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.”