September 19 to October 24, 2020
54 Franklin Street, between Cortlandt Alley and Lafayette Street
New York City, postmastersart.com

Of the sixty or so drawings in Steve Mumford’s recent exhibition at Postmasters, all of which were done on site in a spiral sketch pad with either pencil or pen and ink, roughly half of them were worked up later with watercolor, using cell phone photos as reference. The uncolored ones range from a furious mass of rhythmic scribbles in Police Try to Separate Back the Blue Demonstrators and Counterprotestors, Bayridge, Brooklyn, NY, Jul. 12, 2020, (2020) to a considered group portrait in Officers Wong, Castillo and Chen at Occupy City Hall, New York City, Jul. 15, 2020, (2020). The speed and expressive qualities of the drawings seem to directly reflect the circumstances under which they were made. The colored pieces, some of which are double sheets, are like studies for full scale paintings. The depictions of the people involved move from quick impressions toward fully delineated types, with clothing, haircuts and expressions fleshed out. Some pieces feel like sheets from a graphic novel with comments and noise effects laid in. The range and confidence of Mumford’s method is extraordinary throughout.

The three main locales Mumford went to were Portland, Oregon; a Trump rally in Fredericksburg, Virginia; and his home turf, New York City. It is immediately evident that Mumford was there to observe, not to satirize or idealize. Everything is treated with the same cool objectivity, even as things get violent. One striking image, “Photojournalists Outside Wyckoff Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY, Apr. 7, 2020”, neatly encapsulates some of the questions posed by Mumford’s work. The painting shows a group of photographers from the back, all hung with impressive amounts of camera equipment as they approach a freezer morgue truck behind the hospital. What are they hoping for? It’s just a big truck; maybe an orderly will appear with a corpse on a gurney. I imagine Mumford hanging to the rear with pencil and sketch pad, taking in the scene without any special need for drama, trying to capture some of the paradoxes of the situation. The extended process of his observation is in sharp contrast with the photographer’s quest for a good “shot”. How does his artifact differ from a photo? Does his involvement in the production of the image depend more on memory and imagination, or less? One thing is for sure: His feeling for the reality he sees has a quality of engagement, almost like an interview, something photos are hard pressed to capture.  You feel he is getting to know these people.

At the end of the day there is a conceptual aspect to Mumford’s work that is easily missed as we relate to it as illustration. It is an act of witness, and the paintings are almost a magnificent residue of that act. As with Goya’s “Disasters of War”, the whole presentation states emphatically, “I was there. This is what I saw.”

The post There to Observe: Steve Mumford’s Dispatches from Rallies and Protests appeared first on artcritical.

February 17 to March 31, 2018
54 Franklin Street at Cortlandt Alley (between Broadway and Lafayette Street)
New York City, postmastersart.com

In Perry Hoberman’s Suspensions, detritus collected from an abandoned town in the California desert is assembled into bungee-corded chains hung from the Postmasters ceiling. Rather like refrigerator magnet poems, each “suspension” conforms to something bordering on syntax in its assemblage of small to medium sized objects: flattened toys and rusty cans, orphaned gears and transistors; shiny round things; jagged, plastic things. A portion of the gallery is given over to hanging, scroll-like digital prints of the same objects in silhouette. Individual chains have mordant titles like Low Credit Risk and Pinched Nerve Jamboree, and do not seem overly concerned with sculptural or taxonomic rigor. But nonchalance flips to obsessive literality when the visitor puts on one of the virtual reality headsets placed around the installation. Each suspension has been mapped and recreated in digital space, with scores of individual objects, each corresponding in shape, surface detail and location to the physical ones in the gallery. Yet the differences are striking: with the motion-sensitive headsets projecting a stereoscopic view exactly synchronous to the turning of one’s head, the viewer notices first of all that one nearby digital Suspension jiggles like a child needing to pee, while others swing slowly like porch hangings in a breeze, naturalistic gravity and bungee bounce having been modeled into the virtual dynamics. In the really real world of the gallery all remains decorously still, but the viewer is likely to remove the goggles again and again in order confirm the fact.

That is only the beginning, however, of this “non-trip to a Non-site,” to use a typically open-ended phrase of Robert Smithson’s, whose ideas about 3-D mapping, displacement, landscape as quarry, the neutral abstraction of the gallery, and much more seem pertinent to both the critical and the visionary polarities of Hoberman’s practice. With goggles back in place, the gallery walls unfold like, well, a white box. The suspensions now hang weirdly from an infinite blue sky, and a stark, barely differentiated desert panorama is available if you spin your view. The ground drops away as you look down, then piles of rock float underfoot and one fears to take a step. Projective geometry hems you in. A stereoscopic slideshow plays haphazardly behind the confabulated digital sculptures hanging in the foreground. You can walk into the slides, towards a recurring giant who traverses the barren landscape and explores the decaying innards of cheap, prefabricated homesteads. The giant is the artist himself, and the strange scale shift an effect endemic to 3-D VR, which fixes the viewer, unlike in cinema, at an absolute location, which in this case is the end of Hoberman’s selfie stick.

Hoberman is an artist/researcher who has been on the circuit-building front lines of a wide range of simulation technologies since the 1980s. He currently teaches and leads study labs at the University of Southern California and consults on the development of VR systems with rival acronyms (AR, MxR, and MEML, et al.). But if Hoberman is an insider he is a dissident one, a skeptical historian of every dropped thread and wasted opportunity of virtual reality precursors, which in modern times can be said to date to Wheatstone’s invention of stereoscopic drawing in 1838. Hoberman has proposed recreating Daguerre’s once-legendary painted and mechanized diorama with digital technology.

Though clearly enraptured by sensory illusion, Hoberman is anything but an uncritical technophile. Previous works have typically programmed computers to malfunction with the banal malevolence of the corporate culture that proliferates with them. A show at Postmasters in 2003 included a digital still from an interactive home screen with a pop-up window reading, “Security forces have been alerted, and will be arriving shortly.” Users could mouse-click on three bitterly hilarious options: “Read Me My Rights,” “Call A Taxi,” or “Surrender.”

The hanging shards in Suspensions are garnered from abandoned homes that were sold cheap to military families from a nearby base that has already featured in Hoberman’s work. His recent multimedia collaboration with performance artist Julia Heyward, 29 SpaceTime, delved into the juju of this same desert Non-site with mesmerizing paranoia.

One thing that is, unfortunately, missing from Suspensions is Hoberman’s expertise at vivisecting image and sound. He began his performance activities in the 1980s, collaborating extensively with Laurie Anderson (he was artistic director on the O Superman video, among others), but at Postmasters the only sound accompanying his piece is incidental: an audio bleed from Jillian Mayer’s adjacent installation fills the void plausibly enough with a soothing electronic score. This imposed mood softens Hoberman’s deliberate rough edges and visible seams, which are intended to show us what VR can’t do as much as what it can, and we may miss how the artist is cackling under his breath at an essential absurdity: after all, what is the point of painstakingly simulating garbage? Garbage, what’s more, which is already right here?

The viewer, contemplating the truth of the illusion, may be all the more awed by VR’s transformative potential, as Hoberman surely is. His decades-long quest for sensory engineering could only have been fueled by optimism worthy of a Quattrocento perspectivist, if not by the fevered Wagnerian dream of a totally enveloping artwork. Of course, whether in fascist or rampantly capitalist regimes, gesamtkunstwerken have a way of ending badly, and few dreamers understand so intimately as does Hoberman the inevitability with which visionary artistic research enables corporate bread and circuses. If dark thoughts of interactive shooting games and their full-metal VR counterparts used in mechanized wars of occupation come to mind when you put on the high tech headsets, you’re paying attention.

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April 25 to May 30, 2015
54 Franklin Street (at Cortlandt Alley)
New York, 212 727 3323

The subject of Holly Zausner’s 2015 film Unsettled Matter is the artist herself, but just as clearly, it is us, the viewers. It is a cyclical film, which variously embraces and casts off narrative, almost on a whim. Zausner passes through New York as a ghost — purposefully marching through empty streets, lobbies and stations, sometimes no more than a flicker, but just as often stopping to contemplate: a book in the basement of the Strand, the mangled visage of Queen Hatshepsut at the Metropolitan Museum, or us, the viewer, at the center of the swirling maelstrom of Times Square (the only time in which we see other human beings). Though she interacts with no one, she is performing for us, right up until the possible endpoint of the film, when she comes physically crashing down onto her workbench strewn with stills from her last work — death by art.

We cannot tell if the most spectacular special effect of Unsettled Matter is in fact the end of the artist. In Unseen (2007), her previous film, set in Berlin, her silent antagonist is a larger-than–life-sized rubber doll. This feminine and sculptural figure has appeared as a prop in many of Zausner’s works over the years. It is burdensome and seems to provoke danger wherever the artist goes: in Unseen she is watched by a tiger and threatened by a nearby explosion. Unsettled Matter is more foreboding as the enemy is ever-present, and we get the inkling that it is somehow contained within our own act of spectation. Besides a sense of determination in her demeanor and gait, Zausner’s primary emotion seems to be impatience and weariness. At one point the artist, wearing sunglasses indoors, drinks a pint and takes a brief respite from her perambulations — giving us a moment to breathe as well.

If this film has a beginning or an end, it is a tale of escape and alienation, and of the artist’s lonely practice, which, it would seem, always ends badly — the tense lines that support, very literally, this floating life, can give away at any moment. But such a linear narrative to Unsettled Matter is a bit too easy, and Zausner inlays the very simple activities of the film — walking and looking — with a few brief supernatural gestures that lead us to understand that we may disbelieve our eyes at any moment — this is the stuff of metaphor. The mystical details also become more apparent after watching the piece again, when we are half-expecting them and the suspense is much stronger. This is another indication that there is a rhythmic and endless cycle at play. Zausner briefly communes with the pharaoh Hatshepsut, then while admiring a tomb in the Metropolitan Museum, she departs, leaving her reflection standing there a few seconds too long. Similarly weird is a passage in the Strand, in which all the titles are inverted — a mirror of a mirror. Zausner also moves in slow-mo and speeds up until she becomes a blur. Despite these visual sleights-of-hand, the superb sound always keeps us aware of her steps, clack-clacking on the pavement.

Unsettled Matter seems most likely to be a dream, and a rejection of time. Unlike Unseen, which was decidedly tragic — the artist weighed down by her life, her choice, her femininity and her art — here she eludes us, traipsing through memories of past and future alike. She flits and stomps through the city, which is all hers, coldly regards the hysterical Monica Vitti in L’Avventura, and moves on, and keeps us a sympathetic but bewildered spectator, hustling to keep up.

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If ever the timing of a show was pitch perfect with the circumstances of its venue, it is David Diao: TMI.  This at once ironic and plaintive show, delving into the cruel vagaries of the art market, is the set-striking event at Postmasters, drawing a close to their fifteen years tenancy at 459 West 19th Street—because their rent is being doubled.

The last day of show and space alike is Saturday, April 27.

TMI is an artist’s considered revenge on the perceived slights of the system.  Diao has made paintings that document the derisory results of an embarrassing dumping of his work in an inappropriate auction house.  One image, for instance, consists of the fateful auction catalog pages, replete with circled,  hand-written under-selling hammer prices.  In another painting he fantasizes a result in the opposite direction, inflating his actual auction record even more dramatically than their landlords did his gallerists’ rent.  High up on a ledge are duplicates in miniature of the devalued works,  for sale at a “correct,” (IE non-market) price in a gesture of what the Chinese call “chutzpah.”  But he doesn’t stop with auction injustice.  Other paintings adapt the graphics of a MoMA Picasso retrospective for an announcement of a fictional retrospective for himself at the same institution.  Another drops one of his own pictures into a painted rendering of a photograph of the old trustees’ dining room to memorialize the moment when curator John Elderfield presented the work to the board for consideration, only for it to be declined.

A master of “conceptual abstraction,” Diao is no stranger to the theme of indignant loss.  His previous, 2009 outing at Postmasters, titled “I lived there until I was 6…,” delved into family history.  His grandfather had been a well-off official in Sichuan before the revolution when their estate – tennis court and all – was confiscated by the communists.  Diao ingeniously melded architectural plans and state and party emblems into a faux-Suprematist iconography that both told an old tale and affirmed his current artistic values.  But this new body of work has a very different spirit as the focus shifts from family to career, and the foe from party state to art world.

Self-pity, of course, is a familiar theme among artists, but le peintre maudit usually gravitates towards an appropriately romantic style: something fey or expressionist, perhaps.  The jarring peculiarity here is between Diao’s intellectually aloof-seeming, coolly meticulous painting craft, on the one hand, and his only half-self-mocking sense of ruffled entitlement, on the other.  The MoMA announcement, for instance: is it saying that he was due a retrospective there? Is it goading institution and viewer alike to take action or to expect one some day?  Diao may well be forging a novel hybrid aesthetic with this show: Hard-Edge Patheticism.

While other Chelsea galleries, including the old Peter Blum and Sean Kelly spaces, are giving way to condos and boutiques in the High Line-propelled anti-art boom, the fine space that Magdalena Sawon and Tamas Banovich built in Chelsea will actually not be lost to art: it will soon serve as a new home for Leo Koenig Gallery. Postmasters, meanwhile, are retracing their steps downtown as they are set to reopen in Tribeca.  Not the worst place, as it happens, to experience downward mobility.

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Carla Gannis and Peter Patchen are colleagues at Pratt Institute where they are Assistant Chair and Chair, respectively, of Digital Arts.  artcritical let them loose in Play Station,  the exhibition of artist-made video games, curated by Marcin Ramocki and Paul Slocum at Postmasters.  True to form, the venerable professors soon adopted avatars from Street Fighters II in a series of tweets and SMSs on the show.  What follows is the edited version of their exchange.

Chun-Li (Carla Gannis): In high school for two days or so I had the top score in Pac-Man at my local arcade. I played home console games too, but public gaming spaces really appealed to me. Competing and having fun was a different experience from my painting and piano classes, where I was expected to be serious and thoughtful and focus on “Capital A Art.”

The Postmasters opening last Thursday night, touted as “fun, exciting, post-video game, interactive,” whether it was or was not, provided its own counterpoint to art in all caps, and a relief to the after taste of Miami Basel blue chips and over-priced cocktails.

The cacophony of sound and action, of hands wielding controllers and keyboards, of voices shouting in victory or sighing in defeat, transported me back to a pre-internet ‘80s arcade, then forward to a post-formal art space where notions of precious art are subverted by prescient ideas.

Ryu (Peter Patchen): Nostalgia was certainly in the air at Postmasters. I felt like I was carried back to a 1990’s LAN (local area connection) party, video games on all of the walls, projectors everywhere and everyone seemed to have brought their own wonky computer. Beeps and squawks, guns, fighting noises and…was that a cowbell?

I expected to see another showdown with Feng Mengbo in Q4U (2002) but it was you in Street Fighter II (Travis Hallenbeck’s contribution to the show).

Chun-Li: Thursday night definitely was bonus round night, including not only the Play Station exhibition, curated by Marcin Ramocki and Paul Slocum of 12 digital artists (Mike Beradino, Mauro Ceolin, Mary Flanagan, Travis Hallenbeck, Jeremiah Johnson, Ernesto Klar, Joe McKay, Jason Rohrer, Rafaël Rozendaal, Eddo Stern, and CJ Yeh) but BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer), where ten artists (Chris Burke, Zach Gage, James George, Travis Hallenbeck, Matt Parker, Billy Rennekamp, Erik Sanner, Alan Shaffer, Paul Slocum, and Charlie Whitney) brought there own games pieces to project.

The “salon style” installation of video projections and screens in a packed house made it difficult to find a focus at first. One piece from the BYOB group of artists that really stood out to me was Erik Sanner’s piece The Problem With Destruction Is That Once You Destroy Something, You Can’t Redestroy It (2010). A video of an orange traffic cone was projected above an enticingly big red button. Upon pressing the button you shot the traffic cone. Press it repeatedly and you could shoot the cone to bits until the video looped and you shot it all over again. I compulsively pressed the button again and again until a friend intervened, assuring me I’d never get a vote from him for president.

Ryu: That big red button certainly was irresistible. Sanner’s idea of recursive destruction as a creative act kept the crowd busy all night. I don’t think there were 5 minutes without the Sanner family gunshots ringing out. This piece stood out as an artwork from the rest of BYOB projections that were straight-up video games like Street Fighter II.

Chun-Li: It seems that your suggesting straight-up doesn’t represent “games as art.”  I found it refreshing that some pieces, such at Street Fighter II, were ready-mades so to speak. And James George’s ShudderShutter VS (2011) part of the BYOB crew, certainly crosses into the realm of art. In his words it’s an antagonistic mobile game. The gist is two players compete against each other by violently shaking their respective iPhones while live feed video of them is projected from both phones.  A shudder is rapidly closing over both projections and the more aggressive “shaker” distorts her footage but keeps her image on screen longer. (I use the female pronoun here because I remember beating you in this game Ryu).

Ryu: Winning and losing aside, no, I don’t think all of the BYOB pieces were “games as art.” The dividing line for me is whether or not the work engages any concepts beyond gameplay.

Chun-Li: Right, that said the dividing line for “art” has become so much more about price tag, status, and where an artist earned his/her degree. The works on display opening night and in the official exhibition appealed to me because they did not seem to embody art ideals established by the “1%.”

The pieces on view, and in use sans tokens, provided platforms for social critique, personal narrative, or as in Rafaël Rozendaal’s Finger Battle (2011), an impetus to explore ones own OCD behaviors. There was a resonance in the physical juxtapositions of old, new and hybrid hardware and software. I don’t think you could achieve the same affect online.

Ryu: I still contend that there is a divide, an interesting one, between art and game within the game context. You can’t deny a stark contrast between Street Fighter II and  Mauro Ceolin’s RGB webdroids 2 (2009). While both are “video games” webdroids 2 comments on current socio economics while Street Fighter II just lets me body slam you Chun-Li!

Chun-Li: Touché Ryu. I’ll admit Thursday night felt more like the “party til it’s 1999.” When I returned to the gallery on Saturday I formed different impressions for quite a few of the pieces.

Ryu: I agree about the return trip. On closer inspection each game had it’s own sense of time and distinct place in time. While some games like Rozendaal’s Finger Battle used the very contemporary iPhone, most had a sense of nostalgia ranging from Atari or Nintendo controllers to familiar game tropes like asteroids or missile defense. I think the quiet gallery helped the more contemplative pieces like Mary Flanagan’s [domestic] (2003).

In contrast to the arcade quality of the main gallery, Ernesto Klar’s Luzes Relacionais (2010) provided a more contemplative space. While Klar’s work is more contemporary, technologically speaking, than many of the nostalgic pieces in the front gallery, Luzes hearkens back to Anthony McCall’s Long Film for Four Projectors (1974)– 16mm film wedges of smoke-filled light ending in interactive minimalist lines create a wonderfully simple work. By the way, what exactly was I breathing?

Chun-Li: The back gallery offered full immersion. I stood under one of the triangles of light and asked Scotty to “beam me up.”

It’s interesting that Klar pays tribute to Lygia Clark, but not to McCall. I wonder if he is aware of the McCall work? I wasn’t, prior to your mention. A lot of earlier installation and digital art has only begun to be re-examined.

Ryu: The question is, are the interactive elements in Klar’s work sufficiently unique to make it significantly different from McCall’s installation?

Chun-Li: I think context is significant. McCall would have probably incorporated interactivity in his earlier work had there been the technology to do so, but there wasn’t. When we see a photo of the McCall and the Klar they seem almost indistinguishable, and this is when experiential aspects really come into “play” (pardon the pun).

Ryu: Of course, McCall’s work was also interactive, that is, people interrupted the light and changed the installation through physical interaction. With digitally mediated light, there are more possibilities or variations but the question of whether it significantly changes the concept remains.

Chun-Li: I don’t see a problem in an artist expanding upon the ideas of earlier artists. Honestly how can it be avoided at this point in history? A more interesting aspect of the installation, in the context of the Postmasters show, is its inclusion of Luzes Relacionais as a game. Organic lines of light, both independently expressive and responsive to our gestures, and sound as an amalgam of integrated algorithmic and biological participation– these aren’t elements we commonly find integrated into game engines. The curators’ extension of interpretation excites me.

To that point I did feel a dichotomy in my own reactions to the broad spectrum of gaming that the works represented. Mary Flanagan’s [domestic] for example I watched, interpreted, and even while “playing” I absorbed meaning. On the other hand in Joe McKay’s Swatter (2011), an insect killing game, I figured out the mechanics and played for the high score. The physical interface was certainly novel; the player directs his aim with a wooden knob and smacks a fly swatter on a DIY table to shoot projected insects crawling down the gallery wall. A blue emergency button sometimes worked to save you from the onslaught of bugs.

Ryu: I find Flanagan’s [domestic] to be a very different experience from the other pieces. The work is a large video projection of a “house” on fire with a video game controller hanging from the ceiling of the gallery. As the game controller slipped into my hands I automatically began moving quickly through the space as though something were chasing me. It was a very visceral response that works against the contemplative content of the work. As I explored the game controller, I discovered I could shoot a green glob at most any surface that would turn into a romance novel. While the piece was rendered in a video game engine and controlled with a game controller, the work is actually an interactive exploration of Flanagan’s memories of a house fire. In order to really see the work, I needed to slow down and read.

Chun-Li: Yes, it took a while to slow down my reaction time to all of the works. What I appreciated was that there was no “false advertising” in the show description. Flanagan’s [pileOfSecrets]: Jump + Ascend (2011) was the only spectator piece, where a viewer couldn’t also be a player or user.  Quite a counterpoint to the Social Media show a few months ago — a rather static show about online social engagement. There was very little representation of “real” virtual engagement within the exhibition.

Ryu: Mauro Ceolin’s RGB webdroids 2, an Astroids style shooter game is a good example of this kind of engagement. With the Happy Mac startup icon replacing the spaceship blasting the logos of E-bay, Skype, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube and my personal favorite, Wikipedia. I think Ceolin was smart to leverage iconic game play that we all know to comment on the relentless data noise of the Internet. Of course, along with the game trope comes the concept that you can never win.

Chun-Li: I’m very competitive as you might have noticed when we competed against each other in Finger Battle, Street Fighter II and Shudder Shutter, but I take perverse pleasure in interactions that are recursive and inconclusive, like RGB… or Jason Rohrer’s Inside a Star-filled Sky (2011). Oddly or not Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of 10 came to mind with Rohrer’s piece. The work “Playing a painting”, a fully functional Atari 2600 painting, Mike Beradino’s Electric Paint 2.0 (2011) had its conceptual and perceptual charms.

Ryu: You are competitive! Four Finger Battle defeats and you kept coming back for more. After your run in with shooting Sanner’s pylon, I was almost afraid to win… almost.

Chun-Li: Despite my losses to you, my right hand did beat my left hand in Finger Battle. There were two Zork-like games. One, Jeremiah Johnson’s Void Gaze (2011) I found engaging and an evolution of the original platform. Through the right keywords you could unlock images that expanded the narrative and aesthetic experience. Travis Hallenbeck’s RPG (Random Party Game) (2011) I found somewhat frusterating. The set up—“Dec 20th, 2012 at 11:30pm”– conjured up all sorts of narrative potential that felt thwarted once I began to interact with the AI.

Ryu: As I mentioned before I found it interesting that each game had its own pacing. The older the game was, the slower the tempo seemed to be. I couldn’t focus at all on RPG or Void Gaze at the opening. The next day, in the serenity of the quiet gallery, I felt transported back to the 80s and actually slowed down enough to explore the work.

Chun-Li: Indeed the opening night was frenetic. I’m looking at a photo of you from the evening leaning over a keyboard, shoulders hunched, mouth agape, glazed over eyes and your fingers are a blur. Let’s not talk about the photo of me trying to obtain the true secret to happiness by jumping towards the Google+ block in CJ Yeh’s Happiness X 100 (2011).

No digital conversation is complete without keywords. Here’s one that I know will put you on the defensive. Nonlinear.

Ryu: n.o.n…um…linear?

Chun-Li: Yes! N.O.N. L.I.N.E.A.R. as in nonlinear narrative.

Ryu: O.K. Chun-Li, I accept your challenge.

Chun-Li: Nonlinear narrative — “disjointed narrative or disrupted narrative is a narrative technique, sometimes used in literature, film, hypertext websites and other narratives, wherein events are portrayed out of chronological order. It is often used to mimic the structure and recall of human memory but has been applied for other reasons as well.”

That’s what Wikipedia says.

Ryu: Wikipedia!? Where’s the RGB webdroids 2 Asteroids blaster when you need it?

Each action, idea or thought comes in a linear progression. An ever-new idea is understood only by comparing it to previous experience. While we may take different paths or revisit an earlier stage in a work or game, we can’t un-know what we have already experienced. This is as true in Jeremiah Johnson’s text-based Void Gaze as it is in Jason Rohrer’s Inside a Star-filled Sky. Iterative, recursive, multi-pathed, yes, but nonlinearity doesn’t exist for humans. Take that! Right(2) Forward Back Square! (Not Forward Right(2) Square Back).

Chun-Li: It exists for humans with short-term memory disorders. (I’m cheating).

Ryu: No fair! We call that insanity.

Chun-Li:  I think it’s an issue of semantics. I think linearity connotes a direction that doesn’t diverge from one path. I think of nonlinearity as multi-pathed, as a branching form. I suggest the inherent nature of the Internet is nonlinear, where one always has multiple options (trajectories) instead of a single one. Flanagan’s [domestic] provides a nonlinear narrative. The user is provided the agency to experience the work out of sequence.

Ryu: Tomato – Tomato eh? O.K. I block your semantic punch and answer with a ludology/narratology combo!

Chun-LI: Ah game theory! Ludology as I understand it focuses on the rules of play as the central aspect to gaming. Narratology posits games within a tradition of other narrative and expressive forms. Finger Battle could be favored by a Ludologist for example. Eddo Stern’s Earthling (2011), with its suggestive keywords: road work, survival of the fittest, progress to the right, perhaps would appeal more to the Narratologist.

Ryu: Why are these mutually exclusive? Shouldn’t the gameplay be informed by the narrative? It seems to me that context is key in understanding any narrative and gameplay is certainly context. This also seems like a very one-sided debate. as I doubt that the Ludologists named themselves this.

Chun-Li: “Ludologistlovestoriestoo: notesfromadebatethatnevertookplace”

Ryu: Nice kick Chun-Li, I stand corrected.

Chun-Li: I got a few good kicks in by the way, “for a girl.” Which does bring me to the point that out of all the artists in the Play Station show and the BYOB, there was only one woman. Is there an elephant in the room anyone? (Of course one in full-on matrix kick suspension)

Ryu: I noticed that too. Gaming seems to be one area in which women haven’t gained much ground. I think the numbers of women in interactive art programs are on par with men. Maybe the disparity is just on the game side and not art/tech in general?

Chun-Li: On par if not surpassing in school enrollment numbers. But certainly within the commercial game industry there is a dearth of women.

Ryu: There are some pretty significant female role models in tech– like Rear-Admiral GraceHopper, co-inventor of COBOL – that are getting more attention now. In gaming do you think that has to do with opportunity or the relative maturity of young men versus young women?

Chun-Li: I think the game industry can be comprised of more than men in extended states of adolescence. Brenda Laurel, Theresa Duncan, and Flanagan come to mind as women who have made or are making inroads into games for girls and getting women involved in gaming as “players” (in both senses of the word). I’m optimistic about women being involved in innovative forms of gaming, and as one potential, the extension of passive narrative forms into participatory experiences.

Ryu: Interesting, I think the extension of classical narrative forms and not just gameplay is a key feature in a game as art. Of the works in the Playstation show, I think the more successful artworks transcended time. Mary Flanagan’s Pile of Secrets for example used clips that ranged from Mario Brothers (1983) to Oblivion (2007).  These edited clips of Flanagan playing 1st person shooter games follow characters across multiple games performing the same actions and reinforcing the same limited patterns no matter which game it is.

Jump. Shoot. Punch. Kick. Run. Kind of a sad list in regards to human potential.

Chun-Li: Yes, but her other piece Ascending is more aspirational. [Insert smile emoticon].

Ryu: I think it will get better soon in the arts. The technology is making its way into the hands of artists who are interested in more than just the technology. The question is, when will the collectors of interactive arts become sophisticated enough to see past the eye candy to the content (or lack thereof)?

Chun-Li: What’s exciting about the Postmasters show, particularly following the Miami fairs, is that you and I are compelled by the work to ask so many questions, and that there are so many tangents to them. There are not a lot of other art experiences that excite me, rile me, or force me to ask questions about my own preoccupations with art and technology.

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Carly Berwick, Ellie Bronson, and Ken Johnson join David Cohen to discuss Anthony Goicolea at Postmasters, Leandro Erlich at Sean Kelly, Alex Katz at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, and Haim Steinbach at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.

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During the January 2009 Review Panel’s discussion of Peter Doig’s recent exhibition, the estimable Ken Johnson of the New York Times denied that a painting of lasting significance could be made with ping-pong as its subject matter. The critic may be correct, but if the contest in question were tennis, one could cite David Diao’s current show at Postmasters as compelling evidence to the contrary.

In truth, the show, titled “I Lived There Until I Was 6…” is only glancingly “about” tennis, though the motif of a tennis court seen in plan recurs in 10 of its three dozen canvases. (Many others are keyed to variations on the colors of grass and clay.) The sport looms large in the artist’s memory for reasons that slowly dawn on the viewer and echo through this lovely, haunting collection of recent work.

For decades, Diao has injected deeply personal, even confessional content onto the placid surfaces and into the untroubled spaces of Modernism by way of a formal vocabulary grounded in the conventions of presentation graphics: diagrams, plans, text. In the early 1990s, for instance, he made paintings charting the relative size of his various New York studios, and of his annual sales figures. The new work retains its erstwhile formal elegance and restraint, but rueful humor is replaced by a seething emotional undertow stemming from the artist’s inherited memories of his family’s displacement and fragmentation at the hands of the Chinese government.

A small painting just inside the gallery entrance clues  the viewer in to the back story. In silver vinyl lettering on a dense green ground, it reads:

Da Hen Li House

I lived there until I was 6. When I returned to
Chengdu 30 years later, it had just been
demolished. There are no photographs. The only
certain scale to rub up against my memories was
the tennis court. I have since uncovered ciphers
of its having been.

The next few paintings provide spatial orientation. They are based on a series of increasingly specific maps that locate the tennis court in the context of the family’s property, neighborhood, city, province, and nation. The chronological sweep of events of both personal and historical significance is accounted for in the largest work in the show, the 13-foot-long Timeline. In 1949, as Mao’s forces prevailed over the Kuomintang, the family mansion was seized and converted to Communist Party offices. The family was separated; Diao eventually made his way to New York. Timeline limns those and other markers such as the Cultural Revolution and Tianamen Square, as well as the death of the artist’s parents and the demolition, in 1979, of the Da Hen Li House.

Then there’s that tennis court leitmotif. In Wild Swans it underlies a quote from Jung Chang’s eponymous 1991 saga of life before, during and after Mao in which the author refers to the office of the Sichaun Daily, which was among those housed in the commandeered Da Hen Li house. Red Star Over Tennis Court depicts the star-studded crimson banner of the People’s Republic obscuring the center line and one forecourt. The painting’s chromatic opposition has plenty of visual snap, but the niceties of formalist abstraction dissolve under the weight of history and the confluence of the personal and the political, public and private, industrial and agrarian.

Above a seemingly straightforward painting of the dimensions of a tennis court, calledStandard Measurement, hangs a small canvas called Balls in which a pair of yellow circles is suspended in the center of an orange-ochre field. Given Diao’s penchant for tweaking the master narrative of 20th-century painting, it is perhaps not too fanciful to consider this work in the light of Jasper John’s Painting With Two Balls, widely interpreted as mocking the macho swagger of mid-century gestural abstraction. Diao’s retooling of the pun is a tacit admission that his upper-middle-class family’s ostentatious enjoyment of the Western, bourgeois pasttime might have seemed a brazen display of counterrevolutionary chutzpah.

In a twist of fate, the artist’s father died while playing tennis, in New York in 1990. The event is dispassionately commemorated in a small 2007 tennis court painting.

The show’s understated tone, its precisely measured sense of bewilderment and outrage, is in marked contrast to Jim Dine’s recent, diarrhetic exhibition at Pace on 25th Street. Dine’s unfettered, inchoate, apparently autobiographical blatherings formed a dense torrent from which the visitor emerged feeling embarrassed and demoralized, as if blanketed with a thick coating of partially digested ideas. The difference between the two shows is like buckshot versus a sniper’s bead.

In this rebus-like exhibition, a painting’s content is absorbed in part from surrounding works. Hanging above Timeline are two small canvases bearing traditional Chinese characters. At around 1935 is a small canvas called To Construct, which indicates the order in which eight strokes of the calligrapher’s brush form that verb. Marking 1979 is Demolish, crudely wiped on a stark white canvas twenty inches square. It is easy to imagine it emblazoned on the side of a building earmarked for razing.

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April 28- June 2, 2007

Anthony Goicolea’s photographs are fantastical constructions of derelict landscapes. His large-scale black and white photographs—they measure up to eight feet wide—fill the front room at Postmaster, depicting traces of man’s interaction with the natural environment in a surreal manner. Goicolea’s photographs are at once meditative and filled with malaise, atmospheric and materially present.

Although they can recall the stillness of Ansel Adams photographs of the American landscape, they are less documents than constructions, as they have been worked in Photoshop. Goicolea culls elements of urban decay, unusual occurrences and dramatic atmosphere, primarily from European locations. From foreground to background, soft edges of objects overlap sharper edges.  By the way they digitally reassembling space, an irregular depth of field is created. Goicolea’s process recalls digital matte painting– a technique in contemporary cinema used to create virtual environments– yet mounted on aluminum and laminated with matte Plexiglass, these photographs as objects are convincingly material.

These landscapes are largely absent of the human figure, for which he is most known as a photographer. In previous work, meticulous digital montage self-portraits self-consciously addressed issues of male adolescence, sexuality and Catholicism.  The new work follows a steady progression away from self-portraiture into environment while additionally working with drawing and painting.

Yet the human figure does appear in less overt ways in the series of ten diptych portraits in the rear gallery. A photographic negative, hand-painted on mylar, is digitally reversed to produce a positive image. These ten daguerreotype-like portraits of elderly men and women, Goicolea imagines, are the inhabitants of the worlds in the front room. In Deconstruction (all works 2007), figures implausibly hang from hammocks inside of a dilapidated façade-less building, nestled behind a foreground of rubble. In Low Tide, presumably it is the character of Dina (a character who appears in the diptych portrait series) sitting at a park bench at the foot of an ocean rock formation, across which tramlines dangle.

Like Goicolea’s previous work, these photographs have a tendency towards meticulous detail– in North Bank, for instance, hidden on the horizon between the buildings are minute suburban and industrial buildings neatly placed in a grid pattern. A lone chair in the foreground of Sky Lift prods one to look closer and discover, amid the haze, silhouettes of figures walking single file across the background. These displaced details evoke the surreality in the work.  But he subtly avoids absurdity and overstatement.

Goicolea’s treatment of sky unifies an ominous tone in the work.  Open, airy, and often polluted, it emotes a brooding and foreboding mood. These expressive skies bear a strong resemblance to a similar mood in the paintings of David Caspar Friedrich, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole. Most impressive are the vertically wavering cloud forms in North Bank, a nearly eight foot wide photograph, whose blurry and blended quality suggests further feathering and enhancement in Photoshop. The wispy clouds contrast with the dour, anonymous industrial architecture, in front of which an iced irrigation pond extends. Smoke Stackdescribes a heavily polluted sky where swirling, heavy plumes of smoke hang over a packed architectural panorama.

The most surprising thing about Goicolea’s current body of landscape photographs is their black and white format. Technically, this may allow a more seamless assembly of these disparate elements, as no painstaking color correction is necessary. However, the lack of chroma gives an old-fashioned feeling to these scenes. And while Goicolea’s contemporary subjects foretell a bleak future, his photographs anachronistically recollect a past quickly being forgotten.

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Postmasters
459 West 19th Street (at 10th Avenue), New York

March 5 – April 2, 2005

Any beekeeper can tell you that when the bees in a hive become too numerous for the space available, all or some of them will leave to begin a new colony elsewhere. Their en-masse activity is called swarming, and it usually occurs after periods of rapid population growth due to fertile surroundings and favorable conditions. Presumably, Diana Cooper experienced such an optimal environment in Italy last year as a Rome Prize winner, for it is clear that she has been busy populating her brain with new artistic ideas. Some of Cooper’s new concepts have emerged from her creative comb and taken up residence at Postmasters Gallery in Swarm, her aptly titled, first New York exhibition since her return from Italy. It is a honey of a show.

There is one dominant piece in each of the gallery’s two rooms. The other works are seen in relation to the dominants—like Workers hovering around their Queens. In the first room, the viewer is immediately drawn to the graphic vibration of a large, predominantly black and white installation that shares the show’s title. As the name suggests, many relatively small parts act in unison, giving the work a swirling, dynamic energy. Like the hexagons in a honeycomb, recurring forms play a major role in the dynamic strength of Cooper’s works. In this installation, a chorus of chevrons and rounded, technological looking shapes soars along the walls and the floor. Like almost all the pieces in the show, it is remarkable in its complexity, impressive in its overall form and demonstrative of another trait that Cooper shares with bees: an ability to build intricate, marvelously engineered constructions using simple materials. Bees use wax; Cooper uses mostly corrugated plastic, cut paper, felt and foam core.

In the second room, Orange Alert: USA is the royal in residence. Its bright orange presence spans the room from floor to ceiling, emitting a visual hum that commands attention, almost impelling viewers to kneel in respect. There is even a pair of felt strips projecting straight from the base of the piece to a cushion that could be used for genuflection.

Or, maybe the pad is meant for introspection. The most memorable components of Orange Alert: USA are small windshield-like objects made with foam core frames and orange gel panes. Visible through them are red felt shapes that look like distant spiky mountain ranges. While four-wheeled travel and far away mountains have symbolized American optimism since the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada highlighted the horizons of settlers in covered-wagons, in this work, the tables have turned. Red mountain ranges, whose contours resemble turbulent economic charts as much as picturesque peaks and valleys, seen through orange windshields, all in front of a fealty pillow, provide a striking combination. Shall we take a knee and contemplate whether instead of seeing things through the rose tinted lenses of late 20th century sanguinity we now huddle behind worldview windshields colored in the orange-alert chroma of caution?

Maybe, but Orange Alert: USA is flying solo in terms of subject matter; geopolitics and economics are not obvious themes in this show. The real common denominator here is the complex visual lyricism Cooper achieves in coupling technological shapes with organic rhythms. In title and in appearance, Mechanical Cloud sums up this intriguing partnership. Its combination of angular and rounded forms brings to mind disparate elements such as circuit boards and cell structures, subway maps and snakeskin patterns; and marries them harmoniously. Tropical Depression, Trapped and Untitled (The Emerger) are all similarly successful, evoking a wide range of imagery including electrical schematics, fungal colonies, topographical maps and urban planning diagrams. All of these pieces, like good Worker bees, function well both individually and as a part of the group, supporting and strengthening their Queens.

But every swarm includes a few Drones: haploid bees that do nothing but mate and die. Genetic placeholders, they are like DNA vessels that pass genes to the next generation without contributing new traits of their own. It is a testament to the quality of this Swarm that only one such cipher exists here. Moving Targets in Black and White functions more like a receptacle for Cooper’s artistic stem cells than as a finished piece. It will no doubt grow into something as beautiful and alluring as any of the other pieces in the show, but it is underdeveloped and has been unfairly asked to hold a wall by itself. It would be interesting in an exhibition of studies, or as part of a documentary on Cooper’s studio practice, but it cannot compete with the other works in this show.

Overall, it is evident that Cooper has been as busy as the proverbial bee in constructing wonderfully engaging and interesting works. If she keeps up her pace, the buzz will be about how her visual sting hurts so good.

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