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.