In LIVESupport, Nari Ward’s 1st show at Lehman Maupin Gallery, a white ambulance stands as the centerpiece of the show. It’s instantly recognized as a vehicle that offers “life support” and yet you will quickly realize the ambulance is filled with smoke (thanks to a smoke machine running on a cycle). The smoke along with the ambulance’s flashing lights introduces an ominous note. Does the tension between the rescue and sickness aspects of the ambulance reflect the current state of affairs with regard to health care?
Notice that Ward has masked the ambulance’s identifying labels by applying white vinyl over them. The masking encourages you to peer closer at this at once familiar and now newly-made strange vehicle.
Ward pointed out in an interview at Lehman Maupin Gallery with Naomi Beckwith, Assistant Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem (SMH) that the rest of the exhibition plays with issues of “blackness” in contrast to the whiteness of the ambulance. Ward covers the surfaces of both found and made objects with black stencil ink. He described how he likes what the ink does to the surfaces of the objects and how it makes the viewer slow down and see a familiar object in a new way.
In the Role Playing Drawings, Ward masks or silhouettes parts of the images to create new narratives. Ward found the cards in the trash of an elementary school across the street from his home in Harlem. In the 1960s, a child’s psychological state would be judged on the story they told about the picture. What stories do you imagine as you look at these images? How would your psychological or emotional state be judged?
From the beginning of hiscareer, Ward has been interested in the found object. Born in Jamaica in 1963, Ward came to NY to study art and received his BA from Hunter College (1991) and his MFA from Brooklyn College (1992). Squatting in an apartment building in Harlem, Ward became interested in the debris on the streets of his new neighborhood. He did a residency at the Studio Museum of Harlem, culminating in Amazing Grace which included 300 abandoned strollers he had collected from the streets of Harlem and then installed in an unused firehouse in his neighborhood.
In his first stand-alone video Father and Sons, Ward addresses the complex situation facing African-American police officers dealing with young men of color. It’s filmed at Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network House of Justice, a space Ward said he is enamored with and features a police officer who’s actually retired and the father of the 2 young men in the video. The audio includes the reciting of one’s Miranda Rights (which Ward’s brother, a lawyer, had printed on the back of his business cards) and the supportive words spontaneously spoken by the dad/police officer encouraging his son during filming “you can do this”. By turns tender, tense, and ambiguous, Ward’s video offers a potent and open-ended narrative. What’s your interpretation of it?
As you look at the other works in the exhibition that incorporate a variety of existing objects including store gates, MRIs, Chase construction signs, and church pews, consider how the idea of support - physical, psychological, spiritual, and monetary - connects them all.
Last year, the artist Yun Fei Ji came to meet with a group of young people I was working with at the Museum of Modern Art. He was rather shy and spoke matter-of-factly about the incredibly detailed and large painting the students were observing. His presence echoed his painting style — subdued but filled with incredibly colorful stories.
Ji paints in a traditional Chinese painting style (specifically from the Song Dynasty that begun over a thousand years ago). Amazing to think that they can be so fresh while using the same materials (mineral dyes on mulberry paper) that artists have used for millenia. On trips, he documents what he sees by taking photos and making numerous sketches in little notebooks.
Currently on view at James Cohan Gallery is a selection of work that he created after witnessing parades during the 60th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China last October. He was among the crowds observing the parades and began to realize how many police and state officials were among the celebrants. The paintings are a result of the feeling he gets from this display of governmental control. According to an article in the New York Times, “he rode home to place an online order for “The 120 Days of Sodom,” the scandalous 18th-century French novel by the Marquis de Sade. “For some reason,” explained Mr. Ji, who was born in Beijing but is now an American citizen, “whenever I go to China, I feel the need to transgress.”
Migrants of the Three gorges Dam, 2009. Courtesy James Cohan Gallery.
Looking closely at the work, you notice that the paintings focus on the mixture of people and landscape. The people have been forced from their homes and are moving their belongings, including the buildings they inhabited during the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China. As the artist stated in an interview with John Yau in the Brooklyn Rail, “You know, villagers had to dig up their ancestors’ graves and take their bones with them; it’s quite sad.”
As you scan the landscape, mixed in with the trees and rocks and all of the people and their belongings are also strange creatures — is that a large monkey figure with human legs? Does it represent a specific person or is it a spirit in the landscape? In many of the works, skeletons are walking around among the living, helping them shuffle along. Each figure is unique, but often of the same colors as those of the landscape. The relationship between them is apparent but subtle and an element of fantasy runs through. The landscape seems ancient as the people are constantly in flux.
What are the relationships you notice between the people and their belongings? What stories do these objects tell us about them? And how would you describe their connection to their surroundings?
Yun Fei Ji
Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts James Cohan Gallery - 533 West 26th Street
until March 27, 2010
Yin Xiuzhen sits in front of her suitcase-installation.
Ecology, nostalgia, travel, and mutual trust and understanding. The subject matter that the artist Yin Xiuzhen has chosen for her work is realized with an imaginative flourish that is at once welcoming, engaging, personal, and universal.
Resting on the floor in her exhibition on view in Chelsea are several used suitcases opened to flaunt detailed models of cities made from old clothes and other found materials.
“When I began this series, I was constantly traveling. I saw the baggage conveyor at the baggage claim every time I traveled. Many people waited there. I was one of them. Since I always traveled with a huge suitcase, it felt like I was traveling with my home.” Yin Xiuzhen
Since they are made from used used suitcases and worn-out clothes and the models inside them are constructed from experiences rather than strict cartography, the suitcases are considered portraits. The series is called Portable Cities. As described on the gallery’s website, ‘Portable Cities: Vancouver, 2003 constructs a visual and audio portrait of the city from used clothes, a city map, and audio equipment. ‘
Washing the River, 1995.
Also on view are photographs depicting actions that the artist has created in various sites throughout China. One work, called Washing the River is a set of 4 photographs of a piece created by freezing ten cubic meters of the Lhasa River, which is heavily polluted. People walking by were invited to pick up brushes and scrub the blocks clean, participating in a symbolic environmental act.
The question of how life and art are connected is answered in a very real way through Yin Xiuzhen’s work. If you have a chance to see the work in person, think about what other ways her life overlaps with her art.
Collective Subconscious, 2007.
You also have a chance to physically interact with her work Collective Subconscious. It is currently on view in Projects 92 at the Museum of Modern Art until May 24 and viewers can enter the space and sit to have a relaxing conversation with their fellow museum-goer.
Works: 1994 - 2008
Yin Xiuzhen Chambers Fine Art - 522 West 19th Street
until March 20, 2010
#class, Organized by Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida at Edward Winkleman Gallery. 2010.
On view now and with events taking place daily until March 20 is an exhibition/conference called #class (h-tag class) at Edward Winkleman Gallery. Artists Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida have created what the artists describe as “a ‘think tank’, where we will work with guest artists, critics, academics, dealers, collectors and anyone else who would like to participate to examine the way art is made and seen in our culture and to identify and propose alternatives and/or reforms to the current market system. By ‘current market system’ we mean the commercial model and attendant commodification of art, but also the unquantifiable, intangible, unpaid aspects of participating in the art world.”
At Winkleman, the artists have created three different areas, including a Think Space, a Work Space, and a Market Space, that represent the existing structures and multifaceted spaces that artists inhabit. Entering the gallery, you immediately see the Think and Work space; the Market space is, interestingly, in the back of the gallery where you can put a bid on original works by the artists (pictured above: Purchase Agreement, Powhida and Dalton, 2010 & Ed’s Rules, Powhida, 2010.) These pieces ask you to state your rationale for wanting to own them and then name your own price. A committee, including the artists themselves will review your claims and make a decision.
There are also several resources and supplemental materials online: a live webcam feature, links (Ben Davis’s 9.5 Theses on Art and Class is an enlightening breakdown of class systems in the artworld), a schedule of the events taking place, and more.
Both artists have created work in the past critical of the artworld: Powhida’s recent indictment of the New Museum was presented on the cover of the Brooklyn Rail, and Dalton has engaged viewers with work that provides souvenirs to take home or by asking questions, “Are Times of Recession Good For Art?“
The issues of access and distribution in the arts are pressing concerns and are determined by funding and the valuation of arts in our culture. If we intend to support the arts and art education because we find value there, what is the best way to do that?
Arts education has a great many contributors that deal with learning and learners on a daily-basis in the public schools, community organizations, galleries, and studios of NYC. Many of the organizations have been founded by artists, and almost all employ artists as freelance instructors, writers, curriculum developers, evaluators, etc. Education is a central part of the lives of many artists and the fact that artists are increasingly taking over commercial gallery spaces to do this is heartening (especially for ARTime, since we already use them as our classrooms!)
What’s left to do but begin participating in the discussion, which could be the real purpose of art.
#class Winkleman Gallery - 621 West 27th Street
until March 20, 2010
Ida Applebroog. Monalisa, Installation View, 2010. Hauser and Wirth Gallery.
Forty years ago, artist Ida Applebroog, mother of 4 took refuge at night in the one place of solitude: the bathtub. As she soaked for several hours each evening, she drew her body, specifically her crotch in a series of sketch pads. The endeavor resulted in more than 160 vagina drawings. The year was 1969, she was turning 40 years old, known by her married name Ida Horowitz, and unhappily living in San Diego. When she and her family returned to NY in 1974, the drawings were packed away and never meant to be seen by anyone else. As recounted in a recent NY Times article, Applebroog and her assistants in early 2009 were rummaging around in the basement of her home and studio near Broome Street and opened a box containing a blue 69-cent Strathmore Alexis drawing pad full of her bathroom sketches.
A selection of these drawings form the central element of Applebroog’s new installation Monalisa on view at Hauser & Wirth New York. They were scanned into the computer, digitally manipulated, printed on translucent Japanese gampi paper and occasionally enhanced with washes of pale pink, grey, and yellow. More than a hundred skin-like panels are stretched over the wooden frame of a structure referred to by the artist as “Monalisa’s house” but more accurately it’s the scale of a room. As the press release proposes, “Applebroog’s architecture - an updated ‘little sanctuary’ conceived through the lens of 80 years of life - makes home and body interchangeable analogs, containing the terrors and pleasures of existing in both.”
As you circle the structure, consider that you can’t enter the space but peer between the vagina images to see the inside. In the catalogue essay, Julia Bryan-Wilson writes, “… the home is not a stable location but an unfixed nexus of sexist violence, perversion and thwarted safety, as well as tenderness, secret stolen moments, bodily pleasure, and honest labor.”
The back wall of the interior features a large-scale blood red woman who the artist calls Monalisa and the only other figure appears at the “front door” and Applebroog calls him Brian. To understand how Applebroog creates these creepy figures watch these 2 videos from ART: 21.
Visit upstairs to see a selection of Applebroog’s original india ink drawings made with a crow-quill pen. The sketches, some water-stained, are grouped together by the notebook they came out of or as the artist describes it the “family” they are a part of. Notice the range of representation from highly detailed to minimal abstractions. How do they compare with their digital cousins downstairs?
If you have time, sit at the table Hauser & Wirth provide upstairs and read the engaging and highly informative exhibition catalogue. Bryan-Wilson offers details about Applebroog’s previous and current work, art historical precedents including Marcel Duchamp , Louise Bourgeois, and Tracey Emin, relationship to the women’s movement, and much more.
Don’t miss Applebroog’s self-portraits that are part the 1969 sketch pad drawings and on view in the first room at the entrance to the gallery. Throughout her career, Applebroog has been characterized as making unsettlingly dark work but as she said in the NY Times article, ” I don’t see my work as particularly tough. But we live in a world that’s tough, and this is what happens. It just comes out of my head, and it’s there.” It’s inspiring to see that at almost 81 years old, Ida Applebroog hasn’t compromised one little bit!
For more information about Ida Applebroog, check out her website and ART:21.
Ida Applebroog
Monalisa
Hauser and Wirth - 32 East 69th Street
until March 6, 2010
A new PLAN is available featuring a guide through the works of Superflex, El Anatsui and Leonardo Drew. Works by these artists are on view in Chelsea right now - so take ARTime with you to see the work in person, or use it as a virtual tour. The galleries are free and the PLAN is free!
‘We Don’t Have a Manifesto’ is a quote from Bjørnstjerne Christiansen of Superflex who goes on to state that his group works within the situations that they find themselves, that they are not dogmatic. This idea is evident in the work of El Anatsui and Leonardo Drew, both of whom use materials taken from their surroundings. Everything in these works is contingent, and therefore of the moment, poetic, and approachable.
For his first solo gallery show in 2002 Life is a Gift, Christian Holstad transformed Daniel Reich’s gallery (which was also the gallerist’s apartment) into the plastic-enclosed bedroom of David Vetter, known as theBoy in the Bubble. Born with a defective immune system, David Vetter was forced to live in a germ-free plastic environment isolated from human touch. Holstad used this true story to explore the physical and emotional bonds between people. In a DIY and craft-informed approach, he presented a range of two- and three-dimensional works that incorporated knitting, quilting, crocheting, collage, drawing, and erasure. From the patchwork quilt with woolen viral pods to the patterned collages of coupling “bubble” boys, Holstad demonstrated his investment in handcrafted labor-intensive process and revealed his inventive thoughtfulness, sense of humor, emotional vulnerability, and sexual directness.
In his current show The World’s Gone Beautiful at Daniel Reich Gallery, Holstad responds to the current economic situation, consumer culture, and proliferation of big box stores.
As you approach the gallery, notice that the security gate has been pulled down and only a sign on the door states “open” for business. Upon entering, take a moment to observe the installation of soft-sculpture shopping carts draped over low pedestals or hung from hooks on the wall.
Do the pedestals remind you of a stage or a pallet used to stack and transport goods? Don’t miss the spotlight on the back wall and the shadow from the security gate as it falls across the shopping carts in the front of the gallery.
Christian Holstad. The Worlds Gone Beautiful, 2009.
The carts are handmade from a variety of materials including the luxe fabrics of silver lame and ultrasuede. They seem to have personas. How do they appear to you? What do they communicate to you?
Each shopping cart is titled The Road to Hell is Paved and followed by the name of a chain store in parentheses. Do you recognize which stores the carts come from, for example, Target with it’s red basket? What does it mean if you do or don’t recognize the carts?
From the shopping carts, check out Portraits #1 - 4,intricate collages of overflowing public garbage cans. Look closely to discover the painstaking cut-paper technique Holstad employs to render the highly detailed images.
Found on the street corners of NYC, the pails contain a range of discarded items - my personal favorite being Portrait #3: the overturned can with roses, stroller, bra, studded collar, prosciutto with melon and much more. What do these scenes make you think about? Also, notice the chain-link fence that appears in the background suggestive of an urban schoolyard. Can you find the hopscotch board and playground equipment?
As thepress release explains, Holstad is “concerned with beginnings and endings as expressed in the life and death of ‘things’ metaphorically born in shopping carts, ‘used-up’ and then buried in garbage pails.” Read the press release for more insightful suggestions such as “… we are not so different from the elastic enveloping carts, all rather ordinary, despite our aspiration for difference. We are rather, insatiable empty vessel’s looking to be fulfilled…”.
Before you leave, don’t miss in the back of the gallery Consider Yourself a Guest, a towel hand-embroidered by the artist that is a genuine and sly performative offering by Holstad of his blood, sweat, semen, and tears.
For more info, visit Christian Holstad’s website and listen to a short talk he gave at MoMA.
Christian Holstad
The World’s Gone Beautiful Daniel Reich Gallery- 537A West 23rd Street
until February 26, 2010
When I came across Omer Fast’s Glendive Foley (2000) in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, I immediately wanted to know who this guy was! Fast presented a 2-channel video installation featuring on one monitor: the facades of the suburban houses of Glendive, Montana (the smallest television market in the US) and on the other: six smaller inset frames showing the artist producing the soundtrack of the suburban community with his hands and mouth. The foley or sound effects he created whistling, hissing, and smacking lips (among other things) are recombined to imitate wind, insects, birds, dogs, lawnmovers, and passing cars. I was intrigued by Fast’s insightful and playful depiction of “reality” that at the same time is revealed to be fake by the common use of artificially produced and synchronized sound effects.
Currently living in Berlin, Fast was born in Jerusalem in 1972, came to NYC as a teenager, and received his BA from Tufts University (1995), BFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and MFA from Hunter College (2000). As Fast was quoted in New York Magazine, “I don’t deal directly with reality but with representations and stories. The truth basis of what I’m doing is not interesting to me. In an act of storytelling, there is a truth.”
The press release for his current show at Postmasters states that “these exact words [in above quote] were never uttered in this order. But, like in Fast’s works, it is precisely in re-telling, editing, interpretation, misunderstanding and subjective recollections that we encounter the kernels of what is real.”
(Images: Omer Fast. ”Take a Deep Breath”, 2008 - production stills. Courtesy Postmasters Gallery)
Take a deep breath on view at Postmasters uses a familiar Fast strategy of interview and documentary style. He has used the interview format in previous works including Spielberg’s List(2003), Godville (2005), and The Casting (2007). Listen as Fast describes his ideas and process as it relates toThe Casting.
As with many of Fast’s video works, Take a Deep Breath begins with an interview of a real person recounting an actual event. In this case, it’s Martin F. who in the summer of 2002 was standing outside a Falafel shop in Jerusalem when it exploded. A trained medic, he was faced with the dilemma of performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a young man who had lost both legs as well as an arm. The situation is heightened by Martin F.’s subsequent realization that the young man was the suicide bomber. You may be thinking this is way too gruesome but hold on because in the middle of the most dramatic moment, the camera pulls back to reveal the film company under the direction of Omer shooting the story in Los Angeles. Despite the mood shift from horror to comedy, the scenes make apparent the bias and insensitivity of the film crew re-telling the tragic and complex event.
(Image: Omer Fast. De Grote Boodschap, 2007 - production still. Courtesy Postmasters Gallery)
Instead of the documentary approach, Fast presents in Der Grotshoppe the intertwined lives of 6 fictional characters. The cast includes a drug-addicted elderly white woman, her grandson, her caregiver a young black woman who is also the lover of the grandson, and 2 neighbors: the wife is a flight attendant and the husband stays at home often listening to the conversations next door. When the grandmother passes away, the grandson shows the flat to a Middle Eastern man. Things heat up when the husband next door hears what he believes to be Arabic being spoken. Our allegiance to who’s the good guy/gal and understanding of the “truth” is constantly changing as the scenes shift from one apartment to the next.
(Image: Omer Fast. Nostalgia III, 2009 - production still. Courtesy Whitney Museum)
Having won the 2008 Whitney Biennial’s Bucksbaum award for Casting one of Fast’s perks in addition to the $100,000 award is a solo show at the Whitney. Currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art is his 3-part video installation called Nostalgia. Here the main subject is the plight of the refugee seeking asylum with the fragmented narrative centered on a former child soldier from Nigeria. As Holland Cotter concluded in his New York Times review of Omer Fast’s shows at the Whitney and Postmasters, “He’s amazingly good, and getting better.”
Omer Fast Postmasters - 459 West 19th Street
until February 13, 2010
“We consider it a response to a series of recent activities in Western Europe––riots that looked like small civil wars, during which many cars were burned…but it’s also part of a larger project of “symbolic” films we’re working on, which uses cinematic models and tries not to emphasize anything too specific.” - Superflex in Artforum, Jan ‘09.
Burning automobiles probably have a different symbolic meaning in the States than in Europe at this point in time. But the film was shot in Vietnam — quite a mix!
Superflex Peter Blum Gallery - 526 West 29th Street
until March 22, 2010
The Ghanaian-born, Nigerian-based artist El Anatsui opens a show of work tomorrow at Jack Shainman Gallery. In anticipation (because we haven’t seen what will be on view), we’re posting a video from the Met that shows him installing a piece there. The artist describes his work as cloth made from metal and has 16 - 20 assistants that prepare his materials: used bottle caps from liquor bottles. He says he recognizes the differences in the way that the each folds the bottle caps and states:
“Art grows out of each particular situation and I believe that artists are better off working with whatever their environment throws up. I think that’s what has been happening in Africa for a long time, in fact not only in Africa but the whole world, except that maybe in the West they might have developed these ‘professional’ materials. But I don’t think that working with such prescribed materials would be very interesting to me–industrially produced colors for painting. I believe that color is inherent in everything, and it’s possible to get color from around you, and that you’re better off picking something which relates to your circumstances and your environment than going to buy a readymade color.” El Anatsui: Art in America, May 2006.
A visitor to his work can read a historical significance (the bottle caps ”encapsulate the essence of the alcoholic drinks which were brought to Africa by Europeans as trade items at the time of the earliest contact between the two peoples.” El Anatsui), and a contemporary significance (the leftovers from our own material culture). Can’t wait to see what other stories get evoked in this upcoming exhibition.
