May 4 to August 17, 2018
537 West 24th Street and 510 West 25th Street, both between 10th and 11th avenues
New York CIty, pacegallery.com

At first glance, the tiny wriggling strokes repeated in line formation in each of Michal Rovner’s large video-based tableaux appear to be legs, or the balletically pointed toes, perhaps, of variously jerking and swaying dancers. (Rovner’s technique entails an ingenious capture of what look to be vignettes of individual video deployed in an extended grid.) But these gyrating limbs could also be chromosomes bouncing back and forth. Or maybe some kind of inkblot test, eluding identification. Whatever these simplified human shapes are, they’re stripped of uniqueness.

“Evolution” is shown at both the 24th and 25th Street locations of Pace Gallery. In both venues, Rovner’s compelling formats vary. The video-based tableaux predominate, but there are also several static images, printed on paper,Cipher 2 (2018), for example, that resemble  barcodes or smudged lines from a typewriter. There are video-based sculptural works and a full-room video installation, Mechanism (2018). The immersive experience of this last piece, though silent, synaesthetically conveys a visualization of static sound in the sudden shifting of the small black figures. Like Mechanism, but in tableau format, Matches 2 (2018) also features the abstracted human blobs, this time red instead of the ubiquitous black and white. They gesticulate like specimens trapped behind glass that are aware of being watched. The forms become an eye test: You try to make out letters or some recognizable hieroglyph within the constant movement, but the wiggling, blurred digits resist definition.  

In Urgency (2017), where the shapes are still writhing and waving, red splays across their blurry heads like a heat signature – splotchy and angry. These figures, in contrast to the vaguely  comical, insistent buoyancy that pervades the rest of this show, appear desperate, whether or not they know they are being targeted.

Elsewhere, the abstracted forms act like language. Take Gmara (2018), for example. This consists of a vitrine encasing a projection on stone tablet in which the person-smudges operate like lines of text. Gemara is the analysis and commentary section of the Talmud. This title, like so many of others in the show, complicates the meaning of the piece, casting not only archival, but also religious connotations. This referentiality, as well as the distinct line work that separates the blobs, connects “Evolution” to Rovner’s larger body of work by evoking  political and social issues: separation through borders and conflict, individual and societal relationships, and human migration. The restrained movements of the figures, as well as the lack of obvious personhood and individuality, might bring to mind the Israel-Palestine conflict, for instance, a topic on which Rovner (who is Israeli) has worked before, as in Makom (Place), 2006, which used rubble from both Israeli and Palestinian neighborhoods to create a new structure.

The proliferating interpretations brought to mind by Rovner’s abstracted forms complicate the title of the show. Does “Evolution” refer to human evolution, as in the growth of either an individual, a society, or a species? Or are we in the political realm, confronting issues of shifting alliances and leadership? Or perhaps there’s a quip here about a lack of evolution: human stubbornness, with the same indistinguishable blobs bouncing back and forth without making progress. Rovner’s rhythmically meditative and yet thematically challenging works encourage the kind of slow looking that allows for multiple interpretations. Her morphing forms legitimize each of these possibilities, as well as others.

At both venues varying dimness in the lighting creates spaces for thoughtful contemplation, as well as a mood which ultimately turns the viewer into a kind of embryo, allowing us, too, to evolve.

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A Mercedes just burst into flames, right in the interior middle. Mercedes are kind of universal, right? In movies and on the news you always see members of a junta or cartel kingpins or threatened pro-Western dignitaries or suspicious CEOs riding around in Mercedes. And then you see the blackened husks of those cars in the aftermath of civil strife. They often provide a kind of proxy for the bodies we don’t see on the news. There are, perhaps, burned Mercedes in Syria, Mexico, Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere right now. The fire just kind of leapt up. The space around the car is totally undefined blackness and the flames spread and there’s no sound except for roaring and crackling auto combustion. There are few cuts in the video and you just see the fire engulfing the car as the camera pans back and forth. Pretty quickly it’s an inferno spewing sooty black into the night sky. The video was made in Vietnam, which, along with its neighbors, Thailand and the Philippines especially recently, has experienced more than its share of violence. The tires are burning and the paint is puckering with boils. The camera gets really close, circling the car. Have they drained the oil, the gasoline and other flammables from out the vehicle’s organs? Could it explode? Superflex is from the Netherlands, where you probably see scenes like this far less often. But if they had Mercedes in the 17th century, there would have been Dutchmen torching them. Lawrence Weschler’s essay, “Vermeer in Bosnia,” does a great job at piercing the myth of still reflection in Dutch masterpieces, reminding you that just outside his beautiful paintings Vermeer’s countrymen were conquering the world (including Vietnam) and setting it up for the kind of crises that lead to flaming luxury sedans today. The tires are gone on one side; the thing takes a contrapposto stance in the darkness, fire still chewing at the headlights and guts. It’s still burning when the credits start rolling. All this happened in about eight minutes — is it in real time? How long does it take to completely destroy a car and leave only a charred skeleton on the roadside, rebels trudging past, for civilians to ponder the horror of?  NOAH DILLON

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“In the beginning everything was dead,” chanted a voice from Camille Henrot’s mesmerizing video Grosse Fatigue (2013) as it leaps off to 13 minutes of throbbing inquiry. There is something slightly contradictory about this statement: death is the cessation of life, so how could death precede the existence of living things? An attempt to trace the history of the Universe usually leads to a brutal confrontation with the limits of one’s perception and ability to comprehend infinity, and describing the endpoints of a creation story seems essential and grounding. Or perhaps this doesn’t matter so much.

Henrot’s exhibition at the New Museum, “Restless Earth,” is one of the most energetic and rejuvenating installations to visit New York this season. It expands upon her explorations of culture, history and informational systems in her earlier works, deliberately toying with the artificially established boundaries between disciplines of study, research and perception as Henrot masquerades as anthropologist, scientist, librarian, sociologist and artist. She explores how the material world and culture is formulated, acknowledged, recorded, organized and standardized, but more prominently, it demonstrates all the chaos and energy these processes exhale.

A large section of the exhibition is filled with sculptures inspired by various works of literature, guided by Ikebana, the Japanese practice of flower arrangement. In these engrossing displays, Henrot attempts to visualize literature through slightly absurd compositions of flowers, grocery vegetables, other seemingly arbitrary ingredients, such as USB cables, Japanese newspapers, sheet moss — all exposing their physical and socio-economic connotations, their roles as food, decoration or mechanical devices, the stories of their discovery or their taxonomy. Each work is labeled with a quote from a work of literature, as well as detailed, hilariously scientific lists of its components — this interest in cataloguing and factual archiving is noticeable throughout her exhibition. These terse, contemplative canopies sprout from countertops, drape from the ceiling and crawl past the walls (Melville’s epic Moby Dick, 1851, is reduced to a few scattered crescent-shaped palm leaves), to form a little jungle ecosystem of their own, a buzzing room of dialogue. There is something strange and attractive about nature jolted into unnatural juxtapositions, considering these fragrant, vivacious arrangements are of amputated flowers and leaves nearing the end of their lives — “at death’s door” would be melodramatic, but their drying edges and fading color carry a hint of ephemerality and urgency.

Her fascination with appropriation and biological material is extended to another room of the show, containing a long table of neatly arranged pages from a 1995 Christie’s catalogue, Jewels from the Personal Collection of Princess Salimah Aga Khan. Henrot illustrates the descriptions on each page with dried bookmark-like flowers and leaves stolen from residences on the Upper East Side. The magnificent gems and luxury uptown urban herbarium are both deliberate demonstrations of excess, but also, to their owners, decidedly necessary measures that define their social status. The catalogue pages only note estimated prices, rendering the values of the jewelry — and whatever they signify — speculative until juried by the auction attendees. This small sense of instability is perhaps furthered by spare, conspicuous slices of opaque tape affixing immobile and dried leaves to the pages, as if to restrain their plot to escape.

Then there are Henrot’s videos. The exhibition features several earlier videos that study the role of various symbols, practices and material objects across different cultures: Coupé/Décalé (2011) documents the origin of bungee jumping; Le Songe de Poliphile (2011), of the semiotics of the snake; and Million Dollars Point (2011), on World War II materials abandoned in Polynesia and the “cargo cults” that subsequently formed. Grosse Fatigue is the most conceptually ambitious (and probably low-budget) of them all, a series of desktop windows appearing on a computer screen, propelled by a groovy rap song that stitches together various origin myths, scientific presentations and annals of anthropology with the coherence of a surging music video. The deluge of imagery in today’s Internet age is a popular topic for artists, but few successfully conjure much beyond some purposefully collaged frenzy. Henrot’s selection of images (animals of from various phyla, different cultural practices, shots of mundane activity such as a manicured hand rubbing an orange) is not unpredictable, but they provide more than a simple sensation of distress and visual saturation. She consciously demonstrates the gaps and limits that still (and might forever) exist in our already overwhelming knowledge of history, a vault of information that could be more reasonably experienced through the momentum and innate disorder that weaves it all together.

Grosse Fatigue was made at Henrot’s 2013 Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian, during which she collected footage of animal and plant specimens, obscure digital archives, blank hallways and anonymous office workers. She paired that imagery with the unending reach of the digital realm, which, in many ways, is an archive and simulation of the immense universe beyond the monitor, but also feels oddly tangible as it is fully manmade and portable (one shot features an iPhone with a green croaking frog parked on top, held by a hand). This strategy allows her narrative to swell with felt urgency and inscrutable complexity, and also the leisurely nimbleness of aimless web surfing. Queues of browser windows at times pile up like flashing torrents of spam advertisements, but they can be readily clicked shut like full drawers of ghastly, vibrantly preserved tropical bird specimen. In the beginning and end there were both uncluttered Mac desktops.

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Simon Preston Gallery
May 4 to June 7, 2014
301 Broome Street
New York, (212) 431-1105

Whitney Biennial 2014
Lobby Installation
May 7 to 11, 2014

Victoria Fu’s first solo exhibition at Simon Preston Gallery is centered primarily around two complex large-format video installations, Belle Captive II and Belle Captive III. These works, like Belle Captive I, which was shown at the Whitney Biennial in early May, are immersive digital projections, created via an overlay of diverse time-based and light-based materials and approaches. In each work, the context/content becomes a mysterious but partially decodable sum larger than its parts.

The three Belle Captive video installations are non-narrative, and the subject matter is hard to distinguish. In Belle Captive II, an ethereal purple-pink atmosphere serves as the constant background of the projected video (this hazy imagery is actually derived from footage that the artist shot of a sunset, on 16mm film). In the foreground we witness people dressed in business-casual attire as they perform certain tasks, and pose in specific interactions with one another. The figurative imagery in this work was culled from commercial stock footage downloaded by the artist over the internet, which she subsequently re-cropped and re-edited. In the six-minute looped piece which is projected on a central wall within the gallery, we watch various actors at both close and medium range as they make sign language gestures, climb up an ascending series of leveled stairs, stand in half circles smiling, and most strikingly, hold large green-screened placards in front of themselves, which render parts of their bodies invisible.

Belle Captive II functions more on an abstract level than as a form of “critique,” associated with the appropriation of found images. The gestures of its borrowed main characters are stripped down to being little more than the actions of human beings within a certain barren digital atmosphere. A surreal dramatic quality takes over, heightened by the consistently-haloed appearance of the green-screened objects and people. A close-cropped smile on one of these characters faces, for instance, implies something different then it ever did in the source material, where it must have been scripted for easy infomercial digestion. Without using any overarching narrative or single dominant technology, the work seems to profile some heightened, futuristic, but closed-off version of reality that exists within its own time-based capabilities.

Belle Captive III, which is situated on the other side of a wall from II, is unpopulated by contrast, containing no characters or recognizably sourced footage. This work seems even more inherently technical than the other videos. It consists of a projection that spills off the wall and onto the floor, containing two-dimensional shapes that are the color and consistency of the sunset-pink imagery found in the other video. Many of the shapes are abstract, but at times others represent the silhouettes of human figures, objects, and settings, some of which appear in Belle Captive I and II. In actuality Belle Captive III was created by recording within a physical set, and with the cut-out shapes we see as props. There is a strange, self-reflexive and iterative quality within the cross-referencing between these works. In comparison to Belle Captive I and II, this piece was created within real time and space . In another sense, though, this video is almost the dry template to the dramatic environs found in the other two Belle Captives. It envisions the digital realm as a stage, and proceeds in two dimensions to block out all the loaded symbols and moments that in the other instances become activated in a digitally-fabricated world.

The exhibition also includes two additional works. There is a 16mm black-and-white film where a mirror held by the single pastorally-situated protagonist occasionally reflects into the camera and washes out the image, and there is a sole photographic work created by documenting the projection of a room’s corner onto the corner itself. These media-based explorations are interesting, but they do not have the immediate reach of the Belle Captive video installations, which aesthetically delve into the reality of a mediated world rather than alluding to it.

Belle Captive I, as it was installed at the Whitney, would seem to be the most all-encompassing realization of this series. As with Belle Captive III, there are nods to the experiential, phenomenological, and disorderly capabilities of video installation. The main projection falls across a small wall in the foreground, then jaunts unevenly onto the wider wall in the background, setting up the sense of a semi-narrative video “framed” within a larger airy video installation.  The mis-en-scene in I is more expansive then the contents of III. The imagery is derived from similar commercial stock footage of business-attired actors, but also includes a range of characters of diverse ages, and footage of specific objects, flora, and fauna. In one memorable montage, a teenage actress drinks a glass of water until she is obscured by a time-lapse of a leafy plant growing. In another, a colorful bird in close focus sits on a hand, followed by a markedly-red tomato that appears in front of an out-of-focus face. The inclusiveness of the material has increased just to the point that the commercial nature of the source footage remains barely evident (one giveaway is that all of the images are “positive”–hands with thumbs up, flowers growing, dog drinking water, child smiling).

Victoria Fu’s practice indulges in media-based content in a similar manner to how Pop artists in the 1960s indulged in the seduction of visual advertising. At the same time, though, the pieces have a distinctly sociological feel. Maybe at heart, the work tries to split the difference. These videos, which share a name with the 1983 avant-garde mystery film directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet, attempt to wade into a digital world we are still in the midst of creating, and don’t yet fully understand. 

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The Kitchen

August 27 to October 5, 2013
512 West 19th Street
New York City, 212-255-5793

Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) was a pioneering video artist whose work was under appreciated in her own lifetime. Although Bender was connected to the group of artists known as the “Pictures Generation,” she never received the recognition and institutional legitimization that many of these artists now enjoy. A new exhibition at The Kitchen, Tracking the Thrill, suggests that Bender’s videos and her prophetic views on the media’s relationship to art and perception was ahead of its time, and that perhaps it is only now that the radical dissonance of her work can be fully appreciated.

The top floor of The Kitchen presents the video installation Wild Dead (1984), a video documentation of the lost performance piece Dumping Core (1984), and a sampling of her commercial work. Her flashy, high-speed intro for the television show “America’s Most Wanted” is shown alongside music videos she edited or directed for bands such as Megadeth and New Order. The slippage between these commercial works and her artwork is fascinating. As an artist who also worked in commercial television, Bender was something of a double agent: she played an active role in both developing and appropriating the system of commercial advertising to expose the viewer to the manipulative language of the industry. Bender was aware of an artwork’s half-life, and by controlling the high-speed intoxicating language of commercials she worked to stay one step ahead of art’s absorption back into advertising. She speaks with poetic urgency in a 1987 Bomb Magazine interview with Cindy Sherman about the power and effect of the media, describing it as “a cannibalistic river whose flow absorbs everything” and flattens out content. It is her recognition and intervention into this incessant movement that feels the most shockingly relevant today.

Total Recall occupies the entire bottom floor theater and takes its name from the 1990 film by Paul Verhoeven, which was still in production at the time. First exhibited at the Kitchen in 1987, the 18-minute video installation is an operatic tour de force, and curator Philip Vanderhyden does an excellent job in re-staging it. A stack of 24 television monitors and three projection screens pulsate with images woven together in a way that is both absorbing and frightening. As the viewer is confronted with bits of movies, news, personal graphics, and film, very rarely do all the monitors and screens show the same image simultaneously. The eight channel analog piece has a rhythm all its own and the work demands that the audience sync to its rapid pace. Bender’s long time collaborator Stuart Argabright’s soundtrack flutters between assault and surrender that perfectly compliments the visual speed of Total Recall. This unsettling pace will not allow a passive viewing; as soon as one begins to feel comfortable, the tempo of sound and image change radically. It is this fast-paced rate of change that is paramount to understanding this work and indeed Bender’s overarching vision. Because one is never fully able to grasp the entire work and although one might recognize commercial logos and fragmented images from popular culture, the edits destabilize a complete and “true” read of the symbols. We are left simply with their particle form, an aesthetic empty shell. As the hollowed scenes and symbols are sequenced, their speed and movement simultaneously become context and content.

Despite its chaotic abstraction Total Recall, like much of Bender’s work, evokes the political climate of the time. Regan-era conservatism and the monolithic aspect of consumer culture was pervasive, and Bender worked furiously to expose how advertising reflects our society’s obsession with entertainment. One merely needs to turn on a television (or stream digital news) to see just how prescient she was in anticipating the way we now consume information, and how our appetite for such rapid consumption is never satiated. Today, when so many artists are passively using the language of advertising, Gretchen Bender is a bold reminder that they should be “active agents.”  Although the current of information may be strong, we can jump in and change the flow of the pulse.

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