ARTFORUM.COM Critics' Picks and Film Reviews
2006: Sue de Beer, "A Fold in the Fabric," Molly Smith, Fred Tomaselli, "Ecotopia," Sara VanDerBeek.
2007: Raymond Pettibon, Yuri Masnyj, Trisha Donnelly, Jef Geys, "Photography and the Self: The Legacy of F. Holland Day."
2008: Ken Jacobs, Carol Rama, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Christian Marclay, "Constraction," Louise Bourgeois, Lisa Tan, Joy Garnett, Alan Saret.
2009: "The New Festival," Beeswax, Dorothy Iannone, Alice Shaw, Unica Zürn, Jennifer Bornstein, Erica Baum, Our City Dreams, Christopher Miner.
2010:
SHORTLY AFTER GRADUATING from Harvard with a Ph.D. in philosophy, Adrian Piper began to teach. She lectured, scribbled on chalkboards, and gave precise instructions: Here’s how you do the shoulder shrug and head nod; this is how you isolate your hips while thrusting your pelvis. Piper called these performance-lectures Funk Lessons, 1982–84, and she used them to address xenophobia, an issue increasingly central to her art. Under the guise of a “get down and party together” affair, she began to teach white, primarily art-world audiences about the histories of African-American funk and soul music. Yet the lessons also underscore that “at least some perceived racial distinctions are learned, and learnable, behavior,” as critic Holland Cotter notes.
A nearly fifteen-minute video directed by Sam Samore in 1983 shows Piper giving her lessons to a large and noticeably diverse audience at the University of California, Berkeley. The work is intercut with soft-focus shots from Soul Train, sound bites of the cheerful artist interviewed postlecture, and clips of singers like James Brown and Aretha Franklin that support Piper’s improvisational points (“What Chuck Berry was for Elvis Presley . . . Bootsy [Collins] was for the Talking Heads”). Meanwhile, didactic phrases like FUNK IS MODULAR and FUNK IS IMPROVISATIONAL are overlaid in static, character-generator-driven text.
Never light with her touch, it’s worth keeping in mind that ten years earlier Piper began more outlandish performances as her male alter ego the Mythic Being; not long before that she was covering her body in vinegar, eggs, milk, and cod liver and stinking up buses, among other public spaces, with her Catalysis works. By her mid-twenties Piper had conceived of her art as a much larger (and lifelong) project of consciousness raising, which she assiduously tracked in her self-critical essays. In Notes on Funk (1985), for instance, she writes that Funk Lessons offered a path to “self-transcendence and creative expression within a highly structured and controlled cultural idiom, in a way that attempt[s] to overcome cultural and racial barriers.” In the video, she describes it another way. When asked about stereotypes, particularly the one about why “whites can’t dance,” she replies (with a dash of skepticism): “It’s just a matter of practice.”
Funk Lessons and a selection from Piper’s Shiva Dances with the Art Institute of Chicago (2004) play at the Maysles Cinema on January 29 at 8 PM; a dance party will follow. Artist Monica Carrier organized the screening as part of her fellowship at AIR Gallery.
Marie Lorenz
JACK HANLEY GALLERY
136 Watts
January 2–January 31
The mythic narratives pullulating from Marie Lorenz’s ongoing project The Tide and Current Taxi are chillingly evinced in Capsize, 2009, a video at the heart of her first solo exhibition in New York. Lorenz launched the “taxi” in 2005, ferrying passengers around New York City’s waterways in a small, homemade plywood boat. During its fabled first voyage, the vessel sank in the East River, leaving the artist and her passenger to swim to shore. Her latest video, made while Lorenz was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, begins in media res, with the artist already in the water after a boat has capsized. Impressively, she recorded the event while holding a camera in her mouth for a riveting seven minutes. It’s hard to discern whether she’s navigating toward or away from the boat––but that point seems moot anyway, as incandescent washes of blue and green produce entrancing, lithe abstractions, diluting her heavy panting.
The remains of that vessel (a few broken slabs of wood) are rendered in a large rubbing and are accompanied by several other works on paper that recall the dizzying effect of the video. A few graphic rubbings of whirlpools were created on wood Lorenz later used to construct another boat that is installed, perhaps too obviously, in the middle of the gallery, while four collographs made with flattened toy boats suggest tropes of entropy and reduction. That Lorenz’s deeply romantic project embraces failure and risk, and acknowledges these as essential components of romanticism itself, is reason enough to follow her wherever the waters might take her.