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About time to finish off my reviews of New York art shows. Only two left. One is over -but god was it good, the other one runs until June 21.
The one exhibition i could not miss was Tom Sachs' lineup of new works at the Sperone Westwater. The show is called Animals so there's a fair amount of pieces which explore the presence of the animalistic in our everyday lives but there's also some quirky machines and installations. Sachs cultivates a trashy aesthetic. Each of his sculptures is hand made by piecing together plywood, foamcore, synthetic polymer paint, hardware, and found or scavenged objects such as phone books or police barricades. There's no Prada Death Camp nor Chanel guillotine in the gallery this time but the titles and content of some of the works are nevertheless sure to get the public's attention.
First there's Negro Music which you could regard as interactive. It's a big white-painted box with a retro gangsta-style boombox inside, you insert your hands inside orange rubber gloves, rummage inside the box, select a k-7 of your favourite "negro" music, fiddle with the control buttons and play the music as loudly as you wish inside the gallery.
And Waffle Bike! Sachs has even crafted a mighty waffle-maker-bicycle, complete with a mini-fridge, a cage for chicken to lay fresh eggs as well as components to hold ingredients like whipped cream, and others we have never heard of in waffle-heaven Belgium like Pam cooking spray, and lingonberry jam.
Hardcore is already the third in a series of large-scale gun chests inspired by Renaissance dueling cabinets. The huge cupboard is shockfull of handmade wooden guns along with the tools that were used throughout their fabrication.
Exhibiting these cabinets is not without a risk. As art on trial reports, Manhattan art dealer Mary Boone displayed one of them in her gallery back in 1999. The cabinet contained homemade guns but also a vase containing live 9-millimeter cartridges which visitors were invited to take as souvenirs. Ms. Brown was arrested by the police and charged with unlawful distribution of ammunition. When it was determined that the homemade guns were functional, police added unlawful weapons possession charges.
Then there are the Animals which give the tile to the show. There's a couple of installations made to please some of them such as La Guardia, an impressive tower for the exclusive use of cats and featuring a litter box requiring minimal cleaning chores, a McDonald's that serves cat food, a Japanese Zen garden with a video of clouds and birds chirping, and a penthouse with a paw-operated catnip atomizing spray.
There's a white whale on a black piano and a tiger lamp. Most of the show is just good old Sachs fun, bricolage and subversion. The public loves it so why should Sachs change the magical formula? The real surprise (at least for me) were the pyrographic works depicting cruel fables. They are conventional in their making and very La Fontainesque, although one suspect that most of the stories end very badly for whichever weaker creature stands in the way of the choleric wolf or the lecherous lion. At Sperone Westwater until June 21. My Tom Sachs images. Previously: Tom Sachs at the Fondazione Prada in Milan.
why on earth?, Anthony Pontius' solo exhibition at 31 grand closed on May 24 but i liked it so much that i can't help mentioning it here. Pontius recontextualizes historical imagery, stories and concepts in the today's world, mixes past and present techniques, and builds a universe which under some aspects looks familiar but is difficult to interpret and understand at first sight. The second sight doesn't help much but that doesn't prevent his paintings and studies from being utterly charming. |
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I'm back from New York for more than a week and getting ready for new adventures in little Europe. Time to turn a page on the transcontinental trip by throwing in a couple of posts the best exhibitions i saw while i was in Manhattan. Some of them are still up till the end of the month, others have already closed their doors. Here we go... In the collective exhibition AMERIKA: Back to the Future, David Herbert, Anthony Goicolea, Marcus Kenney, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy play with American icons. The artists vision is somewhat dark, critical (how could it not be) but often humorous. Starship Enterprise is re-visited by future cavemen, Mickey Mouse goes on a size-zero diet and a burnt-down chain retailer's suburban storefront aimlessly rotates on a plate.
My favourite by far were Marcus Kenney's assemblage of discarded and old magazine clippings, book illustrations, old receipts, stamps, wallpaper etc. to create nostalgic imagery dealing with contemporary issues. The stars of his compositions are weird children, young women setting foot on distant planets or a girl walking on crutches painted with the motifs of the U.S. flag, etc. A closer look reveal the figures of U.S. presidents and American natives. The colourful and (at first sight) cheerful collages are hinting at some of the pages of American history which do not tend to make its citizens very proud.
On view at Postmasters through June 21, 2008. More images. I walked to the edge of the art Chelsea area to see Actus Reus, Tamara Kostianovsky's solo show. Ready to be butchered beef carcasses were hanging on hooks. Disturbing and so "life"-like that the gallery almost smelled of meat, the animals were made out of discarded human clothes.
Actus Reus is the second part of The Proper Animal, a three-part multidisciplinary program comprised of three solo exhibitions by artists who utilize sometimes disturbing animal iconography to bring ethical considerations into play. The next episode, a show by Julian Montague, looks equally fascinating and as it will focus on spiders i suspect it will be equally repulsive as well.
Closed recently at the Black and White Gallery, Chelsea. My images. I got to discover the work of Dutch collective Antistrot by chance. I was in the building where they are having a solo exhibition to see another show. I happened to take the wrong corridor and enter the wrong gallery. That was for the best. Wild and powerful styles manage to cohabit almost peacefully on Antistrot's paintings: animals you'd see on the walls of your favourite city, gangster faces you encounter mostly in fanzines, monsters like you'd get in a fairy tale without happy ending and busty girls being well... mostly very busty.
Current members of Antistrot are Paul Börchers, David Elshout, Johan Kleinjan, Silas Schletterer, Michiel Walrave and Bruno Ferro Xavier da Silva, with additional help from Charlie Dronkers. Video:
What we do is Secret is at Sara Tecchia Roma New York until June 21. My antiimages, also on artnet. Shot in coastal waters and regions as far apart on every aspect as Australia, Japan, Antarctica, Kuwait, Iraq and California, An-My Lê's photographs examine intersecting themes of scientific exploration, military power, environmental crises, fantasies of empire and the vast ungovernable oceans that connect nations and continents.
Although the themes and settings are deeply grounded into reality, the images give an eerie feeling. The structures, military equipment, boats and landscapes captured by the photographer seem almost too big and out of this world to be true. Seen at Murray Guy (the show is now closed) Shuli Hallak's photographs document cargo in its state of transit between production and consumption. Almost every manufactured product humans consume spends time in a shipping container, yet most of us have little clue about the process by which goods are actually transported.
Fascinated by cargos, the photographer embarked on a container ship in New York and traveled to Florida, crossed the Panama Canal and ended the journey in Guayaquil, Ecuador to pick up some bananas.
On view at Moti Hasson through June 28. |
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It's not everyday that Dick Cheney gives its title to an art exhibition. In the weeks following September 11, the U.S. Vice President justified a steep increase of surveillance measures by explaining that "Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become permanent in American life. They represent an understanding of the world as it is, and dangers we must guard against perhaps for decades to come. I think of it as the new normalcy." Almost 7 years later, the collection and sharing of personal data by governments, luggage searches, Internet monitoring, and wiretaps have indeed become part of a "new normal" in American life.
The New Normal brings together thirteen artworks which explore private information. All the works have been developed after 2001, the year that ctrl[space] : Rhetorics of Surveillance, a major exhibition on privacy and surveillance opened at the ZKM center in Karlsruhe, Germany. It's not a redux of the exhibition: new factors have changed the surveillance panorama since the ZKM exhibition opened. There's President Bush signing the Patriot Act on October 26, 2001, the number and efficiency of technologies of surveillance have skyrocketed and we have come to accept the new state of "normality". The New Normal reveals how difficult it is to set clear boundaries around the concept of privacy. The private sphere encompasses domestic spaces, personal data, the content of your pocket, bodies, thoughts, communication, and behaviors--contexts that are usually rendered inaccessible to the public eye by legal, social, and physical boundaries. What is most remarkable about the show is the subtle way it engages with the complex concept of privacy. The videos and installations do not hammer their messages on your head, you're not told what to think and what to be very afraid about. Instead, the exhibition argues that today's society is indeed living Cheney's new normal life but this doesn't meant that the new condition of public disclosure cannot be harnessed in the service of artistic endeavours and the creation of "tactics for political critique."
Submitting oneself to security measures can be turned upside down by adopting what Hassan Elahi calls an "aggressive compliance". Elahi daily points a mocking finger to absurd security measures with the real-time self-tracking website he set up in a bid to demonstrate to the FBI investigator that he's not spending his time traveling to the Middle East and plotting some attack in the U.S. The models features in Sharif Waked's Chic Point Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints video seem to have adopted a similar strategy.
Sharif Waked's video features male models catwalking in clothes designed to expose the flesh of body parts such as chests and abdomens. It would be hilarious and cheeky were the images not juxtaposed with stills taken from recent years displaying Palestinian men having to lift their shirts, take off their pants and kneel shirtless in order to be authorized to cross Israeli checkpoints. The absurd pieces of clothing evoke the bodily humiliation experienced by Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints.
Equally politically-loaded is the series of badly photocopies of passports of CIA agents researched by Italian authorities in connection with the abduction of radical Egyptian cleric Abu Omar. On February 17, 2003, Abu Omar disappeared off the streets of Milan. The man had been kidnapped by the CIA, transferred to Cairo, where he was secluded, interrogated and allegedly tortured and abused. He was released 4 years later. The Imam Rapito (or "kidnapped Imam") affair prompted a series of investigations in Italy.
Twenty-six Americans were submitted to a trial in absentia along with several former Italian intelligence officials for their role in this case of extraordinary rendition. Trevor Paglen managed to get a copy of the photocopy of the fake passports that the agents had to deliver while they were checking in posh hotels in Italy in preparation for the kidnapping. The documents were released by Italian prosecutors in 2005. Although every element appearing on the identity document is fake, the picture had to be authentic. This ensured that the cover of the agents was blown and that the surveillance tools used by a government to achieve questionable goals can also become an instrument of justice.
Back to New York City after five years spent in The Netherlands, Magid kept hearing this announcement in the subway "You may be a subject to searches "for security reasons"." She approached a police officer and asked him to search her. He refused because only women officer had the right to search a woman but she managed to convince him to call her and tell her each night where he was on shift. She'd join him to be "trained" and kept record of the meetings in different forms: diary (read excerpts), photos, objects, etc. He would lend her his duty shirt, she'd give him a picture of her wearing it in return. She makes him tuna sandwiches, one day he allowed her to hold his gun. The relationship they build bit by bit is both intimate and somehow doomed: they are so different, the officer has never been to an art museum, Magid is "one of those liberals". Several works show that the intrusion into the private sphere is not just made of CCTV systems and biometric apparatus, it can also be voluntarily self-inflicted now that new online platforms called blogs, Facebook and image sharing call for self-disclosure. As curator Michael Connor writes, Private information has never been less private. The best example of this is probably the collection of videos that Guthrie Lonergan archived on you tube under the title MySpace Intro Playlist. Although they were made to be viewed by others, they convey an embarrassingly intimate echo once they have been decontextualized and exhibited in an art exhibition.
Developed by Michael Frumin during the 2004 Campaign in the U.S., FundRace is back. The website maps donation made to the candidates of the Presidential Election in the U.S. and enables you to search by name or address to see who your friends, co-workers, and neighbors are supporting. You can also search by profession and discover who celebs and museum curators are donating to.
THE NEW NORMAL is a traveling exhibition co-organized by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York, and Artists Space, New York. It is on view at Artists Space until June 21, 2008. Hasan Elahi at The Colbert Report: Related: Sousveillance culture, Orwellian Projects, Book review - ctrl[space] : Rhetorics of Surveillance, Transmediale exhibition: Conspire, Trevor Paglen's talk at Transmediale, etc. |
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There's a mix pop art, cartoon aesthetics and ukiyo-e prints in the exhibition currently running at the Flomenhaft Gallery. But there's also some dark pages from American history.
Born in Seattle in 1939, Roger Shimomura was two years old when he entered a Japanese American internment with his parents and relatives. Minidoka (Idaho) was one of ten hostile desert relocation centers. When Japan attacked the U.S. in the Pacific and World War II started, some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, 62% of whom were U.S. citizens, were regarded as suspects, spies and dangers no matter how long they had lived in the U.S. or how devoted they were to their adoptive country. It constituted the single largest forced relocation in U.S. history. Most of these camps/residences, gardens, and stock areas were placed on Native American reservations, for which the Native Americans were neither compensated nor consulted. Roger was five when the Shimomura's were permitted to return to Seattle.
To create the Minidoka on My Mind series, Shimomura had to collect scraps of memories from the back of his brain, consult archives and get some help from the diaries of Toku, his grandmother. For 56 years, from the day she left Japan to come to America until she died, Toku meticulously described daily domestic tasks and weather conditions in succinct phrases, sometimes despairing but never expressing anger.
What makes the paintings striking is that the prisoners are dressed in what was (i guess) very fashionable in the U.S. at the time. Prisoners look very American, they do their best to get with a normal life while they are kept under constant watch by fellow (albeit whiter and carrying binoculars and machine gun) Americans.
One painting, Not a J.A. (Japanese American) depicts a young guy called Ichiro playing baseball behind barbed wire. The Enemy #2 shows a young Japanese in traditional clothing smiling behind barbed wires. Block Dance shows a teenagers' party, they dance and flirt but they are confined inside a stern barrack. As a journalist of the Seattle PI commented, In an age of surveillance and a time of war, "Minidoka on My Mind" has relevance beyond its immediate subject. If you're walking down a city street, chances are good some camera is tracking you. And no imagination is necessary to relate to the idea of a military operation hanging over daily life like a dark cloud or a term like "enemy alien" used to frighten people. Given the climate of xenophobia and suspicion that is taking Italy by storm these days (although in my personal experience there is nothing really new, being a foreigner in this country can definitely not be equaled to a long string of laughters), we need more works like Shimomura's to remind us that fear might not always be the wisest adviser. Image gallery, more pictures at Greg Kucera. |
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Although i tend to spend most of my time inside every single branch of Sephora when i'm in New York, i got to see some pretty interesting exhibitions while i was there. Daneyal Mahmood Gallery is hosting until June 14 an arresting installation and series of photographies by Justine Cooper.
Cooper has an unquestionable interest for science. The Australian artist is known for having spent one year snooping around the storerooms of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
According to an interview she gave to Trace blog, the Terminal portraits she is currently exhibiting are inspired by the formal portraitists of the late 19th century and by the scientific work of Bernice Abbott. The stars of Cooper's photographs are medical mannequins (just like Tomer Ganihar's hospital series) and robots. Highly sophisticated, they have been designed to simulate human traumas for training doctors and surgeons. During her research, the artist found that the personnel charged with the care of the mannequins had humanized these objects into subjects by calling them Sally, Peter, Charles or Mandy. They dress them as if they were about to leave for the Bahamas and even construct a narrative through their care.
Also on show, RAPT I is a computer animation created 10 years ago from hundreds of images produced when Cooper voluntarily underwent six hours of MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanning (video). RAPT II is a fascinating installation comprised of 76 of the MRI axial scans, printed on architectural film, suspended and aligned to create a 24 foot long floating body. I found very distressing the idea that i was able to pass my hand between the slices of her body.
Rapt is what the artist calls a universal Self Portrait, originally posing the question of if and how new technologies shift the way we can conceive of space, by presenting us with an alternate, elastic interpretation of the body.. "Just as the body is re-codified through medical technology, so its internal spaces and brute physicality are remapped and made accessible in these works. Living flesh is translated into malleable data"
The exhibition is on view at Daneyal Mahmood Gallery until June 14, 2008. |
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Is there anyone left in this room who doesn't know how much i like Takashi Murakami (and his Kiki character)? Is there anyone who doesn't like his work? Or doesn't like to loathe its shallowness? Now that i'm back in Europe (Yeah!), the usual programme will resume and start with Takashi Murakami retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. I'm not going to bore everyone with a review of the show, just a few facts i discovered and images you've probably already seen everywhere.
- Murakami's company/factory/collective is called Kaikai Kiki which means elegant or strange or bizarre phenomena. The term was used in the 16th century by critics to describe the work of painter Kanō Eitoku as brave, powerful and yet keenly sensitive. - Kaikai and Kiki are the pink and white stars of a new animation. They travel the world in a living spacecraft, watch as nasty monsters are turned into poop by a mighty princess and learn how to grow watermelons. Trailer: - One of the reasons why Murakami is dubbed "the Japanese Warhol" is because he plays with the idea of blurring the commercial with the artistic. Not that he needs money to pay his rent, his Lonesome Cowboy sculpture recently sold at an auction for $15.1 million, nearly four times its $4 million high estimate. Aaanyway, Murakami did what even Warhol hasn't done: he installed a fully functioning Louis Vuitton shop right inside the museum.
- The artist re-appropriated the LV logo in the painting The World Of Sphere in 2003.
- The 18th century handscroll Compendium of Vegetables and Insects by Itō Jakuchū (detail) inspired the 7 panels of Murakami's catalog of mushrooms. But the mushroom that most troubles Murakami is the atomic one.
- For a guy who siphoned classical painters, Disney characters, mangas and everything in between he is effing obsessed with copy rights.
- Murakami has started making portraits. The museum is showing two paintings of r Bodhidharma, the sixth-century monk credited to have introduced Zen Buddhism to China. There are numerous videos about Murakami on you tube, my favourite so far is this extract of one episode of Ben Lewis' art safari tv series: Followed closely by Jonathan Ross' interview of the artist on Japanorama. The New York Times has more images.
The Takashi Murakami retrospective runs until July 13 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. |
