October 27, 2008

ART REVIEW

‘Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence’ at USC’s Fisher Museum of Art
The exhibition casts a cool, shadowy light on transience and morality

By Leah Ollman

 

Jim Campbell, Library, 2004, L.E.D. continuous-motion image with attached Plexiglas and photogravure, 26-1/4 x 31-1/2 x 3 inches

 

The original phantasmagorias were theatrical thrill rides, equal parts haunted house, communal séance and intense dream. Spectacles that played in Paris, London and beyond beginning about 1800, they used pre-cinematic rear projections, smoke and manipulated lantern slides to create illusions of figures advancing and receding, creatures materializing and dissolving.

Viewers knew what they were getting into — the shows were entertainment, not scientific efforts to raise the dead — but the experience tapped into primal human wonder about mortality and its residual traces, the immateriality of the soul and the foggy boundary between absence and presence.

Today we have more ingenious means of conjuring convincing apparitions, but the same basic questions persist: What happens to us after death? How tangible a force is memory? Why do the imagined, the feared and the desired seem at times so real?

“Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence” at USC’s Fisher Museum of Art presents the work of a dozen international artists who explore such fundamental mysteries using the substances so often associated with them: light, shadow and atmosphere.

Overall, it’s a relatively tight show — physically involving, emotionally absorbing and conceptually sound.  Each artist is represented by a single work, dating from the 1980s to the present, but all have demonstrated over time a broader, deeper engagement with the issues at hand.  No artistic integrity was sacrificed in the name of thematic consistency — and that’s one of the show’s most impressive absences.

 

 Jim Campbell, Library, 2004, L.E.D. continuous-motion image with attached Plexiglas and photogravure, 26-1/4 x 31-1/2 x 3 inches

 

The spectacles range in intensity from whispers to roars.  One of the quietest works, the Colombian Oscar Muñoz’s “Aliento (Breath),” is also one of the most poignant.  Five mirrored discs hang at eye level and bear no image but the viewer’s own reflection until breathed upon.  Condensation causes another face to emerge, a small photographic portrait of a deceased man or woman, there only briefly, then once again submerged within the disc’s glossy surface.  The faces’ anonymity and the brevity of their appearance act as powerful metaphors for our transient condition, our lives as fleeting as a single breath.

Muñoz’s delicate act of breathing life into vanished souls competes with the foggy extravaganza of a neighboring installation.  Danish artist Jeppe Hein’s “Smoking Bench” blankets you with vaporous plumes when you sit on it.  A nearby mirror allows you the pleasure of watching yourself momentarily vanish, a gimmicky but amusing smoke-and-mirrors illusion.

Vapors are central to several other works in the show.  Five portable humidifiers in Teresa Margolles’ “Aire (Air)” emit gentle streams of air moistened, in part, by water that was used to clean corpses in a Mexican morgue.  The notion is stirring, but the piece is otherwise mute.  In “Experiencing Cinema,” a better use of atmospherics, Brazilian Rosângela Rennó revives an early 19th century phantasmagoria practice of projecting still pictures onto veils of smoke.  Photographs, gathered from found family albums, cohere briefly on the smoke screen; then both image and screen dissipate, mortality again provocatively aligned with ephemerality.

Atmosphere is an active, even aggressive force in Laurent Grasso’s untitled three-minute film of a roiling cloud tumbling through the streets of Paris.  The foggy mass pushes forward like a biblical pillar of smoke, endowed with a will.  It fills every street, enveloping cars in its path, persisting with a constant low rumble.  The image is mesmerizing and beautiful, even as it recalls 9/11’s death-infused clouds of dust.

 

 

 Jim Campbell, Library, 2004, L.E.D. continuous-motion image with attached Plexiglas and photogravure, 26-1/4 x 31-1/2 x 3 inches

 

William Kentridge’s short film, “Shadow Procession,” similarly fuses the epic with the historically specific.  Silhouetted cut paper figures parade across the screen: workers, scavengers and fighters, the injured and maimed, mothers with children, a man hanged, another being beaten, the victorious and the defeated.  The displacement that comes from violent upheaval, as in South Africa in the ’90s, when this work was made, fuels this dark parable of persistence.

The evocative power of shadows and reflections dominates the remaining works.  Christian Boltanski’s orbiting dancer, seen in shadow through a partly opened door, is mildly intriguing for its calculated elusiveness.  In Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s installation, the movement of viewers triggers the brightness of a row of low-hanging incandescent bulbs, creating a play of overlapping shadows on the opposite wall, but the effort amounts to little.  Regina Silveira’s perspectively distorted shadow of a reader (in vinyl, adhered to wall and floor) holding an actual book, feels slight, as if it ought to be part of a larger installation.

Viewers become animators in French artist Michel Delacroix’s installation.  His four portraits, on mirrored plates covered with a thin layer of water, are mounted on tall, slim-legged tripods so the faces cast a ghoulish reflection on the wall behind them.  As you walk on the wooden platform beneath them, the features warp further, rippling and quavering like ghosts released by permission of your movement.

Jim Campbell layers a photogravure over a grid of programmed LED lights to create an image of shadowy figures moving up and down the steps of the New York Public Library.  Human presence appears as shifting, translucent gray washes across the fixed stone edifice, resulting in a lovely meditation on time, endurance and transience.

 

 Jim Campbell, Library, 2004, L.E.D. continuous-motion image with attached Plexiglas and photogravure, 26-1/4 x 31-1/2 x 3 inches

 

Danish artist Julie Nord introduces a welcome note of play, fittingly tinged with the ominous.  Her wall drawing illustrates a sequence of hand positions and their corresponding shadows of dogs and rabbits.  In the final frame, the one-to-one relationship breaks down and the dark demons of the unconscious take over, unleashing shadows of a fire-breathing, fork-tongued dragon and a vaguely human, clawed beast.

This is the final stop for the exhibition, curated by José Roca for the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República in Bogotá, Colombia, and Independent Curators International, based in New York.  It may not consistently get under the skin, but it regularly sends a tingle across it.

 

Ollman is a freelance writer.

 

© 2008 Los Angeles Times

October 12, 2008 p. WE10

 

ART REVIEW
An Artist’s Roots in Sculpture, Reclaimed

 

By Benjamin Genocchio

 

 

Hannah Wilke, Geo-Logic 4 to One from Generation Process Series, 1980-1982, acrylic on ceramic and wood, 48 x 48 x 3 inches

 

“Hannah Wilke: Gestures,” at the Neuberger Museum of Art, is a complex exhibition with a simple point: that Ms. Wilke’s roots and practice as a sculptor have been largely forgotten, replaced by a narrow view of her work as a photographer and performance artist.

 It is not entirely clear how this historical oversight happened, though Tracy Fitzpatrick, the exhibition curator, has a theory: the widespread display and dispersal of reproductions of Ms. Wilke’s photographs, stripped from their original context, perpetrated a condensed vision of her art.

 The exhibition puts sculpture back in the picture, beginning with a concentrated look at early, little-known clay pieces by Ms. Wilke (1940-1993).  Among the displays are several of her small, fragile clay forms in the shape of female genitalia.

 

 

Hannah Wilke, Fork and Spoon, 1974, kneeded erasers, metal utensils, fork; 7-3/8 inches, spoon; 7-1/4 inches
Courtesy and Copyright © Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt_Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles

 

Produced in the early 1960s, these sculptures represent some of the first explicit vaginal imagery arising from the feminist art movement.  Ms. Wilke was not just an experimental artist, but a feminist pioneer.

 Further displays show that Ms. Wilke worked with clay throughout her career, but she also experimented with other sculptural materials.  There are sculptures made of latex, wax, cookie dough, erasers, chewing gum, Play-Doh — even laundry lint.

 

Hannah Wilke, Landry Lint, C.O.’s, 1974, set of 12 sculptures, Lint, various colors, 13-1/2 x 13-1/2 inches
Courtesy and Copyright © Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles

 

All the materials are malleable, and all her sculptures are based on a specific method of folding, through which she turns flat, surfaces into three-dimensional vessels.  The final shapes have vaginal connotations of varying degrees.  Sometimes the forms are laid out along the floor in a line or arranged in a grid, but beyond the momentary delight of discovering a work’s unexpected material, the shapes can all start to get monotonous.

Ms. Wilke was aware of this concern.  Her roots as a sculptor lie in minimalism, but she never wanted to be associated with the minimalists, who prized standardized geometric shapes and forms.  Her sculptures, she argued, were different insofar as each of them was unique.

She also employed color to dramatic effect.  Some of her folds are painted in bright primary and secondary colors, while others, like the “Generation Process” series from 1982, are spattered and flecked with paint.  The point was to make each one different, to give it a personality.  Among the hundreds of folds in this show, no two are the same.

Most probably, the choice of colors was also deeply personal.  Nine ceramic folds titled “Blue Skies,” begun in 1987 but completed shortly before her death six years later from lymphoma, are dark and bleak — a mess of swirls of blue and white on a black field.

 

Hannah Wilke, Blue Skies, 1987-92, 9 multi-colored painted ceramics on 9 black painted boards, 7 x 59 x 89 inches
Courtesy and Copyright © Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles

 

Given her work with body imagery, it was inevitable perhaps that Ms. Wilke should also begin to work with her own body.  In her 1974 video “Gestures,” shown here, we see her using her skin as a sculptural material as she slowly kneads and pulls at her face.

This led to other videos and photographs of herself, usually in the nude, the most important and best known of which are the photographic body-art pieces from the “S.O.S-Starification Object Series,” begun 1974, in which she merged sculpture and her body by creating little vulva-like sculptures out of chewing gum which she then stuck all over herself.

One image from the “S.O.S” series is here.  It shows the artist, naked to the waist, a veil wrapped about her head, her face and body covered in the chewing-gum sculptures, which look like hives or welts, or even some kind of painful tribal scarification.

The display could have included more than one of these works, along with other examples of the artist’s body-art photography and video.  (I am thinking of the photographs of Ms. Wilke in pin-up poses.)  However, given the show’s ambition to resurrect her sculpture, it is understandable that the curator has sought to minimize the inclusion of this line of work.

Over all, this show is not so much a retrospective as a kind of art history search-and-rescue project.  It is not easy to experience or even to like, given the confrontational, repetitive use of female sexuality.  But in earnestness and for art historical purpose, “Hannah Wilke: Gestures” sets a standard to which most museum shows don’t even bother to aspire.

 

“Hannah Wilke: Gestures,” Neuberger Museum of Art, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, through Jan. 25.  Information: www.neuberger.org or (914) 251-6100.

 

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Alice Aycock’s large sculpture is represented in MOMA’s group exhibition:

Here’s Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art

September 10, 2008 – March 23,  2009

 

 Alice Aycock, Project Entitled “Studies for a Town“, 1977. Wood, 9′ 11/2″ x 11′ 7 3/4″ x 12′ 11″.

Collection: Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

Here is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art, the fifth in a series of ongoing installations in moma’s second floor Contemporary Galleries, brings together more than 100 works of film and performance, photography, painting, sculpture, prints, drawing, and video drawn from moma’s collection. Here is Every attempts to link today’s artists with their historical predecessors from the 1970s, an era whose cultural and sociopolitical shifts profoundly impacted the current diversity of contemporary art. Topics such as the relationship between the body and sculpture, the Vietnam War and its legacy, the representation of the changing urban landscape, political dissent, and the radical transformation of media culture map a narrative through the art of the recent past. – Artdaily.org   (more…) 

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 Cherie Benner Davis

Southern Exposure (Group Exhibition) @ Ruby Green, Nashville, TN

October 18 – November 29, 2008

 

Cherie Benner Davis, If I Ruled the World (small), 2006, oil on panel

 

Southern Exposure is a sampler of drawings by fifteen southern California artists. The curator, Mery Lynn McCorkle, is originally from Georgia and has observed the parallels between work executed in California and in the South.
Both areas are extremely influenced by nature, its colors, textures and rhythms. This exhibit provides an opportunity for residents of Nashville to see preparatory sketches and studies as well as finished works by some of southern California’s most interesting artists. The artists include Cherie Benner Davis (SolwayJones Gallery), Tao Urban (Acuna-Hansen Gallery), Joe Biel (Acuna-Hansen Gallery), Timothy Nolan (Carl Berg Gallery), Thomas Muller (Haus Gallery), Nick Agid (Domestic Setting Gallery), Rebecca Niederlander (Carl Berg Gallery), Heather Brown, Mara Lonner, Alison Foshee (Carl Berg Gallery), Virginia Katz (Jancar Gallery), Andre Yi (Carl Berg Gallery), Samantha Fields (Kim Light Gallery), Roland Reiss, Dawn Arrowsmith (Tom Jancar Gallery).

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Jim Campbell is included in the group exhibition:

Phantasmagoria; Specters of Absence  @ USC Fisher Museum of Art

September 3 – November 8, 2008

Jim Campbell, Library, 2004, custom electronics,  L.E.D. panel, photogravure on rice, treated Plexiglas diffusion screen, 22 x 30 x 3 inches

Long before large art exhibitions and blockbuster shows, crowds were awed by traveling shows called “phantasmagoria” in which familiar scenes and stories were performed with the use of magic lanterns and rear projections to create dancing shadows and frightening theatrical effects. These lively, interactive events incorporated storytelling, mythology, and theater in a single art form that entertained while providing a space for thinking about the otherworldly-playing with the viewers’ anxieties regarding death and the afterlife. A comparable trend can be seen in works by contemporary artists who create ghostly images to reflect on notions of absence and loss, using spectral effects and immaterial mediums such as shadows, fog, mist, and breath. These artists’ approaches range from the festive to the ironic, counterbalancing the emotionally charged, often somber implications of their subject matter.

 

Jim Campbell is participating in two related events to this exhibition in USC Fisher Museum of Art:

1.    Appearances and Disappearances,  October 10, 2008

 2.    Icons of Culture: A Lecture by Artist Jim Campbell,  November 5, 2008

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Paul DeMarinis

New Works    @   Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, Ca

September 4 – October 4, 2008

UNTETHERED; A scuplture garden of readymades  @  Eyebeam, NY

September 25 – October 25, 2008

Paul DeMarinis, Hypnica I, 2007 , vintage wooden metronome, custom electronics, 9-1/4 x 4-1/2 x 4-1/2 inches

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Jean-Pierre Hébert in a solo exhibition:

Drawing With the Mind, Curated by Elaine LeVasseur

Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum

August 30 – November 9, 2008

Jean-Pierre Hébert, Vermilion, Ceruleum – 0804291902, 2008

Exploring what is now known as “computational drawing,” Hébert composes computer code to realize mesmerizing images on a variety of plotters. Seeing the computer as a “tool for the mind” and his plotter as a replacement for his hand, he forms a direct connection between his mind and finished works of art.

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Diane Landry

 

SOLO EXHIBITION;

Madonnas @ la galerie du nouvel-ontario (La GNO), Ontario, Canada

October 29 – November 22, 2008

 

Diane Landry, Stolen Water (Les Eaux volées) , 2007, washing machine, photographies on acrylic, mirror, lighting, motion sensor

“My projects attempt to modify emotional memory linked to the recognition of certain objects. When we remember an object, our memory doesn’t recall just its formal characteristics, but also the sensorial and emotional reactions we experienced at the time of contact. The emotion this object generates is linked to the object in the same way its name is. I try to insert new emotional links in other people’s memory. “  -  Diane Landry

 

 

Retrospective Exhibition, “The Defibrillators”

Musée d’art de Joliette (Quebec)

September 21, 2008 – January 4, 2009

 

 Diane Landry, École d’aviation, Installation View. Courtesy the artist

Diane Landry takes her inspiration from the world around her to create playful environments that plunge the visitor into an experience of sights, sounds and emotions. To make her works she recycles, transforms, manipulates and falsifies everyday objects, wrenching them from their original function to imbue them with a new kind of poetry. Incorporating into her works the time element of performance and the spatial dimension of installation, this multi-disciplinary artist seeks to destabilize viewers, stimulating in them a different perception of familiar objects.

 

 

 

GROUP EXHIBITION;

The 2008 Shanghai eArts Festival, eLandscape

Shanghai Science and Technology Museum & Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shangai, China

October 18 – November 10, 2008

Curator: Richard Castelli (France)

 

Diane Landry, Mandala Perrier, 2002, bottles of water, motors, selected object, aluminum, wood, halogen lamp, scuplture; 39-1/3 x 39-1/3 x 19-1/2 inches projection; 23 x 11-1/2 feet

 

eLANDSCAPES is not only perpetuate the tradition of panoramas with the added value of stereoscopy and interactivity but it proposes many others ways to considers the concept of landscape.

eLANDSCAPES involves a total re-working of the screen-spectator relation for which new technologies and new narrations are necessary. Whether immersive, labyrinthine, and/or interactive, these new possibilities are bringing numerous centres of research and production together with new artists who are liberating themselves from the constraints of the classical screen and are proposing to draw out and to sculpt the projected image and to shatter the relation between the spectator and the works.

 

 

Vue Sur Quebec: Manifestation Internationale d’Art De Québec, in partnership with Jump Ship Rat

Contemporary Urban Centre, Liverpool UK

September 20 – November 2, 2008

 

Diane Landry, Mandala Naya, Detail View

 

Vue sur Québec showcases eleven artists, each of them featured in previous Québec City biennials. In addition to the exhibition at the Contemporary Urban Centre, three billboard works on Leece Street and street performances by BGL complete the show.  The work of these artists from Québec responds to Liverpool Biennials theme of MADE UP. Works in this Biennial – as well as recent work of many quebecois artists – are those that explore themes of allusion and ambiguity; evoking life, happiness and a life force that also means to enter and reveal places of paradox and contradiction. (more…)

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 Tom Marioni

GROUP EXHIBITION

The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

November 08, 2008 – February 08, 2009

 

Tom Marioni, The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends is the Highest Form of Art, 1970-2008, installation view, ART LA 2007

Well-known examples of participatory art set the stage for a handful of restaged historic installations and new commissions that invite the public to take an active role. Revealing how artists pioneered many of the collaborative tactics associated with the Web 2.0 zeitgeist, The Art of Participation will change form and content as visitors contribute — both at the museum and online.

 

As a related event, Tom Marioni with guest bartenders will host his salon installation, “The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends is the Highest Form of Art“

Thursdays, November 13, 2008 – February 05, 2009 (except November 27, December 25, and January 01)
5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.

 

 

Tom Marioni, The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends is the Highest Form of Art, 1970-2008, installation view, ART LA 2007

 

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Susan Silton is included in a group exhibition in Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego:

Memory is Your Image of Perfection

MCASD Downtown

August 3 – November 30, 2008

 

 Susan Silton, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, 2006, Chromogenic print, 72″ x 65″

 

Memory Is Your Image of Perfection—which takes its title from a photograph by Barbara Kruger—investigates the subject of memory through associations, oppositions, and overlaps amongst photographic genres that range from straight documentary photography to manipulated photography. Often driven by a Feminist critique of the visual languages and politics of representation, artists in the exhibition have expanded the usages and limits of photographic media. They have exploited the ambiguities created by trust in photography as a realistic record and the artists’ desire to express their own subjective and individual positions through this medium.  – press release    (more…) 

 

As a related event, Susan Silton will perform She Had a Laugh Like a Beefsteak, at this venue on

Friday, November 7th. 

 

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Joan Snyder

One Blue Sky  @ Danforth Museum of Art, MA

September 6 – November 23, 2008

Joan Snyder, My Lai, 1970, collage installation, 32 x 32 inches

This exhibit presents an opportunity for Museum visitors to view many works not included in the Danforth Museum of Art’s 2005 retrospective survey Joan Snyder, A Painting Survey, 1969-2005, which traveled to The Jewish Museum in New York. The ten works in this show are all politically motivated, with collaged newspaper photographs that focus on the plight of children in troubled times.

 

 

…and seeking the sublime  @  Nielsen Gallery, NY

 September 13 – October 18, 2008

 

 

Joan Snyder, A Girl’s Life, 2008, acrylic, herbs, rosebuds, velvet, on burlap, 48 x 36 inches

courtesy Nielsen Gallery

Hannah Wilke: Gestures

Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase NY
October 3, 2008 – January 25, 2009

Needed-Erase-Her #4, 1976, 13-1/2 x 13-1/2 inches
Copyright  © Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt_Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles

Hannah Wilke: Gestures traces the ways in which the artist’s expanded notion of sculpture threads through diverse aspects of her body of work. The exhibition will begin with a focused look at Wilke’s early sculpture and include, as examples, her early box sculptures and the gestural objects. The show will then consider the way in which Wilke’s complex conception of sculpture fed the development of her living sculptures, video, and performance art.

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