April 12 to June 7, 2015
49 Delancey Street (at Eldridge Street)
New York, 212 219 0326

Walking into “I won’t wait for grey hairs and worldly cares to soften my views,” recently at Callicoon Fine Arts, was like walking into a kids’ art studio where the adults have lost control — but much stranger. Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian, the three artists responsible for the visual cacophony, filled the gallery from floor to ceiling with a schizophrenic amalgam of sculptures, videos, and two-dimensional pieces that fluctuate between fantasy and nightmare. Despite the frequently bright and graphic nature of the works, the artists successfully maintain enough editorial restraint to hold the installation on the precipice of dizzying inundation, without ever falling over.

The Haerizadeh brothers originally met Rahmanian in Tehran, and then moved to Dubai to escape artistic censorship in Iran. In light of the recent controversy involving the United Arab Emirates prohibiting members of the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition and NYU professor Andrew Ross from entering the country, it might seem ineffective for artists to defect from one area of creative oppression to another. The act reveals the omnipresence of political manipulation that artists in the Middle East have faced for decades, which forces artists to find ways to challenge the highly congested political systems both locally and abroad.

The exhibition at first appears to be a playful free-for-all of image and text, and then reveals itself to be a darkly comical and deeply satirical critique of power, identity, sexuality, and culture. Long-stemmed amaryllis — flowers whose common name is Naked Ladies — grow out of a black-and-white, geometric path that snakes around the gallery floors and walls, and leads to a row of collages by Ramin Haerizadeh, hung low on the back wall. Each titled Rib Room (2015), the works feature fractions of images of women from fashion advertisements or art historical paintings with their bodies partially drawn back in with ink and pencil, and stamped labels that read phrases such as “PORK ROAST” and “SKIRT STEAK.” What could be interpreted as an objectification of female identity becomes part of a broader narrative critique of dehumanization by power structures. In two of Rokni Haerizadeh’s series, he paints on printed stills from YouTube videos and makes Rotoscope-like animations over top, adding animal heads and body parts to humans in protests and demonstrations.

Rokni pairs fable-like images, which melt in and out of clarity and painterly abstraction, with titles such as But a storm is blowing from paradise (2014–2015) and Subversive Salami in a Ragged Briefcase (2013–2014) that further enhance the works’ ominous tone. Rahmanian’s paintings and collages continue the thematic removal of identity through images ranging from tragically funny puns to celebrity defacements. In his series Rearview Portraits (2012), we see the backs of the heads of elderly white men in suits and a white-haired woman wearing a crown and pearls (bearing an unmistakable resemblance to Queen Elizabeth II, though none of their identities is openly revealed). The portraits hang close to the ground or shoved into corners, as though they were put on a time-out for bad behavior.

The show’s installation occurred over a period of several weeks, during which time the three artists brought their own artworks, works by Etel Adnan, Hannah Barrett, A.K. Burns, Martha Wilson, and Rose Wylie, and a variety of readymade objects into the gallery space. Through the process of extending their shared work and living spaces into the confines of a commercial gallery, the artists present a good-natured dismantling of the conventions surrounding artistic autonomy; everything is presented as one holistic idea, as opposed to a group show of many separate but related artists. The collaboration has resulted in an immersive experience that is further heightened by the show’s many three-dimensional objects: sculptures inhabit the space as both autonomous objects and interventions with the gallery’s bureaucratic operations. In the back office, where the exhibition continues, the gallerists sit on pieces from Untitled (2015): white plastic lawn chairs with blue painter’s tape partially covering the form or extending it in strange, decidedly nonfunctional protuberances. Break Free II (2015), a fuzzy cat tower decorated with bizarre hoardings both analog and digital stands like an absurd sentry near the entrance. An iPad and an iPhone playing videos of the artists, the devices’ chargers, wind-up teeth, bungee cords, a plastic ear, and various other bits of everyday life make up just one of the installation’s several readymade compositions.

Saturated with layered cultural and art historical references that have been turned on their head through the artists’ contemporary reexamination, “I won’t wait for grey hairs and worldly cares to soften my views” creates new language through familiar signs. Imagine a car that has been crushed for disposal at an impound lot, and then expanded back to some semblance of its original form. All the initial information is there, but it has been translated into something entirely new. The collaborative, reconstructed visual lexicon enables the artists to use satire to criticize a humorless system.

The post The Way of the World: Three Iranian Artists at Callicoon appeared first on artcritical.

Although artist and Franklin Furnace Founder Martha Wilson’s signature asymmetric two-colored hairstyle is instantly recognizable, her performances and photographs have always been centered on her identity’s permeability. As she explains in one of the myriad texts and pictures that make up Martha Wilson Sourcebook: Forty Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces, she’s turned a sense of emptiness into a source of inspiration. After she broke up with a boyfriend in 1971, she began to make art “in an effort to sculpt a personality in the vacuum that remained when his was gone.“

For this illuminating new publication, the first of a projected series, Independent Curators International has devised a fresh conception for the artist’s monograph. In addition to the usual essays and reproductions, it’s also filled with photocopies of words and images taken from books Wilson actually owns, offering readers a chance to leaf through her library and discover a portrait of her mind.

In the early seventies, Wilson was teaching grammar to art students at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where cutting-edge artists were often invited to stay. Feminism was nonexistent at the school, but Wilson still came up with Breast Forms Permutated (1972) a grid of nine photos showing an assortment of mammary glands ranging from small to pendulous. An intimate indictment of sexist categorization expressed in the stringently impersonal forms that were recently invented by male conceptualists, the piece was included in Lucy Lippard’s “c. 7,500”, a groundbreaking 1974 all-woman exhibition that also featured Laurie Anderson, Adrian Piper and Hanne Darboven.  The catalogue essay and works by each of the artists  (originally printed on index cards) are reproduced in the book, giving readers a snapshot of early feminist art.

For A Portfolio of Models, a series of 1974 photographs also reproduced, Wilson posed as six different stereotyped versions of femininity: Goddess, Housewife, Working Girl, Professional, Earth Mother, and Lesbian. Dressed in assorted costumes and wigs, she demonstrated the mutability of gendered existence several years before Cindy Sherman began her celebrated series of outlandish transformations.

The Sourcebook documents Wilson’s artistic influences with copies of the text that accompanied Vito Acconci’s notorious 1971 Seedbed performance (when he masturbated under a ramp on the Sonnabend Gallery floor); the controversial dildo ad Lynda Benglis published in the November 1974 issue of Artforum; and a two page spread featuring Carolee Schneeman’s Interior Scroll, a 1975 performance in which the artist pulled a length of paper from her vagina, along with the witty textual send-up of a pretentious male structuralist filmmaker that was written on the scroll.

Most of these pioneering works are already well known, and the samples taken from Wilson’s wide-ranging reading list are thus a bit more enlightening. Laurence Sterne’s Portrait of Tristram Shandy (including the famous black page) and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons highlight Wilson’s love for digression and abstract language, while excerpts from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Erving Goffman’s 1959 The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life illuminate the arbitrary, often artificial nature of the faces we present to the world.

Wilson’s own Truck Fuck Muck (1974), a fascinating text about a hitchhiker’s tryst with a truck driver written from three different points of view, is an almost clinical exercise in detached self-observation. And “Making Up: Role Playing and Transformation in Women’s Art,” an essay by Lippard that was published in the October 1975 issue of Ms. Magazine, shows the evolution of the performance forms that have come to pervade the art world.

A section on Feminism works its way from a couple of pages on vaginal self examination (with diagrams) to the index card script of Wilson’s performance as Nancy Reagan on inauguration day, making stops along the way at a song list from Disband (the punk band Wilson organized with four other women unable to play any musical instruments) and an excerpt from Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls. “I use various rituals and acting techniques to manipulate my appearance. Because if the picture stays the same, the facts will fade…” Wilson as Reagan says, and “If you are crazy, poorly educated, single, homosexual, or an artist, forget it. The party of tooth and claw is not for you.”

An article Wilson wrote about performance art’s history begins with the day in July 1910 when some Italian Futurists climbed up a clock tower in Venice’s Piazza San Marco and pelted eight hundred thousand copies of a broadside down on pedestrian heads. That particular piece of futurist ephemera was an early modernist ancestor of the post-1960 artifacts that Wilson lovingly collected and cared for at Franklin Furnace, the institution she founded in 1976. It began as a bookshop for artist’s publications, but performances and video installations were also presented, featuring such artists as Willie Cole, Nicole Eisenmann, Liza Lou and William Pope.L. Wilson sold Franklin Furnace’s entire book collection to the Museum of Art in 1993, ensuring its proper preservation.

Her appetite for innovation unabated, Wilson moved Franklin Furnace out of its longtime Tribeca home in 1997 and transformed it into a virtual space, providing several artist’s grants each year that support the creation of live internet art. The Sourcebook’s final essay is a history of this budding discipline, also recounted by Wilson herself.

The book concludes with a copy of Wilson’s self-portrait announcement for “I have become my own worst fear”, her September 2011 exhibition at P.P.O.W. Gallery – a gutsy meditation on the bodily changes produced by time. Seen makeup-less, hair slicked close to her head, double-chinned and grinning, she stares out unflinchingly, ready to embark on another courageous decade of multifaceted self-exploration.

Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces. Foreword by Kate Fowle. Introduction by Moira Roth. Text by Martha Wilson. (New York: Independent Curators International, 2011. 272 pages. ISBN: 978-0-916365-85-1?$25.00

The post Making Up: Martha Wilson Sourcebook from Independent Curators International appeared first on artcritical.