The New York Film Festival’s Projections series is an often-overlooked selection of the finest in recent experimental and avant-garde film. Spread over 11 programs, this year’s subjects ranged from documentary to magical realism, from fades to found footage. Aggressive editing techniques and sound collage offered some new and provocative investigations, yet it was the modest program of two seasoned filmmakers — Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler — that beamed with the liveliest verve and curiosity. Partners in love and art for over 50 years, they have earned a following of poets, philosophers and artists steeped in as much affection as respect for “Nick and Jerry.” Like their legendary at-home screenings, this was a show-and-tell of gentle, beautiful things.

The program included three short films — Dorsky’s Autumn and The Dreamer, and Hiler’s Bagatelle II (all works 2016) — each imbued with the pair’s characteristically playful and patient observations of natural and interior life. Autumn, however, stood out as Mr. Dorsky’s most transient tapestry to date, and a significant interpretation of haiku — the pure poetic form that first seized him as a youth. Shot in 2015, during the last months in that year, as California’s drought continued, the film is dedicated to all autumns and ruminates on its essence through nature, using short shots of the California countryside. Inconceivably crisp and luminous, the 16 mm film is 26 minutes long and silent, complimented by the tick-tock of the projector. Dorsky’s films do without narrative structure, allowing the images to speak directly. By such standards, Autumn is verbose.

The film opens slowly, burying us eye-deep in foliage before clearing a space for Dorsky’s found treasures: broad-eared rhododendron and butterfly bushes, wayfaring between islands of light, fade in and out of a blackness that comes to linger within an organic, oneiric, day-for-night tone. Everything seems steeped in twilight — the violet hour, the day’s autumn — where partitions blur and something slips. Flora is constant, becoming a verdant ether, occasionally contrasted by the slick hide of a building, but we are always quickly pulled back under the brush. Each image, dyed in oscuro, is kernelled and then connected by a constant flow of gaze. Vegetation, despite its thirst, pulsates and vacillates throughout while, against reason, bushes blush green. Dorsky is reflective, more mirror than director; his subjects, once pinned to celluloid, are egalitarian: the darkening bough, a sun freckled path, light smeared like jelly across a window, an ache for life.

Such is the poetry of Dorsky, and his interest in haiku has long been shared among filmmakers. In the 1929 essay “Beyond the Shot,” Sergei Eisenstein precisely correlated the natures of montage and haiku. In both practices, it is the copulation of forms to create a “representation of something that cannot be graphically represented.” He offers the Japanese lexicon as example: the combination of water and eye mean to weep, knife and heart mean sorrow. Such laconicism describes haiku as much as Dorsky’s art; to see his film is to see master poet Matsuo Bashō’s 17 syllables glowing at the edge of winter:

Autumn moonlight —
a worm digs silently
into the chestnut.

A self-proclaimed hunter of the Zen occurrence, of satori (the sudden enlightenment), Dorsky applies a number of poetic rules to the film, allowing his images to move us as consistently as Bashō’s cranes, cuckoos and moons. Vital to haiku are kigo (“season words”) — such as cicada, typhoon or grapes — that connote the time of year. Autumn is pregnant with the kigo-laden images of its namesake: rain slick streets, coy ochre moons, hexagonal light and tawny leaves glide down, across and over the screen. This is not simply a rummaging of diaphanous delicacies, however. Cutting is as essential to haiku as montage, and each cut is precise. Cutting works like a punctuation mark, and for Dorsky like a door. Throwing the juxtaposition into revelatory light, it links us to a new dimension — the moment of satori.

Such delightful turns happen throughout the film; seasoned and cut with care, Dorsky’s images become incarnations of linked verse. In one observation, light-tickled water meets a crush of velvet black reeds; the pair, now joined, transforms into an ominous sea urchin. Midway through Autumn, some late afternoon light falls yellow on the nubby back of an armchair or sofa. It glows, beginning to resemble a wheat field, but a crossfade exposes a dark landscape of whirling gears beneath: upholstery and infrastructure combine to reveal parallel universes of leisure and grind, flesh and mechanism. This all quickly falls away again, yet you can still taste a type of yellow, decidedly post-harvest.

In material as much as purpose, both film and haiku are attempts to bottle the moment of revelation, the fleeting experience. Indeed, the haiku is traditionally printed, like celluloid, as a single vertical line. Their kinship culminates towards the end of Autumn, the frame lingering on a voluptuous bit of vegetation. As Dorsky pushes and pulls us in and out by his signature dark fade, we move through a hypnagogic and hesitant collapse (or arising), towards a new vision: constellations of inestimably starry flora. In its final syllable, the film negotiates heaven and Earth: the Milky Way in milk thistle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s a delayed shock built into the work of sculptor and video artist Yeshaiahu Rabinowitz, which is all the more effective for not being immediately apparent. Underlying his work, which at first seems playful, is a quiet but no less searing reflection of how it might feel to be a gentle, slightly built Israeli male facing the prospect of army service.

Rabinowitz makes sculpture out of soft materials like felt and cardboard to deal with hard subjects, including violence and war, fear and vulnerability. He keeps his subjects at a distance; the action is offstage. But it is Rabinowitz’s sense of drama that attracts attention to his work, starting with the life-size sculpture of a fallen horse made of cardboard sheeting, which he presented at his degree show two years ago — which led to almost immediate showings of his work at the prestigious Herzliya and Israel Museums.

His first solo exhibition, “Attributes of a Hero,” was staged at Hansen House, Jerusalem, earlier this year. The space was built as a leper hospital in the late 19^th century, and still retains a spooky, historic atmospheric even after being reinvented as an art center. Rabinowitz’s sculptures of hand-sewn, made-to-measure body parts — or coverings for body parts — are well suited to the venue, a stone-walled gallery space with domed ceiling and cobbled floor. And it’s not just because of the association of leprosy and losing limbs. The dim, cell-like space, with spotlights that cause the shadows of sculpture and viewers to move across the walls, adds to the theatricality of the work, but also — if I’m not looking too deeply into it — its melodrama, fakeness and subversive joke.

The limp, tailored shapes are scaled and segmented, like pieces of human and animal armor, momentarily bringing to mind Claes Oldenberg’s big, soft replicas of everyday commodities, being both strange and out of context, yet immediately familiar. Instead of a hamburger or household plug, we discover a bit of human torso, a horse’s muzzle, pair of legs, horns. As shells sloughed off by a living body, or waiting to be used, they emphasize a need for protection — not that they would be of any more use than the plug or hamburger.

These pieces could be theatre props, perhaps from an amateurish Shakespearian production, either abandoned or waiting to be used in a play. Then the gallery space could be a scene in Macbeth’s castle. In discussion, Rabinowitz says that indeed, Shakespeare and his views on the complexities of heroism are an intrinsic part of his plot.

The organically shaped shells or molds are casually but expertly cut and sewn. Rabinowitz trained as a tailor after his obligatory national service as a soldier in the Israeli army, and says he “entered the art world through the back door.” Conceptualism comes naturally to him. He makes his art out of the unlikely combination of soldiering and sewing, uses it to express irony and an eager enjoyment of being an artist, and expresses a worldview that is tragic, naïve and knowing, all at once.

In the exhibition’s eponymous video, Rabinowitz shows himself trying to become a hero. An observant Jew with a yarmulka on his mop of curly hair, he first dresses carefully in white shirt and trousers, the modest clothes of a yeshiva student, while telling about biblical war heroes. His personal training exercise turns out to be running around in circles in a disused city space, crouched forwards with his fingers raised like the horns of a bull. The gentleness of the smiling young man and the futility of his personal exercise are offset by fierce energy and determination, and undermined by his own amusement. It’s the histrionics of heroism: weakness and foolishness fueled by heroic fantasy and will power. It’s a far-reaching metaphor that includes the collapsing horse. War is a subject often returned to by Israeli artists, but Rabinowitz has his own way of making a lot of suggestions about it, and leaving them in the air.

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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.

The post Implicated Viewers: Looking at Violence through Contemporary Latin American Art appeared first on artcritical.

June 23 to August 5, 2016
83 Grand Street (between Wooster and Greene streets)
New York, 212 279 9219

The same day “Golden Eggs” opened at Team Gallery, the UK voted for the economic insanity of leaving the European Union, following on another economic insanity of austerity, privatization, and cheerful steroidal encouragement of the financial sector. The vote to leave was, in part, a severely misguided reaction against wealth concentration and the technocratic institutions of Brussels, Frankfurt and London, which have for decades segregated citizens and underserved them, or even put a boot to their neck. “Golden Eggs,” with work by 10 artists organized by Alissa Bennett, performs a similar kind of disaffection as those referendum voters, though framed by the analytic reflectivity of Marxism (probably at least a little sardonically) instead of the reactionary know-nothing populism that just made a basket case of Britain, that has threatened other European nations for almost a decade, and which is threatening the US election.

Bennett described the show to me as a kind of answer to Art Basel, which had concluded five days earlier. That fair was, this year, seen as something of a test of the market’s continuing hypertrophy, coming on the heels of an apparently lackluster run of auctions. And the outlook was judged to be good. Wasn’t everyone very glad that the party is likely to continue?

A large red-and-white painting by Gardar Eide Einarsson, The Next Recession and Where to Hide (2016), summed up the mood of the show succinctly: a giant arrow hurtling toward the lower right corner, imitating a graph of a crashing global market. It’s a brusque, cool image that invites both terror and dispassionate admiration. It’s appropriated from a January 2016 cover of Time Magazine, headlined with the painting’s title in fearful, capitalized letters. Einarsson’s painting excludes the original text, which had also ominously crowed about China and boasted a clever report from Davos, meaning the World Economic Forum, another Swiss confab for market makers, then congregating leaders and representatives of the most powerful businesses and nations on Earth to discuss economic policy, as they’ve done for 45 years. Although the meeting intends to help guide capitalism toward the benefit of all, it has prevented neither the greatest worldwide consolidation of wealth in almost 100 years, nor the costly, global, economic supercatastrophe that’s been playing out since 2007. In fact, it’s probably done a great deal to enable those twin phenomena. Einarsson’s bolting arrow isn’t predicted by or aimed at Davos, but is cast by Davos; it’s everyone else trying to find where to hide.

The people at Basel and Davos can be seen as the market’s invisible hands, though perhaps “occluded hands” would be a better name, since although many of the participants at each conference are certainly recognizable, there’s almost zero transparency in what they do. Hans Haacke’s kinetic sculpture, The Invisible Hand of The Market (2009), anoints the whole show, hanging high on one wall. It’s a large box, with the title written out like a billboard. In the center, a large, open hand tilts from side to side, its innards ticking metronomically. The disembodied hand greets, waves, grabs, swats, remains out of reach, and dominates. It quotes Adam Smith, capitalism’s godfather, and his proposition that the private vices of individuals can, in their self-interest, invisibly, almost magically, develop into public benefits. However, Smith was speculating about the disembodied power of crowds, not the secret pillaging of oligarchs. And what is the social benefit of a global art-as-investment frenzy remains unclear, even more so when vast quantities of artworks bought in Switzerland remain there, sealed in indefinite storage at the Geneva Freeport, constructed to sequester collections and avoid taxes, and maybe trade and deal and hide. Given bad incentives — such as those that reward opacity in the art market, or that repay, with taxpayer money, dumb, massively over-leveraged financial bets — private vices may instead yield results which are simply vicious, yield a market whose aims and procedures are warped to favor wealth accumulation rather than innovative cultural production or social good. Karl Marx asserts that this is capitalism’s inevitable trajectory, not merely an accidental flaw.

Alex Bag, in Coven Services (2004), shows what such market forces look like as products for ordinary consumers (not citizens). Her video strings together several ad parodies, with interludes consisting of segments from a published sex tape starring the heiress Paris Hilton, shot in infrared, so that she and her paramour are rendered in green and black. This is riffed on by Bag, in clips where she plays PFC Jessica Lynch in green Army fatigues, selling Halliburton; a green witch named Eli Lilly dosing nubile children with Prozac and Satanism; and by a guy in a night-vision segment pimping the “warm, sticky infojaculate” pumped to consumers by AOL-Time Warner. She weaves a narrative of the interconnectedness (read: “collusion”) of the military, politics, capital, and entertainment in the construction of a totalizing ideology of consumption and obeisance.

Three text-based works — by Barbara Kruger, Jessica Diamond and Bjarne Melgaard — sneer at the developed world’s socioeconomic turmoil, bringing to the surface a primary contradiction. Diamond’s wall drawing declares “I HATE BUSINESS,” which is the product of her own business. Two prints by Kruger, wonder, respectively, about the relationship between being successful and feeling “FAKE,” and “IS BLIND IDEALISM REACTIONARY?” Melgaard snipes, “THE WORLD iS FULL OF RiCH CORRUPT CUNTS.” But his oeuvre is known for its ostentatious kind of cuntiness and opulence, and here is also included one of his sculptures, mounted with beauty products and a Brioni jacket. Embroidery over the interior breast pocket, conspicuously visible, indicates that it was made specially for Melgaard; I have no clue what a bespoke coat costs, but suffice to say its retail price is at least several thousand dollars. None of these artists would be considered rich from the vantage of patrons in the transnational capitalist class who fund so much of the art market. But, looking upward, they seem rich, and it can feel really impossible for emerging artists to gain purchase among such established figures. The art market, like other markets for other labors, is built in such a way as to suppress or exclude the emergent and retain the privileges of the already established, even the blasphemous establishment.

It’s tempting (and probably necessary) to extend this kind of critique, but it also smacks of the same myopia that always infects dogmatic demands for ideological rigor, or at least for the appearance of absolutism. In 2011, during the Occupy protests, TV personalities jeered at the protesters for leaving rallies to withdraw cash from Bank of America ATMs for lunch or whatever, as if the protesters’ coerced interaction with corporate behemoths was in some way hypocritical to that movement’s purpose. Einarsson, Haacke, Bag, Melgaard, Kruger, Diamond, and other artists here, as well as Bennett, have a license to criticize money and power. The meaning of their work, as pointed as it may be, is often secondary to its value for collectors. If the insults lobbed at capitalism provide good return on investment, then the market will reward its hecklers. These artists didn’t choose this, but they are illustrative. They’re collected at Basel by the kinds of people meeting at Davos, and they make a living. But Davos and Basel have true power, not them.

Marx, elaborated by ideologists such as Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, wrote of sharpening contradictions as a propulsion towards the collapse of capitalism (a longtime fantasy not likely to be realized anytime soon). As can be expected, those forces and contradictions play themselves out in every aspect of culture, from factories to studios. The depredation of middle and working class nest eggs, combined with the distribution of golden parachutes to speculators who were supposed to lose under the economic laws they had championed, has driven the contradictions to extremes. Will they crack? What happens then?

The post Encompassing Hostility: “Golden Eggs” at Team Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

June 3 to July 16 2016
600 Washington Square South (at South 6th Street)
Philadelphia, PA, 215 629 1000

A day in the life of a dying metropolis: At noon, a building collapses under glaring sunlight. At dusk, an orange glow washes over an overgrown rail viaduct. At dawn, banners flutter in from every direction, carrying a cryptic message to the city’s empty streets. Suddenly, flying shards of material adhere to the sides of a crumbling warehouse, resurrecting it as a luxury loft. Such is the transformation that artist Tim Portlock depicts in his video 11th_St_City_Symphony.mp4 (2013), from the exhibition “Ash and Gold,” at Locks Gallery. It is a transformation one sees in cities throughout the United States, in which whole neighborhoods disintegrate and new development takes root at the blink of an eye.

Bookending Portlock’s video are two bodies of prints that blend photography and computer rendering, one based on blighted scenery from the East Coast, the other on similar landscape in the West. The older prints show a city derived from, but not identical to, Philadelphia. Salon (2011) overlooks a dramatic V-corner, denuded of most of its structures and populated by wild dogs. Abandoned factories loom in the background, and behind them a structure that resembles Philadelphia’s massive city hall clock tower — topped not by the statue of founder William Penn, but a hulking figure that might be a staggering corpse from The Walking Dead.

Anyone who has travelled to Philadelphia by rail will find this desolation familiar. Yet Salon is not one site in particular but a distillation of Philadelphia scenes, and by his own admission, the artist has omitted certain objects and inserted others to capture what he considers to be the city’s essence. Portlock has been deliberate about the alignment of details, putting, for example, the sun’s glowing fireball directly behind the menacing clock tower statue in — much the way Thomas Cole cast dramatic sunlight on figures locked in struggle in his 1836 painting Course of Empire: Destruction.

Although his images depict a cycle of decline and gentrification unique to today’s city, Portlock has stated that they are inspired by the 19th-century American landscape art of painters like Cole. Those Hudson River artists also manipulated the scenes they painted in order to embed in the landscape a deeper vision of the American character. They bathed mountains, rivers, and wild animals in a quasi-religious sunlight, identifying nature with broad themes such as sin, redemption, harmony and conflict.

If Portlock’s Philadelphia scenes are like a painted 19th-century jeremiad, his West Coast prints are more like the thin rants of a modern-day religious television show. Many are based on San Bernardino, California, where the washed out colors of the Mojave Desert create a relentlessly even light. Instead of color cast from the sun, the artist uses the artificial colors of signage and advertising to create visual drama. In Yellow Dancer (2015), for example, he inserts a deflated acid-yellow AirDancer in the foreground. Collapsed over a wire, the figure’s deformity, coupled with its artificially happy hue, embodies a void more profound than that of Philadelphia’s decay.

The AirDancer is the closest thing to a human presence in any of Portlock’s work. The artist has said that he omits the figure in order to avoid the tendency, seen in much realist art, to show people as embodiments of their victimhood rather than depicting them as human beings in full. Instead he draws attention to the forces that create such forlorn scenes. Like the fluttering banners in the video 11th_St_City_Symphony.mp4, the Air Dancers also serve as metaphor for the weightless condition of U.S. cities, in which stone, steel and asphalt float on the worthless paper of land deeds and advertisements. The trail of false promises these documents embody enables a landscape of endless freedom, and also of endless emptiness.

The post Death and Resurrection in the City: Tim Portlock at Locks Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

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.

The post Guns, Guerrillas, Music Videos: The Propeller Group at the MCA Chicago and James Cohan appeared first on artcritical.

April 19 to May 22, 2016
Wiesner Building, 20 Ames Street (at Amherst Street)
Cambridge, MA, 617 253 4680

At the List Visual Arts Center’s exhibition “Narrative Color,” the first phrase that came to me while watching KP Brehmer’s three-minute film Ideale Lanschaft (Ideal Landscape) (1970), was “schizophrenic gardens,” but I corrected myself. The depicted gardens themselves were not disorderly — in fact, as English gardens, they were the pure image of order, “the triumph of sovereignty over nature,” as the narrator acutely described them. It was only their representations within the film that seemed fleeting, vibrant, paranoia-inducing. This, in itself, becomes a sort of theme within the show, where each of the five films, made by seven artists since the 1970s, deliberately refuses to be structured by a traditional narrative arc, instead using color to explore the construction and deconstruction of language. The show includes work by Brehmer, Bernadette Corporation, Mareike Bernien and Kerstin Schroedinger, Derek Jarman, and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.

Scenes in Ideale Lanschaft move quickly: only a few scenes of some garden somewhere at a time, occasionally with a dancing man intervening, at first with German dialogue and captions, then interspersed with color blocks and corresponding names of colors. In a seconds-long take, a flowerbed is briefly framed and the camera moves on to a wall of foliage, which becomes a green streak across the screen. A man dancing in the garden appears as a vision when the camera quickly swoops away, as if running away from the image. The scenes become more like color fields, of skies and gardens, largely static but slightly wavering.

Fortuitously, the first headphones I used were apparently broken: the only soundtrack was heavy breathing in my left ear, which narrowed my focus to the film’s frantic visual scape and heightened the unsettling affect of the film. Watching again, this time with functioning headphones, I followed the dialogue more closely to understand how and why flashes of lush estates and near-stills of tonal skies were woven together. In German, with English subtitles, a male narrator argues quite calmly that we learn how to see, order, and assign color socially and that “Nature’s sphere of influence is determined by society.” The technical necessity of using subtitles for both spoken and unspoken text conveniently enhances the film’s argument that color is learned, for HORIZON BLUE reads as the consequence of “the desire to return to… nature.” The colors’ given names become more and more arcane, and because the subtitles labeling colors do not correspond to speech, the film becomes an exercise in divorcing visual from written and spoken languages. As curator Alise Upitis writes, how might color depend on language?

As the first film in the exhibition, Ideale Lanschaft necessarily colors the others, its arguments influencing the viewer’s impressions of the remaining films. “Narrative Color” must grapple with the very formation of human societies, some long event of conquering. The imposition of language upon color (and all else) is an imposition of power, just as (according to Ideale Lanschaft’s narrator) in Europe, “the ruling classes used laid-out greeneries to demonstrate their power.”

Another exploration of how color operates within society, Rainbow’s Gravity also complicates the plot of human conquest presented in Ideale Lanschaft. The film, directed and produced by Bernien and Schroedinger, is set around an Agfacolor Neu factory, where Nazi concentration camp workers produced color film. The title, Rainbow’s Gravity, alludes to Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel, also set during World War II. As the film opens, a woman narrates what one sees on screen: several women sitting in a dark room where the only light source is a projector that begins to play a film. The speaking woman sits in this room, her voice wavering and self-conscious. Until now, it has not been clear what this projected film is, but as the camera shifts to show a scene of several women dancing, it is revealed as Veit Harlan’s propagandizing Opfergang (The Great Sacrifice) (1944). “Do you remember the colors?” another woman asks in the dark. “My memory is in black and white,” the first answers. “Spielberg said, ‘I think black and white stands for reality. I don’t think color is real,'” she continues. “I think certainly color is certainly to the people who survived the Holocaust.” The women, actors, describe what it must have been like to manufacture color film during the Holocaust, when film was used to propagandize on behalf of the regime that enslaved them.

Bernadette Corporation’s Hell Frozen Over (2001) delves deeper into the linguistic complexities of negation — where the negation of color might be black and white or the active addition and removal of colors. The film opens with several scenes shot against the sublime white of a frozen lake, showing the semiotician Sylvère Lotringer giving an excursus on poet Stéphane Mallarmé, explaining that “‘nothing’ for Mallarmé is very positive… there are four different ways of saying nothing. Each word is saying something.” Interspersed with sparse shots of Lotringer are complex scenes of female models posing for an invisible camera alongside props and backdrops. The negation and assembling of color relationships are haltingly connected to fashion through this footage, as the models move, hide, or otherwise rearrange brightly colored consumer goods. In one segment, for example, a woman removes a red suitcase from underneath a couch and reaches for a series of thermoses perched on a reflective table. As she puts these yellow, blue, white, and black thermoses into the suitcase, one-by-one, the visual appeal of the scene incrementally melts away.

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June 8 to August 7, 2016
643 Park Avenue (between 66th and 67th streets)
New York, 212 616 3930

Middlebrow culture has long been a contentious territory: it was critically viewed by Modernists as an ineffective attempt to water down and vulgarize innovative cultural endeavors, to produce a faux intellectual lifestyle that can be mass-produced for its status and entertainment value. Post-Modernists deemed the middlebrow edgy, clever, knowing, stylish, and formally inventive in its eclectic appropriation of the pretenses of a high culture, and their insertion into the everyday world of its audience. Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed embraces middlebrow culture: his art is for those who want to be in on the joke. One painting is a joke about Jackson Pollock, a video refers to Piero Manzoni’s cans of the artist’s shit, stacked chairs and battered cardboard boxes nod to Sol LeWitt and Minimalism, his paintings in varied styles are about taste(less-ness).

“The Back Door,” now at the Park Avenue Armory, surveys work from Creed’s more than 20-year-long career. The exhibition’s title can be taken in any number of ways — servants, trades people and less than respectable visitors come to the back door. It also has some naughty sexual connotations as it refers to anal sex. While I’m sure that this title was meant to conjure up these associations, in this case it quite literally, refers to the actual rear door of the Armory, which Creed has motorized so that it continuously opens and closes. That piece is titled Shutters Opening and Closing (2016) and offers three events in one: the slow opening of the doors, the simultaneous dramatic shedding of light into the almost empty, cavernous interior of the 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, and finally a glimpse of people walking by on Lexington Ave. This brought to my mind the allegory of Plato’s Cave, in that Creed implies that we, the audience, live in a shadow world and that without his reminder, we would not be aware that just outside, real living beings go on with their lives unconcerned with what is going on in the Armory.

There are four other pieces scattered throughout that employ the on/off, open/close theme; one is in the big corridor, where a massive set of curtains, usually decorously tied back, hang loose, endlessly opening and closing. In the elaborate Veterans Room, a white grand piano on an oriental rug, slowly opens only to immediately slam shut with a resounding bang. The other is the backdoor to the Parlor Room, called A Door Opening and Closing (1995), behind which, in the Parlor, The Lights Going On and Off (1996) is enacted by two rows of white, globular lights hanging from the ceiling. In combining these two works he has synchronized the so when the door is closed the lights are on and when the door is open the lights are off.

The only thing that occupies the Drill Hall is a large screen hung from the ceiling on which six videos are screened. These three-minute-long videos play alternately with the opening and closing of the rear door. The videos are of different women of various ages and in varied settings. The camera slowly zooms in on each woman’s mouth; when it arrives at its destination she opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue to reveal half-eaten foods stuffs, then closes her mouth to swallow. The seemingly obvious reference for these benignly undignified videos are those porn films in which women showily take cum in their mouths and then swallow.

In a series of small rooms along one side of the Drill Hall, a retrospective of Creed’s videos has been installed, one to a room. In one, against an immaculate white ground, young Asian women squat to take a shit, in another video we are again given a clean, white space in which different women enter the frame to repeatedly induce vomiting so as to produce a Pollock-like “painting” on the floor. A third video gives a close-up of a single female breast as a disembodied/decontextualized sex object. As for videos of men, there is one in which a man angrily smashes bouquets of flowers against the floor and another, shot like a home movie, in which the artist in bathing trunks is shown at the beach, wiggling about striking various pin-up poses that allude to both male and female, soft-core porn. These videos, which are meant to represent Creed’s investigation into the basic tenets of human existence, though often pathetic and dehumanizing, actually verge on the banal.

Beyond the videos, Creed has painted the upper walls of the Armory’s grand corridor and staircase with a pattern of diagonal black bars, which break for the many portraits, architectural woodwork, display cases and his own paintings. In the rooms along this corridor, Creed has installed his paintings and sculptures. Subsequently, in the Colonel’s Reception Room he has installed Work No. 2497: half the air in a given space (2015). It promises to be a crowd pleaser, the room half-filled with large white balloons is a tight squeeze for visitors moving through it. The work is akin to an oversized ball pit, like those children play in at Chuck E. Cheese restaurants. In other rooms, such as the Library and the Field and Staff Rooms, he has installed sculptures made by stacking battered cardboard boxes on top of one another in descending size. Others consist of likewise stacks of secondhand furniture. Other sculptures use stacking and repetition, as with an 8 foot high stack of half-inch-thick sheets of plywood, which is as high as the sheets are long. In the Library, he has placed numerous small objects, among them a progression of potted cacti (Work No. 2376, 2016), and a nod to the days of protest against the military and war, he has installed in a display densely packed with mostly silver trophies, two small clenched fists — one gold-plated, the other bronze — as such reminding us that context is everything.

Creed is part prankster, designer, dilettante and entertainer, and he’s completely serious about the sampling of borderline banal contrasts, ludicrous situations. So much of Creed’s work refers to easy art, and to easy, tchotchke-like “folk” forms — virtuosity is antithetical to his homemade mode. Staged as a non-spectacle, this survey of new and older works is intent on engaging and potentially provoking his audience to consider each work or encounter as an act of (perhaps bad) faith. All of this is so well balanced as to be indeterminable as to whether it is implicitly culturally critical in its silliness, or if the joke’s on us for thinking so. All of this brings me to the conclusion that Creed is clever in the ways he turns the challenging endeavors of his predecessors into something accessible and playfully minor. But, then again this is part of the definition of what it is to be middlebrow.

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LESLIE WAYNE: You grew up in Rome and have been living in NYC for the last six or seven years, right?

BEATRICE PEDICONI: I first came to New York in 2009 for two months because some artist friends invited me to check out what was going on here compared to the European art scene. On that first trip I met Stacey D. Clarkson, Art Director at Harper’s Magazine, who asked me to do a portfolio for their April 2010 issue. And because of that I was contacted by Michael Gira, of the New York City musical group Swans, who invited me to do the cover of their upcoming album My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, released in September 2010.

That’s interesting. The cover of the new Radiohead album reminds me a lot of your work and I remember thinking, “Gee, Beatrice really ought to think about doing something like this!”

Yes! Good thinking! That encounter with Swans really made me aware of the connections between music and my work and from that moment on I’ve often collaborated with musicians and composers for my videos.

You just did a collaboration with a dance company at the Sheen Center in New York recently and I was sorry I missed it.

Yes, the choreographer Vanessa Tamburi, and Artistic Director of Flusso Dance project asked me if I would do a video scenography for one of their performances during the Idaco NYC Festival of Dance. I like the idea of collaborating with other artistic disciplines to see my video in a different context. So I was very curious and I totally embraced the project when she told me that it addressed the issue of foreigners, which in my opinion is one of the ancient ghosts of mankind. It’s certainly a reflection on the future of Europe, which needs to solve the conflict between its bureaucracy and the desire to be hospitable, and perhaps rethink their fundamental choices about human mobility. Also I liked that when she asked me to do this project, she said it was because I was working with water, which represents movement and displacement. And in my work it’s not the water that moves, but all the substances/elements I make pass through it. So that project became Moving ID-ENTITIES, which I am sorry you missed. It was great and we hope to present it in another theatre in the future.

It sounds very dynamic. I also hope there will be another opportunity to see it. So where did we leave off? You were telling me about your album cover for Swans. That was back in 2010.

Yes. During that same period I met Lyle Rexer and after showing him my work he included me in a group show he curated for the Aperture Foundation called “The Edge of Vision.” Esa Epstein, the Director at Sepia Eye, who was at that time running Sepia International, saw my work there and suggested I apply for an artist residency called The Lucid Art Foundation, in Inverness, California. I got that residency, which brought me back to America in 2010 for three months. On my way there I stopped in New York and met David Freedberg, Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art, and Director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, who asked me to do a solo show at The Italian Academy in February 2011. A few months before that show I decided to move to New York with my brand new artist visa. After all these incredible events happening in such a short time, wouldn’t you have moved to the US too? I saw it like a call I could not refuse!

Absolutely! What a whirlwind of amazing experiences and connections!

You know, I first saw your work at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia two years ago. It was an immersive experience, and completely transformative. You projected a video of these moving fluids on all four walls, and they floated round the room on an endless loop and in total silence. It was as if I was back in the womb!

Can you tell me how you first came up with this idea of painting in water, as you call it?

When I was studying in my twenties, in Rome the most professional and prestigious school of art was the University of Architecture, so that’s what I got my degree in. During the first two years I was able to take courses in drawing and photography and I loved both techniques. I supported myself by photographing my professor’s architectural projects and publishing them in architecture magazines. That income helped me to continue my own research, which was more focused on drawing and abstraction and the very opposite of the static and immobile architecture I had to stage and photograph for money. I was much more interested in movement, the unstable and unpredictable.

Then one day around the beginning of 2000, I found myself in a shocking situation. Someone I knew very well had fallen down some stairs. I went to help them, not knowing what to expect and was feeling very anxious about what I would find. There was blood everywhere and I totally remember the exact moment I found emotional detachment from that scene and started to look at the beauty and the texture of the blood. I was amazed by it and this allowed me to find the strength to enter the room and call for help.

The day after when I woke up I took a tank from my dark room, put some water in it and I started to drop whatever color I was using for my drawing and painting into it, trying to re-create that beauty I had seen in the blood. The moment I saw the colors disperse in the water, I felt a kind of serenity I had never felt before. So from that traumatic experience, I created something that gave me a sense of relief, of being able to transform a tragic situation into a magical experience. I thought if just one viewer looking at my work could feel the same thing, that this was already a great success. So I really like that you describe my work as transformative, you totally get the sense of it.

Yes, I felt as if I was enveloped in an environment that had no language, just a kind of primordial beauty. But I also felt that it was utterly contemporary and of its time, in spite of our being in the middle of a digital revolution. It felt like you were taking a stand.

Unlike Andreas Gursky for example, whom I always thought was brilliant in the way he uses digital manipulation to create photographs like one would create a painting. But you literally are putting painting and photography on a level playing field.

But let’s talk first about your current show at Sepia Eye. You have on display four different manifestations of the performative act of painting. A limited edition artist’s book, a series of Polaroids, large format prints from 8 x 10 transparencies and a video.

I want to ask you about the performance first, as it is gestational to the rest of your work. From that initial traumatic experience, you have developed a unique method of painting as performance by injecting different substances into water, from honey, egg, oil and milk to inks and paints.

I say painting because I actually paint on the water. I have many brushes, all different kinds and thicknesses and also different syringes. To be more precise, I first drop the color, previously diluted with solvent in the case of the oil paint, and then I paint with brushes on the surface of the water.

It sounds relatively simple, but I know that you’ve done a great deal of research to find the perfect chemical structure for the water to accept the fluids in a way that they would perform most compellingly. You then document the fleeting essence of these fluids in motion, in prints, books and videos. 

Actually this is the first time I have treated the water with a powder because water and oil don’t mix, and in order to facilitate my painting on the surface I had to make the water more jelly-like.

So for this project, you used only oil paint and the effects are quite different from some of your earlier works. The Polaroids and large-format prints look like aerial maps, or strange geological pools of something prehistoric. They also have the delicacy and beauty of marbleized paper.  

First of all, the very idea of using Polaroid today is nostalgic. I so remember as a child being captivated by the magic of its instantaneousness! Now it’s a virtually forgotten medium, overcome by the newer magic of the digital revolution. Are you, like Tacita Dean, taking a stand for the inherent value of analogue film and the unalloyed image of an instant in real time?

Of course there is a kind of nostalgia in the use of Polaroid, but in my case it’s not intentional. I have been using Polaroid film since I first started to record my ephemeral painting process. What is new in this show at Sepia Eye is the format. I was lucky enough to work with the Impossible Project in 2014, which revived the use of the large format 8 x 10 inch Polaroid. I started using 4 x 5 inch Polaroid film first, as I felt it made perfect sense with the action of my work. Each print is a record of a unique instant in the paint’s movement. But also, Polaroid cannot be reproduced and so the prints are a singular and real record of the painting in the exact moment the paint exists before it dissolves.

I had a more conscious feeling of nostalgia for old artisanal techniques in the making of my book. Each book was individually wrapped in linen and each page was bound by me, using a loom I made for the occasion. The book is also wrapped and tied in the traditional method historically used for illuminated manuscripts.

The book is pretty complex in its conception. It’s not just a limited edition. It’s a project of nine unique books. The first book only has two Polaroids in it, taken during a session in March. The second book has three Polaroids, taken during another session in April, and so on, until you reached the ninth book which contains ten Polaroids from the last session taken in November. It’s a crazy idea, but at the same time makes perfect sense when you think about it. The Polaroid print is unique, the moment in time that it records is unique, and so each book is unique. Together, they form a kind of gestational record of the whole project, from conception to birth! Nine months, nine books.

Yes, exactly.

Also, the way you open the book and see the Polaroids first framed behind a passpartout and then revealed when that window page is turned is very interesting. Just visually, seeing the pink of the film paper exposed is formally striking next to the monochrome of the print. But also to see the naked Polaroid like that is a way of declaring once again, that each one is unique. I can’t help but think that your knowledge of architecture contributes to the way you visualized these books as objects rather than simply enclosures for your photographs.

In general, do you think three dimensionally, or are you thinking only about what the two-dimensional photograph will end up looking like?

I love this question! To be honest I never think about what the photograph will look like. I just think about what I see while I am working. Even now with this new body of 8 x 10 inch Polaroids, I was painting with oil paint using red, blue, green and yellow but I recorded them with black and white instant film not even knowing exactly what kind of black and white grade they would be. I liked the idea that by giving the painting over to photography the work would continue to change, not just as a technique but in its color.

Transformation, illusion and movement are an integral part of my work in every sense. But I agree with you that my architectural studies have somehow influenced me in thinking three dimensionally. They’ve trained me to arrive at this kind of mental process, and I realized this even more as I started doing video installations to create an environment, a space that becomes a vessel in which the visitor is invited to enter.

Sepia Eye is at 547 West 27th Street, #608, New York, 212 967 0738

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