Saul Becker The Beginning of Every Story Seems Ridiculous at First 2008 oil on panel 29″ x 35″
Saul Becker Tender in Every Joint 2008 oil on linen 29″ x 35″
Although I’m now embarrassed to say I found them a bit underwhelming when I first saw them, the paintings of Saul Becker which Sean Horton showed at Volta very quickly managed to give themselves real presence. Maybe I was suspicious of the subdued earthy colors (my favorites) in these foggy landscapes, but my eyes quickly opened when I started to notice here and there oddly-natural elements of grafitti, industrial fencing and even more heavy-duty detritus. I then learned that the artist, currently represented with a solo show of large-scale ink and gouache drawings at the Lower East Side [L.E.S.] gallery which I have not yet seen, works just somewhat outside en plein air landscape practice. These scenes don’t exist except in Becker’s eye. The show’s press release tells us, as a matter of fact, that the works, “best described as composite landscapes, combine fragments from different places and sources to create new, invented locations.”
Category: Culture
Adam Dant with Hales at Volta
Adam Dant Liberty 2008 ink on paper 95″ x 72″ [installation view, including the entire drawing, but cropped just inside the edges of the folio]
[detail, shot from an angle below]
Adam Dant was the artist London’s Hales Gallery chose to show at Volta last month. Although the artist showed work drawn entirely from iconic sites of New York City, William Hogarth, his home town’s genius hovered over these large ink drawings on paper.
Barry and I also saw a portfolio of a handsome print edition which was a version of this image, but run without including the Watteau Pierrot inside the construction scaffolding, in fact without including any figure. Dant had instead added a different character, in contrasting red ink, as a unique drawing on each print. Every one of them is a distinctly different monument substituting for the familiar “Liberty”, something of an extended commentary on a subject dear to this engaged, lampooning artist.
Dant is perhaps still best known in England as the the creator of “Donald Parsnips’ Daily Journal” [sample], a quirky broadsheet he wrote and drew, photocopied and handed out to fellow Londoners (and Parisians, Berliners, New Yorkers and Cairenes) every day for four years beginning in 1995.
Vincent Gagliostro with Margaret Thatcher at Pulse
Vincent Gagliostro After Louie, an excerpt video [stills, and large details of stills, from installation]
Margaret Thatcher showed a video by Vincent Gagliostro at Pulse. I’d like to describe it as an art trailer for a full-length film not yet produced, but even in its current form it’s certainly a complete work of art. There’s not a single ugly or unnecessary frame in this piece. I snapped only five images while standing in front of the video screen last month; five images appear here.
Gagliostro describes the work as:
. . . a political love story set against the backdrop of a time when the gay movement mattered, when lovers were not looking for their rights within mainstream structures and when activism existed in its rightful home: the streets.
The artist is a friend and an activist colleague of mine.
Although I’m also no stranger to the world which inspired Gagliostro in creating this film, I prefer to let the gallery press release set the scene with the help of the director’s own input:
“After Louie” hits you like a time bomb . . . was there really ever a New York like that where adventure and discovery and sexual tension were still palpable and possible on the skinny island of Manhattan? Was there a meatpacking district before Pastis? When you watch Gagliostros video, you actually remember, for a moment, the streets and the clubs and the boys with nice abs.
In the visual and audio collage of Gagliostro’s piece you recall that New York City from the not-so-distant end of the last century like it was yesterday. You remember it all not with nostalgia, but, quoting Gagliostro, “with relief that this New York actually existed and actually happened before it was too late; that despite the tragedy and loss and pain of that era there was still the nourishment of real off-line experience and the comforts of heart and sex and art and strangers and bodies and life, and soul growth before everything was already discovered, developed, trained, tracked, exploited, done, over.”
There’s a clip of the video here, on the artist’s very beautiful site.
PSJM with Espacio Líquido at Pulse
the advertising video
the shop corner
I was delighted with the quality of the installations at Pulse of Espacio Líquido, a new Spanish gallery located in Gijón on the central Asturian coast. They look like they’ll be worth watching.
The images above can’t begin to describe the project of just one element of the gallery’s presence in New York last month. My few words can’t do much more but I can say that PSJM is a Madrid-based collaborative formed by Pablo San José and Cynthia Viera. Tricked out as a shiny, sexy commercial brand itself, PSJM offers a critique of both global capitalism and market-based art. “Made by Slaves for Free People” – so went the title of the pair’s show at London’s Riflemaker earlier this year.
Sean M. Johnson curated by Arning at Pulse
Paul M. Johnson Donut Eating Contest 2008 video [still from installation]
Video takes time, and frankly Barry and I didn’t have much left when we finally found the video room at Pulse, “Sameness, Difference and Desire”, curated by Bill Arning. I have to admit this work by Sean M. Johnson was the only one we managed to see while we there, but on the basis of Arning’s track record over the years and the merits of this piece alone, I’d have vouched for every other one in the lineup. Those included videos by Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom, Maria Friberg, Allen Grubesic, Danny Hobart and Gabriel Martinez.
Cordy Ryman with DCKT at Pulse
Cordy Ryman Silent Echo 2008 mixed media on wood 18″ x 15.5″ x 3.5″ [installation view]
Cordy Ryman Octopus 2008 mixed media on wood 18″ x 15.5″ x 7.25″ [installation view]
DCKT showed work by Cordy Ryman at Pulse. The color and surface magic of the first piece in particular was dazzling. I’m looking forward to the artist’s first show with the gallery.
Trying to find a link just now I realized, to my shame and surprise, that I’ve never posted images of Ryman’s work before, and this after tracking, enjoying and photographing his smartly-whimsical sculptures for years. There are more images here on the west coast.
Ofri Cnaani with Andrea Meislin at Pulse
Sure, I admit I seem to be a sucker for Mylar, but I really liked these and the other Ofri Cnaani drawings shown by Andrea Meislin at Pulse.
Andreas Leikauf with Ernst Hilger at Pulse
Andreas Leikauf i think we can sell this easily 2008 acrylic on canvas 55″ x 33.5″ [installation view]
I’m inclined to agree with the artist’s text. This gorgeous canvas by Andreas Leikauf was shown by Galerie Ernst Hilger at Pulse.
Matthew De Leon shown with Parsons at Pulse
The Pulse people set aside a booth for Parsons MFA Fine Arts students to create a “reading room” for the fair located on Pier 40. Called “PULSE PAUSE”, the installation was curated by Jeffrey Walkowiak and included work by a number of artists who managed to make it one of the most interesting stops of the afternoon.
Even though, or perhaps because, it was almost fully camouflaged I was especially taken with the installation by one participant. The video stills shown above are from a small portable DVD player which the artist had completely painted over in yellow paint. Sadly, and uncharacteristically, I do hot have his name or the work’s title. Maybe one of my readers will be able to enlighten us.
Until I sat down to do this entry I was certain I had written it down somewhere after Brandon Nastanski had enlightened me. I do remember he said the artist was surprisingly only a first-year student. Nastanski had created the one-person “speakeasy” which attracted most of the media attention for the entry.
I can at least begin to describe what you are looking at: A young man, perhaps the artist himself, is seen standing directly in front of a fuzzy projection of a male-female couple having sex. The young man tries over and over to duplicate the various positions being enjoyed by the woman on the screen. The video is looped. It’s beguiling.
UPDATE: Jeffrey Walkowiak, the curator of the installation, tells me that the name of the artist is Matthew De Leon. It’s now included in the headline of this entry, but I’ve made no other editorial changes]
FURTHER UPDATE: Looking for something else in a search on my own site I just today [February 16, 2009] came across this web site of the artist.
Jana Gunstheimer with R�merapotheke at Scope
Jana Gunstheimer Reservat 2003 acrylic on linen 46.5″ x 69.75″ [work not at Scope]
I’m not sure that it should be necessary to mention it, even if it may be germane (no pun intended), but Jana Gunstheimer, described by her Swiss gallery R�merapotheke as an artist and ethnologist, was born in Zwickau, in what was then known as East Germany, or the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. In the years immediately following the precipitous disappearance of that communist state she studied painting in Leipzig. Today she lives in Jena, near Weimar. She’s known in Europe [and in Philadelphia {scroll down}] mostly for her beautiful black and white expressionist painting. We haven’t had nearly enough opportunity to see it on this side of the Atlantic.
Jana Gunstheimer [large detail of installation at Scope]
The image just above is of items from the artist’s physically very different body of work, “Heiligsprechung” [Canonization], a part of which was brought to Scope New York this year by R�merapotheke. No, the two framed watercolors don’t represent attempts to display divine stigmata, but are merely protestations of the negative, “ich tu dir nichts” [I did nothing to you] or “Ich pass auf dich auf” [I leave it to you]. Gunstheimer’s general conceit is described just below in a large excerpt from the press release for her current show at Filiale in Berlin. Note that “SBK” is the German-language acronym for her fictive Austrian department of government, “State Authority for National Heroes”.
SBK
State Authority for National Heroes
In 1976 Austria’s federal government was planning to set up a “canonization” authority as part of the celebration of 1000 years of the country’s existence (the process is known as “beatification” in the Roman Catholic church). After due examination, exceptional people would be granted access to high public esteem and entry in the annals of popular or national heroes.
However, the real reason for setting up such an authority was the prospect of high revenue in the form of voluntary payments by citizens. In fact the minimum costs of thorough examination of each application, expert appraisal, reimbursement of witness expenses, production of documentation, printing, decoration during the ceremonies and multiple fees and taxes were calculated at 80 000 shillings.
In the first year alone, the Authority received well in excess of 1000 applications. In many places, associations were formed to sponsor candidates of slender financial means and give the member of their community a chance of becoming an official popular hero.
As it happened, none of the applicants in the first year was deemed worthy of elevation to this rank. Indeed, in the next five years of the authority’s existence, only three candidates made the grade. Instead, the Authority’s examination revealed not only that applicants were not popular heroes, but that most had committed major or minor offences. Faithful to their obligation of disclosure, they had allowed the Authority access to all spheres of their lives.
Establishing the Authority was an ideal ploy for a government. Citizens pay large voluntary sums into government coffers and actually turn themselves in.
Last year she came to Chicago for her first show in the U.S.
She is known for her observation of and creative satire of the weaknesses within both German and Austrian society and culture, but at the Chicago Institute of Arts she made a very successful incursion into the frailties of our own. The Chicago Reader’s review described her project with a headline which reads like it might have been inspired by New York’s Daily News: “The upper classes take a dive in Jana Gunstheimer’s clever disaster scenario.“.
THE CENTRAL WALL in Jana Gunstheimer’s installation at the Art Institute features a large cutout of the Tribune’s logo accompanied by a giant, delicately executed silhouette of a dilapidated high-rise. The ominous headline is “Status L Phenomenon” — also the title of the exhibit. A stack of newspapers, which visitors may take with them, announces “Members of upper class affected by inexplicable phenomenon of lost status.” A smaller headline reads “Lake Point Tower plus two luxury villas suddenly replaced by affordable homes — Occupants seem different.”
Jana Gunstheimer [view of installation at Scope]
The image shown just above is of a stack of two editions of the artist’s newspaper, Massnahme. She plans a series of eight editions, each related to issues of unemployment. There will be an interval of two years between each, corresponding to the duration of the German government’s current program for people unable to find work. The Issue on the left was created for the Chicago show, and may in fact be an “extra”. The stack on the right is of copies of issue #1; its headlines describe, along with other stories, an experiment inside a “containment camp”.
I want to see more of Gunstheimer. If she can be so disturbed by, and address so well, the dark side of what we often perceive as the remarkable success stories of Germany and Austria I can’t begin to imagine what she could accomplish here in our benighted American homeland.
[image at the top from Galerie im Kunsthaus Essen]
UPDATE: D-L Alvarez has a review of Gunstheimer’s current Berlin show in the ArtCal Zine, and in his blog “Modern Art Notes” Tyler Green discusses the artist’s show at the Art Institute of Chicago, both items posted today, April 18.