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Anne Chu, Woman with a guardian figure, 2008, Aluminum, Woman: 25 x 39 x 6", Guardian: 45 x 20 x 14". |
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Donald Young Gallery In an exhibition of new sculptures and paintings by New York based artist Anne Chu. The artist mines the history of figuration across cultures and eras to create works that evoke ritual, storytelling, and mythology. Her wide-ranging sources are employed more for their capacity to trigger the imagination than for their particular references. Showing in the gallery's new space, a nickel bronze bear head sits atop a tall pedestal. The bear is a constant subject of Chu's work, for which she first received recognition in 1996 with a series of life-size cast paper bears derived from diverse sources including Chinese burial ceramics and European medieval subjects. The expressive sculpted surfaces of the bronze head impart depth and pattern, while the form emotes the iconic strength of the bear. A second sculptural installation includes a floating figure accompanied by a second figure on the ground. The frontal view of the works suggests mass and depth, but when viewed in the round, the hollow cast aluminum forms defy gravity and challenge the viewer's perceptions about strength and structure. More recently Chu has employed forms of goats in her work, and for this exhibition she presents a cast bronze goat standing within a set of polychrome ceramic cubes. The contrast of the solid bronze volume and empty space refers to minimalist sculpture or drawing, while the addition of the literal figure lends a psychological and art historical tension. Also included in the exhibition are a group of Chu's multicolored egg tempera and oil paintings, which convey a layered surface, a landscape of paint that refers to her three-dimensional work through its suggestion of volume and depth. Lastly, Chu exhibits two ink jet prints, photographic studies of her embroidered bird sculptures, which demonstrate the ways that complex patterns both mimic and hide a figure's formal shape and color. This event marks Anne Chu's fourth solo show with the Donald Young Gallery. Past solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Florida and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Chu's work was included in the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Westfaelischer Kunstverein in Münster, Germany. |
Anne Chu, Raven (print), 2008, Inkjet print, archival pigment color on Hanemuehle Photo Rag Paper 32-3/4 x 47-3/4", Edition of five.
Anne Chu, Cardinal (print), 2008, Inkjet print, archival pigment color on Hanemuehle Photo Rag Paper 32-3/4 x 45-1/3", Edition of five.
Anne Chu, Small Bear, 2008, Bronze, 9 x 5 x 3", Edition of six. |
Anne Chu, Bear Head, 2008, Nickel Bronze, 22 x 21 x 16". |
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Angelina Gualdoni, As we sleep, 2009, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 18 x 20". |
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Kavi Gupta Gallery In Angelina Gualdoni’s work, urban symbols are subjected to decay and deterioration. Buildings collapse, weeds grow in between architectural structures and cities fall in on themselves. Her paintings depict a somewhat desolate landscape. While she investigates various states of ruin, Gualdoni also presents an optimistic viewpoint. Her isolated representations of city, suburban, and country structures are not just records of a declining society, they are imbued with a hopeful outlook for renewed generative life. Gualdoni’s small watercolors and gouaches on paper and her large canvases are each a portrait study of a collapsing and dilapidated form that recalls and echoes the memories of past inhabitants. Alternately, the glowing pinks and yellows may portend an approaching fire that will consume this frail construction, creating uncertainty as to whether the scene is one of hard-fought survival or imminent destruction. It is impossible to tell if the sites depicted in the paintings have grown from the artist’s imagination or if they are depictions of real places. Angelina Gualdoni engages the complex legacy of modernism as it has played out in the visual arts and architecture during the second half of the twentieth century. Although her work is devoid of cynicism or polemics, Gualdoni is interested in the phenomenon of failed utopias. The disuse and collapse of the buildings that populate these canvases suggest meditations on the transience of life, or vanitas paintings for the early twenty-first century. The paintings draw upon a range of modernist sources that are given new meaning in their unlikely juxtapositions and, one might say, their gentle corruption. In Gualdoni’s hands, Le Corbusier-inspired modular buildings (which were carefully theorized to produce harmonious proportions) are afflicted with the indignities of old age. Morris Louis’s technique of staining, or pouring paint directly onto unprimed canvas (celebrated as disembodied, purely abstract color) is adapted by Gualdoni to create backgrounds for illusionistic landscapes. The literal and metaphorical sense of ebb and flow in these paintings is a result of Gualdoni’s technique. She begins each painting by pouring diluted acrylic pigments directly onto raw canvas, which reveals both the texture of the underlying fabric and the often irregular paths taken by the paint as it flows, swirls, and clots on the surface. The direction the paint takes when it is poured and the degree to which it is absorbed into the canvas are variables that Gualdoni manipulates but cannot utterly control; rather, these are elements of chance she allows into the process. She notes that in much the same way that architects engage specific sites when designing buildings, her paint pours create a specific site upon which she builds the work. Gualdoni attended Washington University, School of Art from 1993-1995, she received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, in 1997 and her MFA in 2000 from University of Illinois at Chicago. She has shown work at many shows including at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Galeria Senda in Barcelona, the Museum de Paviljoens n the Netherlands and the Momentum Gallery in Berlin. She is represented by Kavi Gupta in Chicago. |
Angelina Gualdoni, Odds and Ends, 2009, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 28 x 34".
Angelina Gualdoni, Blush, 2008, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 60 x 48".
Angelina Gualdoni, Proposals for Remnants, 2009, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 50 x 45". |
Angelina Gualdoni, Given Ground, We Build it Everyday, 2009, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 42 x 36". |
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Laurent Millet, Les Vacances, Dusseldorf, 2006, Courtesy of Robert Mann Gallery, New York. |
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Museum Found in Translation “It would seem that photography has recorded everything. Space, however, has avoided its cyclopean evil eye.” —Robert Morris, The Present Tense of Space” 1978 As Robert Morris, a sculptor, observed, something is inevitably lost when a three-dimensional sculpture is translated into a two-dimensional photograph. The experience of sharing a space with an object (and being able to move around it), and the experience of seeing that object represented and embedded in another object — a flat photographic print — are very different. But do we always experience the photographic image as absolutely flat? Isn’t it the tension between the flatness and the illusion of space in photography — its fidelity to the real — the very thing that makes it compelling, possibly troubling? Photography clearly allows us to imagine space. So is there a strict distinction between phenomenological space and imagined space, and how unambiguous, or understandable for that matter, is the difference between the two experiences? The relationship between photography and sculpture, and the effects that are found in translation between the two mediums, have been of interest to artists since photography was invented. Some of the first photographs featured sculptural objects: both Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot recorded marble statues and plaster casts in the late 1830s and early 40s. An early attempt to overcome the limitations of photography, specifically its inability to translate three dimensions, was the invention of the stereoscope in 1849. Using a special viewing device that rendered two photographs taken of the same subject from slightly different angles, the viewer experienced one image as having lifelike depth and volume. In the early 20th century sculptural forms fascinated photographers such as Edward Weston, who took pictures of vegetables and shells, Edward Steichen who photographed Auguste Rodin and his sculptures, and Man Ray, who studied the female form. One recent example of artists documenting what they considered to be “found” sculptures is Bernd and Hilla Becher’s first book, Anonymous Sculptures: A Typology of Technical Buildings, published in 1970, which presents multiple pictures of lime kilns, cooling towers, and silos as elegant structures without any overt pictorial embellishment or romanticism. In the 1980s Robert Mapplethorpe used dramatic lighting and cropping to make nude photographic studies that refer to photographs of sculptures from art history. His two-dimensional translations of his models arguably increase the feeling of the body’s weight, mass, and permanence beyond what would be experienced by seeing it in the flesh. And of course there are artists who use photography to more practical ends to document their sculptures, especially if their creations are ephemeral or remote, such as Andy Goldsworthy’s interventions in nature and Robert Smithson’s land art. Similar to performance art, photographs allow this type of work to be documented and disseminated. These documents raise the question of the privileging of experience, and circle back to Morris’s concerns about documents always lacking some aspect of the firsthand experience. Their works resist the notion that the world simply gets folded into the two-dimensional surface of the photograph. PhotoDimensional is an exhibition of works by contemporary artists who investigate the relationship between sculpture and photography, between two and three dimensions, and explore perceptual issues intrinsic to those relationships. Their works resist the notion that the world simply gets folded into the two-dimensional surface of the photograph. As a result, their works are almost always layered, with subjects translated in ways that invite us to imagine passing from the experience of one dimension to another, and sometimes back again. Thus, perceiving their works provokes feelings of unsettledness, a wavering between seeing and knowing in our minds, a tension that becomes an engaging condition of their artwork. Originally trained as a sculptor, Vik Muniz (Brazilian, b. 1961, lives in the United States) took the dust collected over several months by the maintenance staff at the Whitney Museum of American Art and used it to create drawings based on installation photographs of the museum’s collection of minimal and post-minimal sculpture. In Muniz’s photograph of his dust drawing of Tony Smith’s minimalist cube, the dust is easily discernible and its constituent hair, pebbles, and small scraps of paper appear larger than life. Ironically, dust is usually the nemesis of the pristine photographic print and polished sculptural surface. Also starting with historical photographs of sculptural forms, Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960) used James Van Der Zee’s photographs as her inspiration for 9 Props (1995). Made while she was an artist-in-residence at Pilchuck, a glassblowing school in Seattle, Simpson had the artisans re-create the elegant vases that appear in Van Der Zee’s pictures. She then photographed the glass objects and printed the photographs onto felt accompanied by simple texts. By endowing the pictures with tactility and three-dimensionality, Simpson aligns her work with the modernist concerns of surface and form. |
Like Weston, Steichen, Man Ray, and Mapplethorpe, some of the artists in the exhibition photograph existing forms to enhance their appearance and identity as sculptural objects. When John Coplans (American, 1920–2003) began photographing his aging body after he turned sixty, he created a set of images that evoke classical marble sculpture. His documentation of advanced age is alternately humorous and disquieting in the closeness of its observation. Seeing himself as an actor, Coplans examined various body parts closely, often quoting art-historical postures with his sagging figure against a neutral background in the style of many photographers of found sculpture before him. Florian Slotawa (German, b. 1972) creates makeshift sculptures with furniture in hotel rooms across Europe, documenting his architectural interventions in black and white before he checks out of the room. Leslie Hewitt’s (American, b. 1977) (Untitled) Replica (2006-08) is a triptych of a domestic scene including plants, books, and photographs in which she turns the orientation of the images upside down to call attention to the formal qualities of the still life. In her photo-sculptural works simple events between the images such as shifts in the lighting register the passage of time and human intervention, and found family photographs and books on African-American history communicate a sense of cultural significance and histories both personal and communal. Other artists make works that confuse two and three dimensions. Sculptor, architect, designer, and photographer David Ireland’s (American, b. 1930) images of the island of Skellig Michael off the coast of Ireland are mixed-media works in which the artist deliberately creates a distance between the viewer and the subject by painting directly on the photographic print. In one, an expanse of water acts as a barrier to the island, while a painted green rectangle in the center of the photograph expands the viewer’s visual experience in a less representational sense. Pello Irazu (Spanish, b. 1963) and Laurent Millet (French, b. 1968) also compellingly combine drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography to create the illusion of three-dimensions in two-dimensional images that are difficult to reconcile in the mind’s eye. In her video work La Ronde (2004), Bettina Hoffmann (German, b. 1964, lives in Canada) uses a slowly panning video camera to give us multiple points of view on human subjects who are absolutely still. As the camera circles around the periphery of the people, the effect is one of traveling through the space of a two-dimensional photograph. It is as if the space surrounding the subjects of a still photograph has opened up for the viewer to navigate from multiple points of view, while the subjects themselves remain frozen in time. Chicago artist Heather Mekkelson (American, b. 1975) makes three-dimensional sculptural objects inspired by disaster photographs she finds on the Internet and in newspapers. Keeping an archive of images from floods and hurricanes, Mekkelson isolates interesting details and translates them into sculptural forms that she distresses to recall the original disaster. These objects are then placed around the gallery in non-literal translations of the photographs, ghostly details from disasters usually communicated to us through photographs. Similarly, Katalin Deér (American/Hungarian, b. 1965, lives in Switzerland) translates photographs into sculptures and back into photographs, making multilayered renditions of simple, modern architecture and commonplace furniture that are meant to create, in her words, “a new, entirely unforeseeable and strange space that fluctuates between dimensions and perspectives.” Interested in emphasizing the object status of the photograph, Deér casts pictures into concrete, turning them into architectural objects. She further underscores the physicality of photographs by pinning unframed prints directly to the wall — but only at their top corners, so they can curve in the humidity. Finally, both Melinda McDaniel (American, b. 1978) and Susana Reisman (Venezuelan/Italian, b. 1977) make sculptures out of photographic materials. Reisman prints photographs onto long strips of canvas and molds the strips into forms that allude to the photograph’s original subject matter. McDaniel places strips of photographic paper outside for days at a time to achieve varying degrees of exposure and imprints of weather, revealing the subtle color gradations inherent in the paper’s chemistry. She then exhibits the uniformly shaped strips in the gallery in a deliberate, regimented manner that recalls minimalist sculpture and creates a tension with the random, abstract patterns of the weather marks on the paper. Katalin Deér has remarked, “Photography mirrors a peculiarity of vision. It folds the visible world into the surface." All of the artists featured in this exhibition recognize that the surface is rarely experienced as static. Photography may not be able to record space, just as it cannot record many other things like fragrance or sound. But it can convey space. And the particular way that it communicates space and translates reality into two dimensions can be used in intriguing ways by artists to translate subjects from two dimensions to three, and back again. These investigations allow us to experience their works as the active, exciting experiences they are intended to be — experiences that are found in translation. — Karen Irvine, Curator |
Bettina Hoffmann, La Ronde, 2004, Dvd. Courtesy of the artist |
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Paul Chan, RE: The Operation, 2002, Single-channel video, 27 minutes, from Tin Drum Trilogy, Courtesy of Video Data Bank, Chicago, © 2007 Paul Chan. |
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The Renaissance Society Pimps Up Rain or shine, it’s my habit, about five of an evening, to go for a stroll in the Palais-Royal. It’s me you see there, invariably alone, sitting on the d’Argenson bench, musing. I converse with myself about politics, love, taste, or philosophy. I give my mind license to wander wherever it fancies. I leave it completely free to pursue the first wise or foolish idea that it encounters, just as, on the Allée de Foy, you see our young rakes pursuing a flighty, smiling, sharp-eyed, snub-nosed little whore, abandoning this one to follow that one, trying them all but not settling on any. In my case, my thoughts are my whores. — Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, 1761/1774 By the time Diderot finished •Rameau’s Nephew•, the Enlightment was conscious enough of itself as a movement to embrace its own caricature. If anyone had earned this right it was Diderot. His imprisonment in 1746 following publication of •Letter on the Blind•, in which he openly questioned the existence of God, helped unify the circle of French intellectuals known as the philosophes. Their use of empiricism to challenge a Christian worldview defined the so-called Age of Reason. As humanists, the philosophes’ writings touched on a range of subjects that would eventually evolve into discrete intellectual disciplines ranging from economics to natural history, and from the physical to the social sciences. Their critique of the morals, beliefs and laws regulating social relations was based on an inquiry into the origin of society. There was no shortage of paradigms to overturn as the philosophes were trying to understand the world in human rather than divine terms. Of the topics where social theory and a critique of morality would converge, none could form as volatile and complex a nucleus of discussion as sex. Regarding sex, however, Enlightenment thought was distinguished neither by its critique of morality nor its consideration of sexual relations as being at the basis of society. As a staple of mores the world over, sex, by default, lends itself to any critique of morality. And the teleological relationship between sex and society has been part of a Western intellectual tradition since Plato’s Symposium. Instead, Enlightenment thought was marked by its use of sex to consider not the origins but the limits of society. Within a Christian framework, humankind was created in God’s image. Sex, however, in confirming humans as animals, spoke to our literally lower rather than higher selves. In an Enlightenment discourse challenging a Christian worldview, pleasures involving a regression to base instincts then became the site of transgression. As a result, sexual sovereignty was cast as the supreme expression of individual freedom. This last line of thought was indelibly inscribed into the trajectory of modernity by none other than the Marquis de Sade. •My laws are my whores•. The immediate question raised by this provocative title, namely who pimps the law, belongs less to Diderot, from whom it was derived, and more to, say, Jean Genet. In answer to this question, Paul Chan has graced the entrance to his Renaissance Society exhibition with charcoal portraits of the nine United States Supreme Court Justices. As an artist whose work is informed by his political activism, Chan has never been one to shy away from pointed and scathing satire. The snarky hyperbole of Re: The Operation (2002), a 27-minute video in which Chan uses the genre of the soldier’s letter home to flesh out the psyches of former president George W. Bush’s inner circle, while highly entertaining, is also tragically on the mark in its depiction of an utterly vainglorious administration. In what was surely a surfeit of script-worthy material, Chan’s wit rose to the occasion. By comparison, the drawings of the Justices are a restrained affair. Their stilted quality is not a parody so much as an underscoring of their source in state portraiture. The only feature suggestive of caricature is the eerily recurring, smug, beatific grin that translates into a sense of detachment. Hung in the upper portion of the gallery, well over viewers’ heads, the Justices are literally above it all. But they are not the overseers in the sense of a panopticon. Instead, the Justices have been thrust to a more remote, ethereal, yet expansive realm of authority, making for a notable shift of tone in Chan’s work as his target has changed from the executive to the judicial branch of government. |
Whereas the executive branch embodies the government in action, the High Court is the government in its guise as law, which does not avail itself to an accountability of the directness leveled at the presidency. This does not, however, preclude Chan from asking the simple question, who is the law, just as one might ask who is the president. As an answer, Chan, a champion of the literal, offers up these nine charcoal portraits of the Justices. But the larger question for Chan is, what is the law, specifically human law. If the remainder of the exhibition is taken as an answer, then, in a word, it is sex. The portraits of the Justices find their corollary in 14 large text-based drawings done after characters from works by Sade. A bowdlerized redux of the language describing the various characters’ sexual exploits and misfortunes, these drawings, although strictly text-based, nonetheless qualify as portraits albeit linguistically. These drawings are also studies for fonts which Chan has produced and made available on his website nationalphilistine.com. Each letter and symbol on the keyboard corresponds to a titillating phrase so that once installed, anything typed is rendered nonsensical pornographic drivel. The loss of control over what one types is metaphorically orgasmic. In addition to computer-based fonts, Chan has also had other texts translated into his fonts, as is the case with the episode of Law and Order featured on the plasma screen monitor. Chan translated the dialogue into one of his fonts and then reintroduced it as a running subtitle after removing the audio track. In forsaking the figurative for the textual, Chan’s interest in sex proves to be something other than the pornographically explicit sense that comes to mind when one thinks of Sade. For Chan, the discourse of sex is where an inner law of human impulses and desire interfaces with an outer law responsible for regulating and/or containing libidinal forces. Marriage. Adultery. Sodomy. Pederasty. Rape. Incest. Sexual harassment. Prostitution. The state’s regulation of sexual relationships is arguably at the heart of the social compact as liberty’s limits are mapped within the most intersubjective of realms. The efficacy of the social compact in maximizing the pursuit of happiness is then mirrored in sexual relations as spelled out by the law, which over and above origin and limit, comprises the very structure of society. More significant than being a form of authority, a society’s laws are its architecture, which in Sade’s case was a cage whose bars he spent the better part of his life rattling. Chan’s juxtaposition of Sade and the Supreme Court Justices constructs an historical trajectory in which the United States is unavoidably to be viewed as the child of the Enlightenment. For better or for worse, Sade’s thought remains with us in perpetuity. Chan, however, is hardly interested in Sade the overly celebrated libertine. Of greater importance is the relationship between sex and the law, in which sex, as a basis of society, is also an issue for which the law achieves a degree of opacity, revealing its role in structuring society at its most fundamental level. For Chan, this is yet another layer of overtly political subject matter he has been steadily plying for the last decade. Chan belongs to a generation of artists and collectives that are heir to debates about the relationship between aesthetics and politics; debates that emerged in the wake of a neo-autonomous minimalism on the one hand and widespread social unrest of the 1960s on the other. Told from the present vantage point, however, what were once two camps now find themselves partners in an expanded field of cultural production. The question of art’s relationship to affecting social change used to be fraught with a tension confirming the art world as a bubble with a discrete inside and outside. Thanks to the likes of Chan, activism, which once stood firmly outside the bubble, has become indispensable for the manner in which it informs a range of practices such that politics is no longer a quality of the work of art proper, but has instead become a way of looking. Likewise, the reverse is true. Activism may be viewed culturally, making its means and ends the subject of critique usually reserved for art. This two-way dialogue has helped dispense with false categories such as “political art,” and allowed artists to adopt a broader range of methods available to them on an as-needed basis. In this respect, Chan is a poster child for the post-medium era. His output includes activist pamphlets, production of large-scale performances (mounting Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans’ lower 9th Ward), a website, drawings, collages, video installations and last but not least, several single-channel videos which in and of themselves display a range of approaches. Chan’s transition to a new body of work has taken place on the still-warm grave of the Bush presidency. Just as there was a need for socially engaged practices before George W. Bush’s presidency, the same applies afterward, even if at a minimum, to facilitate the transition from anger to hope. — Hamza Walker |
Paul Chan, Oh why so serious?, 2008, Plastic and electronics, edition of 3, Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York. |
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