Artists Unite Issue

This weekend is the last chance to see “Pour Your Body Out,” the new Pipilotti Rist video installation at MoMA. 

It’s not perfect, it’s not even great but it is bold and it reaches even if it doesn’t grasp, and it’s provocative in a number of ways, and it’s worth seeing. Rist’s MoMA commissioned, site-specific installation doesn’t relate to the museum’s atrium space or set up a dialogue with it the way the recent Olafur Eliasson free-swinging by virtue of it’s own essence fan by did, but it certainly transforms the space. The artist has created a lush and warming colorful, almost baroque, womb at the heart of an ice-cold, white walled, grey steel and glass skinned modernist box which is something in and of itself.

And it’s big, 7,354 cubic meters, a panorama of moving imagery 25 feet high and 200 feet across in almost every direction. Big doesn’t necessarily mean better, but it does mean something. There is something to big; think of big deal, big idea, talk big, think big, make it big, go over big, in a big way. To stand or lay around in the big room on the big sofa on the big rug that’s part and parcel of “Pour Your Body Out”, while giant floating dripping bodies, or giant green strawberries, or giant bubbling pits of pinky liquid, or giant monstrous wild boars traverse the four walls two stories high is surely curious. The big scale dictated slowing the speed so nothing happens in real time. It’s not quite slo-mo, but slow enough that the lush organic forms creepily morph into close ups of facial pores in the dreamiest of ways.

Of course one of the problems with big is that there’s always bigger, and in fact I immediately wanted that. Why weren’t the walls of the uppermost floors were also covered with video images?  Why not seventy-foot wild boars peeking through one hundred foot grasses, and eighty-foot high feets sloshing through muddy puddles the size of Rhode Island, and psychedelic flora and fauna the size of houses floating from two hundred foot heights? 

No doubt the imagery was meant to provoke and it does. For me it most provoked thoughts of a slightly-almost R rated version of Bugdom, the third-person action platform computer game developed and published by Pangea Software. Like In Bugdom, there’s a mesmerizing sound track. The “Pour Your Body Out” sound piece composed by Anders Guggisberg loops at a slightly shorter time frame than the video so at no time does the image and sound match-up repeat. Bugdom doesn’t have that but it is also set in a garden or outdoor bug kingdom. There the goal is to help a pillbug named Rollie McFly defeat evil fire ants, free imprisoned ladybugs, and restore peace and tranquility to the wonderful world of Bugdom^. In “Pour Your Body Out” unlike in Bugdom, it’s not obvious who the protagonist is, though you get the sense that there is a one; nor is the through line clear, but there is something Stanislavskian or at least psychophysical about the entire experience.

It’s also evocative of the Disney experience. I was reminded of someone’s explanation of why she and her husband continue to vacation at Disney World long after their kids were grown. And that is, for example, because they have this big theatre with a big screen (IMAX I’m guessing) and they show these cool movies, like the one of the rain forest, and you stand there inside this big room with big screens and you feel like you’re smack dab in the middle of the forest and then they have misters that all of a sudden spritz water and you really think for a second that you’re really in a forest in the rain.

This person as it turns out lives in the woods and when it was suggested that they might just take a walk in their back yard the next time it rains she further explained, in total exasperation, that it’s not that easy, not everyone can just go out in their backyard in the rain.

Which is all to say that despite the fabulousness of the experience - size, sound, color, and couch wise - something essential is missing, something like meaning.  Unless of course the medium is the message, and unless this is what it looks like when you push up against a new art frontier, one that lies beyond the land of viewing art into a realm where we inhabit it.

Like that of other contemporary installation artists, for example Olafur Eliasson’s “The Weather Project” and Doug Aitken’s   “Migration”) - both with recent major MoMA installations also curated by the razor smart, fearlessly grooving head of media, Klaus Biesenbach - Rist’s work seeks to take humanist thing further than it’s ever been.  So there they are, re-visioning art in a world full of re-visioning, like a Renaissance Redux.

Go see it if only to see what you think and while you’re there check out the Viz Muniz curated show, “Artist’s Choice: Vik Muniz, Rebus.”

Pamela Popeson

my father sent a link to this flash movie. Tracking it back, it appears to be part of some kind of software/cloud site called Virtual Postcard (Wendy helped me translate the Russian). Great fun to watch, but also a reminder about getting your anatomy straight when drawing the figure (I instead thank god for cameras!). I can’t find the main page to see how you can make your own, but it seems to be possible, with lots of authors there on the site…

Quincy Jones has started a petition to ask President-Elect Obama to appoint a Secretary of the Arts. While many other countries have had Ministers of Art or Culture for centuries, The United States has never created such a position.

www.petitiononline.com/esnyc/petition.html

I have been a big fan of this sculptor of raw materials since I saw his work a decade ago. As Sky Pape points out in her latest Gallery Crawl post, we caught a show featuring several of his early works at Sean Kelly. You can read Sky’s post for details, but I’ll share three of my photos of the installation. The first two are the centerpiece of the show (Rice Meals, 1983) and a detail showing the one bowl that contains hazelnut pollen instead of rice (the 7th bowl in in the top image). The third is a piece in beeswax (untitled, 2007). For those of you who want more of an intro to Laib, there’s a nice description here.

Sure enough, people were lined up down the block on January 10th, waiting for Metro Pictures to open their doors. If I were Bill Cunningham of The New York Times, I would have had lots of material for a feature on stylish glasses and fabulous winter hats. Just marvelous! There was an idea floated out that there was a small fortune to be made if one were prepared to back up the offer of “Cocoa! Get your hot cocoa here!” But at that moment, the crowd began to flood into the gallery for Postcards from the Edge, the benefit for Visual AIDS. Obviously, at the preview party the night before, many savvy collectors had pinpointed the pieces they had every intention of buying. In a nonstop blur of activity, things flew off the walls. My little drawing was purchased before I even located it myself. This annual benefit not only presents work of surprisingly high quality, but it tends to be managed extremely well thanks to smart staff and va-va-voom volunteers. The atmosphere is like a big party, and there really does seem to be something for everyone. My hope is that Visual AIDS raked in scads of dough, and I’ll look forward to the recurrence of this event next year.

Our next stop was just down 24th St at Fredericks and Freiser, for John Wesley’s show A Question of Women (through Feb 7). My biggest exposure to Wesley’s work in person was at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, and perhaps then my mind was just too caught up with the overwhelming presences of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin to be able to fully appreciate him. This well-curated show was my Wesley moment of enlightenment. It brings together a number of canvases from private collections that have not shown in New York before and some from the artist’s studio that have never before been exhibited. Their collective impact is disarming, disturbing, and delightfully captivating. Painted between 1992 and 2004, these paintings should be considered in context from an artist who, born in 1928, has been perfecting this style for over 50 years. As cool and controlled as they may be, given the tightly drawn lines, the flat application of paint and the specificity of palette, they are startlingly dramatic. Naughty and erotic in a slightly Betty Boop kind of way, the abstract elements of the canvases — the colors, the quirky shapes (those eyelashes!), the negative spaces — hold powerful sway in the overall experience of the paintings. It is tempting to think that the simplicity of art employing a comic-book style makes it easy for digital images on the web to adequately stand in for the in-person experience. That notion is particularly false with Wesley’s paintings and although I’ve included links, I would strongly urge you to go see the show before viewing all the images on the gallery’s website. With 65 solo shows under his belt, this may be one of Wesley’s best yet, and that’s saying something.

The next stop was BravinLee Programs on 26th Street, where John Lee treated us to a fascinating walk-through of Bhakti Baxter’s exhibition After Certain Amounts of Breath. In order to enter the main room of the gallery, you must detour around the remaining fragments of sheetrock and metal studs that once comprised a dividing wall. There’s a short, vicariously cathartic Youtube video of the artist creating (or should I say deconstructing?) it. The wall, and all the pieces in this show, relate to themes of temporality, mortality, and the pure energy of matter as it relates to existence. The featured work in the main gallery is a sequential series of large drawings on mylar depicting the gradual dissolution of the skeletal remains of a human couple, and their transformation or return to a kind of cosmic energy. The back gallery continues the idea, but on a more conceptual level. It has the makings of an intimate, yet spare, living room, in which one can sit and reflect a while. The decor of the room is subtle, yet purposeful: an Eames rocker invites the visitor with a possible reference to Charles and Ray Eames’ film “The Powers of Ten”, a film that looks at similarities of macro- and microcosmic views (Baxter offers another way to rock as well: there’s a cassette deck playing, for those of you who remember what cassettes are); wall murals channel Albers’ extensive series “Homage to the Square”, and ideas of harmonious proportions; there’s even a drawing of an agave plant to bring to mind the wonders of the Fibonacci sequence (a plus for this Fibonacci fan). The references may be a bit obscure, but the ambition to coalesce themes of love, life, death, decay, harmony, scientific phenomena, art history, and even some gentle humor, is heartening, particularly in that cynicism is nowhere to be found here.

Beating me to it, the New Yorker just highlighted Emna Zghal’s exhibition at M.Y. Art Prospects. Emna’s work may have been under your radar, but not long ago, she won a coveted purchase award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This was her first solo show here of oils on canvas (as opposed to works on paper), and in the dead of winter, it gives you hope that Spring will indeed return. Without sticking to earthen tones or expected shapes, the bold colors and non-representational marks, lines, and gestures of these poetic canvases convey a love of nature: The rustling of leaves, the flow of water, the movement of a creature not quite seen, but sensed. They feel like fresh air and the outdoors without being sentimental or sweet. They express an energetic and layered space in a way that would have been impossible without Pollock, but which in no way seems derivative of him. This selection of works, finely done but never fussy, feels as refined and carefully edited as a sonnet.

CONTINUE READING THIS POST HERE: http://www.skypape.wordpress.com

[images starting at top: John Wesley, Question of Women, 1993, Acrylic on canvas: 42 x 49 inches; Bhakti Baxter, left to right: After certain amounts of breath 2008 india ink and dirt on mylar 59.25 x42 inches; Residual bodies 2008 india ink and dirt on mylar 61x42 inches; A dispersed way of being 2008 india ink enamel and dirt on mylar 61 x 42 inches; Emna Zghal Tree Threads, 2008, oil on canvas, 25 x 37 inches]

Interesting post at NPIRL. I will provide a link to the article along with some of the key points for me. (I need to separate them from the text to facilitate my thinking due to ingrained self taught short attention span) (I was reading Bob Dylan’s bio last night and he talked about forcing himself to read long poems and memorize passages to offset or wean himself away from the tv, 45rpm, 3 min song lazy thought pattern.)

The Work of Art in the Age of Computational (Re)Production ***
Posted by Alpha Auer…

Key points (for my understanding)

a very vital component of artistic practice is no longer present with us today. Or at least not immediately and obviously so. Does artistic output still serve the intrinsic purposes of humanity? Or has art simply lost its cause?

unless we provide an intrinsic purpose for it, and one which transcends that famed holy cow of “creative self expression” at that, our artistic goose is pretty much cooked! Overcooked, if anything, should you ask me… ;-).

Personally, I have created Syncretia entirely by the credo of “livability” as opposed to “viewability” and my future efforts in metaverse creativity will follow along these lines as well, since to me this seems to be a thoroughly viable means of providing context to artistic endeavor today: The provision of usable objects and spaces serving the ritual of behavioral change and consequent self discovery through play.

Well what do you think? It looks to me like I am still rooting about in the subconscious for myself and for the viewer I am providing the visual narration of my spiritual concepts. But then what was “Ghost Story”?

Recommended viewing

The story of stuff

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.

Victor Lebow

The modern industrial economy works like this: resources are dug from a hole in the ground on one side of the planet, used for a few weeks, then dumped in a hole on the other side of the planet. This is known as the Creation of Value. The Creation of Value improves our quality of life. Improvements in our quality of life make us happier. The more we transfer from hole to hole, the happier we become.

Unfortunately, we are not yet transferring enough. According to the Worldwatch Institute, we have used more goods and services since 1950 than in all the rest of human history. But we still don’t seem to be happy. Indeed, over the same period, 25-year-olds in Britain have become ten times more likely to be afflicted by depression. One in four British adults now suffers from a chronic lack of sleep, and one fifth of schoolchildren have psychological problems. Over the past 13 years, mental health insurance claims have risen by 36 per cent. American studies suggest that between 40 and 60 per cent of the population suffers from mental illness in any one year. The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2010 depression will become the second commonest disease in the developed world. Unless we start consuming in earnest, we’ll never experience real joy.
George Monbiot