Carol Bove, Kimmerich (NYC)

Viewing Carol Bove's work is a venture in translucency.  She presents a complex, decorous model that is as approachable as it is nebulous.

Carefully formal, Bove reveals the vulnerability of the glossy contexts she creates, paying keen attention to the display of the organic found and reapportioned object.  Feathers on linen, steel lattice on plastic, and iridescent shells held aloft by crooked steel fingers each offer succinct, almost brutal duality.  Bove affects scale and perspective by presenting multiple sizes of comparable mesmerizing objects, like the large driftwood specimen harnessed to the wall and the diminutive shred dangling to its immediate left.

Balance and materiality are thoroughly poeticized.  Objects (sculptural components) can be read directly, isolated to the right degrees or held in suspended animation, but they are also subject to their whimsically stylized platforms. The work is an invitation to assess the almost inexplicable, phenomenological artifice in nature, the enigmatic curve of a shiny shell, the infinitely porous eaten tree, and the showy peacock tailfeather. These objects, which are beautiful and functional in nature, are reduced to a state of mere beauty in the cube. Placed alongside delicate jewelry, they seek to gauge such theatricality, carnal and otherwise, akin to the tactical propmaking of Marcel Broodthaers. 

The works avoid the idea of a true, definitive center physically and emotively by highlighting the framework and setting natural ‘wonders’ to new order.  They call to mind the supposed sentiments of Hieronymous Bosch, melding possible religious (via mysticism) and secular reads and playing with standardized “traditional” display tactics.

Faux gold pedestals lift coral chunks, thin necklace strands hang in delicate swathes (nets) patterned from above. All are shimmed into place like so many damaged, cruise ship retail souvenir stanchions on the uneven Kimmerich floor. The uncandid “daintiness” feels almost sarcastic, especially when offset by weighty plexiglass and steel fence portals, entitled “Harlequin”.  These thick and rigid structures create a double lattice visual trick, allowing perceptual phenomenon to become central and viable as an artistic tool, an illusionary lesson learned of Op Art.  It is difficult not to consider the endless evolutionary strains behind the decoration at hand, both in the realm of conceptual art and in that of Darwin.

In essence, everything visible here is dead. The remains may reflect their absurd show and role in life, but they has been plucked, mined, and henceforth domesticated before being transported and rearranged in the SOHO space.  The artist seems to be trying her hand at affecting objects by softly classifying them.  Decay is made new.

These are thoughtful objects of fetish that can challenge or gratify.  With moves more classy than those of blunt arrangers like Rachel Harrison, you may feel equal love and sardonicism from the enigmatic works at hand.

http://www.kimmerich.com/index.html

The Sun - Alexander Sokurov

Poetry and War

Despite historical consensus and the drastic global underpinnings of the place and time within The Sun, Sokurov manages to present a calm coming of age and an intensely strange antihero.

We see a tiny fragment of a world at war, a secluded bunker/ bungalow, the hideout for Emporer Hirohito, presumed descendant of the sun god. His people are devout unto death. The war is almost up. Japan is ravaged and there is little more to lose.

In a time of war, there exists the populace, soldiers and warmakers. All are affected in ways that cannot be hidden. As portrayed here, Hirohito is different. He is aloof, studying marine biology, willfully distracted, overjoyed by nature’s diminutive food chain basement. He is carefully carted through a series of rooms within a makeshift bunker, anxious caretakers hastening at his side. He takes MacArthur’s demand for surrender as a chance for more research, this time on the demeanors and customs of a brash American general.

The portraiture of the film is strong and steady, faintly blurred to denote time; it is easy to stay aware of the frame. Up close and intimate shots of almost still politicians in extreme states of emotion, beaten by a nation’s pride and death by the thousands plead with Hirohito to stop the war, succumb to shame. The petitions are met with a fleeting poem as written by the emperor’s grandfather, a confusing, quirky, and distanced recall to arms.

Contrast is a powerful tool. Who can relate to a god? How can a fledgling country understand the praxis of an ancient civilization? Is a holed up poet qualified to sacrifice thousands?

Can we relate the unanimous emperor to the film’s director, by way of poetic historicization?

This film encourages an introspective response beyond politics. In its humble climax, Hirohito rejects his deified status and for the first time feels human, free. A strange, almost beautiful revolution in a world torn to shreds.

paternal ego: Children of the 90's

"Only one of my favorite pictures ever. Also, I will have really good stories to tell my grandchildren, when I live in a house like Grey Gardens and my hair is about the same color", reads the caption on 13 year old Tavi Gevinson's critical fashion-diary blog, titled, Style Rookie.

There are no convictions concerning this young adolescents intuition and ingenuity. In fact, what exits within the hype surrounding Tavi is an instigative activity of nostalgia and self reflexivity. Tavi reminds readers of their own soluble youth and successfully pins it against a contemporary progressive (re)revolution. Some may consider her ahead of her times, but Tavi stands for a generation self aware of the ambitious times. As Ryan Trecartin said in an interview with the New York Times, “People born in the ’90s are amazing,” he said excitedly. “I can’t wait until they all start to make art.”

read more from Tavi on her blog: http://tavi-thenewgirlintown.blogspot.com/

UNABOMBER BOOK CLUB

COMPLETE BIBLIOGRAPHY

UNABOMBER ON ART:

"Art forms that appeal to modern leftist intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment." - Industrial Society and its Future

UNABOMBER HOUSE IN MUSEUM:

REPRODUTION OF UNABOMBER HOUSE IN MUSEUM:

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at Barbican Centre, London

French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot creates works by drawing on the rhythms of daily life to produce sound in unexpected ways.

For his installation in The Curve, Boursier-Mougenot creates a walk-though aviary for a flock of zebra finches, furnished with electric guitars and other musical instruments. As the birds go about their routine activities, perching on or feeding from the various pieces of equipment, they create a captivating, live soundscape.

27 February 2010 - 23 May 2010
The Curve, Barbican, London

Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty, New Museum

Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty

New Museum, New York, NY

21/10/09 - 7/2/10

Words like trompe l’oeil, hallucinatory, illusion, and hyperreal dot the press release for the current exhibition at the New Museum in New York. Urs Fischer’s first large-scale solo presentation in an American museum, Marguerite De Ponty, punctuates the end of a long 18 months doused in youth for this renewed New Museum. The younger programming was implemented in a conscious effort, as discussed by chief curator, Richard Flood, to help compete with spenditure. Fischer’s unique conceptual worth was solidified with the memorable “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?” a historic intervention at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, using photographic wallpaper and intuitive layering techniques to confound and overlap the icons of Francis Bacon, Keith Haring, Sarah Lucas, etc., an audacious imposition of new and old.

Comparable curatorial inferences can be found in the New Museum survey. Marguerite takes up all three floors of the New Museum, the first solo exhibition to necessitate the space. Fischer takes great care to present the minute and feeble gesture, the grand, staggering sculpture, and many contradistinctions between.

Though the fifth floor houses life size models of warped grand pianos, melted lamp posts, dissected subway seating, proportion-shifting metallic crags and an electromagnetic floating cake, the most memorable work takes place on floors two and three. The installation Service a la francaise consists of more than fifty mirrored cubes flawlessly screen printed with an array of images and displayed on the concrete floor; subjects including a used matchbook, a blank audio tape, a cardboard cut out of Ashanti, cheese blocks and sneakers were photographed from all sides (left, right, front, back, and top), enlarged by varying degrees, and seamlessly adhered to the chrome surfaces.

The fluctuation of image and size unifies the work in a city-like community of objects. The collision and free associative selection liberates their everyday, conceptual tones. A cardboard cut out of Ashanti reflects onto a nearby settled block of cheese; they cannot escape one another in the systemized grid since the mirrored perimeter ricochets reflections in every direction. Fischer calls to attention ‘object vanity’ or commodity in sculpture and art history through this dizzying display of mirrors and mundane, remade readymades.

The third floor of the museum features a panoramic wallpaper installation. Every interior surface is meticulously rendered photographically, recreating walls, light fixtures, exit signs, vents, and doorframes in a gesture entitled Last Call Lascaux, a reference to the first known so-called artistic endeavor. The entire space is wrapped in a 360-degree image of itself, thorough efforts enacting a clever, one liner idea. One and Three Chairs, Kosuth’s notoriously philosophical installation comes to mind, seeming economical and anticlimactic by comparison.

Within the same room a floating, moon shaped croissant acts as a perch for a tiny artificial butterfly. The delicate nature of this suspended sculpture is a perfect diversion from the massive, enveloping anti-installation (wallpaper).

Fischer’s theatrics are only rivaled by his stupefying range of reference. Marguerite De Ponty somehow encapsulates an artist at his ambitious best, given absolute free reign and delivering the fantastically elusive.

Disquieting Landscapes, Wexner Center for the Arts

"Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate—he has little success in this—but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others: after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor."

-Franz Kafka

Disquieting Landscapes, a series of photographs and films by Cyprien Gaillard, creates icons of abandonment and false progress in the vein of Robert Smithson.

View over Sighthill Cemetery, a rich chromogenic print, captures a spotlit apartment building by night, framed on three sides by stark black sky. The photograph is big and crisp enough to reveal the atrophy, the end of its conventional function and the beginning of its life as a loaded monolith. In the foreground, cockeyed headstones stare up at the structure, monuments to varying degrees.

Cairns (12 Riverford Road, Pollokshaws, Glasgow, 1967–2008) is the same scenario in a future phase. In this photograph, the centerpiece is a neat stack of rubble, the product of a careful implosion.

The accompanying videos offer more tonal clues. Real Remnants of Fictive Wars is a slow motion 35mm projection in which a cloud of smoke pours from a mystery source, envelopes a tree, dissipates and drifts away. It is menacing and dramatic, but the weaponless, destructionless cloud leaves little more than a temporary stain on the landscape. Gaillard attempts to breach historic fiction. Alluding to no war in particular, we are given an overriding and romantic view of violence. By removing specificity in this vacant reenactment, he creates an engaging contingent proposition.

Desnianski Raion is a series of clips on a loop. In one moment, the frame jitters skyward, flying through, and above the common apartment blocks seen beyond Sighthill Cemetery. Silent save for the light thumping of helicopter blades, the slow winter’s drift has a distinct apocalyptic tone. The sounds fade neatly into moaning club music, enough to dance to or cry to. A calculated brawl that feels like hell’s initiation ensues on the street level, three factions blindly swinging and struggling with no apparent aim. Finally and again, the tower block at night. The video is decidedly less crisp, like a twice-filmed television. Colored spotlights, graphic roses, and a two-bit laser light show bounce across the building as the soundtrack climbs to a slow climax of synthesizers and bass beats. The fine, drugged line between dread and elation. Finally, the building implodes, folding inward, sending smoke everywhere at once.

Disquieting Landscapes is unassuming at a glance. Ruins are powerfully ominous, an oft-used conceptual tool and Gaillard is attempting to preserve them for all their allegoric weight. They remind us of our deaths and the panic with which we cultivate, build, and replace, creating monuments that according to Smithson, rise “into ruin before they are built.”