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:
IN 1963, KEN JACOBS received a postcard requesting his presence as a guest on a daytime NBC television show. The honorarium—a “much-needed” twenty dollars—along with the chance to present his films to a broad national audience, seemed like an appealing, if unusual, arrangement, and Jacobs accepted. He decided to bring along Saturday Blood Sacrifice (1956), his black-and-white slapstick comedy featuring his friend Jack Smith.
Arriving at the studio, Jacobs learned that he was to appear alongside Carolee Schneemann on . . . a quiz show. Broke and game for practically anything, the artist and auteur agreed to appear on Play Your Hunch, even though the studio replaced the sound track of Jacobs’s film with their own music. Hunch Your Back (1963), Jacobs’s grainy 16-mm short, captures the affair from a TV set; jumping and flickering lines distort the fish-eyed appearances of the artists, contestants, and the host as well as the film-within-the-film in true Jacobs fashion. Following the disorienting jump cuts and meandering shots, a final intertitle provides comic relief: It took a month for the check to arrive.
Continuing to play off tragicomic themes, the two aforementioned films, along with Little Cobra Dance (1956) and Death of P’Town (1961)—four shorts Jacobs collectively dubs “The Whirled”—portray Smith as an enigmatic and transfixing subject. However, it is Blonde Cobra (1959–63), one of Jacobs’s most influential films, that most intimately follows the feverish luminary. Smoking pot, drinking, eating, and wearing garish dresses and heavy makeup, Smith seems never to leave his apartment. “God is not dead, he’s just marvelously sick!” he screams while black leader rolls. A sense of uneasy camaraderie emerges in the film through Jacobs’s erratic and intense edits. In 1964, their intermittent friendship was put to the test: Jacobs was arrested at a screening of Smith’s audacious (at the time) Flaming Creatures and sentenced to sixty days in a New York City workhouse. As J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum note in their book Midnight Movies (1991), “the underground nearly went under.”
Ken Jacobs’s “The Whirled” and Blonde Cobra will be screened at Anthology Film Archives in New York December 19–20. Ken Jacobs will be present at the showings.
Carol Rama
MACCARONE INC.
630 Greenwich Street
October 25–December 20
At ninety, the self-taught Italian artist Carol Rama is a beacon of change. This long-overdue miniretrospective makes a strong case for resistance—to a specific movement (such as Surrealism or arte povera), to any one medium, and to a particular iconography. As writer and poet Edoardo Sanguineti aptly noted in 1965, Rama’s art is “refined brut and cultured naïf,” and all of the thirty-six works in this exhibition, which date from 1943 through 2005 and range dramatically from hard-edge abstraction and drawings laced with erotic symbols to bricolage and mixed-media sculpture, showcase this curious combination. In one of Rama’s most notoriously explicit paintings, Dorina, 1943, a nude woman with a long, languid tongue and a Louise Brooks–style bob rests passively inert while a snake slivers out of her vagina. Installed nearby, the most recent offering here, Metamorfosi (Metamorphosis), 2005, depicts a pair of loosely rendered feminine legs sheathing a hairy red phallus. While the specters of Freud and French feminism linger strongly in the galleries, Rama takes a more humorous and, at times, absurd approach to sexuality and gender. In Feticci (Fetishes), 2003, a blue high-heeled shoe and slender toes (from an invisible foot) are rendered on a found piece of upside-down paper. Rama was a muse to Man Ray and Andy Warhol; she is one the artists celebrated in Le Tigre’s pop song “Hot Topic” and was the recipient of a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the Venice Biennale. Although she’s well loved, she’s not well known—but in all likelihood, akin to her transformative practice, that is about to change.
SIX YEARS BEFORE THEIR BEST-KNOWN WORK, the film Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) (1987), was completed, the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss created their first, equally charming and humorous films: The Point of Least Resistance (1981) and The Right Way (1983). These 16-mm gems make plain the correspondence between their collaboration, which began in the late 1970s, and the broader teamwork necessitated by the medium. Yet one wonders what the production managers must have thought of the footage, since what characterizes Fischli & Weiss’s work has been its eccentricity, its outlandishness, and how remarkably touching it is. These films foreground several signature elements in their practice: the positing of large philosophical questions; absurd, seemingly pointless acts; an emphasis on leisure and pleasure; and the transformation of everyday life into a spectacle at which one wonders.
The camera meanders alongside the artists, who are dressed in tattered rat and bear costumes, on adventures through and on the back alleys and freeways of Los Angeles and the sublime forests and lakes of the Swiss Alps. The Point of Least Resistance is a nonlinear crime drama wherein the rat and bear attempt to become artists and stumble across a dead body in a LA gallery. Curiously, the animals take the body with them, hoping it will lead to new paths of glory (although the result is more reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction watched after a dose of psilocybin mushrooms). In The Right Way, the duo drift around the Swiss countryside like furry nomads in search of meaningful, primitive experiences—which they then discuss to the point of near imponderability. For example, while gazing at the moon, the bear waxes poetic: “It’s like me. It comes and goes, always on the move, looks at everything. It does what it pleases.”
Their 2006–2007 retrospective at Tate Modern presented the original bear and rat costumes in glass cases that seemed like coffins for characters laid to rest. One gets the feeling that Fischli & Weiss could have made many more films documenting the kind of quixotic adventures presented here, and that the rat and the bear would have analyzed every last detail of them. For now, viewers should be adequately occupied with the questions prompted by these films’ observations until, with a bit of luck, more of the artists’ videos are released on DVD.
Two Films by Peter Fischli and David Weiss is available now on DVD from Icarus Films.
Christian Marclay
PAULA COOPER GALLERY
534/521 West 21st Street
September 2–October 11
One can barely think of Christian Marclay without thinking about music (hip-hop and punk rock come to mind first), as for over thirty years he has created smart visual and conceptual works that play against the ephemeral nature of sound and the fragility of its media. Although Marclay has tended toward deconstruction, destruction, intervention, and manipulation, the new works in this exhibition appear to be threnodies for two outmoded media: cyanotypes and cassette tapes. The gallery’s largest room features nine large cyanotype prints that the artist produced this year at the GraphicStudio at the University of South Florida, Tampa, a printing atelier known for its experimentation and, accordingly, an impressive roster of visiting artists. Smashed cassettes line the bottom of these works, with hanging and interweaving twisty tangles of ribbon swathing, stretching over, and sweeping across the silhouetted surface. Each of these works is aptly titled Memento, 2008, a reference to their look—party streamers left hanging after a rowdy night—and time-based production, as well as the near obsolescence of both media. Fans of International Klein Blue, Prussian blue, or just plain periwinkle take note: The oceanic backdrops of these prints are drop-dead gorgeous. While deep, gut-wrenching blues impart an atmospheric moodiness and melancholy to the exhibition, color isn’t the only captivating element here. What surprises is the fact that these works, though photographs, have a painterly feel and therefore seesaw back and forth between gestural abstraction and dry conceptualism.
"Constraction"
DEITCH PROJECTS
76 Grand Street
June 28–August 9
Hot on the heels of “Substraction,” a group exhibition that featured gritty, street-inspired abstractions by six young painters, this show, organized by Kathy Grayson, presents a focused selection of artists using conceptual and minimalist approaches. The earlier exhibition posited the gestures of Yves Klein and Jackson Pollock as primary influences on the likes of Sterling Ruby and Kristin Baker. Here, references are also easy to find. Ara Peterson’s wall-based sculpture of laser-cut patterns, and the conceptual schemes deployed in paintings by Xylor Jane and Tauba Auerbach, for example, all bring to mind Sol LeWitt. Yet a sense of resuscitation seems far from the point, even if the gallery’s press materials urge a revival of “strategies in abstraction that have fallen into disuse” and “reshuffling the deck of conceptualism and minimalism.” Although uneven at times, “Constraction” makes a stronger case for innovation than for slavish inheritance.
Black-and-white geometric abstraction dominates the show. Jane’s five small canvases of dots, one of which is based on information gathered in personal journals that describes near-death experiences, deploy a self-generated system that determines the color of the dots in the paintings. The works’ task-based underpinning nonetheless allows imperfections, such as smudges, to emerge. As one moves further away from them, the canvases resolve into psychedelic patterns that complement Auerbach’s Op-art paintings, installed on an adjacent wall. Recalling Liz Deschenes’s recent series of “Moiré” photographs, Auerbach’s new works mark a departure from her previous, text-based paintings. Fields of black Ben-day dots on large white canvases resemble a crumpled sheet of spotted paper from a distance. These stark patterns echo in Auerbach’s tessellated ceramic-tile floor, which stretches across the room to Peterson’s computer-designed and handpainted sculpture, itself a mosaic of wavy black and white lines. Rounding out the show are more minimal yet colorful works by Peter Coffin, Joe Bradley, and Mitzi Pederson.
LOUISE BOURGEIOS: THE SPIDER, THE MISTRESS, AND THE TANGERINE (2008) tenderly untangles the personal and public lives of the esteemed artist, and clocks in at just over an hour and a half—as if to offer a minute for each of her ninety-six years. The film is the third and final production by the Art Kaleidoscope Foundation, a nonprofit established in 1990 by Marion Cajori (1950–2006), who began work on this film in 1993 with codirector Amei Wallach and editor Ken Kobland. Its premiere at Film Forum precedes a presentation of Bridgette Cornand’s documentary video trilogy at Anthology Film Archives, and both coincide with Bourgeois’s full-career retrospective at the Guggenheim.
Like Cajori’s previous features about Joan Mitchell and Chuck Close, which provide unusually candid interviews, this atmospheric portrait of Bourgeois bypasses the dryness of most art documentaries. It resembles instead a work of art in its own right, no doubt fueled by the uncanny sight of an artist revisiting her ideas from over forty years ago with vivid clarity. The film’s three sections are titled after Bourgeois’s sculptural installation I Do, I Undo, I Redo, 1999–2000, and explore several of her major themes, including memory, trauma, and identity. Although difficult to encapsulate, the best précis of Bourgeois’s career is offered near the end of the film by Tate Modern curator Frances Morris, who notes, “For me, the first encounters with Louise were really as a historic figure, a classic modern twentieth-century artist. Subsequent encounters with her were as a contemporary artist. . . . She’s the only figure in twentieth-century art that I see in both these contexts. . . . As she’s become physically older and, in a way, more ambitious, her work has become more universal.”
Other interviews with curators, such as Robert Storr and Deborah Wye, offer personal glimpses of their relationships with the artist. Wye emphatically states that she was “totally taken” and “in her power” when she first met Bourgeois; Storr compares Bourgeois to a vampire sucking up psychological energy. (“But most of the time she’s putting energy out,” he concedes.) However, the most scintillating bons mots are offered by the doyenne herself, and there are enough here to fill up a pocket-size inspirational book. These weave through the film as she gleefully describes and lovingly caresses her works, like little children. A few gems: “The purpose of sculpture is really self-knowledge”; “The artist has a privilege of being in touch with his or her unconscious”; and, in response to a question from her longtime assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, “You have to read between the lines when I talk.”
Although Bourgeois’s joie de vivre is infectious and at times downright endearing (as when she rides in a Cadillac or wears a fluffy, hot-pink coat), viewers are reminded how her works have shaped—and have been shaped by—the art world. Never fully embraced by Dada, Surrealist, or Abstract Expressionist circles, she stopped showing her work in the early ’50s, only to gain late-career success in the ’80s, when “Greenberg formalism was on the way out.” As Gorovoy aptly puts it, “My generation was interested in narrative. . . . Louise had been mining that area for a long time.”
Not long after Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” plays on the sound track, the moody and meditative film concludes with a montage depicting an invasion of sorts: Bourgeois’s massive bronze spider sculptures parked in front of art institutions around the world. Bourgeois notes that her spiders have been her most successful subjects and represent her mother, yet the film makes a stronger case that the artist is her own most successful subject and is the “mother” of generations of artists, particularly those working with feminist themes. As two members of the Guerrilla Girls argue, “Whether she likes it or not, she’s our icon.”
Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine runs at Film Forum from June 25 to July 7. To view the trailer for this film, click here. Brigitte Cornand's La Rivière Gentille runs at Anthology Film Archives July 8–20.
Lisa Tan
D'AMELIO TERRAS
525 West 22nd Street, Ground Floor
May 8–June 21
At first glance, the three works in this show (a painting, a picture of a painting, and a sheet of text) might invoke Joseph Kosuth’s tautological investigation in One and Three Chairs, 1965. But a closer look reveals a muted introspection and restrained melancholy that couldn’t be further from Kosuth’s Conceptual landmark. Moving a Mountain, 2008, documents Tan’s visit to Mexico City last November and broadens the wanderlust increasingly central to her practice. “It was the Day of the Dead, and the city was decorated with orange clusters of candles and marigolds,” begins the text, which looks like a delicately incised page from a book yet reads like a diary entry or a letter. The narrative cautiously describes Tan’s walk down the Alameda to a closed restaurant, her Colonial-style hotel, the sounds of two lovers in the room above, and then, in more detail, a painting above the bed of a snow-capped mountain. Months later, Tan returned to Mexico to replace that mountain image with another: a painting of a desert scene reminiscent of West Texas, where she was raised. Tan took a large-format photograph of that work, which faces off in the small gallery with the original Mexican painting like an imperfect reflection. Although the paintings are not too remarkable (the late Bob Ross comes to mind), the metaphoric anchors of reciprocity and exchange that link them are intriguing. More involving, though, is the sense of privacy and isolation that suffuses the understated installation. With consummate frugality, Tan examines the social life of objects and the mechanics of desire, without neglecting the equally powerful longing to get lost, to be alone.
Joy Garnett
WINKLEMAN GALLERY
637 West 27th Street
February 15–March 15
Scenes of the apocalypse and disasters both natural and man-made could now be considered New York–based artist Joy Garnett’s signature subjects, yet they retain their capacity to frighten. In her latest works, which once again incongruously deploy sumptuously applied paint to render open-source images culled from the Internet, the artist depicts vistas from around the world taken at ostensibly the same moment. Although they verge on abstraction, the canvases provoke memories by drawing on the lingua franca of documentary news photographs. Garnett’s talent is for simultaneously imbuing these sublime landscapes with a hushed vastness that nearly nullifies their perilous circumstances.
The smog-filled serenity of the sun rising over a densely packed city and undulating horizon in Morning in China, 2007, is suffused with anticipation. Here Garnett’s loose, impressionistic brushwork and colorful palette underscore the pace of China’s rapid transformations, whether positive or negative—increasing population, burgeoning economic force, looming environmental concerns. This sense of bated breath gives way to trepidation in the twilight ambience of Harbor (2), 2008, in which a blaze of red paint seems to stretch from the land out into the water, signaling danger in an otherwise romantic seaside landscape reminiscent of Karen Kilimnik’s paintings. Though Garnett’s new work may seem like a departure from her more recent themes of “strange weather” and global warming, perhaps these landscapes should be considered through another definition of weather—as an inquiry into how long we can withstand our current conditions. Right now, they seem like a forecast of things to come.
Alan Saret
THE DRAWING CENTER
35 Wooster Street
November 9–February 7
In 1971, at the age of twenty-six, Alan Saret left New York for a three-year sojourn in India. By that time, he had achieved several markers of artistic success, including solo exhibitions at Bykert Gallery that aligned his work with post-Minimal and anti-form artists then gaining traction. One gets the sense while looking at his work that the trip must have affected him indelibly, perhaps deepening his interests in ritual and spirituality. The “Gang Drawings” in this exhibition, which were made between the years 1967 and 2002, seem like remnants of ritual: Each work was made by marking the page with a fistful of color pencils in seemingly random, fleeting gestures. Like a controlled experiment, the outcomes are different in similar ways. These lyrically titled works bring to mind the linearity of blades of grass (as in Way Entering Ensoulment, 1983–96), the density of multihued fireworks, and even the rhythm of Cézanne’s landscapes. Mutable and delicate, at times Saret’s marks are also dense. In Sana Whirl Will, 1983, an upside-down tornado of subdued colors looks nearly three-dimensional.
Typically, his drawings have been presented alongside his amorphous wire sculptures (in a 1990 retrospective at P.S. 1 and a 2004 exhibition at James Cohan Gallery), but in this exhibition of thirty drawings and only a few three-dimensional objects, the works on paper receive due recognition. Saret played a large role in the organization of the show, opening his archives to integrate a few drawings that have not been exhibited before. The chance to see a well-edited, thoughtful selection of his works from over four decades is a revelatory opportunity, one that, like ritual, encourages slowness and contemplation.