ARTFORUM INTERNATIONAL Exhibition Reviews
2007: Sadie Benning, Dana Frankfort.
2008: Chris Johanson, "Quiet Politics," Danica Phelps, Tomory Dodge, Muzi Quawson, Adrian Piper, Alex Hubbard, Molly Springfield, Kristin Lucas.
2009:
December 2009:
Elina Brotherus
Martin Asbaek Gallery
“Artist and her Model,” Finnish photographer Elina Brotherus’s second solo exhibition in Copenhagen, surveyed a narrow selection of the artist’s photographs from 2000 to 2008 and offered a finely wrought mini-retrospective. Viewers familiar with her work might have read the title as tongue-in-cheek, since her pictures are nearly all self-portraits—seeing the show instead as a lineup of greatest hits from a larger archive and, moreover, as the diaristic examination of a persona, simultaneously in front of and behind her camera.
A few examples from her well known series, “The New Painting,” 2000–2004, were on view, including one of the only works without Brotherus in it: Figure au bord de l’eau (Figure on Waterfront), 2002, which voyeuristically captures a nude man as he quietly ponders the sublime lakeside view before him. Brotherus took classical paintings––primarily from the Romantic tradition––as inspiration for this series, and Caspar David Friedrich appears as one of her primary influences. But unlike Friedrich, she draws attention to the figures in her works as performing staged emotions, echoing the artifice of the image itself and, at times, offering a burgeoning concern for the gaze (male and female). Within a few years, however, with artists such as Justine Kurland and Ryan McGinley expanding and making more ambiguous the relation of figure to landscape in photography, Brotherus too seems to have renewed her exploration of the theme.
Several photographs from the series “Fuji-mi,” 2005-ongoing, depict the artist in Japan standing before a picture-perfect view of Mount Fuji. In each image, she wears the same blue coat with a fur collar, but appears in different locations around the circumference of the mountain, looking toward the camera, with her back to it, and gazing toward the horizon. While these images continue to recall traditional pictorial schemes, they are most interesting when compared to Brotherus’s photographs that portray the artist in other landscapes. Take the diptych Points of View on a Landscape 1, 2006, in which Brotherus shows herself standing directly in front of the camera in a misty Nordic landscape; this was smartly installed in this show next to the “Fuji-mi” works, and the juxtaposition underscored themes of nostalgia and memory running throughout all of her works. With these pictures, the artist departs from the gaze and staged emotions to focus instead on how longing is connected to and constructed by such sublime iconic views.
Issues concerning the gaze are taken up again, however, in photographs wherein Brotherus looks neither at a landscape nor toward her camera but directly at another figure in a studio. Two pictures from the series “Études d'après modèle, danseurs” (Model Studies, Dancers), 2007, show the artist watching a male dancer as he stretches and holds a pose. In each image the camera’s tripwire is exposed, and the artist’s foot leans lightly on it. Strikingly different from the other photographs in the exhibition, Brotherus notes that these images depict “neither the male gaze nor the female gaze,” but “something neutral.” The artist never quite makes good on this assertion; it will take more pictures and at least another exhibition before it becomes clear how Brotherus might incorporate the idea of a neutral gaze more broadly into her work. But the attempt is provocative, even promising.
Anthony Goicolea
Postmasters
The adolescent male fantasies and youth-obsessed sensuality that imbue much of Anthony Goicolea’s art have often made it seem to add up to little more than eye candy. The 2001–2002 “Detention” series, for example, comprises digitally manipulated photographs in which schoolboy clones of the artist pose in various fanciful settings. This show encouraged a new look at his work, revealing a more serious side to his biography-driven practice.
Titled “Once Removed,” the exhibition was—like two gallery presentations earlier this year in London and Los Angeles, and a show in spring at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art—a product of Goicolea’s first trip to Havana, where his parents and grandparents once lived. The body of work created after this 2008 visit includes drawings of old family photographs and pictures taken during his stay, as well as a family tree and other more personal investigations. At Postmasters, Goicolea expanded upon the metaphoric and heavily nostalgic process of reconstruction and reclamation at play in those pieces.
For the three-panel painting Night Sitting (all works 2009), Goicolea worked from photographs to memorialize four generations of his family at various ages. His relatives are cast as glamorous figures, an effect compounded by the presence in the picture of several high-powered lamps of the kind used on film sets, which illuminate the scene and add a level of theatricality to the piece. The knowingness in the construction of the fantasy these lights imply is of a kind almost entirely absent from the artist’s earlier output. In other pieces, however, he risks being too obvious (as with the missing-person portraits of his relatives tacked to telephone poles and trees in 2008’s “Related” series) in creating allegories for a sense of dislocation and damage. For instance, in the center of the gallery was Transplant (Terrace Garden) an island of small trees, several of which were borrowed from Goicolea’s father’s home in southern Florida. Most were held upright with splints, conveying wear and tear from their journey; one was repaired more forcefully with duct tape.
Cement blocks appeared throughout the show, notably under a number of carnivalesque portrait busts of family members. They feature, too, in Foundation, a large photograph of an abandoned construction site under a glorious grove of banyan trees, which pointed up the smart dialectic between landscape and personal history that energized much of the show. Sitio portrays a similar view, this time with the scene of an excavation––or a burial?––surrounded by palm trees and under an impossibly ominous sky.
The blocks were present in one further notable work, a piece that suggests a newfound comfort with ambiguity, as well as Goicolea’s self-constructed resolve in the face of a disrupted family history. Installed in the back room, Displacement was projected from within a scale model of the artist’s family home in Cuba. This moody three-minute-long video, shot at night with an infrared camera, shows the artist carefully pitching cement blocks out of a tiny boat, one by one, as if they were possessions too heavy for a long journey. The symbolism was clear, but the high-pitched sound track of sirens that continually filled the room and spilled out into the rest of the space nagged at other interpretations and issues. One hopes the artist will shed some of his too blatant references and imagery and refine the themes of his recent works before his first—and surely nearing—midcareer retrospective.
November 2009:
"Character Generator"
Eleven Rivington
For this group exhibition, Matthew Lyons, a curator from the Kitchen in New York, gathered a collection of nearly all black-and-white works by nine artists undertaking a range of poetic and political challenges to the orderly system of language—what Roland Barthes saw as its inherent fascism. Exploring terrain connected to that charted by figures such as Mel Bochner and Robert Barry in the 1960s, several artists here examined moments in which communication seems too rigid or fixed in its meaning, or where it otherwise breaks down and exposes its own flaws. A few pieces appeared hostile to the ways in which language prioritizes or structures reality, and stood out in their aversions toward its supposedly straightforward communicative capacity.
Among exemplars of the latter approach was Karl Holmqvist’s I’m with You in Rockland, 2005, which offered a paradigmatic disintegration of sense, seeming to mirror a disordered experience of the world. The twenty-five-minute “music video” features lyrics in white text popping on and off the bottom of a black screen as the artist languidly speaks. Like a singsong stream-of-consciousness poem, littered with pop culture references, the seemingly nonsensical flow of words is punctuated every so often by the phrase: HOW DO YOU SAY. Adjacent to Holmqvist’s work, Matthew Cerletty’s painting Fact, 2009, put forward similarly wobbly wordplay: not to the fact that who reads them is inscribed in a variety of fonts on its surface, a reference-cum-memorial to a sentence that the artist garbled in high school during a live recording for a faux newscast.
A few works imparted a sense of the personal as political, highlighting the potential of language to undermine or camouflage identity. Cody Trepte’s Twenty Most Frequently Used Words (Written and Spoken), 2008, delivers just that in two square silk screens with the glaring omission of any female pronouns. Installed as a foil, perhaps, on a small adjacent shelf, Emily Roysdon’s Surprise . . . You’re Pregnant!, 2007–2009, takes the form of a pair of acetate glasses, with its title inscribed on the top rim of the frames. The work may seem absurd at first, but provokes open-ended questions about gender and perception.
Four typed-text pieces by Christopher Knowles, the elder artist of the exhibition, offered its most compelling take on linguistic power, and shed some light on his idiosyncratic and distinctly experimental practice. Untitled (Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Budget), 1983, quixotically compares the artist’s expenditures (on sneakers and cassette tapes) with Reagan’s $770 trillion budget of that year. The humorous undertone resonated nicely with Roysdon’s glasses, where a blur of wit and folly undermines the boundaries between public and private—and between art and life.
If each work could be seen as a letter, strung together piece by piece in the show to produce meaning as a character generator would, then Shannon Ebner’s Untitled, 2008, created an obstruction. The only photograph on view, it portrays a solitary figure holding a large blank white sign while standing on a small tarp-covered hill in a barren and dusty landscape. The sign seemed to symbolize agency, or at least the capacity to act, and in the specific context of this exhibition it pointed to the limitations of words, slogans, and messages. Rather, it seemed to suggest that more might be said with silence.
October 2009:
Lynda Benglis and Robert Morris
Susan Inglett Gallery
Some art world controversies never get old. Lynda Benglis’s November 1974 Artforum advertisement for her exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery remains a contender for the most persistently demanding of attention. Lesser known, perhaps, is the image that sparked her ad: Robert Morris’s April 1974 poster for his Castelli-Sonnabend show. Yet these iconic plays on gender––Morris, buff in chains, and Benglis, in the buff with dildo—offer just a slice of the pie, similar to the ensuing story of the editors at this magazine who objected to Benglis’s “centerfold,” two of whom, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, defected to establish October. This intelligent show, curated by Specific Object’s David Platzker, aimed to redress the familiar weighting of the narrative with a selection of contextualizing materials and accounts from 1973 and 1974, including magazine and newspaper articles, works by both artists, and most significantly, thirty-seven unpublished letters from various parties to Artforum (from Benglis’s archive), which made their public debut here.
Some of the letters mirrored the views of the five Artforum editors who published a disavowal in the December 1974 of the magazine deploring the image as an “object of extreme vulgarity” and were miffed that—as a paid ad—it skirted their objections to its inclusion as editorial content in conjunction with an article about Benglis by Robert Pincus-Witten. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe dubbed the image “flabby opportunism.” Arlene Raven and Beth Iskin said it “illustrated . . . inescapable self-promotion and self- prostitution.” A handful of school principals and librarians requested their subscriptions be cancelled. A few letters were encouraging, however: A telegram from Vito Acconci, Jennifer Bartlett, Germano Celant, and Nancy Kitchel applauded Benglis’s “way of bypassing editorial censorship.” Elizabeth Murray wrote that she was “astonished that intelligent critics . . . could not get past their ‘taste’ enough to realize that they are blocking . . . freedom.” The magazine spreads on view included Lucy Lippard’s October 1975 article in Ms. (“A group of Artforum editors played into Benglis’s hands.”) and other published correspondence with Artforum, such as Peter Plagens’s tongue-in-cheek proposal that his fellow editors might cover “the offensive anatomy with a small Don Judd inset.”
Other fascinating pieces of ephemera were scattered throughout the exhibition. An article from the February 1975 issue of New York described how the artist had made fifty T-shirts with her famed image on it, half of which were to be sold in order to recoup the costs of taking out the ad. Additionally, there was a “model contract” from an advertising agent named Roberta Kimmel, disclosing, “Benglis owns all rights to the photograph.” A few works rounded out the show: Benglis’s cast-lead sculpture of her double dildo, Smile, 1974, was in a vitrine above the reception desk, and her 1972 video Mumble was in the main gallery among the printed matter. Morris’s 1973 video Exchange, made in response to the latter, was also installed nearby.
While Platzker’s exhibition interestingly brought artists’ ads and ephemera into a broader discussion, the other subjects raised by the show—the strong and differing reactions to feminism, representations of the body, and objectification—would have benefited from a little more room. The issues of gender and identity that Benglis’s ad provokes might have been more fully explored, for example, if drawn into dialogue with the centerfolds commissioned from Cindy Sherman for Artforum in 1981. Likewise, Hannah Wilke’s 1977 Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism poster would have offered an interesting riposte to Raven and Iskin’s letter. Nevertheless, this exhibition showed that a little dedication to archival research goes a long way, and it was refreshing to see someone bringing such rigorous historical examination to a noninstitutional context.
September 2009:
Anne Eastman
ATM Gallery
Anne Eastman’s first solo exhibition in New York used mobiles made of wood, mirrors, and fishing line to ardently sample a range of early-twentieth-century art, from Russian Constructivism and Surrealism to the kinetic sculptures of Duchamp and Calder. She seemed particularly fixated on Moholy-Nagy: One work carried the lubricious title, Oh! László, suggesting excitement or titillation. Its small Plexiglas mirrors, suspended within a black wooden frame, primarily offered fleeting reflections of gallery visitors. As in the rest of the show, Eastman’s modestly articulated take on abstraction and identity here proved more intriguing than her references to other art.
While Eastman’s exhibition was clearly inspired by art history, it was ultimately too timid to explore the ideologies that underpinned earlier practices. Gentle and genteel, it brought to mind the design aesthetic of the 1960s and ’70s (and contemporary artists such as Carol Bove and Peter Coffin) more than the avant-garde experiments of the ’20s and ’30s. Still, an interpretation of Eastman’s works based solely upon their qualities as design objects is hard to sustain in light of the three videos also in the show. For You Are Not Just A Meaningless Fragment, 2008, the artist trains her camera on the moving reflecting discs of one of her large mirrored mobiles, revealing scenes of a youthful crowd milling about during an opening or an open studio, sipping beers and chatting. Yet through Eastman’s voyeuristic gaze, the experiential and participatory aspects are here made secondary, the work focusing on the mobiles as closed systems, paradoxically operating independently of external perspectives.
Seeing the works in person is a very different, almost interactive affair. The wind created by the movements of viewers around the gallery slowly modified the orientation of the mobiles’ mirrored discs, highlighting their kinetic qualities and creating an experience of fragmentation and doubling that provided a slight, pleasurable sense of the uncanny. A few smaller mobiles, such as No Private Point of View and To Do With As We Like (both 2009) were positioned on low concrete blocks, so that visitors needed to crouch over them if they wanted to be mesmerized by the reflection of their fragmented visages sliding in and out of view.
As some of the other works more effectively suggested, Eastman’s aim in this show was to offer a space for meditation. The Intention of the Device, 2009, a video made in the African art collection in the Yale University Art Gallery, contemplatively depicts the masks on display and Louis Kahn’s minimal architecture—reflected, once again, in one of her large free-floating mobiles. Yet an invitation to Zen-like rumination was conveyed most persuasively in another video, Hand Held Moon, 2009. This shaky, close-up observation of the full moon is projected against a black piece of stained wood leaning against the bottom of a wall, evoking the qualities of moonlight reflected on water. Although this work accentuated the romantic overtones of much of the exhibition, it also appeared much less restrained and less indebted to other art and, perhaps for that very reason, the most full of life.
Summer 2009:
Xavier Cha
Taxter & Spengemann
Over the past few years, Xavier Cha has developed a mythic reputation for her strange, nearly gauche, performances. In her exhibition “Holiday Cruise!” in 2006, for example, she appeared in several ways: lounging in an enormous cornucopia; as a deity called Polyhedra; and gyrating while wearing a full-body costume of hair braided in cornrows. Anyone expecting such lavishness in her recent exhibition would have been surprised by the chilly, detached tone, by the stark and minimal presentation and the less over-the-top subjects. But most unexpectedly, she did not perform here herself, opting instead to hire a stand-in who arrived at the gallery at 4 pm, three days a week.
Installed in the first gallery were seven large photographs, each depicting a woman whose face is obscured by a beauty mask or a “peel.” The subject of Brush (Inger hand) (all works 2009) brought to mind that of a Bioré advertisement, while the lifeless visage behind the white mask in Peel 2 (Rebecca Hands) evoked more horrific terrain, particularly Georges Franju’s 1960 film Eyes Without a Face. Christopher Williams also came to mind. While viewing these images, whose deadened subjects and cold backgrounds were complimented by a bizarre, corporate-feeling installation––each work was tautly suspended by steel wires from the ceiling and floor––I was greeted by a short muscular performer, toolbox and costume in hand, as he made his way into the second gallery.
I watched him prepare behind a large two-way mirror there, amid the sounds of Applause, a looped video of an audience at the Paris Opera, clapping for just the two of us that afternoon. While the looped ovation grew numbing, the man dutifully applied make-up to his face, brushing and stroking until he was covered in red power, with large, white, cakelike circles around his eyes. Through the gray-tinted glass, the shadowy features of his face looked grotesque and skeletal, but on the other side, in the mirror’s reflection, he seemed youthful and animated, with fine black dots on his cheeks and neon green eyelids. Cha’s emphasis on the abject and voyeurism, life and death, was clever, and the attention-grabbing performance made even more apparent the exhibition’s many opportunities to experience uneasy pleasure. Throughout the show, Cha coolly walked the line between art and entertainment, advertising and photography, scopophilia and spectatorship and provoked, in a manner recalling Tino Sehgal’s work, questions regarding the different social roles that artists assume, from manager to maker to performer. The clown piece also brought to mind the little-known but increasingly important performance artist Stuart Sherman, who seems to be a crucial influence on Cha’s generation and who died in 2001.
At twenty-nine, Cha is well on her way to becoming a great artist, though her work at this point sometimes falls flat. For instance, Say Something, a box wrapped in brown paper and string and tucked ominously under a staircase, presumably refers to the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority announcements (“If you see something, say something”), but seemed slight in a show that offered several more forceful plays on disguise and concealment. Nevertheless, Cha presented some of her most compelling ideas here, and, even in her absence, her strongest performance yet.
May 2009:
Xylor Jane
Canada
Xylor Jane’s third solo exhibition at Canada, titled “NDE,” as in “near-death experience,” did not on first impression look to be about death. Products of a conceptual, task-based approach that Jane began developing in the mid-1990s, these new works, more explicitly than their predecessors, depict patterns through dabs of brightly colored oil paint. Some of these patterns have their origin in printouts of numbers from the Internet. Others are based in a system that Jane has generated that links the seven colors of the rainbow to the seven days of the week. If their palettes were more consistently muted, their grids more judicious, her new works might bring to mind Agnes Martin’s meditative paintings. Instead, the dots form bright and busy rhythmic patterns—as they do in Bombinating, 2009, where they build into equilateral triangles fitted together hexagonally––or they outline numbers.
In an accompanying four-page, handwritten guide, Jane notes that Shroud, 2008, is based “on prime Julian days from 06.06.08 to 07.17.19, paired according to their day of the week.” The document provides useful notes about most of the exhibited paintings, even if it doesn’t explain what Phi decimals or palindromic number sequences are, and how they might be represented. “Dot boxes celebrate 28, the second perfect number,” she adds, while the result, more simply, resembles the form designated by the phrase written below this text, ostensibly an organizing principle of her work: “Rainbow Quilt.”
Looking at Jane’s dense vortexes and networks of dots, I was reminded of Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she writes “Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed. . . . They live by symbols.” It is clear that Jane has long been interested in nature and the unknown and possibly the sublime. She is thoroughly engrossed in systems and mathematics, and creates order and structure in her work, and perhaps in her life too, through numerology. Her obsessive practice brings to mind a wide range of artists––from Danica Phelps to Yayoi Kusama to Hanne Darboven to Bridget Riley––and, like Martin, who spent nearly forty years in Galisteo, New Mexico, Jane lives in a small community outside of major art-world centers and off the grid, where she laboriously, if idiosyncratically, paints.
As with Phelps and the others, the trace of Jane’s hand is present throughout her works, a reminder that nothing can be completely controlled or perfect. Mistakes are marked in pencil and sit on the surface, undisturbed. Jane does not seem to idealize precision, and is comfortable exposing the flaws that materialize in even the most controlled experiments. Her conceptualism is less mechanical and impassive than it looks, her self-generated systems more personal, and more about death (and perhaps, life), than they initially seem. Her works are records of time but also reflections backward and projections forward, abstracted calendars of days past and days to come.
Jane has been known to work her ideas out in various forms—printouts, calendars, notes, and finally the paintings themselves—but the handwritten key was unexpected. Partially illuminating and partially mystifying, the guide offered yet another side of Jane’s intricate exercises while the works showed how much her practice has developed since the early 1990s, when she graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute. Somewhere within the scramble of numbers and colors, grids and patterns, were, I sensed, fleeting glitches of emotion, like blips on radar, slow yet steady.
April 2009:
Keren Cytter
Thierry Goldberg Projects
Keren Cytter, who lives in Berlin, pulls from film history for her work, usually in service to video, the medium for which she is best-known (though she redirected the practice to text in her novel from last year, The seven most exciting hours of Mr. Trier’s life in twenty-four chapters, which draws from Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom). The two short videos in her exhibition at Thierry Goldberg refer most directly to Blowup and Dial M for Murder, though they also bring to mind a range of other subjects: soap operas, reality television, Godard, Fassbinder. But while Cytter’s videos explore particular and historic threads, they also, at times, appear irreverent of the past, the artist invested solely in ravenous experimentation.
Loosely based on the Julio Cortázar short story that inspired Blowup, Cytter’s video Les Ruissellements du Diable (The Devil’s Streams), 2008, opens with the image of a translator and amateur photographer, named Michélle, on television, telling the viewers that a man looking at the screen is in love with her. From there, we see Michélle in what appears to be a living room, and then the man in the same room, without her. He watches her on the television and looks at a photograph of a park, but has a lustful gaze that suggests he is daydreaming about her. The pursuit becomes increasingly unclear (who is desiring whom? Who is real?), as ambient melodies, reminiscent of those in Wong Kar-Wai films, play over slow and gracious shots—a cigarette here, a penis there—that give way to scenic views of the couple in a park, in the apartment, together, alone. A meditation on desire and longing, truth and fiction, the video unfolds like a daydream, but is also more coolly detached and contemplative than Cytter’s previous works.
An adjacent room offered Cytter’s distressing yet humorous video Dial G for Murder, 2008, which recalled Dreamtalk, 2005, the love-triangle tale in which she first showed her penchant for interwoven voice-overs and interior monologues, and demonstrated her script-writing skills. In the new work, a man fantasizes about a woman (his pregnant neighbor) and appears crazed with desire. Two men wearing white golfing gloves, like the menacing duo in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, duel as his conscience and provide fleeting comic relief through absurd lines and gestures. The action occurs entirely inside one apartment, primarily in the kitchen and dining room, while Japanese text fades in and out, perhaps offering context or additional complications for the fluent viewer. In the end (spoiler alert!) the love-struck man kills her––a splash of blood on the wall, a hand grasping for help––in the only scenes that recall Hitchcock, though whether this is meant in homage or parody, or as a reference at all, is unclear.
Since 2001, Cytter has explored and sampled cinematic structures, yet she has continued to make videos rather than films. Even so, many critics and the artist herself have called her work “film” (as Barry Schwabsky noted in these pages a few years ago), and she has recently begun participating in film festivals. But Cytter’s work itself moves beyond genres and speaks to a postmedium condition, suggesting that film, while it remains her primary fixation, is nearly exhausted, increasingly obsolete.
March 2009:
Daniel Guzmán
Harris Lieberman
Since the 1990s, Daniel Guzmán has made drawings that borrow imagery from a wide range of sources––from punk rock to the daily news, heavy metal to Mexican mural painting––and his first exhibition at this gallery charted similarly dense terrain. Guzman’s latest sculptures share certain motifs with his drawing series “La Búsqueda del Ombligo” (The Search of the Navel), 2005–2007, in which he explored his cultural roots; but they focus on darker subjects, namely the New Fire, an Aztec bloodletting ceremony, the artist channeling aggression and disenchantment into metaphor.
The rectangular structures constituting the series “Everything is Temporary,” 2008–, have been constructed with carrizo, a “ubiquitous, determined weed,” according to the Journal of Homeland Security, that “chokes waterways, erodes banks and canals . . . and affords potentially dangerous illegal aliens the cover they need to slip into the United States across the Rio Grande.” Fastened together with strips of black leather, the carrizo is adorned with thrift-store bric-a-brac and found objects, including records, flowers, blue bandanas, and a Kiss mask that, hung by its ponytail, resembles a decapitated head. With their makeshift simplicity, the objects suggest various uses, from ritualistic to monumental.
Installed in a corner, Day One. “Smoking Mirror,” 2008, consists of a stack of bound carrizo fitted snuggly between two large perpendicular mirrors that reflect each other through a Smithson-like refraction. On top of the stack rest pieces of a ceramic skull covered with pesos––perhaps blood money or a blessing. Too ambiguous to be heavy-handed, the work echoes the large drawings, lining the gallery walls, from “El Grafico,” 2008, Guzmán’s series depicting graphic crime scenes shown on the cover of the eponymous daily tabloid. Causing further disorientation, the video El Secreto del Mal (The Secret of Evil), based on a posthumously published novel by Roberto Bolaño, could be heard throughout the main gallery. Projected in a side room, Guzmán’s zombie flick is smarter than most B movies but not quite a spoof, nor is it an homage. The video shows two men engaged in idiosyncratic political, poetic, and philosophical conversations in Mexico City (“I haven’t lost my hope, it just has AIDS,” says one) as they flee from an undead mass chasing them, Night of the Living Dead style.
And like George Romero’s classic film, Guzmán’s new work operates as an allegory for contemporary violence in Mexico, raising questions regarding voyeurism, satire, and symbolism. The title of the show, “El Sol de México,” was displayed as a large black vinyl sign that spanned the gallery’s street-facing window, alluding to the Mexican newspaper as well to Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of sun and war. That Guzmán created such a strikingly cohesive installation, uniting past and present cultural references, is indeed impressive. Having distanced himself from previous sources of inspiration (Bukowski, Burroughs, and Pasolini, to name a few) and having tethered his practice more securely to Mexico’s particular history and culture, the artist has produced his most pressing and important work to date.
February 2009:
Charlotte Posenenske
Peter Freeman, Inc.
In the May 1968 issue of Art International, the thirty-eight-year-old German artist Charlotte Posenenske published a manifesto lamenting the “regressed” utility of art and, by implication, the larger network of the art world. Her statements convey her concern with the social role of artists and presage her decision later that year to become, perhaps unsurprisingly, a sociologist. Yet unlike other artists from the late 1960s and early ’70s who employed strategies of rejection or withdrawal—Lee Lozano comes first to mind––Posenenske was not concerned with blurring the boundaries between art and life. Rather, her final works, the Prototypes for Mass Production, 1965–1967, composed of bent and bowed aluminum sheets spray-painted in RAL waterproof colors, were meant to be endlessly reproduced, the reproductions exhibited in non-commercial venues and distributed at cost. Twenty-three years after Posenenske passed away, and following the notable presence of her work at Documenta 12 in 2007, the occasion of her first solo US exhibition makes considerations of her practice all the more intriguing and difficult.
Fifteen Prototypes, the majority having their gallery debut, were installed in the main exhibition space, adjacent to a small room of Posenenske’s early abstract paintings on paper and a solitary collage. The paintings reveal her increasing formal concerns and share the Prototypes’ basic colors––black, blue, red, white, and yellow. A few of her earliest works recall the gestural and violent marks in Joan Mitchell’s canvases, while the scaled-down Streifenbilder (striped pictures) and Spritzbilder (sprayed pictures), dating from 1962 to 1965, foreshadow the Prototypes’ hard-edge motifs and materials. Take the creased aluminum rectangles in the monochrome Faltung (Fold) Prototypes from 1965, which give way to the following year’s convex, concave, tented, and zigzagg Relief works; with their metallic curves and slopes, these serialized and standardized sculptures appear completely geometric and reductive, all surface and no depth.
Nonetheless, the conceptual underpinnings of the Prototypes and their mimetic copies, which are regulated by Posenenske’s estate, should be understood in the context of a 1960s desire to democratize art, even if their strong, sleek, and stripped-down patinas point elsewhere, namely to American Minimalism. Given Posenenske’s rejection of the singularity of objects and her desire for art to be an agent of change, her work is more closely aligned with El Lissitsky or even Joseph Beuys than with, say, Donald Judd. Posenenske intended for the prototypes to be exhibited outside, on the floor, in multiple configurations and public contexts (in the late ’80s, a few were shown in markets and airplane hangers). Yet their coolly detached elegance seems almost antithetical to public participation, and in fact only patrons or curators can choose their arrangement: a case of theory versus practice.
Did Posenenske’s focus on mass production hinder her political convictions or belie a social objective? Perhaps, if her withdrawal from the art world is any indication; however this exhibition proved that her work is not so easy to characterize. That Posenenske’s career is undergoing a revival speaks to the tenuous boundaries of contemporary art, to the perpetually unfinished business of writing artists into the canon, as well as to the art market. Near the end of her prophetic manifesto Posenenske remarks that as artworks age they accumulate prestige and achieve higher prices. These prescient sentiments resonate strongly, however eerily, as her status ascends.
January 2009:
Lorna Simpson
Salon 94 and Salon 94 Freemans
One intriguing aspect of mid-career retrospectives is that they typically herald a new phase in an artist’s practice, a reinvention. Take for example Lorna Simpson, who recently, a year and a half after her mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, had a two-part exhibition at Salon 94. Marking a significant shift from her large-scale photographs juxtaposing figure and text, her new work, including two series of drawings, imparts an intimacy and directness underpinned by the seminal themes of her practice: race and gender. While her latest offerings continue to blend formal and conceptual approaches in order to explore symbolic systems, they do so through fluid experimentation, at times nearing abstraction.
The uptown gallery featured Photo Booth (all works 2008), an installation interspersing fifty found black-and-white photo-booth portraits—images of poised black men from the 1940s—with fifty inkblots on paper. On first look, the forms recall both Rorschach images and the glued paper remains on the flip sides of pictures ripped from photo albums. On closer inspection, however, the abstract washes appear as mysterious voids, perhaps performing a metaphoric “blacking-out” of history or a slow, methodical erasure of an archive. This open-ended inkblot motif extends to an elegant series of drawings, each depicting a woman with her head turned away from the viewer. Lining a foyer, an alcove, a regal staircase, and two walls of the main gallery, the pictures showcase a plethora of attractive hairstyles—from the beehive, to the bouffant, to the bob—and daintily rendered napes of necks, emphasizing difference over unity. These works evoke Simpson’s earlier photographs of black women with averted gazes and the floating lithographed wigs on felt in her installation Wigs, 1994. The bountiful selection demonstrated Simpson’s process of relearning how to draw, after nearly three decades of taking pictures, and a desire not to overedit.
While some semblance of attractiveness was on display uptown, the mood downtown was much more grotesque. Here Simpson’s sensitive use of graphite and ink was redirected in unsettling depictions of the American “war on terror.” Seventeen of her “Interrogation Drawings,” which are based on images of Guanátnamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Iraq, were lined up on a single wall. Made on sheets of pastel-colored graph paper, these drawings of interrogation rooms, prisoners, cells, and torture devices exude a haunting magnetism, bringing to mind Susan Sontag’s study of wartime images in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). Like Sontag, Simpson’s work engages aesthetics and ethics, but her drawings eschew didacticism or any particular political stance. They are instead rooted in ambiguity, seeking to question the power of images and their mass circulation rather than the mechanics of making powerful images.
Adjacent to these drawings, Simpson’s video Long Slow War created a dialectic in the gallery between historical spectatorship and modern cruelty. The work pairs Thomas Edison’s silent film of two trains crashing head on, Railroad Smash-up, with a black-and-white film of fireworks exploding. The sound track, slowed-down pops and bangs that sound like dreadful moans, correlated eerily with the nearby drawings. Pivoting between beauty and brutality, Simpson’s new works show that she is taking stock of her past, embracing change in the present, and experimenting with future possibilities.