Luminous Blotches – Some Gallerists (Group Show @ The Duck) by James D Bowman 3

I'd like to liken Ramaya Tegegne’s contribution to a dream that I [might as well have] had, in which Maria Callas did guest vocals on an unreleased Wu-Tang Clan album. I would like to, but it wouldn’t (most likely) be quite right. Bjarne Melgaard’s hilarious work here seems a fever dreamy exercise in parental prayer, and is somewhat reminiscent of recently deceased memes. What heroic palpitations can we sense at the center of these artists’ dark hybridity? Have they twisted colorful chunks of the terrestrial into a semi-transcendent critique of aesthetic paramountcy, and thus avoided the trite death at the center of hackneyed ideologies’ colonization of a collective imagination already marred by an overdose of faux-jouissance? Probably not, to be honest—but it does the heart some good to hope so. Luminous blotches of semi-sub-ideational creation, the works in Some Gallerists manifest as a stunned array of graceful waitresses, no? A cherubic fool, I’ve let the show’s multifariousness arouse my awareness of overlooked actualities that undergird everyday sites of public rituality. One of Max Brand’s beautiful contributions (a boom boxy thing dressed in a plastic bag tank top) seems to me to concern itself with the Then in the midst of the Now, and with the Ins and Outs of the Odds and Ends of the impenetrable legacies aplenty.

Ramaya Tegegne

Max Brand

Bjarne Melgaard

Elad Lassry @ David Kordansky

Lassry, notes the press release, “dismantles and democratizes standard […] hierarchies of subject matter”. Part and parcel of this dismantling act is a series of skillful, systematic contextual dislocations, which are most obvious in the intoxicating constellation of wooden, sculptures at the heart of this exhibition: oblong pieces that don’t rely on semi-amorphousness in their resistance of classifiability, but resist it by means of a resistance of semi-amorphousness itself—and thus call into question, I think, how we locate authentic non-conformism in sculpture today. If semi-amorphousness has been so ever-present in contemporary nonrepresentational sculpture that it’s generated a realm of rote homogeneity (a “world” in which each nonrepresentational sculpture refers, as a rule, less to itself than to abstract-sculpture-as-a-whole and abstract-sculpture-as-a-history) how can a nonrepresentational sculpture refer to itself and to reality foremost and only secondarily (if at all) to an abstract sculpture context which is now become all but utterly wrung of its honey? I think these bottle tree pod-like pieces by Lassry are a step in a correct direction, as they seem to me to make their own context, and them (oddly enough) to maim even it, as unapologetic agents of change. The press release likens them to flash-drives: “like hard drives or flash drives [they] become tangible metaphors for the collection and storage of pixels, situating a disembodied process in a physical space negotiated by embodied viewers.” This seems to me an apt description of the heart of the entire show; a show in which disembodied digital processes are carefully poured into analog “containers” for the purposes of a rich and pleasurable assessment that can only arise in a context so dislocated. Prior to Lassry’s generation of this context, our access to the processes behind these processes was far more limited w/r/t interaction. When the processes behind such processes appear in Lassry’s show, however, a radical contextual dislocation takes place at the very core of a collective contemplation of the contemporary. Lassry’s works here restrict the usual intensity of the processes’ sensorial impact, dislodging it to the surrounding sides, such that there is made a “soil” from which the riches revealed here can surface. Some exhibitions reveal themselves to me like nests of unexpected gems; intimate spaces full of animistic spirits half-hatched from the eggs of material arrangement by means of which they’re manifest. Here, however, the ambit of each piece’s enchantment power is relatively small, I’d say, but they become, taken collectively, a veritable coral reef of allure, in which the reality of pictorial power and potential is paramount.

Flexibility, Intense Fragility, and Death in the Work of Félix González-Torres

It’s been almost two decades since the death of Félix González-Torres and his masterpieces of mutable minimalism have only become more impressive; still more radical than almost any oeuvre that has been developed since. His aesthetic godfather, Bertolt Brecht once said, “Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are,” and González-Torres shows us the opposite-and-equal reality: because things will not stay the way they are, they are the way they are. His oeuvre is more his own and less his era’s, less his culture’s, than most for the simple reason that it doesn’t insist upon itself as monolithic “truth,” as the pioneering but limited work of, say, Donald Judd does. Because González-Torres’s works refuse to stay the way they are, and because their very nature entails incredible variability, they become what they are: witnesses to change, attesting to the ridiculousness of the concept of stasis itself. Static works, like Judd’s or Michelangelo’s “David,” for instance, can’t stay the way they were or are but are endlessly transformed in—and by—the sea of time. Flexibility was an acquaintance of Andre’s, an enemy (it seems to me) of the monolith-making Judd, and a close, close friend of González-Torres. In Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm and Jewish Art, Anthony Julius writes: “Destroying the idol just leaves an empty space, one which another idol may occupy. But preserving the idol, while denying it its bogus magic, strikes a telling blow against all false gods. To defeat your and bury him is one thing. To dress him in a jester’s costume and have him perform for you is another, more crushing, victory. One need not fear his return because he already has returned, in a guise which poses no threat at all.” Félix González-Torres’s work is impermanence incarnate—incarnate meaning “come to life” and “in material form,” and incarnate meaning “made human.”
A kind of consubstantiation takes place in the candy pieces whereby González-Torres’s soul mate’s dying (dead, now) body and González-Torres’s own dying (dead, too) body are present in the candies. It points to death: to his own, to his soul mate’s, to countless other AIDS-related deaths and, ultimately, death in general: the predator of peace that lurks in the fog of the future. If González-Torres bade us break bread or imbibe wine, he would, indeed, be crossing a line. However, he never sets himself up as a savior. In fact, what these pieces say is that he can’t save: himself, those he loves, his audience, or anyone. His pieces make plain their own mutability and impermanence, and are intended to remind us of our own. By dying, his pieces point to death, but are therefore never dead. They’re replenished, over and over, always living on the horizon that separates presence from absence, dying from birth, and pain from paradise

On "Whites" by Andra Ursuta by James D Bowman 3

By the time the eeriness of the sculptures sinks in, the breath-robbing awe is obstinate. Despite or because of this, I’ve been unable to contend with them. They seem to me to be a kind of Alterity incarnate; a precise kind of distanced apartness, which turns out to be clone-creepy, and not as unlike oneself as one would like. Here the proof, however, is: the beautiful horror of unfettered homogeneity. So much of me is irritated by these—what? Creatures? Characters? Snot-clogged Kleenex spruced up into unnamed deities and half cast aside like idols without idolaters? Or are all who stare, semi-spellbound, idolaters—or semi-idolaters, at least—of these? Contemporary art lovers have come to expect eruptions of obsession and “rebelliousness” [against?] to occur in the “white cube” context, but these pieces' whiteness, hammered home by the colorful chairs etc. on which they perch like so many barn owls, seems like a kind of cynical complicity, interested in nothing and rebellious only in their odd and mob-like over-identification with a cause that curbs enthusiastic, liberating revolt. The most interesting section of the press release reads: “The sculptures’ smooth casings and clean modernist geometries contrast with their gaping orifices and skeletal protrusions, suggesting cool modernism infected with a macabre bodily abjection. Instead of pedestals, the figures rest on old kitchen chairs, secondhand office furnishings, modernist design classics, and cast transparent resin bases, some embedded with fake vegetable slices. In seating her 'monuments,' Ursuta underscores their decrepit exhaustion. The clear hierarchy of sculpture and its base is undone (and who can forget her fellow Romanian Constantin Brancusi’s first nullification of the easy distinction between them?). If a commemorative monument is usually soaring and grandiose, implicating high-minded ideals and righteous values, Ursuta’s morose, dejected versions tell of the downfall of the Western modernist, idealist project. They remind us as well of the instability of the images we use to commemorate history—images that can be endlessly bent and adjusted to shifting political needs.” The show reminded me of two sentences from a poem by Eduardo C. Corral. First: “Too poor to afford lilies, / she walked down the aisle holding a glass of milk.” Second: “If I dream I’m cupping her face / with my hands, I wake up holding / the skull / of a wolf.”

On Passage in the Air by Keiichi Tanaami by James D Bowman 3

The [wrestling / boxing] rings that appear in many of these pieces act as points of mysterious departure: mini-stages onto/into which viewers can project whatsoever they choose; and if Passage in the Air is a fever dream, its sculptures mark those moments in which we weep ourselves awake: spectacles drawing upon colors and designs of kimono fabrics Tanaami observed in his birth home, charms of Asian culture the artist rediscovered on his trip to China, movies imposed under the post-war occupation of the GHQ, and pine trees [“I recall reading in a book somewhere that ‘The trees are called “Matsu” (pine) because one must “Matsu” (wait) while god descends from the heavens along their branches.’ I had unwittingly been lured into a bizarre labyrinth and a world of oriental paradise by the pine trees that had stood outside my window.”], and restoring a intense sense of urgency to the exhibition.

Beyond the Genius of the Sea: SIRENS by Steffen Jørgensen, Robert Kjær Clausen, and Allan Nicolaisen @ Christian Andersen, Copenhagen by James D Bowman 3

In the introduction to his book Surrealism and the Novel, J.H. Matthews writes, “Authentic surrealism has always been fundamentally a matter of inspiration, reflected in a certain orientation of curiosity or aspiration, with the artists’ degree of success standing in close relationship to the suitability of form to meaning.” Allan Nicolaisen, Steffen Jørgensen and Robert Kjær Clausen have perfected this relationship in Sirens. Their mermaid corpse suffers the peculiar abjection of post-death objectification as a case of silenced (but vibrant) matter, so that (in this parable that critically echoes the narrative of the systemically problematic—no matter how clandestine—attitudes toward “otherness” brought about by the hauntological reverberations, in our postmodern era, of a blatantly brutalizing heritage) the oral oppressors of the sirens’ drowned-out subjectivities feel free to make—but nevertheless uneasy making—asinine statements about these beings which would (in a world less ennui-ridden, less riddled with disinterested disillusionment) provoke awed wonder instead of mild, ennui-ridden curiosity. These tragic special agents’ underlying awareness of the terrifying implications of the world’s plan-shattering spontaneity acts as a steady thread in an otherwise less-than-stable plot. According to the press release, “The characters in Sirens raise a series of questions about the nature of pretending, posing, and the ownership of their identities when these [identities] are constructed from a palette of media stereotypes” as a lifeguard takes to drinking, a special agent “resorts to rap music.” The remixed tropes that pervade the piece inscribe a stance of bountiful reevaluation onto the surface of the video as a vitalized arena of fractured narrative discursiveness so that trends are called into question rather than reinforced. All of us, as Derrida insists, are (mass-) mediated bricoleurs haunted by our varied and particular horizons; cerebral tinkerers who have to use whatever tools arise around us with whatever hands we’ve arbitrarily inherited from circumstances of culture, capacity, &c. Works like Sirens are crucial fireflies in the poisonous ointment of perceptual homogeneity.

On Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook by James D Bowman 3

By the standards of the near future, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook might be recognized as the lone pioneer in unexplored frontiers. Now, however, to us, raised as we are on less probing machines of relatively petty reveries, the unlikely blessing of her mega-fresh art will inevitably be underappreciated. Her latest retrospective at Sculpture Center is nearly over. My interests in cinesexuality and Zen Buddhism meet in my spectatorial relationship with her work. Zen (which is no more inextricably linked to Buddhism than “method” is to Methodism, really) is her work’s most powerful ally. Zen, writes R. H. Blyth, “means doing anything perfectly, making mistakes perfectly, being defeated perfectly, hesitating perfectly, having a stomach-ache perfectly, doing anything, perfectly or imperfectly, Perfectly.” Her practice discloses the ocean-roses of an internally fertile person. They’re no less multifaceted than they are clear. Nurses of disclosure, her works are broth for heads made less-than-well by the melancholy merchants of ephemeral contentment. I was excited to see some of the show online. Her recent pieces, which delve into dogs’ ontology, include sculptures of the dogs Rasdjarmrearnsook cares for, who were strays before she took them in. Little seems more odd or lovely to me than this: that so humorous and pleasurable, and personal a performer also presents new and breathtaking notions of what it means to be human now, reaching not for eternity but for the present, our present, this present's bliss present; present after present; thrill gift after thrill gift; for ever and ever; amen.

On I: A High Stakes Gamble by Taslima Ahmed by James D Bowman 3

Each key piece in I: A High Stakes Gamble by Taslima Ahmed (Real Fine Arts) seems to call into question the most interesting suppositions of a previous chapter of discursive praxis in the arts: that of, say, the last half-decade. The hauntological presence of the dead, who insist, in spite of their corporeal absence, on reestablishing obsolete modes of self-analysis is, I feel, by no means an incidental aspect of Ahmed’s impressive enterprise. A kind of reckless wedlock between art and society ("polite" or not) risks not only an internal identity crisis (in the grip of which art loses its vitality in the service of relative relevance) but also and more chillingly the naïve but easy-to-adopt practice of treating society itself as a rather static thing: a saucer of tepid broth in which nothing of vitality hatches. The relationship between art and culture is (of course) one of communication, but not of infatuation. They can be neighbors, and should, but never spouses. In essence, the show takes prosaic customs and habits of allegory and lacerates them en masse, refusing to view the antagonism between the intentionally non-iconic and the merely subliminal as an antagonism. Ahmed breaks the always-only-ethereal-if-present-at-all fourth wall. Innocuous images don’t risk taking themselves too seriously in the nexus of the alleged calamity of implosion. Is the feather of some logos (a.k.a. the feather of some plea or expectation, some rational principle that sows and grows the “known” in the soil of chaos) being blown, as it were, away, "out of hand" (and abandoned)? Or is the hand—in the midst of much obsolescence—attempting to catch it; to acquire some kind of primordial spark amid the claustrophobic trappings of self-consciousness-without-self-awareness? Both?

Meditations on Josephine Pryde’s “Lapses in Thinking by the Person I Am” by James D Bowman 3

Pryde’s current show in San Francisco, “Lapses in Thinking by the Person I Am,” a breath of fresh air in a contemporary art scene that is not infrequently marked by cynicism, partakes of the kind of playful, understated mastermindfulness of Félix González-Torres or Jillian Mayer and of the peculiar poignancy of Jason Lazarus (especially in his “Too Hard To Keep” series) and of the poised presentness of Michael Galinsky (especially in his “Malls Across America” series). In this exhibition of eccentric tenderness, Pryde probes the Here and Now as a scientist would organic matter, yielding unusual beauty and a kind of nostalgia for the present. In “Lapses in Thinking by the Person I Am,” our intimacies with time and space and the prism of brilliant existences that they generate as they intersect Venn-Diagrammatically (that very sacred holy ghost of this existential trinity) are made elemental in such a way that the audience’s interaction (even a limited interaction, like mine, which has consisted of looking at and reading about the show online) becomes one of this constellation’s crucial stars. I have not even addressed yet what will naturally be considered the heart of this show: a small but mountable train that basically orchestrates the entire place (creating the sense of place of the gallery space, whereas the photos—works of an odd sort of urgency, which at once insist upon themselves as products of an attuned consciousness and refuse to make excessive demands on our attention, like the picture of a pine cone in a metallic-silver-nail-polished hand—work only in relation to this massive-as-a-model, small-as-an-authentic train. There’s much to recommend the belief that, even more than airplanes, trains have captured humanity’s imagination in a unique and poetic way. For all the bird metaphors that pepper this planet’s poetry, planes seldom appear as similar symbols of freedom, not to mention how the kamikaze pilots or suicide mission hijackers may have marred planes metaphorical potential. In his caustic criticism of the proclamations made in Walt Whitman’s poems, D.H. Lawrence writes: “An ordinary man aches with love for Belinda, or his Native Land, or the Ocean, or the Stars […] It takes a steam-engine to ache with amorous love. All of it.” From the press release: “Pryde’s dual practices of photography and sculpture will be showcased in this first solo presentation of her work in an American institution. Making use of the technical and iconic potential of photography in its various forms, Pryde creates visually arresting and conceptually precise images that play upon the relationship between two dominant historical uses of the camera: scientific analysis and artistic endeavor.” In his probing book Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday, cultural critic Ben Highmore asks, “What are the circumstances of a favorite armchair when we seem to be so unconcerned by it, while it perfectly performs its role of comfortably supporting us precisely so we don’t have to ‘give it notice’?” and “Does the old adage ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ really apply when we consider the precociousness of a family photograph that we see each day but rarely pay any heed to?” The unassuming photographs in Josephine Pryde’s show initially seem about as far from precociousness as photographs can be, but the intelligence of their silence (all photos, of course, are mute, but these ones seem to hint at their subject matter’s silence also) is acute. Modest but ideationally vast, this show seems to me to echo, over and over, some of Albert Camus’s most potent words in his masterpiece The Myth of Sisyphus: “If there is an ‘absurd,’ it is in man’s universe. The moment the notion transforms itself into eternity’s springboard, it ceased to be linked to human lucidity. […] Man integrates the ‘absurd’ and in that communion causes to disappear its essential character, which is opposition, laceration, and divorce. This leap is an escape.”

Floors & Floors' Inversions (On Zuzanna Czebatul’s “Opus Sectile”) by James D Bowman 3

If and when a Floor becomes more Floors than there are Doors before us, even before we reach each Slab, made into a pleasing and imperfect Surface Space on which a Sense of Place saturates an Arena of emotional as well as physical Motion, a Manifestation of the Risk and Chance involved in our Pursuits of Transcendence unfolds. The Tile Panels of Floors in Today’s World are seldom wide enough to become Environments unto themselves, but in Ancient Rome, for Instance, Marble, Mother-of-Pearl, and Cut Glass would be inlaid on/as Floors and (unlike Mosaics) each Panel would be sizeable. Halls, on the other Hand, are deep enough to become Environments unto themselves in most Cases. Here, the Spatial Experience is inverted: the Floor’s beautiful Panels aren’t a Means to an End but an End in themselves. If Floors, most of the Time, bear and transfer not Meaning and Pleasure but hurried Human Bodies from the Here and Now to the There and Soon, it would be a rare Moment in the Hold of which a Manifestations of the Risk and Chance involved in our Pursuits of Transcendence would ever unfurl. In the informative Press Release for the Installation of Zuzanna Czebatul’s “Opus Sectile” at Ludlow 38, we are invited to understand it [the Work] as an almost alchemical Reestablishment of a childlike Sense of Awe and Hyper-Awareness. For the open-minded Child, each Space seems so saturated in its own Isness it'd never occur to the open-minded Child that there was an Alternative to visceral Interaction with the Space. It is a Head polluted that can manage to dismiss Interaction with Space as a Waste of Time, preferring to interact only with Time (the Origin of such Curses as Nostalgia, Future-oriented-Hope-with-no-Room-for-the-Present, and more, even sillier Traps into which few Children walk) which is a Waste of both Time and Space. “Opus Sectile,” however, is a “conceptual Space where the Potential and the continuous transformation of urban Architecture can be renegotiated,” and echoes not only the Aesthetics of pre-modern Sculptures and that of the Club Culture of the Nineties, but modern Forms of Display and Presentation, the Press Release croons beautifully. “Here,” as Joseph Timko, in his essayistic Poem “The Geometry of the Beautiful Horizon” writes, the “Fabric of the World stretched smoothly across its Frame plays evenly against the Air [and] were we somehow to make our Way past the Edge of all this and to look back from the Outside, all the myriad Coherences would dissolve […] for this Path ushers us to the other Sense of Without.”

 

Seashores, Polished Stark By High Tides (On William De Rooij @ Le Consortium) by James D Bowman 3

De Rooij’s soon-to-cease exhibition, “The Impassioned No,” seems to me a spasm of outcast petals in wind. (A much needed spasm, deceptively calm, and so forth, diminished here, as elsewhere in his oeuvre.) The foxes of scrumptious vocab that have o’er and o’er in recent years displaced the viscerality of the visual, but also the shrewd intensity of chat; for it's an exhibition that showcases haunt-hymns, songs-for-eyes that dis/locate language in a rhetorical limbo far from the polemical purgatory between the post- and the neo- orthodoxies of whatever a too-broad term like “contemporary” attempts to mean. Potentials lost on those emotionally marred by the treacherous landscapes of disillusioned international politics surface in forms less marred, though rarely (and only slightly less). These Rooij has made it his business to interrogate. From the press release: “Since the beginning and in many instances De Rooij’s installations included the work of other artists and artifacts from historical and anthropological collections that relate to his own works, forming temporary groupings, which create new layers of meaning. Different formats and shared authorship have always been important in De Rooij’s concept and are the central axis of his new monumental installation of the Fong-Leng’s street-wear collection. Known for her unique and often extravagant garments, she sees her creations as sculptures rather then clothes, and repeatedly described the production of her pieces as a process of construction, or building. Besides these impressive creations Fong Leng also designed more wearable clothing, less labor-intensive. This low production is the new material of de Rooij’s display that embody the ambiguity, the structural polarity, the abstract concepts of opposition, contrast, transition, and nuance.” Rain-drenched limousine scenes. Icicle rides through bruised volcanoes. Our sores all ooze: substantial blisters. Are we here offered an escape hatch? If we undergo (from without, and then into within) an unprecedented freshening, the recent past will seem so dated, so inept a container: an artifact from a humorous political cult of outmoded ideologies that weren’t up to the task as hand.