Fashion Victim:
You’ll feel like you’ve seen her before, this elegant woman laden with bags.
Not just because Nir Hod’s show at Paul Kasmin, opening Wednesday, features ten near-identical paintings of her, each rendered in a different tone, kind of like Andy Warhol’s Shadows. With her classic style; her dark hair pinned in artful disarray; her wary gaze fixed on something outside the frame, she resembles a Cindy Sherman film still, one of those archetypal females enmeshed in a noirish drama. Or maybe she’s just hailing a cab after a long day of shopping.
Then you examine a small silver plate on a wall. That’s when you realize the woman’s look of timeless chic is really Warsaw, circa 1943. To her left is a small boy wearing a big cap and short pants, wobbly-kneed and vulnerable, hands in the air; behind them are more Jews at gunpoint. The picture, from a Nazi report celebrating the liquidation of the Ghetto, is often described as the most famous Holocaust image in history.
“My plan is they will see the show, then they turn around and see it in a completely different way,” the artist explains. “That will be the twist.” He adds, “Then when you discover where it comes from, you feel like guilty…”
Read more in my new story in Tablet
Nir Hod, Mother, 2011. Courtesy Paul Kasmin gallery.
Loading...
Doors of Perception:
Espiral, a 1955 piece by Jesús Soto. The master and instigator of kinetic art, predecessor of perceptual tricksters like Eliasson or Navarro, and pioneer of the very idea of interactivity is at the center of “Soto: Paris and Beyond, 1950-1970,” a spellbinding show at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery. It focuses on the era just after the Venezuela-born Soto had moved to France, where an international contingent of artists converged to experiment with new tactics, new media, new dimensions. Soto was obsessed with “activating spatial dynamism and sensorial instability,” as the gallery puts it. In this piece he has floated Plexiglas, painted with radiating geometric patterns, over wood painted with more. But you can’t get the full impression from an image. Set yourself in motion to see the trippy work in person—and explore a vanguard often neglected by our New York-centric institutions—before the exhibition closes March 31.
Private collection © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Loading...
Making Respect an Art Form:
Over the course of her career the fearless and provocative Cuban artist Tania Bruguera has staged performances tweaking the Castro government, commenting on drug policy in Columbia, threatening to kill herself via Russian roulette in Venice, and plenty more. Her latest project, though, is her most ambitious, and potentially her most influential. A year ago, under the sponsorship of the Queens Museum and the public-art nonprofit Creative Time, she founded an organization called Immigrant Movement International, setting herself up in a storefront in Corona, Queens and moving in with immigrants nearby.
At first locals didn’t know what to make of the fiercely energetic newcomer, but eventually the center’s wide array of services—from legal help to language and art classes—transformed her headquarters, right near the 111th Street stop on the 7 train, into a busy hub. On Monday, April 9, for example, Immigrant Movement International will host a free immigration clinic sponsored by the City Bar Justice Center. Visitors can speak privately with an immigration attorney about matters including visas, Cuban immigration and family reunification—in Spanish, English, or Mandarin.
Along the way her team created a ribbon logo to advocate for their mission, coining the slogan “Immigrant Respect” to avoid the political aspects of the immigration issue and highlight its human side. They chose brown and blue to represent the entry points of immigrants who travel to a new country, over land or sea.
Immigrant Movement—which has been so successful that Bruguera’s sponsors recently pledged to help keep it going for four more years— is part of a larger global trend, as creators like Ai Weiwei and Vik Muniz develop new strategies to connect art-making with activism. Can artists change the world? Maybe that’s not the question—yet. Can they help? Stop over in Corona and find out.
Loading...
We’re in the Monet!
Monet’s gardens at Giverny, the spectacular sculpted landscape that pioneered the use of flora as medium, keeps itself contemporary by having artists to live and work on its grounds. Which is how E.V. Day, blower-up of dresses and flowers, found herself in residence at the Impressionist’s famous estate. In those iconic gardens, amidst wisteria, weeping willows, and water lilies, immersed in the chromatic explosions and felicitous symmetries so carefully planned by Monet, Day’s thoughts turned to her friend and fellow artist Kembra Pfahler.
Pfahler, lead singer of the death-rock band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, derived her onstage costume from LeRoy Neiman’s Femlin drawings; the look, involving stiletto boots, body paint, and little else, seemed to fit in Monet’s highly curated landscape. So Day asked Pfahler to come model. In a series of triumphant, deadpan, and impish photos, the bewigged Pfahler posed along the celebrated vistas—and behind the scenes—for Day’s camera, creating yet a new perspective on a setting that’s been recorded and recapitulated in so many ways.
When these photos arrived at the New York gallery The Hole, the gardens exploded right out of the pictures and into the exhibition space. With sponsorship from Playboy, original home of Femlin, the Bowery venue has been transformed into a faux Giverny, with pebbled paths meandering along a mix of real and trompe l’oeil plants and flowers, modeled on the same aromatic and chromatic mixture selected by Monet. In the center is a copy of Giverny’s Japanese bridge (itself a copy of the original, which was destroyed), arching over real water adorned with fake water lilies. (At a recent visit, the collaborators were still deciding whether to put live fish in the simulated pond.)
On the walls, there’s Kembra, painted various tones of pink and red, looking like a jungle creature that escaped into a European forest. In one photo, with a leg thrown over the bridge, she appears to be making a run for it. But her destination isn’t clear. Is she trying to climb out of the picture plane—or to get herself back to the garden?
“Untitled 17,” by E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler, 60 by 40 inches. Courtesy the artists and The Hole.
Loading...
The Guggenheim’s Magical Mystery Tour (Is Coming to Take You to Queens):
It was funny to get a wristband from an art museum so soon after Kraftwerk, but there we were in Jackson Heights, where we had zipped via the generous bike lanes of Queens, feeling that familiar tug. We had come for the first sessions of Stillspotting, the latest in the Guggenheim’s ongoing, off-site project to find—and enhance—spots of tranquility in our busy urban fabric. This was a few days after the museum had announced a multimillion-dollar global art initiative, sponsored by UBS Bank, to connect with art, artists, and curators from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa. While this style of international networking is miles away from the global expansionist ethic that spawned the Guggenheims Bilbao and Abu Dhabi, Stillspotting is further away still.
Helmed by David van der Leer, assistant curator of architecture and urban studies—who co-curated the BMW Guggenheim Lab in downtown Manhattan and is taking it on the road to Mumbai—Stillspotting is not about spectacle but silence. In part this is literal—van der Leer is fluent in the language of noise complaints and hearing loss-–but it is also metaphorical, about the silence we so often require but rarely obtain in order to properly reflect, heal, and ultimately create. While there’s an earnest, almost urgent aspect to the projects, which have been unfolding over a two-year span in each of the five boroughs, starting with (Brooklyn and Manhattan), each also has a treasure-hunt quality, like a magical mystery tour.
That is readily apparent in the latest iteration, Transhistoria, which is offered for the next three weekends. It’s the work of SO – IL, a husband-and-wife architectural team who in this case acted more as curators, location scouts, casting agents, and producers—commissioning stories from Queens-affiliated writers, finding Jackson Heights residents to read them, and staging the readings in a variety of settings, including a pedestrian plaza redolent of samosa and La Gran Uruguaya café. Upon arrival at the ticketing kiosk at 40-40 75th Street, visitors receive a map showing which six venues are open that day. Out of those, they pick four. Then off they go, through the richly architectural and densely multicultural neighborhood, finding their way to a circle of foam stools and immersing themselves in whatever personal narrative follows—on escape, and assimilation, and longing and belonging. It’s a beautiful experience, at once tranquilizing and hopeful.
Like artist Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International, an initiative of two other art organizations, the Queens Museum and Creative Time, that’s operating out of a storefront in nearby Corona, Stillspotting proves that the most innovative and border-crossing art can occur under the shadow of the jets moving international curators around the globe. The project will continue to take the Guggenheim places it’s never been at its next and final stops, in Staten Island and the Bronx. For some participants, however, the transformation might be permanent.
Stillspotting in action. The site is the garden of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church; the reader is Xia Tio; the story is “At Home in the New World: A Jackson Heights Native Savors her Neighborhood,” by Maria Terrone
Installation by Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO – IL). Image © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. Photo: Kristopher McKay
Loading...
I Sing the Body Electronic:
If Night at the Museum 3 were set at MoMA last night, the Schlemmers and the Charles Rays and a bunch of other objects that celebrate vehicles, robots, and other hyper-modernist devices would have been dancing in the balconies over the atrium as Kraftwerk launched its eight-night retrospective.
The exclusive, lucky, and/or GIF-adept crowd, which strangely (or not) barely moved, gamely donned their white 3-D glasses to see projections of bikes, trains, and the beloved Autobahn that launched a thousand rock bands and dance parties as the band played the 22-minute title track from that groundbreaking album, amidst selections from their catalogue.
And while the concert highlighted Kraftwerk’s “historical contributions to and contemporary influence on global sound and image culture,” as MoMA puts it, it also happened to recapitulate central themes of the museum’s own history—from early machine-age design to the high-tech innovations showcased in recent exhibitions like “Design and the Elastic Mind” and “Talk to Me,” which boldly went where no art museum had gone before in exploring our relationship to our ever-evolving devices. That sensibility, championed by curator Paola Antonelli, was underscored as hashtags, among other logograms and punctuation signs that have acquired new meanings in our electronic age, floated evanescently over our heads (though disappointingly, the @ sign, a recent MoMA acquisition, didn’t make an appearance).
The event also solidifies the role of MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach as a stager of must-see spectacle, a cultural impresario on equal par with the artists he presents. Like LACMA director Michael Govan, who turned the slow movement of a rock on a flatbed trailer into an international news event—while Michael Heizer, the artist responsible the piece, stayed home in Nevada—Biesenbach became for the public face of the concerts as the reclusive musicians kept, as always, to themselves. The retrospective, the must-see event of New York’s cultural season, was hardly accessible to most, given the paucity of tickets and the way they were offered. Still, it broke new ground for the institution. And somehow or other those electronic drumbeats must have gotten infused in its bones.
Kraftwerk, Performing at The Museum of Modern Art. PHOTO + WORLDWIDE 2012 © by Peter Boettcher
Loading...
‘The Last of a Kind’:
Soon after Spain’s most famous artist died, El Periódico, a newspaper in his native city of Barcelona, published a spread with a plaintive headline: “No One Like Tàpies.”
Antoni Tàpies, 88, was a local hero who rose to international prominence by bringing Great Spanish Painting into the postwar era. His metaphysical abstractions are infused with the legacy of his modernist forebears, Picasso and Miró—along with medieval Catalan mysticism, Eastern spirituality, anti-fascist sentiment, and an assortment of humble materials, like dirt and straw, imbued, as his champion Roland Penrose put it, with “a profound hidden meaning.”
Admired for his pro-democracy stance during the Franco era, when many other artists were in exile, Tàpies grew into an éminence grise, a public and much-published intellectual who built a foundation to share not only his own work but also his fascination with other cultures and disciplines. “From the time I was very young, I felt like a missionary,” the artist told me in his home in 1990, surrounded by art objects from Africa, Oceania, and other parts of the world. “It’s always the story that poets are something of the loco, hero, priest, teacher.”
…Asking artists and curators who they thought could fill his shoes as artist or as icon, El Periódico came up empty. “He was the last of a kind,” says Manuel Borja-Villel, founding director of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, who now runs the Reina Sofía in Madrid. “Tàpies was a bridge between the historical avant-garde and the younger generation. He wasn’t modern anymore, and not postmodern. That makes him very interesting. You cannot understand Spanish art and culture without his presence.”
Read more in my story in ARTnews.
Porta metàl·lica i violí (Metal Shutter and Violin), 1956. Collection Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona.
Loading...
Let It Pour!
Holton Rower’s paintings look like landscapes, networks, neurons, and rainbows distorted through kaleidoscopes. Last night, the artist, a grandson of Alexander Calder, celebrated his opening at the Bowery gallery The Hole with a Dior-sponsored dinner, where ever-growing piles of flower petals seemed themselves to spill out of his massive, multicolored works. Then the artist demonstrated before a rapt audience how he makes his pictures, pouring successive cups of pigment onto a wood ground. The concentric circles rippled around vials of Dior nail lacquer strategically placed to create a flower effect as the paint, inexorably moving toward and off the edges of the wood, found its way around them. As the the artist completed the painting, he announced, the last five colors replicated tones from Dior’s new line. Very polished!
Loading...
Shepard Fairey: What a Relief!
Shepard Fairey’s Pace Prints show, titled “Harmony and Discord,” conveys the agit-prop message for which the Obama Hope artist is well-known: one series, Reagan and Friends, depicts the former president, along with Richard Nixon and other corporate types, as corrupt salesmen. Others riff on global warming, the dove of peace, and a grenade that could pave the way for a revolution.
But this political commentary is delivered in particularly seductive and tactile images that show the artist exploring technique as well as the powerful influence of artists he admires. Targets and comic-book text bubbles riff on Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. Rugged, handmade paper is the ground for some of the editions, made with a mix of stenciling, spray paint, embossing, and relief printing. And, for the first time (in an inspiration he credits to Barbara Kruger), Fairey experimented with the magnesium printing plate itself as a ground, reveling in its relief surface as he layered color on top. (He had special plates made so the pictures wouldn’t be flopped.)
At the opening, the artist also revealed his next project: paintings inspired by every song on Americana, the new album by Neil Young and Crazy Horse covering classics like “Oh Susannah,” “This Land Is Your Land,” and “Clementine.” The works, to be exhibited at a private, one-day event to celebrate the album’s release at Perry Rubenstein’s new Hollywood gallery next month, were the result of an elaborate back-and-forth process between artist and musician. “It was a genuine collaboration,” says Fairey, who describes the resulting images as “heroic but with a dark twist.”
Detail of “Rise Above Rebel (Plate),” 2012, hand-rubbed, rolled, and transferred ink on photo-etched magnesium plate. 32 x 24”; edition of five. Courtesy the artist and Pace Prints, New York.
Loading...
Anarkia en Andalusia: Greil Marcus, Spanish Punk, and Me
“I think I wrote that punk produced better art than all the avant-garde movements before it. And I meant that.”
So said Greil Marcus, the great rock writer, during his long, introspective, and illuminating interview with Simon Reynolds, which the Los Angeles Review of Books has been posting in mesmerizing segments. In the latest section, part 3 of 4, Marcus discussed Lipstick Traces, his groundbreaking book subtitled A Secret History of the Twentieth Century--in which, as he puts it, “I spent five hundred fucking pages trying to make this case, that the Sex Pistols had an entire tradition — an unspoken, unheard, invisible tradition — behind them. They were the avant-garde taking its revenge on the 20th century, and saying, ‘Now, you’re going to have to listen to us whether you like it or not.’” He got there by way of Dada and the Situationists, and Malcolm McLaren and Johnny Rotten, and the medieval heretics and the Brethren of the Free Spirit—to name but a few.
I had met Marcus while I was fact-checking his articles at Artforum; though he was victim of one of my most famous typos—the “Butthole Surgers“—he hired me anyway to photo edit Lipstick Traces. And when I told him about the punks I was meeting in Priego de Córdoba, the Andalusian town I frequented in the ‘mid-80s, he helped me land an assignment from the Village Voice. The LA Review has just republished my 1988 piece on its blog.
For me, it was a chance at my first big story. For Marcus, as he explains to Reynolds, the story illustrates one of the great truths about punk: “it’s never revived, it’s rediscovered.”
As he describes it, “These kids come up to her and say, ‘We’re punkys, we have these Sex Pistols records, but we don’t know what they mean… Could you translate them for us?’ So she writes all the lyrics to the songs out in Spanish… Now they start singing the songs in Spanish on the street, but they also start hearing the songs in a way they never could before, with all of the rage and the dynamics and exploding walls in the songs intact, but with the slogans and the signposts too. They begin to delve into the history of their own town and discover forgotten anarchist traditions. They discover how the anarchist movement was repressed during the Spanish Civil War. They begin to realize that they are part of a historical continuum. There has been a conspiracy of silence to deprive them of knowledge of their own real legacy. And then they go off and live their lives, with a sense of resentment and deprivation and anger that they didn’t have before. That’s the punk story. And that was not a revival; that was a rediscovery.”
I was delighted to see my old article get new legs. Even now, some of those lyrics still resonate in my head, especially Kortatu’s chant, “La Cultura— es Tortura.” Who doesn’t feel that way sometimes?
Feria in Priego de Córdoba, mid-80s. Photo by Robin Cembalest
Loading...
