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"
CENTRE POMPIDOU
Place Georges-Pompidou
October 21–November 23
Call it what you will (a stage, an event, a platform?), but curator Bernard Blisténe’s performance-based program at the Pompidou may prove to be nothing less than a major triumph for the museum. Belying its straightforward title, “The New Festival” will gather works by 160 artists during five weeks in a program that escapes any precise definition and recalls the museum’s experimental beginnings in the late 1970s. Certain days offer up to ten events––from dance and lectures to music and films––alongside two related exhibitions, one at the Pompidou and the other at the Conciergerie, a former royal palace and prison.
The highlight of the festival’s opening weekend was undoubtedly Andrea Fraser’s Official Welcome, a parody of thank-you speeches from imagined art-award ceremonies that debuted in 2001 and retains its bite. Proceeding to undress as the performance became more ambiguous, Fraser commanded the attention of visitors in the museum, as well as those outside, who tapped on the glass of the gallery, snapped photos, and thereby underscored the efficacy of her work. That night, Elmgreen & Dragset’s Drama Queens, 2009, also pushed limits between the subject and the object of performance. With a libretto by Tim Etchells, the soap-opera-esque play (one could taste the melodrama) features an anthropomorphic group of sculptures––by Koons, Giacometti, Arp, Hepworth, Rückriem, Warhol, and LeWitt.
Of the standouts at the museum’s exhibition, Ben Kinmont’s On Becoming Something Else, 2009, is a multipart project comprising a selection of essays by the art critic and noted anarchist Félix Fénéon on gastrology, as well as meals that Kinmont organized at seven different restaurants, based on short biographies he wrote about seven artists whose “art practices,” like his own, “led them out of the art world and into a new value structure.” Also of note is the program La Peinture Parlée (Paintings Speak), featuring Heimo Zobernig’s large cage housing thirty paintings, each chosen by an artist, critic, or curator. At 2 PM each day, one of the works will be removed from the confines and left on view with a contextualizing statement by the individual who selected it. Blisténe has even incorporated the Pompidou’s vast piazza into his project; here, visitors can find the festival’s calendar outlined in crisp white text, as if it could be easily contained or classified.
A related exhibition at the Conciergerie is on view until December 12.
LET’S NOT DILATE—as many have—on whether writer-director Andrew Bujalski’s scripts are indebted to the languid stylings of Eric Rohmer, or the degree to which his characters are heirs to the lustful eccentrics in Woody Allen’s films. Let’s also forget about Mumblecore, the poorly named genre he’s said to have pioneered, which is distinguished by the directionless musings of late-twenty-somethings as they try to figure their shit out. If Bujalski’s Beeswax (2009), is any indication, he’s well on his way to surpassing most expectations.
Let’s begin, instead, with the end. It’s a bittersweet moment when the closing credits roll onto the screen. After nearly one hundred minutes of drifting plotlines and relaxed dialogue by a few affable and convincing nonactors (his friends are usually cast in the leading roles), just about everything is left perfectly unresolved. All that is clear is that this young director––he’s only thirty-two––is highly skilled at creating something out of (nearly) nothing. Call it sprezzatura.
The film follows twins Lauren and Jeannie (Maggie and Tilly Hatcher, also real-life twins) in Austin, Texas, as they swim into and out of romantic relationships and deal with sundry problems––Jeannie is quarreling with her business partner, and Lauren can’t decide whether she wants to take a teaching job abroad. There’s also Merrill (Alex Karpovsky), Jeannie’s ex, who is preparing for the bar exam and helping Jeannie with legal issues while falling, again, into her bed. When those credits appear, it might feel like you’ve known each of them for years.
Like Bujalski’s previous films, Funny Ha Ha (2002) and Mutual Appreciation (2005), Beeswax is a low-budget production. Yet it is a more complex work than the others, and its narrative, laced with ambiguities and false starts, is more attentive to character development. It should make Chantal Akerman, his Harvard film adviser, quite proud. All possible influences aside however, Bujalski has struck gold through a meeting of effort and ease, by doing it all his way.
Beeswax opens August 7 at Film Forum.
Dorothy Iannone
NEW MUSEUM
235 Bowery
July 22–October 18
It’s hard to say what, or perhaps who, is pleasuring Dorothy Iannone in her “video box” I Was Thinking of You III, 1975/2006, but such is the dreamy ambiguity of her practice. Like the feminist theorist Luce Irigaray in her eminent essay “This Sex Which Is Not One” (1977), Iannone advances a model of sexuality that encourages multiplicity, mutability, and fluctuation.
A highlight of the 2006 Whitney Biennial, that piece is accompanied in this exhibition––her first solo museum show in the United States––by Iannone’s large-scale magic, mystical paintings, and People, 1966–67, her small wooden figures, as well as An Icelandic Saga, 1978–86, a series of drawings that limns her first encounter with Dieter Roth, her onetime lover and muse. Installed in the museum’s lobby, the exhibition provides a solid, if slightly cramped, overview of Iannone’s work.
Her magnetic creations are afforded more breathing room at Anton Kern Gallery (in a show on view until August 21), wherein several works from the 1970s and ’80s are installed alongside those made in the past few years. The lubricious bodies with exposed and often enlarged genitalia, the conversational text (YES COMING TOGETHER, reads one painting, which features two figures fused in “ecstatic unity,” as she calls it), and the porous portrayal of gender are all key characteristics.
That Iannone’s flatly rendered canvases and brightly hued palette haven’t changed much over the years is striking; more notable is the time it took for her to receive her due in the US. Though these surveys serve as correctives, one holds out hope for a more comprehensive view.
Alice Shaw
GALLERY 16
1616 16th Street
May 21–July 3
Alice Shaw’s third solo exhibition at Gallery 16 finds the artist as mystic and rationalist, medium and maker. In “Auto(biography)”––the follow-up to “People Who Look Like Me,” her 2006 show at the gallery––Shaw develops her droll conceptualism through an even more comprehensive picture of her primary subject, herself. With the help of an “astro-location reader” and the chair of the Graphological Society of San Francisco––whose findings about her ideal locale and handwriting sample are paired with the artist’s responses (pictures of the sea and desert, and a cursive exercise, respectively)––this show presents a selection of Shaw’s new photographs, prints, and drawings that interact in a Freudian game of fort da, in which her identity is repeatedly lost and found. The Artist as Medium (all works 2009), a Shermanesque daguerreotype, follows Premonition, a drawing of a tombstone with Shaw’s name on it. Color Field #1 is a monochrome in dark pink, a color that her “synesthete” friend associates with her name, while Color Field #2 is a snapshot of the artist wearing a gaudy dress of the same hue. Throughout, Shaw refuses to take herself (and her practice) too seriously. Tucked between The Past/The Present and Prediction—a crystal ball on top of a picture of her posing in front of an SUV and a mansion—is the collage What My Show Probably Should Have Looked Like, a depiction of a gallery that features several tawdry nude portraits of the artist. Here Shaw aims her mirror at the art world; perhaps wisely, she seems unconcerned with the results.
Unica Zürn
THE DRAWING CENTER
35 Wooster Street
April 17–July 23
The black-and-white photographs of Unica Zürn’s body—bound by string, coiled, and reduced to a sack of bulbous flesh—are some of Hans Bellmer’s most admired works and, until recently, her mere cameo in art history’s canon. As a remedial course, perhaps, this elegant show offers a bounty of Zürn’s automatic drawings, a few shimmering paintings, and some brilliant pieces of her writing (for which she is most regarded). Although it reprises themes set forth in Ubu Gallery’s similar 2005 show, the Drawing Center exhibition thoughtfully and tenderly examines her short career and mental illness without didactically trying to “rediscover” her and without mythologizing her suicide at age fifty-four or her interest in sadomasochism. The tranquil sea-blue walls and the thick black frames here temper the hotness of these issues, and so do the sweet, nearly oceanic and biomorphic forms in her finely detailed renderings. These creatures hover at the center of her pages, bearing multiple countenances, breasts, limbs, and orifices, though, unlike a Bellmer "Poupeé," rarely do Zürn’s striations recall actual bodies. Instead, forty-nine mostly untitled works here offer roving, repetitive deviations: delicate lines, smudged ink, and twisting spirals appear as faces, then just shapes, and finally as faces, again, through an echolike effect. Intense and otherworldly, they offer a window into a mind that contemporary artists––particularly those invested in psychedelic motifs––should investigate. For some, her work might feel like the sun against their eyes; for others, a beacon in the distance.
Jennifer Bornstein
GAVIN BROWN'S ENTERPRISE
620 Greenwich Street
April 4–May 2
The set in Jennifer Bornstein’s 16-mm abstract film Phantom Limb, 2009, is the same one used in the television show Boston Legal, but you’d never guess it. The eighteen-minute black-and-white work unfolds slowly and silently and ends where it began, with the opening scene flipped backward and in negative. Superimpositions and mirror reflections are spread throughout, in homage, perhaps, to early Surrealist film, and these transitions seem to suit her subject: mirror boxes, traditionally used to treat phantom-limb pains. Bornstein’s work feels a bit like therapy, too: As the camera’s roaming lens closely scans the floral wallpapered surfaces of the set through repetitive and hypnotic movements, it’s hard not to feel increasingly relaxed, or nearly numb. Even the whir of the projector seems to play a role. By the end of the film, when past and present collide, I felt an uncanny, pleasurable, and disorienting stupor.
“Evergreen,” a new series of photographs (her first exhibited in nearly ten years), offers another approach to feeling severed. Intrigued by the story of Treva Throneberry, who enrolled at Evergreen High School in Vancouver, Washington, at age twenty-eight, in these works Bornstein captures dull teenagers amid their even duller academic surroundings. While the images do not seem to offer anything more than the current (and itself cyclic) milieu at the school or point to the elaborate masquerade that Throneberry created in the late 1990s, they do recall the slippery identity issues at play in Bornstein’s late-’90s portraits of herself with young boys. These would have been nice to see here too, in yet another kind of reflection.
Erica Baum
DISPATCH
127 Henry Street
February 15–March 22
The red-, blue-, and green-stippled book edges in Erica Baum’s new photographs bring to mind the paperbacks that encumber used-book stores, thrift shops, and family libraries: faded film adaptations, celebrity biographies, and the occasional art monograph. In this exhibition, she walks a fine line between documentation and concealment, presenting pictures of eight such books fanning out and close-up, open but not completely exposed. Fragments of text and cheaply reproduced images––Goldie Hawn in a scene from Shampoo (1975), Art Garfunkel, Richard and Pat Nixon––are evident between the bars. Although these images appear to mine a specific American decade, the 1970s, Baum shirks nostalgia for abstraction. Previously her work (in black-and-white) examined card catalogs, from which she derived a form of clinical and concrete poetry (SEX DIFFERENCES—SHIRTS, reads one). Here, the pulsating hues create geometric patterns, which appear painterly from a distance and recall a colorful version of Gerhard Richter’s “Vorhang” (Curtain) series from the mid-’60s. The fine red vertical lines in Art, 2008, for example, neatly frame the seated, youthful musician and echo the saturated crimson blocks in Nixon and Pat, 2009, which seem to split the image in half. Without entirely displacing the subjects of these photographs, Baum shrewdly extracts image and text from source, pushing language, both visual and verbal, to unstable, higher ground.
I WATCHED CHIARA CLEMENTE’S Our City Dreams (2008) in fits and starts, as the DVD screener battled my computer. During this graceless do-si-do of breaking down and starting up again, the ensuing allover abstract images captured on screen––pixelated views of artists Swoon, Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith, Marina Abramovic, and Nancy Spero, amid contemplative shots of New York City––seemed to dovetail, in moments nearing cliché, with Clemente’s dreamy and meandering first feature documentary.
An intimate series of portraits, the film trades in contemplative voice-overs and languid views of the artists at work in their studios and homes, installing exhibitions, and traveling. Clemente’s scattered black-and-white, Super-8, 16-mm, and HD footage seemed antithetical at first, more patchwork quilt than urban collage. Yet the dense arrangement works, complementing the differences of the artists and their relationships to their art, families, and, in some cases, gender.
Spero, the beacon of the film, speaks candidly about feminism, invoking her involvement as a founder of AIR gallery in 1972 while providing a political model that is strangely absent otherwise. “I was dying for people to ask what I was working on, and not too many people did . . . but now they do,” she notes. Whether she's shown celebrating her eightieth birthday or attending an exhibition opening of works by her late husband, Leon Golub, one desires throughout her segment for the camera to linger, to absorb; her musings are among the most resonant and profound moments in the film.
Although it lightly scratches the surface of the historical binds between feminism and art, Our City Dreams more thoroughly, if unconsciously, examines fatherhood (perhaps fitting, as it comes in the wake of Clemente’s last short about her artist father, Francesco). Kiki Smith reminisces about her early career, her father, Tony, and her apprehensions about becoming an artist. “My mother died, I had my retrospective, and my bird disappeared after fifteen years,” she recounts in her home, following a montage of pictures from her youth. Smith also discusses the several odd but compelling jobs she worked until the death of her father, in 1980, and its impact on her practice.
Other striking moments include Amer’s father speaking about her work, Swoon bodysurfing in the crowd during her 2005 opening at Deitch Projects, and footage of Abramovic’s weeklong performance, Seven Easy Pieces, that same year at the Guggenheim. Seemingly less about New York City than it is about forging identities as women, artists, mothers, daughters, and wives, Clemente’s film compellingly depicts the underlying, rather undreamy mores that propelled these individual careers in the bright lights of the big city––veracity, dedication, and commitment, to name a few.
Our City Dreams runs February 4–17 at Film Forum in New York.
Christopher Miner
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
534 West 26th Street
January 15–Feburary 13
“After being married for only two years, I’ve found that I prefer to spend more time alone than my marriage will allow.” Self-observant and self-absorbed, Christopher Miner fills his second solo show at this gallery with unbridled quips and deprecating gems. But what at first appears trite or crude resonates beyond the monitor. His outlandish videos dig deep; they recall the abject musings of Mike Kelley as well as the comedic obsessions of Mike Smith. In a new suite of shorts, Miner takes Jackson, Mississippi, his hometown, as subject and muse and presents several intriguing characters––his mom, dad, wife, the neighbors, and himself––chewing the cud. Whether extracting a Christmas tree from a farm or sunbathing on the deck, Miner documents it all in affectionate detail, particularly in Easter for the Birds, 2008, in which his mother cutely inquires in a deep southern drawl, “What is your sushi? What do you have in your life that you really just love?” while preparing bird food. In two adjacent videos, he interviews a few locals––a cross-eyed man and a deformed woman––who recount strange tales awash in racism and fundamentalism, a stark reminder of lingering ghosts in the Bible Belt. One could accuse Miner of exaggerating or, perhaps, exploiting his own life in extreme ways. But like the protagonist of John Waters’s Pecker (1998), a character who at once embraces and is mortified by his upbringing, Miner seems to be irritated and complicit, dazed and confused.