Category Archives: Art Reviews

April 27, 2013 · 10:18 am

Gutai: Performance tour at Guggenheim

Concrete Escort I, II, III, IV– Friday, April 26, 2013 @ 6 pm

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Photo: M.H.Wei

The performative exhibition tour based on the current Gutai exhibition at the Guggenheim was most memorable for two elements: the beautiful constructed  paper “capes” created by Amy Sillman and the playfulness of the white balloon-banners performance.  The Gutai collective was founded Japanese artist Yoshihara Jirō in 1954 in the postwar era and became a forefront avant-garde collective that experimented with new art forms combining performance, painting, and interactive environments. The tour succeeded most in areas where playfulness and interactive were heightened and lines blurred (either by accident or intentionally– for that is the unique nature of play) and lagged most when the tour became divided into traditional lines of audience vs. performer (e.g., comedy duo performance).

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Photo: M.H.Wei

As Amy Sillman placed the taped and painted colorful capes over our heads in an inclusive ritualistic manner (recalling moments like the white coat ceremony for doctors, armor for knights and so on), she cautioned us to allow her to take them off at the end of the hour-long performance, due to their fragility (and the practical need for the second performance). And right she was to worry about her works’ fragility, as throughout the tour, at least one was torn and another trampled over. The capes allowed the audience to transform into participants and transformed a ragtag bunch of visitors into a collective. The capes were constructed from Gutai brochure essays, taped in blue, and painted with black and orange dots and strokes resembling characters. This made our walking crowd look like a dispersed colorful font winding its way up the Guggenheim’s spiral inner staircase. Gathering the tour group into a silver-lined freight elevator became a delightful experience of herding commas and dots into a freight elevator, with tour leaders asking us to pack as tightly together as possible to fit everyone much like a teacher shepherds  their classroom children.

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Photo: M.H. Wei

We traversed the layers of the Guggenheim to retrieve clear banners at the top and on our way down sat and watched a pre-audio-recorded comedy performance about “Frenemies” which was neither poignant or coherent with the theme (for a better conversation on Frenemies see NPR’s This American Life).  The redeeming section of that piece was the “shape-shifting” portion where for 30 seconds the male and female performers created shapes with their bodies.   The finale performance was indeed the most successful and beautiful, with clear banners tied to large white balloons and released into the air while people shook coffee cans (filled with beans?) and members clinked toy red and yellow xylophones.

Photo: M.H.Wei

Photo: M.H.Wei

Recounting the experience with the friend afterwards over dinner, he remarked “Everyone loves balloons.” And while I wanted to think that it wasn’t so simple, I realized that there was truth to the universal playfulness of balloons in resonance with the Gutai manifesto to lift our spirits: ”Keeping the life of the material alive also means bringing the spirit alive, and lifting up the spirit means leading the material up to the height of the spirit.” (December 1956)

Performers of this tour included Ei Arakawa, Shinsuke Aso, Kerstin Brästch, Gabriel Feliciano, Eileen Quinlan, and Amy Sillman.

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March 26, 2013 · 3:58 pm

Are Time Capsules Enough? 1993 at the New Museum

Is a time capsule concept enough to make an art exhibition interesting? That is the question that NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star at the New Museum (until 5/26/13) sidesteps with its articulated goal as putting forth a cross-section of art of 1993. The difficulty is same as with time capsules– that remnants of a period do not equate into conveying the emotional and lived experience of that era. Some pieces of art inevitably fare better than others when reexamined in a new context. And as Russian philosophy Mikhail Bakhtain emphasizes “the primacy of context” generates the meaning– even if it is a new context as in 2013 in which we read 1993 pieces. In this case, the sum was less than the individual parts. This was in striking difference compared to an earlier New Museum exhibit centered around futurism and 1960s (Ghost in the Machine).

Most of the viewers at this particular time appears to be Millenials, or some slightly older as in Generation X, or however one wants to label the age groups. One can’t help but wonder how they synthesized and approached the broad nature of the exhibition. The strength of prior exhibitions at the New Museum have been how pieces will speak to each other, enhance and flow together as a whole. Did the cross-sectional curating undermine some of the individual pieces to make them appear more as time capsule, unburied archaic objects rather than works that are alive today? Why is it that some pieces appear to survive and engage still today while others appear less relevant or not daring enough? Does it speak to what we expect now in this decade to engage us? It was as if the awkward lure and dazzle of the 1990s had lost its voice and not aged very well at the same time.

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December 6, 2012 · 12:36 am

Headless Pause: Huang Yong Ping

Gladstone Gallery

Maurizio Cattelan: Italy:: ? : China/France

If you were thinking Huang Yong Ping, then you may have seen his recent taxiderm-ied installation at Gladstone Gallery. Both artists share references insofar as political satire, dark humor, and use of anthropomorphized dead animals as stand-ins for political and mythical figures. The Chinese French artist who left his native country for France at the age of 35 and associated with Joseph Beuys, John Cage, and Marcel Duchamp stands apart from his Western counterparts as distinctly as his heritage and tradition.

His work has an ability to chill the temperature in the room immediately while saving some surprises at the same time. His most recent installation “Circus” at Gladstone Gallery takes well-known folklore of Sun Wukong into much more troubled territory. The usually cheerful, wily, and intelligent mythical Monkey King leader is now diminished and frozen in skeletal remains attached to a dull large wooden hand. All the lesser animals have lost their heads and it is as if all life force has left the room. A headless ape-seer looks out from a tall wooden dais, the figurative phantom hand shielding his eyes invisible as he tries to see what lies in the future. Impossible and futile an attempt, as there are no eyes– and no head at all. These animals reference the traditional Chinese zodiac stories and tropes of a journey, a race where each animal must outsmart the other in a race to the finish (lead or be led). Here, the outcome– and the futility of such race– is frozen into oblivion. Not even the gigantic hand wields any vitality or source of power; it hangs limply, pieces destroyed. The punchline is, however, in fact upstairs in the gallery, where around the corner behind a large red flag (the color of luck, fortune, blood, prosperity, China) are the skewered heads of all the animals, like a feral shish kabob. Whereas the temperature of the first floor piece was cool, the upstairs heads work is angry, emotional, and violent. Who is responsible? What was the before and after? However, questions of justice or loss, which one might expect, oddly seem out of place and meaningless– as vacant and empty as their glassy eyes.

Huang Yong Ping, at Gladstone Gallery

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August 29, 2012 · 11:26 pm

The Art of Reality TV: Performance, Authenticity, and Murder of the Real

“More real than real, that is how the real is abolished.” - Jean Baudrillard

 

If you ever wondered whether media studies has caught up with the evolution of reality television, rest assured that the field includes a large amount of academic scholarship. Earliest works compared reality TV to documentary traditions and found that the growing genre blurred lines between “information and entertainment, documentary and drama, public and private discourses” (Misha Kavka, Reality TV 2012, p. 3).While some, like John Corner, suggested that elements of documentary persisted in reality TV, others started to wonder if it was just a downward spiral into a postmodern “nightmare.”

Misha Kavka, a media studies professor, suggests a simple definition for reality TV: “unscripted shows with non-professional actors being observed by cameras in preconfigured environments” but argues that a more complex definition would also include mention of the “low production values, high emotions, cheap antics and questionable ethics” related to the commercial nature of its production. Kavka traces the genealogy of reality TV and suggests that we have now entered the third generation of reality TV (2002-) marked by “a spectacular revival of the media’s interest in manufacturing celebrity” (citing Graeme Turner, 2004). In contrast, the first generation (1989-1999) was notable for the camcorder/raw surveillance camerawork (e.g., Cops and crime series like Unsolved Mysteries and America’s Most Wanted). The second generation (1999-2005) turned to surveillance and competition found in shows like Big Brother and Survivor and, increasingly, reality TV begins to intervene (e.g., Wife Swap) and shape the participant’s future (think, makeovers and Biggest Loser). Gallery Girls falls squarely within the third generation of reality TV, with its emphasis on young females trying to make it in the cutthroat art world, referencing both elements of competition (albeit it general and unstructured) and celebrity (i.e., to be known, seen in this elusive “art world”).  The show also continues to provoke recurrent issues discussed in earlier generations of reality TV, most notably the tension between performance and authenticity.

In his paper “Performing the Real,” John Corner first coined the term “selving” in reference to Big Brother (2002) and described it as a process in which “true selves” being to emerge from “performed selves.” He notes that the process “requires a certain amount of the humdrum and the routine” to be credible for the viewer (recall, how many times already in Gallery Girls have you seen the women half-naked putting on their shirt? in fact, that getting-ready-in-the-morning-or-before-going-out scene is a recurring trope on other shows from Project Runway, Top Chef, to The Bachelor– whether it is to help the true self emerge or simply increase ratings with more half-nakedness, we will never know). Audiences begin to “get to know” each character through this “selving” process and judge each of the characters on how “real” they are, though savvy viewers understand that this is a paradox.

Although audiences would like to compare and generate notions of who is being “real” or not based on their own experiences, perhaps it is more useful to refer to the TV personas as Gaerth Palmer describes the “media self.” The idea of multiple selves in different contexts is familiar in both psychology and sociology, with Winnicott’s distinction between the true and false self as well as sociologist Erving Goffman’s argument that “legitimate performances of eveyday life” creates a “frontstage” self in all of us and we change our performance based on our environment. Audiences can relate to this idea but, on another level, still yearn for an intimacy and scrutinize the truthfulness of these TV characters, even though they realize cannot be achieved through the format. The more fantastical and dramatic the person (or the reaction or situation), the less “real” it seems, yet the more entertaining and engaging. This paradox results in many of the early Twitter love-hate reactions where it is hard to peel your eyes off the spectacle.

(to be continued…)

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August 23, 2012 · 12:39 am

Gallery Girls: Reality Served Deep-fried, Sprinkled with Sugar and Lychee Martinis

“The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one’s desires and fears.”

― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

Gallery Girls Bravo TV series is an edited slice of reality pounded into tender submission, stuffed with ground-up ambition, coated in glitter-batter, deep fried, drizzled with truffle oil and served on a sizzling plate called BravoTV. So what does it taste like?

The new BravoTV Gallery Girls reality-tv show has already induced more than a couple biological reflexes (think, gag reflex) after a mere two episodes. A recap is done here, so as not to be redundant or lag behind at this point (especially for those of us behind a couple beats, trying to figure out where to stream it online is nearly as difficult as finding the Olympics opening ceremony without cable), perhaps let’s reassess some different themes about the show so far.

1. Lack of Self-awareness. Stereotypes are rampant, and xenophobic/racist overtones uncomfortably underneath a lot of the show and repressed. The first episode sets up a black-and-white Darwinian scenario of each area of Manhattan and the Brooklyn divide, which is made to sound like it’s across the ocean. Heritage and wealth (old money vs new money (and no money)) are key factors in how one is seen and treated. Privilege is not questioned but leveraged; talent and industriousness in scarce supply and irrelevant. Several characters emerge like fairy-tale story Cinderellas and Snow Whites, distorted caricatures with only self-involvement, clique-forming, and self-promotion as a central theme, with a sensible and sympathetic rare exception here and there (Claudia, a new business owner with serious concerns over the financial situation and Kerri who is so far the main person seen doing much work at all). The most offensive situation isn’t even trying to be satirical: Maggie, a young art gallery intern who has been at the Chinese contemporary art gallery for months and drew some sympathy in the first episode when she nearly cries when her work is not recognized, reveals herself to be sheltered and coddled when she complains about being sent to Brooklyn Bedford area where she is forced to crunch through broken glass in her high-heeled wedge booties, telling a friend she had to get through a “ghetto” on the cab ride back. She has so little awareness of how this reflects on herself more than the surrounding environment that her own supposed degrading jobs now seem deserving. No one is talking about openly about the social class issues and frank lack of diversity on this show, but are so self-involved that they are nit-picking about being a type of girl from Lower East Side or Upper East side, leading me to ask: What would Hennessey Youngman say?

2. Very little of it is real, even less of it is authentic. The art of the reality show is far from a reflection on authenticity of either the environment or the characters. Much of it is written and scenarios are artificially crafted– and furiously edited. Does this forgive its characters? How responsible are the characters for appearing the way that they are seen on the show? A reality TV show is not a documentary, nor is it meant to be one. Who fact-checks? A former self-professed millionaire featured on BravoTV’s Millionaire Matchmaker show is now federal-prison bound for fraud reminds us viewers of the uncomfortable reality-that you can create your entire character as you wish, and we all will never know the difference. Chantal’s character alludes the most to this problem and she seems like she needs to prove something to the world, recreating an entirely new identity in Brooklyn/Lower East Side that will set her apart from her hometown rural roots; you cringe a little when the cracks show as she seemingly haughtily dismisses all wine from Oregon and chooses a wine by country instead, when informed that Pinot Noir is “French.” Her performance is unconvincing and lacks continuity and authenticity, making her seem as real as a bubble, but the worst part is that she seems to have convinced herself. Kerri, on the other hand, shows her Long Island roots and so far is the only one to really illustrate her relationship with her family, making her so far the most authentic character yet.

3. Negativity breeds negativity. Reading the buzz and reactions to the show is both discomforting and entertaining at the same time, much like the show. One person on Twitter quips “@sacksbb This girl Amy on #GalleryGirls looks like a horse who was kicked in the face by another horse.” It’s easier to attack the characters on the show from a distance because, like any public figure, there is a sense that they are not real and that they have taken responsibility in their own exposure, opening their lives up to being filmed and observed. But furthermore, the show is generally about underhanded childish bullying and quickly formed impressions based on prejudice and assumptions. Similarly, Angela, a Vietnamese Californian transplant to NYC describes dealing with her own taunting in Orange County, unfortunately only repeats the cycle of bullying and prejudice by jabbing at Liz for having lived in the OC and then laughed behind Liz’s back a few seconds later. You only hope that this level of childish bickering and envious backstabbing isn’t real, too.

In the end, this show is no different than the Real Housewives or Millionaire Matchmaker– it is just more disillusioning that these people are supposed to care about art, which is supposed to help us transcend and understand our experiences at a deeper level. It is the same story with the same cast of people seeking attention, living in their own heads (some unfortunately with a much narrower perspective than others) and just celebrating the fact that more people can now join them in seeing it their way.

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August 20, 2012 · 10:37 am

Quay Brothers at the MOMA: A Dark, Tiny World

The hallways and nooks of the Quay Brothers exhibition of the MOMA are as winding and darkly lit as their stop-motion films featuring pointed puppets, frenetic rabbits, and dismembered/dismembering dolls. The second-floor section of the exhibit, which spans different floors of the MOMA, is crowded, full of corners, and the layout makes it tricky to navigate and form a cohesive narrative of the Quay brother’s work. But their prolific and dark imagination– marinated in Polish and Eastern European inspiration (think, surrealist stop-motion genius Jan Svankmajer)–  is apparent and the broad scope of the work of these American identical twin brothers (illustration to puppetry to painting) is surprising even to existing fans who are familiar with their more well-known work.

What remains unanswered, however, is what draws these Norristown, Pennsylvanian identical twins to this narrative of oppression, decay, and monitoring? The aesthetic of many of their sources of inspiration is deeply influenced by the 1970s communist regime, with political overtones and facing censorship, and in Bruno Schulz’s case, murder. Schulz, a Polish Jewish gifted artist and writer who wrote Street of Crocodiles, which is the basis for one of the Quay Brother’s most known stop-motion films, was killed by a Gestapo officer. The Quay Brothers, on the other hand, do not seem to impart overt political themes, although they could be interpreted into them. Their uncanny work conveys a more generalized, existentially troubling feeling of unease, senselessness, and suffocation. Tiny windows, jail cell-like spaces, mirrors, keyholes, and locks figure like leitmotifs and convey a sense of being trapped in a Kafkaesque torture device or  Sartre’s”No Exit” house arrest (without the dark humor of Beckett’s Endgame).

In one film, a wheelchair-bound red-faced animal/doll which had emerged from a strange box in the center of the room– killing the strange butterfly man who opened it– tips precariously over the edge of a box that has few and narrow windows that only lead to darkness. As it hovers at the edge, one wonders: Is it trying to escape? Is it trying to commit suicide? What lies in the darkness beyond the edges of the room? None of the questions are answered– a trademark of the Quay Brother’s ever enigmatic, deeply disturbing, and thought-provoking work. Although produced from self-contained tiny surreal worlds of their own and with narratives of needless violence and unexplained appearances/disappearances, their work powerfully mirrors our own reality and– perhaps too closely for comfort– raises the same questions.

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August 16, 2012 · 6:11 pm

Keun Young Park: The Threat of Disappearing

@ Muriel Guépin Gallery, 47 Bergen St, Brooklyn, NY 11201

‘Inbetween”,torn and pasted photo on paper, 42x801inch, 2012

At the summer show at the Muriel Guépin Gallery in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, Keun Young Park’s “Float- Horizon/Pink” (different from the one above but similar in style) stands out. Her work hovers at a delicate point between existence and evaporation– a sublimation tipping point that is frozen in time. Whether the ethereal figure is coming or going seems to be an unanswered ambiguity that hangs in the air and creates a moment of arrested attention. Her piece, meticulously constructed from torn pieces of fragile pink-colored paper, reconstructs a figure as if soaking quietly in an invisible bathtub and evokes a sense of urgency while conveying a sense of calm and resignation. The balance of her work is in a continual state of tension; one wonders if one turns away and looks back, if the figure will disappear like Eurydice called back into the underworld, a ghostly imprint of the past. What is certain is that Park’s work is definitely worth examining while it lasts.

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August 12, 2012 · 5:11 pm

The Sound of the Sublime: Janet Cardiff, George Bures Miller, and The Murder of Crows at the Park Armory

@ the Park Armory from Friday, August 3 – Sunday, September 9, 2012

If the sublime is a feeling of tranquillity tinged with terror, then Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have successfully brought listeners into a transcendent moment of fear and awe of the sublime in their sound installation at the Park Armory. To call the piece a sound installation does not seem to fully capture how powerfully the so-called “film without images” transports one to an ambiguous, yet possibly familiar, place and time. The refrains of cawing crows and rustling wind tickle the memory. The crackling gramophone under the dim lights at the center of the circle of 98 speakers fills the room with Cardiff’s calm voice. Like a vulnerable patient reclined on an analyst’s couch, she narrates alone as if guiding the audience in an ambling, hypnotic dream– from sand dunes to abandoned house to mechanical factory to violent militia. The suggested violence and dismembered limbs lead to themes of helplessness. These disconnected fragments create a tension between reality and fantasy, secrecy and exposure– a nightmare that morphs without beginning or ending.

Cardiff and Miller, a husband-and-wife team, elegantly capture the fragility and fragmentation of the self that can often be the result of trauma. Enhanced by the power of the cavernous dark recesses of the Park Armory,  the installation is an articulation of an emptiness, a surreal and detached space void of certainty or reassurance. One will struggle to find a coherent or satisfying answer to the pieces of narrative, but that is perhaps precisely the intention.

See also Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet, at MOMA PS1– a piece of beauty (as opposed to the sublime). Until Sept 4, 2012

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August 4, 2012 · 10:39 am

Ghosts in the Machine at the New Museum

Lenny Lipton, “Stan VanDerBeek in front of the Movie-Drome, Stony Point, New York,” 1965.

Ghosts in the Machine (until 9/30/12) @ New Museum

“We’re just fooling around on the outer edges of our own sensibilities. The new technologies will open higher levels of psychic communication and neurological referencing,” Stan VanDerBeek explained in Gene Youngblood’s 1970 book “Expanded Cinema.” Long before any new media centers, VanDerBeek promoted an “aesthetics of anticipation” and built the Movie-Drome, a multi-media screening silo, in his own backyard in Stony Point, NY. This recreation is the centerpiece of New Museum’s current exhibition Ghosts in the Machine, a retro playground of the 1950-60s aesthetics and a must-see for this summer.

Stan VanDerBeek, March 22, 1969. Inside the Movie-Drome. Courtesy Black Mountain College Museum.

VanDerBeek video below: “Poemfield No. 2.”

From Channa Horwitz’s detailed colored grids (Sonakinatography) to an old model of the Vocoder to the reconstruction of a torturing Kafka-inspired bed, the exhibit is eclectically curated to explore man’s vision, fear, fascination, and even fetishization (thank you, J.G. Ballard of Crash) of technology. Harley Cokeliss’s original film Crash 1971 featuring J.G. Ballard himself is juxtaposed with Ballard’s self-funded “advertisements” successfully captures the haunting and carnal relationship with the machine.

ABOVE: ‘The Angle Between two Walls’ (1967): JGB’s second ‘advertiser’s announcement’.

Other surprises include Eduardo Paolozzi’s series (“General Dynamic Fun 1965-70″) of photolithography and screenprinted collages which are witty and visually captivating in their saturated colors and juxtaposition of celebrities and advertisements of the time. Jikken Kobo’s postwar experimental film funded by a bicycle association is poetic, ghostly, and ethereal with its landscapes and haunting soundtrack. It is the farthest thing from an advertisement for a bicycle.

The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg (until 8/26/12) @ New Museum

Only steps away in the New Museum side studio space, Djurberg’s sculptures and stop-motion animation films are brilliant. Her vibrant and detailed birds are magnificent and beautiful and the psychological complexity of her films unparalleled. She does not shy away from the difficult and sinful subject matters including violence against women, prejudice, and greed and is able to communicate these themes in a visually stunning and vibrant way.

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July 15, 2012 · 6:33 pm

Play at Work: Patrick Lundeen at the Mike Weiss Gallery

Patrick Lundeen: Good For You Son, June 21, 2012- July 28, 2012 at Mike Weiss Gallery, 520 West 24th St, NY, NY 10011

Patrick Lundeen, a Brooklyn-based artist originally from Lethridge, Canada, has his first New York solo exhibition at the Mike Weiss gallery and brims with playfulness and vivacity that will bring a smile to your lips and joy to your eyes. The large-scale, vivid masks are brightly constructed with gold grommet details and the vivid, detailed acrylic patterns reads beautifully both from a distance and close up. One can imagine its future home as a focal centerpiece of a contemporary and quirky home that relishes in not taking itself too seriously while priding itself on excellent style. The level of exquisite detail and ingenious colors create a culture of its own and are not explicitly referential or nostalgic despite the size and potential for tribal references. Instead, the collection has a sense of celebration and play. A collection of Mad magazine pieces serve as the canvas for other faces while his other sculptural installations, including a wall “face” with a bright “Pizza” sign, are delightful and amusing.

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