewer’s perception, and how that relationship between control and perception creates the idea of representation seems to be Ethridge’s purpose. In art, representation becomes the way an artist can play with an unacknowledged series of viewer assumptions, and when viewers are forced to confront the unstable nature of their assumptions, as in Ethridge’s photographs, reality begins to come undone. Or just enough to get you to see with more sophisticated eyes.

The post The Function of a Photograph: The Disconcerting world of Roe Ethridge appeared first on artcritical.

April 15 to September 3, 2018
22-25 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, momaps1.org

While mysticism likely conjures associations of fog rather than clarity, in the Acts of Appearance series by Indian artist Gauri Gill, a merging of myth and reality results in images that are crystal clear. These photographs, the heart of her exhibition at MoMA PS1, are so palpable in their presentness that a viewer feels they might walk into the scene.

The exhibition is #108 in the Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series, established at MoMA in 1971, and comprises 75 photographs, primarily pigmented inkjet prints from her ongoing Acts series (from 2015), along with images from another ongoing series, Notes from the Desert (from 1999). The Acts are colored photos of varying sizes that depict people going about their daily lives while wearing hand-crafted papier-mâché masks. The “actors” are members of the indigenous Kokna community in Maharashtra, India known for their mask-wearing Bahoda festival, in which, over a number of nights, they reenact Hindu and tribal myths through dance and masquerade. Setting out to re-contextualize this tradition within daily life, Gill commissioned local artists Subhas and Bhagvan Dharma Kadu (who are also cast members) to create a series of masks of everyday people, animals, and objects (rather than the usual festival animals, gods and demons), to be worn by volunteers going about quotidian tasks. Through this process, Gill interrogates the relationship between the mystic and the mundane.

These images are accompanied by Notes from the Desert: Smaller, predominantly black and white silver gelatin prints that feature various aspects of marginalized rural communities in Western Rajasthan, this series includes a subset, titled “The Marks on the Wall”, of murals on classroom walls decorated with words and images. The Notes act as a kind of support to the Acts in the show’s overall exploration of community and collaboration.

One of the first images visitors encounter, Sumri, daughter of Ismail the shepherd, Barmer, from the Notes series, is a prologue to the rest of the show. In it, a girl and a goat lean into one another, the girl’s arms wrapped around the goat, her face buried in its neck. The goat here acts like the masks in the Acts series, merging human and animal in a profoundly intimate moment. Across from Sumri hangs a seductive selection from the Acts in which women pose in or near their homes in various animal masks. For instance, a cobra-masked woman in a pink sari lounges on a couch beneath a window that diffuses warm daylight. Another room features a photograph of a male shopkeeper in a blue shirt wearing this same mask, carefully weighing some onions. In an image featuring both human and animal masks, an old woman reclines on a table at a doctor’s office and wears a mask of a worried-looking old woman. Behind her, a man in a rat mask (of the type often found in Indian hospitals) attends her head, standing in front of a white board, while a younger lady wearing a mask of a woman with a surprised expression hangs an IV. Other scenes of transformed activity include a trio of mammals playing a game on the floor, a bird joining two people on a motorcycle, and the sun and the moon walking down a dirt path, lighting their way in a soft glow. These images are cinematic and playful, a puppet show come to life. Although specific identities are hidden by the expressive masks, each actor appears as spectacularly individual in Gill’s compassionate staging and interpretation

Distributed among Acts of Appearance, the Notes feel like dream scenes, their black and white coloration reading like concept sketches. Rooms with writing on the walls appear to wait for a cast to arrive. In one from Notes, in fact, a woman with a mask halfway pulled up her face, covering her eyes but revealing her nose and below, sits on the floor, as if taking a break between posing. Although the Notes are discrete from the Acts, in this exhibition their intermingling creates the effect of frames from one jovial and whimsical film – Wes Anderson with a twist.

A cinematic interpretation was reinforced by a lack of traditional labels. In each room there was a small key that numbered each work and gave the series to which it belonged, and occasionally also a title (only for works from the Notes series). This lack of institutional labeling consistency from a MoMA affiliate was initially frustrating. For this viewer, my craving for narrative structure fought the sparse, commercial gallery-style hang. But after some time in the show, the jewel colored walls (painted deep blue, crimson, and saffron – inspired by vegetable dyes, indigo, madder, henna, and turmeric), together with the inherent playfulness of the imagery, actually left me relieved at the lack of labeling. Recalling Gauri Gill’s prompt to her Appearance actors to simply improvise and think about “what happens when we choose to self-reflexively ‘play ourselves’,” organizer Lucy Gallun refreshingly made the exhibition an exploratory space in which to move back and forth free from a linear, curatorially pre-digested interpretation. This made the warm wall colors and vibrant images seem all the more welcoming: Each tableau, with the unique rasas (emotions) portrayed on the masks, and the actors’ organic posing, were both relatable in their humanity and mysterious behind those beautifully crafted masks.

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September 9, 2016 to January 14, 2017
500 Capp Street (at 20th Street)
San Francisco, 415 872 9240

Skellig Michael, a rugged island off the southern coast of Ireland, is known for the austere, beehive-like monastery built there in the 6th century. In 1993, the Conceptual artist David Ireland and his friend, photographer and filmmaker Jane Levy Reed, traveled to Skellig Michael for inspiration for their 1994 exhibition, “Skellig,” at San Francisco’s Ansel Adams Center for Photography, a show that consisted of photographs of shared authorship, objects in his studio, and pages from their travel journals. Ireland was primarily a sculptor and painter, with this being his first major use of photography and film. Through it, Reed wrote, Ireland “sought to convey the monastic experience of Skellig as a metaphor for his own acts of artistic creation.” The name itself translates as “Splinter of Stone,” a reference that held special meaning for the artist.

That Skellig is now the subject of “The Echo,” the third curation at the newly opened 500 Capp Street Foundation, by Bob Linder and Diego Villalobos, the foundation’s co-curators. Linder was a student and personal friend of Ireland, and Villalobos was a student of Linder. The rooms of Ireland’s house have remained essentially as he left them, but, using documentary photography from the span of Ireland’s history in the house history, Linder and Villalobos curate additional artworks and objects (such as furniture) that contextualize of refer to the artworks within each quasi-quarterly exhibition.

Downstairs, viewers enter the Foundation into a former accordion workshop, where a suite of Ireland and Reed’s photographic works from the 1994 Ansel Adams show is hung. There are two images of a staircase carved into the sheer face of a cliff leading up from the sea to the island’s monastery, an ancient stone cross, and a wash basin, with jars, which may be from either Ireland’s own house or from the monastery. Rust-colored Constructivist squares are painted on top of the black and white photographs, with large areas masked by white paint, creating a play between documentation, illusion, and object. In one photograph in this entry space, viewers can see a repurposed band-saw machine for giving films the bobbing sensation of being afloat appears.

Ireland was born in Bellingham WA and studied printmaking at the California College of the Arts, before serving in the military. Afterward, he worked as a tour guide in Africa, a carpenter, an insurance salesman, and ran an African import shop on San Francisco’s high-rent Union Street. (Sculptures shaped like Africa or elephant ears can be found throughout the home, especially upstairs.) He returned to art school in his 40s, enrolling at the San Francisco Art Institute, and fell under the artistic influence of John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and especially Marcel Duchamp, who is pictured many times around the house, such as in Ireland’s bedroom and study.

Ireland purchased 500 Capp Street in 1975, and, like Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau, made the run-down Victorian not only a site for artistic production, but also an artwork itself. Resembling his prints of the time, the building’s walls emphasize their own hand working, cracks, and blemishes, glazed all over with polyurethane to preserve their history of imperfections. Paul Greub — the former occupant of 500 Capp Street, an accordion maker who ran his business out of his home for 45 years and, evidently, never threw anything away — provided Ireland with a treasure trove of readymades and inspiration: Greub’s hoard of old jars, old brooms, old chairs, old lamps, etc. There are small brass plaques that commemorate aspects of the renovation, as when Ireland helped Greub move a heavy safe out of the house by rope and plank, and the safe fell twice, damaging the walls and floors. Ireland installed two plaques at the base of two stairs to commemorate the event: The Safe Gets Away for the First Time November 5, 1975 and The Safe Gets Away for the Second Time November 5, 1975 (both 1975).

Upstairs, one finds more renovation projects, as well as a catalogue of Ireland’s work. Complexly twisted wires fall somewhere between sculpture and drawing. Several bookcases are filled with his own work and knickknacks, as well as Greub’s jars — filled with sawdust or other materials gathered in the house’s reworking. Ireland remarked on these as being like small exhibitions of their own. He made more than 200 “dumbballs,” small balls of concrete that were the by-products of his “meditations,” i.e. passing them back and forth between his hands, and which he duly stationed around his house, sometimes stuck in the corners of rooms or on the ceiling, other times carefully displayed in buckets or basins, or on tables.

There’s a great deal of natural light in the house, emphasized by the gloss of the urethane-coated walls. One room emphasizes this fact especially. Another, a dining room whose table is particularly full of sculptures, is slightly darker: an untitled piece is composed of a copper printing plate covering a window. A reel-to-reel tape is included here, of Ireland enumerating the things seen from that window, which had been broken, before sealing it entirely.

Two other rooms, a guest bedroom and a study, are stripped to their natural white state instead of the urethanic ochre. They reprise the Skellig photographs, with a contact sheet marked with a red cross, set on a shelf in the guest bedroom, and a Skellig photo on a desk in the study. Here also are several recurring images: a water buffalo skull from Africa; a picture of Duchamp and an homage to his In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), made with a shovel trapped in a banded cord of wood; several Constructivist-indebted paintings, including some on cardboard boxes; and memorabilia from Ireland’s life.

The rooms read like mysteries strewn with possible clues: an opened book on James Lee Byars, its pages burned, a sting of lights shaped like fishes from Ireland’s hometown, allusive sculptures, personal possessions. Ireland’s work is understated, beautiful and intriguing but not precious. In “The Echo, Linder and Villalobos honor Ireland’s life and art, much in the spirit of Ireland himself, who venerated and preserved the contents of the former owner of 500 Capp Street. Linder and Villalobos’s actions not only create a continuum, with Ireland’s intentions and work, but underscore the basic human need to remember and make meaning from the history and stories of our lives.

David Ireland’s house was rescued by artist friends and wealthy supporters who thought that 500 Capp Street should be preserved. Carlie Wilmans, head of The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, bought the home in 2008, shortly before Ireland’s death the following year, at the urging of many of his friends. Ireland referred to his work in the house as “stabilizing things,” but ironically the first job was to shore up the unstable foundation weakened by his ongoing excavations. He, and we, are lucky the house did not collapse on itself. The small, guided tour offered at the house ends in the dining room where we were seated around a big table laid with silver dessert bowls filled with concrete blobs and silver spoons. The antique gas lamps, the religious figures, the horns, the altar to Natalie Wood, the cabinets lined with reliquary jars of sawdust, the balled-up wallpaper, the leftover birthday cake for Greub — it’s all still there in all its unorthodox glory.

The post Reverberations: Revisiting David Ireland’s “Skellig” Work appeared first on artcritical.

April 21 to August 2, 2016
317 Dundas Street West (at McCaul Street)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 416 979 6648

Visitors to Thomas Ruff’s last exhibition at David Zwirner in New York this past spring may have been surprised by the latest exhibition of his press++ (2015) print series at the Art Gallery of Ontario. When presented independently, the series was a bit bewildering, but there was some sense of delayed gratification once one understood that they were enlarged, notated press photographs on the subject of space. As part of “Thomas Ruff: Object Relations,” however, the press++ series was preceded by several of his other bodies of work, so that this experimental approach to photography lost its novelty.

That loss would not have felt substantial had the introductory series been stronger. On display in the first gallery were several works that Ruff created upon the museum’s invitation to examine their collection and use it as a source for his process of altering found or appropriated photographic materials. For the photographs in Negative (2014–ongoing), Ruff inverted the light and dark areas of each historical photograph so that the new works appeared to be negatives. The series was effective in framing reversal as a key process for the rest of the show, but the works were otherwise unremarkable, feeling more like a reluctant answer to an uninteresting invitation.

That the prints in the press++ series were made from found newspaper clippings manipulated by Ruff comes as no surprise. Though the show’s curation reduced the novelty of this approach, it also allowed more interesting observations to emerge. In the series of “negatives,” for example, one noticed how Ruff’s manipulations flattened space and disrupted one’s ability to perceive animation (the artist’s body versus a statue). Similarly, in the press++ photographs, one may now notice how the superficial marks on the photographs (such as handwriting, copyright stamps, and remnants of glued paper) stand out as more “real” than the people depicted in the images.

In the next room, the ties between works were far more compelling. The series of inverted photographs continued, but here the original photographs were more visually dense, representing the interior of an artist’s studio. In neg◊artist_01 (2014), for example, an artist rests his right leg on the pedestal of a statue of a female body, whose original white color has been reversed into a deep navy. Her pose mimics his, as her right leg also rests on some other object formed as part of the statue. Additional portraits framed on the studio walls hover around them like ghostly presences. Somehow in these inverted images it is far more difficult to ascertain which bodies are real: the artist gets lost in his studio and becomes an object himself while those statues are imbued with life.

In the center of this room, a display case held several found photographs and objects from Ruff’s collection. Bowers and Lough’s 1909 gelatin silver print Electrocardiograms shows measurements of “fatigue of muscle from repeated single contractions” and “tetanic muscular contractions.” Their wavering lines are scientific graphs, but they appear abstract, as if they were studio drawings in ink made to illustrate how line density could convey the progression of light to dark. Opposite these hung Lucien Walery’s photogravures published in a book, Nus (1923). A naked woman holds several different poses as she lies on carpet; however, the carpet is not a floor but a backdrop, hung from an invisible ceiling and run into the foreground. After noticing this optical shift, one can sense the weight of the model’s body resting on the ball of her raised foot. This is another kind of inversion. In their high contrast of white subject (her skin could be polished marble) with dark ground (the Oriental rug was woven with deep hues), these photogravures are reminiscent of Susan Weil and Robert Rauschenberg’s photograms, which were, in another parallel, long “buried, filed under the generic heading ‘Nudes'” in Chicago, according to Michael Lobel, writing in Artforum in February. Other photograms appeared in this show, too, on the wall next to the display case: two of Arthur Siegel’s 1944 works. They do not depict bodies, but as photograms, none have any compositional negative. They relate well to Ruff’s inverted photo series, in which a false negative is created in lieu of the original.

The tension between surface and depth continues in the next room with Ruff’s Sterne (“stars,” 1989–92) series. Each print is an enlarged section of a negative from the European Southern Observatory in Chile depicting clusters of stars. Made larger than a human body, they echo the vastness of the galaxy. In their black depths, the viewer can see herself as well as the other galaxies hung on the opposite wall. Any artist who has dabbled in film photography or paid attention to the show’s thread of negatives might connect these images with dust on a negative. In any case, Ruff’s evident interest in revealing the apparatus behind photographic prints seems to be what links the Sterne series to the 2003 series Maschinen (“machines”) also occupying this room; all images are product photography from 1930s Germany in which, as the didactic asserts, the “close relationship between functional and artistic photography” is highlighted. In each image, a background curtain or veil of smoke focuses the viewer’s attention on the pastel machine to be sold. As with most advertising strategies, the function of these machines becomes less important than the fact that one should want them.

Indeed, Ruff mimics the product photographer’s intent to remove “extraneous” information when he attempts to remove the context from press photographs or re-display found objects. If Ruff is right, the most effective contemporary veils are those that separate image from text, art from media, and object from time.

The post Subjective Contexts: Thomas Ruff at AGO appeared first on artcritical.

May to October, 2016
941 North Street (at Hurlingham Drive)
Greenwich, CT, 203 869 0611

“My body will not be a tomb for other creatures.”
-Leonardo da Vinci

Guests to the opening of Jonathan Horowitz’s “Occupy Greenwich,” at the Brant Foundation, may have been very surprised: whereas the multimillionaire paper magnate Peter Brant and his wife, Stephanie, typically open the spring exhibition at their art and study center with a pig roast, the carcasses of dead animals forced open and staked on the grounds, this year’s attendees were greeted with vegan catering. Horowitz is vegan, and dressing as a slaughterhouse the beautiful Connecticut estate surrounding his show seems likely to have undermined his work, some which speaks to the politics of what people eat and why.

Even before it opened, the show embraced some surprising contradictions. It runs the gamut, in a way, speaking to a number of social and political problems. It was promoted with a full-page ad, reproducing Horowitz’s print Go Vegan! (Stephanie) (2016), with the slogan underscoring the portrait of a seductive young woman. Horowitz is gay, but he also understands that pretty girls sell better than pictures of cute animals, which are often paired with that exhortation. (Though women are also often referred to with metaphors for penned animals, obviously.) At the bottom was the show’s sardonic title, equating the carefully executed exhibition of expensive collectibles with an anarchist takeover of the exurban enclave.

“Occupy Greenwich” touches on a number of seemingly partisan themes, often with messages that are superficially evangelist but which also include a subtext of uncertainty or perhaps even irony. That’s especially useful as America’s political discourse has grown increasingly polarized, in spite of the fact that people don’t lead polar lives and usually have beliefs and practices that differ radically from common stereotypes about, say, vegans, Republicans, working class voters, queer people, gun owners and so on.

Hillary Clinton is a Person Too (2008), staged in one early room, is a cartooned, life-sized bronze sculpture of a woman being crowned by a small boy standing on a chair, with the sculpture’s title cast into the base, in a corny comic font. Next to it, a whole wall of similar figurines — the size of paperweights and cast in the style of 1970s Sillisculpt statues, titled We the People are People Too (2008) — are marked with affirmations that “Young Mothers Are People Too,” “Socialist Medics Are People Too,” “Donald Rumsfeld Is A Person Too,” “Ellen And Portia Are People Too,” “Fetuses Are People Too,” and others. It’s not at all obvious how sincere Horowitz is being in his parodic coronation of Mrs. Clinton and the insistence on a common humanity shared alike by working people and Rumsfeld et al. It is absolutely essential to remember that everyone is a person, but it’s also important to recall that both of those politicians were managers of massive death, and putting them on the same scale as mothers, doctors, and embryos, etc., is discomfiting.

A stairway leading to galleries downstairs is lined with Go Vegan! (200 Celebrity Vegetarians Downloaded from the Internet) (2002/10). Each low-resolution-pictured person eats (currently, formerly, occasionally) a vegan or vegetarian diet, including Vincent van Gogh, Prince and Franz Kafka, among many others. Similar mosaics are found in vegan restaurants, online, and on posters produced by PETA. But they’re also dubious; Horowitz commends the plea and also slyly digs at its cheesy, superfluous celebrity endorsements, which seem to put animal-cruelty-free eating in the same basket as Coca-Cola and Nike.

Downstairs, a large room recapitulates Horowitz’s November 4, 2008 (2008) installation, originally staged at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, wherein viewers watched live election returns in a room divided between red and blue, FOX News and CNN, on back-to-back LCD screens. Here is the same set up, balloons poised to drop from the ceiling. The TV monitors are still playing the ‘08 election, and all of 24-hour cable news’ on-screen signs of urgent immediacy — rapidly moving graphics, breaking updates, a scrolling crawl at the bottom, and more — all this stuff that’s meant to convey nowness, is, eight years later, manic, diminutive, impotent.

The last installation, I, Hillary (2016), is a room empty save for a spare white bench, desk and chair, and an ink-jet printed and framed low-res portrait of Mrs. Clinton. From a small PA system comes Horowitz’s voice, giving a meandering, rational and sort of defensive account of the show and his support for Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. He describes how capable she is, and that her policy aims seem pragmatic and reasonable. Although Horowitz sounds like he’s speaking extemporaneously, if haltingly, his remarks also seem canned, robotically parroted from Clinton surrogates, partisans and pundits. Many of the same claims were repeated at the Democratic National Convention in July and have been found in the opinion media for the past year — the thrust being basically that he’s not crazy about her, but thinks she’s capable and will do a good job and have you seen how insane the alternative is? Horowitz’s minimizations of Clinton’s closeness to Wall Street money and influence are followed by preemptive defenses about working with the Brants at their ostentatious estate, drawing a sharp parallel between her compromises and his own.

“I guess I am not a big proponent in general of supposed ideological purity,” says Horowitz in his monologue. Probably few people are. More than that, though, Horowitz seems deeply interested in apparent contradiction, performativity, appropriation and allusion, both in politics and culture, and in his own life. One can hope that poking at those conflicts and misconceptions might lead to better elections, or maybe more civility. Or perhaps even just a few more vegans.

The post Go Vegan!: Jonathan Horowitz at the Brant Foundation appeared first on artcritical.

May 5 to July 15, 2016
860 11th Avenue (between 58th and 59th streets)
New York, 212 237 1439

“BASTA!” at John Jay College’s Anya and Shiva Art Gallery, revisits the relationship between violence and contemporary art in Latin America. Curators Claudia Calirman and Isabella Villanueva present works by 14 artists from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. Latin American artists have always exposed social struggles of their countries, but “BASTA!” focuses on the conflict between representation and reality — inherent in the use of violence as a theme for art. “How to represent violence without aestheticizing it to the level of the banal?” asks Calirman.

Paintings, installations, and video works are distributed throughout the main gallery, while two videos are featured in darkened rooms. The exhibition is conceptually divided into two main groups: works that use violence as a tactic and those representing violence primarily through aesthetic means. Visitors find the latter when looking at Argentinian collective Mondongo’s Calavera 5 (“skull,” 2009–13), a six-by-six-foot Plasticine skull in which artists depicted tiny scenes of political crimes. Peruvian Giancarlo Scaglia, in his painting Stellar (2016), refers to the massacre of political prisoners — from the guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso — by the Armed Forces, in the 1980s, in Peru. White star-like spots over dark painted backgrounds correspond to the position of bullet holes on the walls of El Frontón prison, where the massacre occurred.

The play between aesthetics and violence is also explored by Brazilian Alice Miceli’s In Depth (landmines)/Colombian Series (2015), a series of six horizontal photographs that seem to depict a serene rainforest with mysterious red and white markings stuck to the ground. Each photograph shows the same location with slight variations, as if the artist moved closer to the markings. But reading the work’s caption the viewer learns that those are land-mine fields in Antioquia, Colombia, and realizes the risk implicit in the making of the piece.

If Miceli deals with risk of death through photography, Teresa Margolles creates a tension between death and life, in which aesthetics is not emphasized. For Irrigación (“irrigation,” 2010), Margolles diluted, in 5,000 gallons of water, the blood and bodily fluids of people killed by drug cartel violence in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The video shows the rear of a truck dispensing water along Highway 90, between Mexico and El Paso, Texas. Her action can be understood as a displacement of the dead, in which blood-evoking symbolisms are absent perhaps to emphasize the “invisibility” of unidentified bodies found in Mexican morgues: it is as if she turned blood into water to “recycle” violence.

Guatemalan artist Regina Galindo, instead, inflicts pain into her own body, producing blood as a tactic. In the video Perra (“bitch,” 2005), she wears a long, black dress, sits on a chair and uncovers her naked right thigh only to incise it with a knife. She carves the word PERRA, letter by letter, into her skin. Harder than looking at the moment of the incision, it’s to see Galindo moving the sharp knife over her leg, as if foretelling the pain. She softly holds her skin so that blood drops don’t slip away from the carved flesh, while the camera shakes above her.

Galindo’s self-mutilation refers to the culture of violence against women in Guatemala, where girls have been found mutilated with the word bitch written on their genitals. Female genital mutilation is a practice that occurs around the world, in different cultural contexts: by making that violence visible, Galindo pursues the pain of a ubiquitous crime. Though it is not the same pain caused by abuse that often happens in the private space, Galindo nonetheless becomes a victim as the viewer becomes a witness — she puts violence under the precision of her knife, complicating its aestheticization.

Other works in the show deal with the nature of systematic violence. In the video Testimonio (“witness,” 2012), Guatemalan Aníbal Lopez, who died in 2014, invited a sicario, a mercenary from Guatemala, to respond to the questions from an audience of art enthusiasts at dOCUMENTA, in Kassel, Germany. The video begins with the sicario’s silhouette behind a white screen — to protect his identity — framed by theatrical red curtains. The man explains his profession saying that he pays for his studies at the San Carlos University by doing “social cleansing” for the Guatemalan army, which pays him based on each victim’s social class. The images toggle between the man’s silhouette holding a microphone and shots of the audience: white men and women looking stupefied after hearing the sicario’s words.

Participants ask him questions for 40 minutes; as time passes by some people in the audience start to smile, even though many keep frowned eyebrows and bulging eyes at disturbing answers such as “One day I had to drown a lady but she wouldn’t die so I smashed her face with a stone,” or when asked if he cares about the spirits of the people he kills, “No, this is just my profession, I don’t have any feelings about it.” The raw brutality of his testimony contrasts with the silly naivety in the expressions and questions the audience asks such as, “Do you believe in God?” or “Do you play violent video games?”

In Testimonio, the performance’s participants compulsorily perpetrate a second violence: one marked by a temporary contract with the sicario’s mode of living, even though not free from judgment, and even though it occurs through an understanding of that man’s life as a theater. Many of the participants seem to judge both the murderer’s and the artist’s gesture as unethical, while others clearly believe the whole thing was staged: they laugh and look doubtful. The work oscillates between fiction and non-fiction, as it tests the limits of reality and truth, defying the boundaries between crime and art. Although the work plays with fiction, it may not matter if the man’s words are make-believe or not: as much as we would like to deny it, violence is institutionalized and can be profitable not only for individuals, but also for entire Latin American elites or imperialist governments that maintain their home countries “safe,” while violence spreads elsewhere. Lopez’s Testimonio disrupts the judicial system of the countries in which the sicario’s crimes had been executed as it snubs the borders between the geopolitical North and South. Ultimately, the anonymous sicario becomes a Trojan Horse whose speech unveils the violent reality of his developing country, but also the silent brutality of privileged countries — represented in the piece by the art world — casting their investigative gaze over the tragedies they’re directly or indirectly complicit with.

Adopting the logics of a confession, Testimonio shows a distinction in the way violence can be perceived across different countries: for the sicario, violence was so natural that it was a rule, not an exception. Because deadly crime rates in Latin America are among the highest in the world, violence is perhaps more palpable in those countries, whereas some people from developed countries may perceive violence through the spectacularization of “moments of exception,” such as when a terrorist act or a mass-murder occur close to home. But in many developing countries violence is endemic and normalized, not understood only through climax: high unemployment, inequality, and broken educational systems, among so many other reasons, produce living contradictions, such as that sicario’s life.

Less than through easy aestheticization, and more through elaborated actions, contemporary Latin American artists who expose and denounce violence ask us to look at it and learn how it works, for it’s through our bond with victims — and also with perpetrators’ minds — that we can seek change. Few of the artists in “BASTA!” offer options for healing, but some open a space for mutual mourning and for a critique of a global reality that expands well beyond the domains of Latin America.

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July 1 to July 30, 2016
126 Baxter Street (between Hester and Canal streets)
New York, 212 260 9927

Every person is a Venn diagram, sequences of spheres coming into and out of focus. We are composed of our gender, sexuality, nationality, histories both personal and cultural; but we are also something more, a quality of selfhood that is as ineffable as it is irresolute. In “The Ties that Bind,” the ICP-Bard MFA class of 2016 offers us selves sketched out in networks across time and space. This group of 10 artists, hailing from eight different countries, undertakes an investigation of self in the attempt to understand who we are in the context of our relationships and our worlds.

Excerpted from larger series and engaging in explicit storylines, these photographs and videos acknowledge their own fragmentation. Verónica Puche’s two photographs are accompanied by a descriptive page, inscribed with the Roman numeral “I,” a mark that suggests the continuation of her account. The story that plays out across her photographs — the life and death of her great uncle Guillermo — resists the photo as an agent of stasis and receives it instead as the ghost of someone long gone. Guillermo comes to the artist and the viewer like a Marian apparition, traversing time and space to look seriously out at us from this photograph of a photograph. Opening onto fracture and discontinuity, Puche’s Guillermo and Granada  (both 2016) announce the photo as a second existence, a proposition that finds correspondence in many of the images now coloring the walls of the Baxter Street Camera Club.

At the far end of the gallery, an unwavering projection casts a still image onto the wall. From a foamy blue room, a young girl looks out from atop the bare shoulders of a man who is turned away. Part of the same projection, English text scrolls  below while a pair of headphones offer the original audio in Spanish. Martha Naranjo Sandoval takes up the personal narrative as written in familial memory in How this has to be told (2016), a audio-visual work that catches the artist and her grandmother disagreeing over the story of this childhood photo. Is the young Naranjo Sandoval crying or laughing? Naranjo Sandoval’s grandmother wavers in the face of a granddaughter’s certainty, however, neither can truly remember. In opening interpretation to dispute, Naranjo Sandoval questions the verity that photography implies; is the past is merely what we believe it to be? How this has to be told demonstrates the continued life of history in the mutability of a photograph, which grows ever more exaggerated with the years that pass between the present and its moment of capture. In the ambiguity of memory and interpretation, doubt is the birth of new narratives.

Beginnings too are born in uncertainty. Matthew Papa catches the story at its inception in Self-portrait with Jerome (2015), one in a series of nude self-portraits that capture the artist as he encounters other men for the first time. Looking inscrutably out of the print, the artist casually accepts Jerome’s tender embrace. This portrait is a dance of intimacies; even while Jerome’s body presses despairingly against Papa’s, his fingers on the artist’s shoulder arch away from this unfamiliar body as if afraid to caress. Papa’s head, cocked upward, reciprocates the tender press of Jerome’s forehead, but also conveys a wary consideration of the camera’s gaze. These tentative affections, tempered by cautious trepidation, feel directly pertinent in the weeks following the shooting in Orlando, Florida, speaking to what we can see of the future and how we may continue to hope.

Each of these works constitutes a proposal, an experiment, in identities coming into contact with others; “You are you, and I am I.” However, you and I must also sometimes be together, overlapping. These works, which are diverse in more ways than one, reckon with the trials of alterity and the modes of understanding the collision of incongruous narratives. Together they offer a model of a self constructed through others and a society of accumulated selves.

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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.

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The Propeller Group: The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music at James Cohan Gallery
April 8 to May 15, 2016
291 Grand Street (at Eldridge Street)
New York, 212 714 9500

In the West, many people are privileged to maintain a distance from the visceral effects of economic and social inequalities. The Propeller Group, however, wants us to confront them. Their work around branding and marketing strategies, notions of nation building, propaganda, and the collective vs. individual, will help viewers consider those systems and recognize how we might be complicit in them and, perhaps, undo them.

Their collective — comprised of core members Phunam, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, and Matt Lucero — began working together officially in 2006, but had met and worked together in graduate school at CalArts (Nguyen and Lucero) and upon meeting back to their home country of Vietnam (Phunam and Nguyen in 2005). The members, each an artist in his own right, formed the collective to realize ambitious art projects and large-scale productions with Vietnamese artists. Their first solo museum exhibition, featuring seven videos and installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, highlight the importance of the convergence of the fine and commercial art worlds in their practice. The group’s ability to shape shift and code switch among genres, traditions, and cultures from the East and West helps them make meaningful critiques of consumer culture, politics and the effects on the human condition.

As young men coming of age in the ’90s — all three cite hip-hop and graffiti culture as important to their mode — The Propeller Group carry the residue of the social and cultural context of the time. In art schools, scholars tended to focus more on theories like deconstructionism, institutional critique, and identity politics over examinations of the discrete art object. During their time at CalArts, Lucero and Nguyen were students of Daniel Joseph Martinez, whose installation at the controversial 1993 Whitney Biennial included distributing admission buttons spelling out “I CAN’T EVER IMAGINE WANTING TO BE WHITE.” Migration is an important influence too: All identify as people of color, Lucero a California native, and Nguyen and Phunam as refugees whose families fled Vietnam during the war.

Guns serve as an important motif in their work, particularly Cold War-era Russian and American assault rifles: the AK-47 and M16. (They’ve even made a feature length film out of montaged YouTube clips, Hollywood films, documentaries, and promotional video about the firearms.) A 21-minute video, The AK-47 vs. The M16 (2015), most recently on view at James Cohan’s Lower East Side location and originally conceived for the 56th Venice Biennale, features a series of blocks made of ballistics gelatin embedded with discharges from each rifle fired simultaneously, and a video of the blast. The video captures the bullets penetrating the gel blocks and colliding with each other. At one point a gun misfires and the discharge creates a smooth trajectory; in another, both guns fire on each other, creating a collision manifesting like ink blots or paint pours. The gel blocks, sealed in resin under vitrines, are often used in ballistics tests and are designed to mimic the qualities of human flesh. While the blocks capture the violence of the blasts and freeze it in time, the effect is diminished after watching the live firing in the video, making the sculptures feel like a redundant let-down. But this can be a shortfall of overtly political art: how to create effective — not overwrought — affect. Works like the sculptures of The AK-47 vs. The M16 or Television Commercial for Communism (2011) fall into such didactic trappings, but that cannot be attributed to the fact that The Propeller Group also has another life in commercial art and advertising. Their work is simply more effective when they collapse the distance between the politics and the person.

Collateral Damage (2015), for example, also mines the theme of guns and violence, but the simple gesture of capturing the pattern of stippling and bullet fragments skipping and tearing across black paper is haunting in its austerity. The Guerrillas of Cu Chi (2012), which uses a propaganda film as part of the installation, is very successful at underscoring the human costs of war. In a darkened room, two videos on opposite walls depict scenes from the Cu Chi district in Ho Chi Minh City where Viet Cong fighters built a complex of tunnels — critical to defeating the US military in spite of its technological superiority. In the black-and-white propaganda film, the narrator describes how the people enjoyed picnicking in Cu Chi, “Until the merciless Americans began dropping their bombs […] on it.” Facing this film, modern day tourists are shown taking photos and selfies at the shooting range that currently stands on the site as captions from the black-and-white film flash across the bottom. The juxtaposition, while seemingly moralistic on the surface, highlights the differences in the way histories are remembered depending on who remembers them.

The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music (2014) is perhaps the group’s most lyrical statement to explore the central concerns of their work. Part of this lies in the aesthetic: The Propeller Group used an “overcrank” technique to shoot frames at a higher rate than normal, allowing the footage to appear like slow motion when played back at standard speed. If you’ve ever seen the movie Chariots of Fire (1981) or nearly any shampoo commercial ever, you are familiar with this technique and know that if done poorly, overcrank can appear hokey and amateurish. The film was originally created for Prospect.3, the third Prospect New Orleans biennial, held from 2014 to 2015, and one wonders: is it the film’s focus on funerary practices in Vietnam and their echoes to those specific to New Orleans, the abundant images of water, references to mysticism, transformation, and change that make it effective, or something else? The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music leaves room for the consideration and contemplation, the joy and sadness — the range of human emotions the world often asks us to elide. Facing the feeling, sitting with the rage, discomfort, confusion or sadness, however, is exactly what The Propeller Group may intend for viewers. These are not the cynical acts of ad men, but the hopeful ones that only artists make.

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