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Rodney Graham, Dance!!!!!, Two painted aluminum lightboxes with transmounted chromogenic transparencies, 107 x 138". |
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Donald Young Gallery In his new large-scale lightbox diptych Dance!!!!! Graham continues his fascination with the myth of the American West. The image depicts a cliché from countless Hollywood Westerns: a man being forced to dance in a saloon by another man, six-gun in hand, shooting bullets at his feet. Playing the role of the "old-timer" compelled to perform the jig, Graham is suspended, clicking his heels in mid-air to avoid the shots fired by a "liquored up young hot-head." Also in the main gallery is the kinetic sculpture entitled Rotary Psycho-Opticon, a replica of a freestanding kinetic op-art sculpture used as a backdrop for a performance by the band Black Sabbath on Belgian television in the early 1970s. By physically recreating what is essentially a readymade sculpture, the artist slyly examines fantasy as it relates to optical perception; the psychedelic patterns and movement of the sculpture itself mirroring the dreamlike haze a fan might be drawn into when imagining his favorite icons. Furthering this notion, Graham has used the sculpture as a backdrop for his own band's live performances. Possible Abstraction Pair 2, 2007-2008, presents two almost identical lacquer abstract compositions on wood panels. The paintings are part of a larger series, which proposes different combinations of the same elements. The work was inspired by a cartoon Graham found in a 1950s men's pulp magazine, where two persons are standing in front of almost identical caricatured representation of two abstract paintings by the artist "Picado" made about 40 years apart. One man says to the other: "If You Ask Me, His Earlier Paintings Were Much Better." This sketch also inspired a silkscreen edition that accompanies the work. Also included in the exhibition is a suite of 13 oil paintings that debuted at the 2008 Biennial of Sydney. In these modestly-sized color-filled abstractions, Graham again performs a kind of historical re-enactment in which he plays the archetypal mid-century School of Paris painter. Referencing the rich impasto of this school, the paintings are paradoxically both satirical and reverential. Rodney Graham was born in Vancouver in 1949 and his work can be found in a number of public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Solo exhibitions include a retrospective in 2004-05 that toured North American venues as well as a European touring exhibition in 2002. He has participated in landmark exhibitions, representing Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1997, and exhibiting at documenta IX in 1992 and at Sculpture Project Muenster in 1987. |
Rodney Graham, Possible Abstraction, Pair 2, 2007-2008, Two lacquer on wood paintings, 96-3/4 x 83-1/2 x 3-1/2".
Dan Graham, Possible Abstractions: Pairs 1-35 / "If You Ask Me His Earlier Paintings Were Much Better," 2007-2008, Two silkscreens, 43-1/2 x 48-3/4".
Dan Graham, Possible Abstractions: Pairs 1-35 / "If You Ask Me His Earlier Paintings Were Much Better," 2007-2008, Two silkscreens, 43-1/2 x 48-3/4". |
Rodney Graham, Rotary Psycho-Opticon, 2008, Silk-screened aluminum, plastic panels, aluminum, steel, leather, rubber, 120 x 144 x 72". |
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Josh Azzarella, Untitled #2 |
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Josh Azzarella, Untitled #38 (Bryan).
Josh Azzarella, Untitled #28 (CE 133-B). |
Kavi Gupta Gallery Josh Azzarella borrows iconic historical imagery and manipulates the contents to reveal an altered view of potent events that have shaped our collective conscience. The images chosen for this exhibition range from serene landscapes wiped of their violent and defining events to scenes taken from more obvious sources, slightly edited, shed of the actions that disrupted our past and continue to influence our lives. By reworking still images and video footage from historic prize winning journalism, security, and news footage made famous by the media, and other documentation of well-known events, a quietude is created. Events are erased as ghosts and impressions from one’s memory emerge in an eerie retelling. A black and white image of a distant shoreline is jogged by the point of view from the water leaving one to recollect the image of the storming of Omaha Beach or to read the image as a calm landscape. Another quiet landscape presents an empty grassy hill site without the falling soldier. A similar approach is taken in several video works where this erasure is created frame by frame. A film featuring the unknown rebel during the Tiananmen Square protests presents this well-known footage, but in Azzarella’s version there are no war tanks, no opposition. This footage is especially potent given how the communist party in China so heavily censors the history of this event. Other videos are more ambiguous and seemingly commonplace in comparison such as altered footage of a shaky handheld image of the sky through the trees. One feels the camera is attempting to catch the glimpse of a fleeting object, which could be a UFO, or a bird, but is actual documentation of an airplane that lingered over Washington after the events of September 11. Azzarella also slows and obscures video footage through a laborious layering process. The result is an estrangement from the original recognizable event becoming a beautiful, amorphic, and transitory picture that unfolds over minutes instead of seconds. The addition of real-time footage re-emphasizes the questioning of certain events that are usually interpreted through the media filter, often with distorted truth and biased commentary creating more questions and more answers for individuals to assimilate their own construction of the past. Josh Azzarella (b. 1978, Ohio) lives and works in NY. He has recently had solo exhibitions at DCKT Contemporary, New York and Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, VA. Azzarella was the recipient of the 2006 Emerging Artist Award and had a solo exhibition from The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. Selected group exhibitions include shows at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, Clifford Art Gallery at Colgate University, Catherine Clarke Gallery, San Francisco, Clarke Western Bridge, Seattle, the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art and the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick NJ. |
Josh Assarella, Untitled #23 (Lynndied). |
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Danica Phelps, Material Recovery, 2008, Installation view, Zach Feuer Gallery. |
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Kavi Gupta Gallery Danica Phelps is known for documenting her life through skillful fluid line drawings and has been painting intricate stripe charts formulated using her own simple monetary system for the past ten years. This project has illustrated important events in the artist’s life through the filter of her personal finances. Her stripe paintings recently became a larger project referred to as The Stripe Factory where the process became unmoored from her personal data and self-referential to the individuals hired to produce these works. Phelps has made several installations utilizing the ephemeral nature of flowers and will continue this project for her exhibition at Kavi Gupta. Fresh flowers are combined with discarded cardboard, plastic and other waste materials that she arranges in an intuitive and playful manner, hinting to a makeshift roadside shrine. The room at first is filled with the fresh pungent smell of flowers and life, but as time passes the smell becomes more unpleasant emphasizing the inevitable outcome. During this process drawings are produced of the flowers as they begin to wilt. After the flowers eventually die, the drawings are all that remain to document their existence. This subtle metaphor speaks to notions of preserving time and holding on to the impossible. The use of flowers is loaded as they are used as symbols in every momentous event of people’s lives from birth to death. They are decorative, ceremonial and markers of passing time. In its entirety, Phelp’s work can be seen as a poetic act of reflecting. A fascination with the unknown and examination of life on a small scale, trying to come to terms with it, but never being able to truly understand. Danica Phelps (b. 1971) lives and works in New York, NY. Phelps has recently had solo exhibitions at Zach Feuer Gallery, NY; Ritter/Zamet, London; Thirtyseven degrees, Sydney; Sister, Los Angeles; and Dina4 Projekte, Munich. Selected group exhibitions include shows at Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, Naples, Italy; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; The New Center for Contemporary Art, Louisville, KY; Aldrich Museum of Art, Ridgefield, CT; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY. |
Josh Azzarella, Untitled #38 (Bryan).
Danica Phelps, 50,000 Stripe Factory Sample, 2008, Watercolor and gouache on paper on panel, 30 x 15". |
Danica Phelps, Excerpt from IVF in India, 2008, Etching, 11.75 x 189.75", Edition of 12, Published by the Lower East Side Printshop, NY. |
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Carrie Schneider, The Kiss, 2008, C-print, 40 x 50". |
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Carrie Schneider, Queen of This Island, (Utö, Suomenlinna), 2008, C-print, 42 x 33". |
Monique Meloche After a year-long Fulbright Fellowship to the prestigious Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Carrie Schneider returns to Chicago with a body of new work for her first solo exhibition with moniquemeloche gallery. Schneider sets up impossible scenarios that pit a character (usually herself) against some force of nature. Through a complex web of personal mythologies, Schneider throws herself into fantasies of escape and concealment, creating uneasy resonances with simple juxtapositions. The result is a series of large-scale photographs and two 16mm films that continue to heighten the familiar to a level of precarious strangeness. Carrie Schneider (born Chicago, 1979 lives Chicago) earned her MFA (2007) from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2001). Schneider attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007, and has just returned from a yearlong Fulbright Fellowship to the Kuvataideakatemia Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Her work has recently been acquired by The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. In the past year her work has been included in a number of group exhibitions including The Ties That Bind: Spencer Murphy & Carrie Schneider at Gallery 44, Toronto and Tense Territories at Santralistanbul, Istanbul, Turkey curated by Aura Seikkula. In January 2009 she will open a solo exhibition at The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki. |
Carrie Schneider, WE (Baltic Version), 2007, C-print, 58 x 76". |
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Dorothea Lange, "Nipomo, Calif. Mar. 1936. Migrant agricultural worker's family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged 32, the father is a native Californian. Destitute in a pea pickers camp, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Most of the 2,500 people in this camp were destitute." |
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Museum This exhibition is part of a year-long Columbia College-wide celebration of Beat culture and the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road. The centerpiece of this larger project is the display of the original manuscript of On the Road, a 120-foot scroll that Kerouac continuously fed through his typewriter, on view at the College’s Book and Paper Center, 1104 S. Wabash, from October 3 through November 30, 2008. Check the Columbia College Chicago website for program details. We have chosen to focus on the philosophical and personal results of travel: learning the difference between the real edges and the ideal, mostly fictional, center of America; discovering the possibility of reinventing the self in transit to and from anywhere; and learning how big this country really is in physical expanse and how very small it can be in individual cultural awareness. These are the central themes of Kerouac’s novel. A model for and subtext of Kerouac’s travels in 1947 was the mass exodus of people from impoverished rural areas of the east and Midwest during the Great Depression just ten years before. The U.S. Government commissioned a group of photographers, under the Farm Security Administration, to document this stream of people moving west and their lives on both ends of the road. The museum recently acquired a large collection of this work. U.S. 66, which starts just blocks from the museum and ends in Los Angeles, was one of the main routes for this migration. What the economic refugees discovered, and what Jack Kerouac, the privileged Columbia University student learned was that that anybody who is bored or broke or dissatisfied with the culture they find themselves in, i.e. “Beat”, can walk out to the nearest highway and stick their thumb out. Arguably the star of the Farm Security Administration was Dorothea Lange. Thanks to major gifts from her family, the museum has a wide spectrum of her work both during and after the Depression. Part of this exhibition celebrates those gifts and explores her Depression work in detail, including the little known series of experiments leading up to her iconic image of The Migrant Mother, who became the poster child for The New Deal. Between 2003 and 2006 David Anderson made over fifty trips to Vidor, Texas, and photographed the town and its residents. This resulted in the book Rough Beauty. Vidor is a small community struggling with issues of extreme poverty and isolation in southeastern Texas. The town is reminiscent of an America unknown to them that unfolded in front of Kerouac, Neil Cassidy, Allan Ginsberg, William Borroughs and the rest of the people in On the Road as they drove and hitch hiked back and forth across it. — Rod Slemmons |
Dave Anderson, Her Public Face, 2004, Gelatin silver print, 15 x 15", edition of 15.
Dorothea Lange, Destitute peapickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children. February 1936. |
Dave Anderson, Breeze, 2004, Gelatin silver print, 15 x 15", edition of 15. |
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Francis Alÿs, Bolero (Shoe Shine Blues), 1996-2007, Graphite, tape, and collage on vellum, 384 framed drawings, installed with DVD animation, 9:40 min, maquette, wooden table, and string, Dimensions variable, © Francis Alÿs, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York. |
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The Renaissance Society Mexico City-based artist Francis Alÿs will present his animation Bolero, along with the 511 graphite drawings from which the animation is made, and Politics of Rehearsal, a 30-minute video that combines footage of a speech by President Truman, narration by critic Cuauhtémoc Medina, and a rehearsal for a striptease. Rehearsal parallels sociopolitical promises from Latin America with the tactics of a stripper — always leaving something to be desired. By the early Twentieth Century, urbanization was a stock part of European modernity come again as a master narrative. Elsewhere the story was just beginning as cities in developing countries, notably those of Latin America and Southeast Asia, grew exponentially during the middle of the last century. The emergence of the megacity, however, has a postmodern corollary, namely the passage from the megacity to what is now referred to as the global city. Unlike the designation "megacity," with its emphasis on a totalizing sense of urbanity forever in crisis of collapse, "global city" refers to the sub- yet transnational character of the world’s largest metropoles as they are hubs of economies that are at once domestic and global. A prime example is Mexico City, poster child for the megacity. Between 1940 and 1990, its population grew ten fold from 1.4 to 14 million. Emblematic of economic globalization, Mexico City has become susceptible to a post-Fordist paradigm no longer exclusive to advanced industrial nations. The structural dynamic linking Mexico City’s regimen of corporate headquarters to the quality of life for the city’s working-class poor is one defined by a decline in manufacturing and an increase in service sector employment. The result is a growing inequality gap and a shrinking middle class as factories either close or relocate. Given that more than half the world’s population now live in cities whose fates belong to the boom and bust cycles of a deregulated global economy characterized by the international ebb and flow of capital, to speak of “how the other half lives” in Mexico City is to speak of conditions that are global indeed. When Belgian native Francis Alÿs (b. 1959) moved to Mexico City in 1986 he had no plans to become an artist. Trained as an architect, Alÿs was inspired by a city overwhelmingly accessible at its street level and utterly incomprehensible in its demographic scope and historical layers — pre-Hispanic, colonial and modern. But Mexico City is less the subject of Alÿs’ work and more his laboratory, if not muse. Insofar as Alÿs could be said to have a medium it would be walking, making Alÿs the consummate post-studio artist. Accordingly, the majority of his work has taken the form of photo / video-based documentation of events (some staged, others a species of vérité) all transpiring in the street. In this respect, Alÿs is heir to that most Latin American of genres, namely the “action,” a gesture falling somewhere between performance and intervention. Enacted in the public realm, “actions” were historically the front line of assault on the barrier between art and life. When Alÿs arrived on the scene, however, that barrier was next to nonexistent, making his foray into the genre organic rather than ideological. If anything, art and life had become a two-way street. Just as art had found its way into life, so too life had found its way into art. In a manner beyond question, Alÿs’ ongoing photodocumentary slide shows of Mexico City denizens caught unaware in their quotidian lives (Ambulantes, 1992-present, Sleepers, 1999-present, Beggars, 2002-present) share equal billing with his actions whose subjects have included crime (Re-enactment, 2000); the economy of trash (Barrenderos, 2004, The Seven Lives of Garbage, 1995); and a vicious pack of stray dogs (Gringo, 2003). Despite the contrast between the actions, which have a strong allegorical bearing, and the photodocumentary work, which is grounded in transparency, both bodies of work signify a marginalized agency and subjectivity that is a staple of city life. In an economy of scale, however, marginalized living in Mexico City is anything but marginal. Mexico City’s various forms of disenfranchisement—social, political, cultural and economic—are part and parcel of the city’s texture, giving its street life a quotient of immediacy. As a result, Alÿs’ work derives its poignancy from gestures that although specific allude to more general conditions in which a tenuous sense of human worth is accepted as a structural part of modernity. This coincides with visual art’s well-cultivated suspicions as to its own use value. Unable to categorize itself as a discrete form of either manual or intellectual labor, art would instead count itself a friend of futility, and proudly so where Alÿs is concerned. But Alÿs’ purposeless yet critical expenditures—whether it is pushing a large block of ice through Mexico City streets for the nine hours it takes to melt (Sometimes making something leads to nothing, Paradox of Praxis 1, 1997) or gathering an army of individuals to shovel an immense sand dune a few inches (When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002) — achieve their legibility in a context whose significance to the global economy as a reservoir of cheap labor cannot be disregarded. In light of these circumstances, Alÿs’ crafting of a tangible futility highlights a purposelessness that in its socioeconomic entrenchment has paradoxically acquired what is perhaps its only use value, namely that of a sign value, making it ripe as a subject for art. Alÿs’ Renaissance Society exhibition features two works installed in an ambitious two-story exhibition design by the artist. Politics of Rehearsal, 2005–2007, is a thirty-minute video made with frequent collaborators Rafael Ortega and Cuauhtémoc Medina, and Bolero (Shoe Shine Blues), 1999–2007, is an installation featuring a short animation and approximately four hundred of its attendant working drawings. Alÿs has described his work as “a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors, or parables, staging the experience of time in Latin America.” The idea of the "rehearsal," with its stops, starts and repetitions all aimed at perfecting a performance, is one such metaphor. As its title warrants, Alÿs has returned to it on numerous occasions and Politics of Rehearsal builds directly on three previous videos. Rehearsal 1, 1999-2004, recasts Sisyphus as a red Volkswagen Beetle that, syncopated to a musical rehearsal, repeatedly attempts but fails to ascend a hill on the outskirts of Tijuana. R.E.H.E.A.R.S.A.L., 2000, is a short, animated video featuring a hand spelling the word “rehearsal” across the top of a piece of paper. And Rehearsal 2, 2001-2006, is a 15-minute video in which a professional striptease is performed to a rehearsal of Schubert’s soprano/piano duet Lied der Mignon (Song of Longing). Alÿs describes Rehearsal 2 as: “a scenario in which the development of a mechanics — such as two steps forward, three steps back, four steps forward, three steps back — and in which, although the progression is not linear and occurs in a different temporality, there is some kind of progress at the end of the day. It’s just a different pace. Postponement or delaying does not mean stagnation. There is always a progression, but through a different mode.” Politics of Rehearsal consists of four distinct components, two of which (the Schubert rehearsal and the striptease) are drawn from Rehearsal 2. The remaining two components are a film excerpt from Harry Truman’s 1949 inaugural address, and running voice-over commentary by art historian and cultural theorist Cuauhtemoc Medina being interviewed by Alÿs, whose voice has been subtracted from the tape. A statement at the beginning of Politics of Rehearsal describes it as a “metaphor of Latin America’s ambiguous affair with modernity.” To call Politics a metaphor is something of an understatement. Not so much a mixed metaphor, it is a mixture of metaphors with Medina’s non-diegetic voice-over as a binding agent. The combination of historical material, performance, and most importantly, voice-over commentary, make it an explicit illustration of Alÿs’ ideas, the literal construction of a metaphor in which the performance is presumed to have an illustrative connection to Medina’s verbal disclosure. The performances and Medina’s words, however, neither confirm nor clarify one another. The result is a brand of latter day surrealism where high art, “tittytainment,” and intellectual reflection coexist in equal measure and free of contention, which is perhaps the most apt of metaphors for Latin America. Bolero is one of several animations Alÿs has made in the past decade. (Time is a Trick of the Mind, 1998, Song for Lupita, 1998, De Fluiter (The Whistler), 1999, and The Last Clown, 2000). All illustrate a simple and singular act of larger allegorical significance, which in Bolero’s case is a shoe shine set to a short musical phrase whose melody and lyrics are written by Alÿs. In contrast to the saturated production values of today’s digital animation, Alÿs’ output is resolutely artisanal. While its vogue in the sphere of the visual arts could be attributed to the rise of video and digital media, animation has always been tethered to the fine arts through the practice of drawing, even as technical proficiency in figurative rendering was relegated to the professional illustrator/ cartoonist. Tellingly, Bolero is animated in a style of spare line drawing whose clarity belongs to commercial illustration. In that regard, Bolero is indebted to Alÿs’ rotulista (sign painter) paintings, a body of work executed between 1993-1997 in which he collaborated with Mexico City sign painters to translate his small figurative compositions into the sign painters’ larger, stylized tableaux. But more important, Bolero, as an exhibition of process and product, converts animation into a site where drawing is not only privileged for harboring artisanal skill, but for translating that skill into a display of labor that, like that of its subject matter, has been marginalized. Here, as with other work, Alÿs’ penchant for futility cannot help but mirror the plight of an artistic labor that since the early Twentieth Century has remained haunted by the anxiety of its obsolescence. In form and content, Bolero represents the crafting of a self-worth that is being insisted upon through a manual repetition now substantially devalued by automation. Yet despite its monumental scope of over five hundred drawings, Bolero’s subject lends it a humility recalling animation’s roots in the flipbook. More than simply capturing it, Bolero dissects the palindrome-like polishing movement, as the back and forth action is syncopated to the signature rise and fall of the musical form that is its namesake. Though set to lyrics that center upon the invisibility of shiner and shining, Bolero is actually a motion study, in which Alÿs makes visible a labor usually classified as far less than skilled. He even went so far as to give the movement sculptural form which resembles a diagrammatic structure, declaring the shiner’s act a sort of molecule on which a macro-economy is built. If, however, the Mexico City shoe shine trade qualifies as invisible, it does so only through its ubiquitousness, making it a trenchant example of that city’s ever burgeoning informal economy, which some experts say accounts for half of the city’s jobs. Whereas those who make a living through unstructured and unregulated activity are by most accounts considered “passive economic agents” who “lost out in the struggle for jobs,” clearly Mexico City gives pause for thought. The relationship between its formal and informal economy is such that they are complementary. The informal economy is not something outside of the city’s economy, it is the city’s economy, and something with and to which Mexico City officials must reckon if not resign themselves. Given its size and the crucial role of many of its services, they have no choice. Distrustful of the formal economy, many informal sector workers are proud of having survived Mexico’s various economic crises—1976, 1982, and 1994 being the major ones— not to mention the earthquake of 1985. While the shoe shine trade cannot fail to signify the relationship between have and have-not, for Alÿs it also represents an agency in one’s survival that perforce becomes an ethos defining the character of his adopted city. But as an allegory of globalization, the shoe shine trade hardly speaks to Mexico City alone. It could just as well be Cairo, Jakarta, or Karachi to name but a few cities where poverty knows no line and wages know no minimum. — Hamza Walker |
Francis Alÿs, Gun Camera from SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC CAN BECOME POLITICAL AND SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POLITICAL CAN BECOME POETIC, 2005, Mixed media, Image Size: 18 x 40-1/2 x 13-1/4".
Francis Alÿs, Sleepers, 1999-2006, 80 Slide Carousel, Image Size: variable.
Francis Alÿs, Drawing for When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002, 16mm film transferred to DVD; 2 rear-projection screens; 1 monitor; DVD projection, Image Size: variable.
Francis Alÿs, Still from Ensayo I (The Rehearsal), 1999-2004, Video projection and 3 annex videos, Image Size: variable, Edition of 4.
Francis Alÿs, Modern Procession (video still), 2002, 7.22 minutes.
Francis Alÿs, Drawing from Ensayo I (The Rehearsal), 1999-2004, Video projection and 3 annex videos, Image Size: variable, Edition of 4.
Francis Alÿs, Studio view of The Liar, the Copy of the Liar, Mexico City, 1994.
Francis Alÿs, The Liar, the Copy of the Liar, Mexico City, 1994.
Francis Alÿs, Still from SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC CAN BECOME POLITICAL AND SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POLITICAL CAN BECOME POETIC, 2005, Performance / video projection. |
Francis Alÿs, Cuentos |
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