Category: Culture

Coralie Huon Dunes Océanes 2006 video [still]

Several entries back I wrote something about noticing a “theme of homes and homelessness” during a visit to Yukiko Kawase at DIVA. The idea of home in the broader sense seemed then to be everywhere, but looking back now, I realize I was probably thinking mostly about the installations in the gallery’s hotel suite bedroom space.
The French artist Coralie Huon showed a video of computer-generated images describing a utopian project for an elegant futuristic self-sustained floating community. I’m an architecture nut, especially when it comes to homes of any kind, but I wasn’t very interested in this part of the room. It probably had nothing to do with it, but for someone who was entertained as a child by the fantasy covers of Popular Mechanics it all felt a bit retro (although thinking about it now, that may have been intentional). Huon probably survives day to day with her work as an interior architect, but even in her professional practice her imagination seems to be a bit more conceptual than is customary for the trade; does anyone expect her floating commune to be built?


Coralie Huon Camping Urbain 2005 mixed media

“Camping Urbain”, her second installation at DIVA shares a concern for satisfying social needs responsibly and with a fundamental concept of utility but here her design skills were only her tools; the work ends up on an entirely different plane, the product of a more purely artistic imagination.
The more obvious distinction is that here she chose to address the requirements of a very different, and already existing, “lifestyle” than that which would be sheltered by her maritime utopia. As potential design clients, the homeless of Paris and other cities of the world are considerably less hypothetical than the future-sleek residents of her “Dunes Océanes”. I don’t expect to be in the market for either kind of home in the foreseeable future, but it was the tiny, minimal house kit installation, and the unsettling message of the tape boundaries secured on the carpet, all of which were contained within the walls of a bedroom of this warm, dry and seriously-bourgeois hotel suite that really captured my imagination [unfortunately it was too far dark and crowded to capture an image with my camera].
The visitor can read about this innovative “extreme mobility” house in a press release whose tongue-in-cheek style is not unlike the mock language of marketing also used to “sell” her companion project for a floating community:

It is ingenious, stylish and compact. It can be taken away anywhere thanks to its carry-on bag matching. In a short moment of minutes, it unfolds and folds back again. It is mobile, but at the same time, it is [an approximately 20 sf] “pod” for the homeless, “my house”, and “my own place”.
In her 3 minutes video, she explains on up-beat rock music:
1. Definition of target: For whom?
2. Specifications and operations: How does it work?
3. Message: How does this communicate?
4. Demonstration: How one can live with it?
“Design for the homeless? This apparently non-sense idea would be a starter of discussions on the homeless issue. Here, the “design” can be recognized as a powerful tool. A tool to make this social issue visible, a tool to identify the homeless as a human being with dignity.
It is a multi-dimensional project complete with sound, visual, and a three-dimensional prototype. Audience will be participating and experiencing life condition of the homeless. Make them aware of the uncertainty of the existence.
“Camping Urbain”, playful and disturbing: not so fun, but not to be dramatized either.

Ms. Kawase, the gallery owner, told us that the artist had been surprised (amused, dismayed?) to find that visitors to the gallery’s exhibition in New York showed little interest in “Camping Urbain” but were much taken by “Dunes Océanes”. This was reportedly the opposite of her experience in Paris, where people are apparently truly disturbed by the increasing visibility of the homeless on the streets.
And why am I so interested in this anecdote? I doubt it’s because I believe that Parisians are fundamentally more compassionate (empathetic?) than New Yorkers, and I don’t think I want to believe they are. Or, if I do want to believe we’re lacking something here, is it because I want to do something to help in a city where I think I could, or because I want to complain in a city where I think I have a right to complain?
Repeating the question of construction probability, does anyone expect her pods will be built, or will we come up with a better, more practical, an achieveable “utopian” solution for bringing the homeless home?

[images from Yukiko Kawase]

Andres Laracuente Dr. Popper 2006 video

Andres Laracuente was another young American shown by the Parisian gallery Yukiko Kawase during last week’s DIVA fair. In the voyeuristic video from which the two stills shown above were taken the good-humored and obliging artist is seen following the directives of an off-screen balloon-popping fetishist he had located on Craig’s List.
In another video of his seen on Sunday afternoon, “The In-crowd Tickle”, a tickling-fetish top is seen interacting with the artist, this time in front of the camera.


Andres Laracuente The In-Crowd Tickle 2006 video

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy When I die this summer, what shirt will I be wearing? 2006 video [large detail of still from installation]


Matthew Lutz-Kinoy Studio Danse 2006 video [large detail of still from video installation]

After following myself being very much taken with work by a third and then a fourth artist represented in her DIVA suite, and while contemplating a rather pervasive gallery theme of homes and homelessness, I told Yukiko Kawase that were I living in Paris I’d want to live inside her Montparnasse gallery; her program is that good.
But once again, even more than the other inspired, largely performance-oriented work she was showing on Sunday, it was the extraordinary unbridled creativity of Matthew Lutz-Kinoy that totally did it for me.
In the video “When I die this summer, what shirt will I be wearing?” [still shown above] Lutz-Kinoy repeatedly fakes his death by lying motionless on the grass in a series of dramatic postures while clothed in an equal number of snappy tops.
“Studio Danse”, takes advantage of the video camera’s technical facility with movement. In this piece, according to the press release, “he explores how people are influenced by sound and colour, in the manner of subliminal messaging”.
At 7:30 tomorrow night (Thursday) Lutz-Kinoy will be performing together with his charming, adventurous and inspired gallery stablemate, Andres Laracuente, in “JJ & Cecel: Melt In The Sun Freeze Underground” at Galapagos Art Space, in a double bill with with Imagination Explosion’s “PRO BONER SHOW TOUR”. Lutz-Kinoy and Laracuente play Egyptian slaves and will be using large sculpture, video and live music to address issues of mental and physical enslavement – and dreams and magic too – all told through references to contemporary popular culture.
For more on Laracuente, see this entry.



[poster image at the bottom from JJ & Cecel]

Edward Monovich Ampoohtee 2003 mixed media on paper 22″ x 20.5″ [installation view]

Edward Monovich Satellite Fist 2006 mixed media on paper 17″ x 22″ [installation view]

That other increasingly-legendary New York homeless institution, Eyewash, displayed about a half dozen examples of Edward Monovich’s beautiful mixed media drawings on graph paper at the Red Dot fair this past week.
Monovich’s work turns the hoary tradition of great battle art on its head: Here no prince has commissioned the work, and these compact paper murals depict not the glory and the spoils but the shame and the costs of war, specifically our very latest one.
Maybe it’s just my perversity, but I had initially been so attracted to the delicate beauty and imagination of the drawing that it hadn’t even occurred to me that they were “political”. They were clearly art, and if there are narratives here, the narratives are clearly not false. Can they still be stamped as political, and to that extent simply unmarketable?
[as I was searching Google just looking for links, I was surprised to be reminded of this from almost three years ago]

Philip Knoll My Favorite Bible Story 2006 acrylic and graphite on gesso panel 20″ x 10″


Philip Knoll Skinny Legs and All [large detail of installation]


Morgan Lehman was showing some eccentric, beautifully-crafted drawings by Philip Knoll in their room at Red Dot. Knoll will have a solo show at the gallery’s New York location opening in late April.
[first image from Morgan Lehman]

Roz Liebowitz The Night Kitchen 2006 graphite on vintage paper 18″ x 13.75″ (23″ x 17.5″ framed) [large detail of installation]


Roz Liebowitz The Mask 2001 graphite on paper 12″ x 7″ [installation view]

I ended up at Red Dot today after almost a full week of art fairs, and at least two special group shows. I ended up only missing out on L.A. Art, and I’m sorry for that. We just ran out of time, even if it was the exhibition located closest to our apartment. To see what I missed I turned to the intrepid Art Fag City.

Red Dot may not be alone among the fairs in the enormous range between its highs and its lows, but I think that if I can still get excited about new work after the sensory immersion of the past week it must say something for the artist. I don’t report on bad art, so in this and I hope in a few other entries I will try to show something of the best things I saw this afternoon on 28th Street.
Sears-Peyton was showing a number of delicate pencil drawings by Roz Leibowitz. They are romantic, hermetic, symbolist, sometimes pseudo-scientific, but always profoundly weird, their imagery sliding somewhere between the natural and the paranormal, but each of them as delicate as fine lace but as indelible as a tatoo.
Once spotted, whether lying on top of a hotel bedstread or hanging on a wall, these drawings are almost impossible to ignore.
The artist’s statement on the gallery website:

My work is influenced by the Victorian Romantic sensibility, and the idea of Victorian womanhood as expressed in the pseudo-sciences of that period. Phrenology, spiritualism, utopianism, mental healing, mesmerism, table-rapping, all of these flourished during the nineteenth century at a time when the industrial/scientific philosophy became the dominate world view. The fact that these so-called fringe movements were led by women is not lost on me; the women in my drawings act as conduits to this shadow world. I consider them characters playing out their roles in an alternative reality, a reality which is still available to all of us if we open our imaginations in the truest romantic sense.
My background is in history and literature; I worked for years as a librarian and am an avid collector of books and ephemera from the nineteenth century occult. Most of the paper in my drawings comes from ledgers or letters or diaries culled from my collections. I feel much more at home working on papers that contain traces of the past. In this current series, I use the simplest of media �a pencil� to create veils of intricate patterns and decoration. I also make use of simple formal devices such as borders and captions to mimic Victorian illustration. I consider my small drawings as pages loosed from a long, dreamy novel, and my hope is that the reader, or viewer, will catch glimpses of this odd narrative, and want to read on.

Tommy Hartung A Short History of the Canon video [still from installation]

Thinkers, breeders and slaves were assembled on 24th Street this past week inside one of the video projection containers set up by the Digital & Video Art Fair [DIVA], one of our favorite destinations since its first appearance in 2005. The fair itself has always been located further downtown, inside the Embassy Suites Hotel, just west of the World Trade Center.
The class cast described above inhabits a video by Tommy Hartung who builds small sets from the detritus of a world either on the make or disintegrating as we breathe. His stunning and provocative six-minute work, “A Short History of the Canon”, is a tour de force. The artist has recently been associated with an increasingly-impressive gallery Moti Hasson, and was represented by both a video and a large sculpture in the exciting show (just ended) which inaugurated the gallery’s new space on 25th Street. That exhibition was curated by co-directors Candice Madey and Tairone Bastien.

Deborah Kass Painting with Balls 2003 oil on linen 84″ x 60″

Paul Kasmin is devoting all of their space at the Armory Show to work by Deborah Kass.
See this post for more context.


[some smaller works on paper, in an installation view]

(one very popular stall)

[detail]

[detail]

Jade Towsend, who shows with Priska Juschka, has a wonderful installation (with sound) in the huge basement men’s room of the 69th [sic] Regiment Armory, the site of the Pulse Fair. It’s a winner, one of the best things I’ve seen this week, and worth a major detour regardless of which gender facility you tend to choose.
Guys being guys, most regular visitors just wanted to ignore that gold brick and the enthusiasts packed into the corner stall. Also, the carved bar soaps above the sinks were definitely getting some use.


(props too subtle for some)

ADDENDUM: Barry recorded the sound on a short video. Go to “click to play” at the bottom of his post.

placemat-size collage by Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt



two small photo collages by Ginnie Gardiner

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt and Ginnie Gardiner are two other artists whose work can be seen in the Pulse fair both of Pavel Zoubok.
I first met Gardiner twenty years ago through a mutual friend, John Blee, an excellent painter, as are both she and her husband, Jonathan Philips. John now lives in D.C. and some of us lost touch with each other over the years. Until I started doing this entry and did some Google searching I had no idea that yesterday I had been looking at work by this same artist, working in a very different medium. All three of them continue to paint, as far as I know.