by Kat Balkoski

You’ve heard the hype. Maurizio Cattelan’s retrospective has exploded into the Rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the form of morbid mobile. Titled “All,” the show has left a long trail of critical chatter in its wake. Humorless art purists have snorted derisively at the show’s chaotic nihilism, while Cattelan fans have struggled with convolutedly articulated attempts to privilege the “concept” behind this consummate provocateur’s newest stunt. The critical assessment varies from “lots of junk,” to a “mass execution,” to “disrespectful and perverse.”

Just to be clear: these last two characterizations were intended as tentative praise. The New York Times’ Roberta Smith argued that the show’s perversity may be “just the thing for our attention-deficient time.” This thinly veiled barb at the show’s intended public (as well as its creator) doesn’t detract from Smith’s intuition that there is something particularly timely about “All.”

Apologizing in advance for my lame punning, I can only concede that my opinion of Cattelan’s retrospective is still, well, up in the air. I will only say that it reminds me, somehow, of a materialized meme. Many of Cattelan’s conceptual jokes resemble those web-based trends that humorously subvert without really threatening. The punch-line may be uncomfortably on target, but its impact fades quickly. Out attention (or lack thereof) is soon caught by other gags. Cattelan certainly bites the hand that feeds him (see the appallingly dehumanizing portrait of Stephanie Seymour), but he is hardly a political radical or an art-world outcast.

Of course, my meme analogy is a little anachronistic, as Cattelan got his start in the mid-80s, long before the Internet’s heyday. Yet his conceptual sculpture seems to operate according to the same aesthetic of pastiche that sets the tone for much of our cyberculture. 

AND NOW: A tangential rant.

I have to take this opportunity to vent the frustration I experienced upon discovering that Columbia students no longer receive complimentary admission to the Guggenheim. That’s right, CU Arts has cut back on its ability to serve students and art institutions alike. I’ll abstain from passing further judgment, as I am not sufficiently informed about the budgetary constraints of Columbia’s Arts Initiative to do more than whine. 

I have to admit that the price of admission (fifteen bucks!) gave me pause. After all, all of “All” is hung from the Guggenheim’s Occulus! It’s more or less entirely visible from the ground floor! And the whole concept behind the retrospective hinges on the undoing of (chrono)logical retrospectives! But I’m glad that I paid for my ticket and wound my way up the ramps. Looking down at “All,” I experienced a hypersensory overstimulation that left me both dizzy and awed. I imagined myself in Cattelan’s position, looking back/down at an uncannily unified body of work and facing dizzying levels of expectation. “What next?” To quote one of his early performance stunts (a sign he affixed to the door of a gallery where he was showing): “Torno Subito.” I’ll be back soon. 

by Emily Lazerwitz

Last Thursday, I attended one of the lectures at the interdisciplinary seminar at Cooper Union. This lecture series takes place every Thursday at 6pm, and while the class is not open to everyone, the lectures are. The purpose of the series is to bring in contemporary artists, who work in all different medias, to talk about their work and their take on the current art scene.

The lecture I attended, Marc Handelman’s Sustainability Report: Some Thoughts on an Outmoded Genre, was given by a landscape painter who does more than just paint pretty scenes. He has brought together the idea of the Sublime with modern political thought to develop a new take on nature painting. His first series of paintings are taken from a series of defense ads. He explored their use of the sublime landscape to promote destruction and weaponry. He pointed out that many of these ads do not even use military iconography, just beautiful skyscapes. It only becomes evident upon reflection that these images’ perspective is that of a missile.  

From this series he moved on to exploring Fox News ads and monumental painting. With this group he looked at the power text and the icon in presenting a political message. He distorted this message through various techniques, like enlargement, cropping, and even partially erasure.

For me, Marc’s most interesting work may be his next project: matte paintings. This lost technique originated in the film industry as the precursor to the green screen. The artist would project a photograph on glass and then paint the projected image on the glass. The end result is very beautiful and pristine. What Marc does to update the process is then save the new painting, erase what is on the glass, and project the painted image onto the glass. The paint does not come off the glass completely so the layering produces a mystical effect.

I would highly recommend these lectures to anyone with time and an interest in art. It’s not hard to get to Cooper Union and the opportunity to listen and talk to these artists should not be missed.
 
Every Thursday at 6pm
Rose Auditorium
41 Cooper Square

Rachel Valinksy is mulling over: 

“Contemporary art? As far as I am largely unconcerned, none of what is termed contemporary art, including what is exhibited and screened in various “museums of contemporary art,” for example the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney (MCA) or the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA), is contemporary¹ and most of it is not art! There can be no museum of contemporary art since while now we can have museums but not contemporaneity, with the coming of the messiah we are going to have contemporaneity but no museums—there is going to be no need for a museum in the redeemed world, a world where one finds only what is willed to eternally recur.”

1. This applies, in terms of its reception, even to the art that constructs and/or presents universes in which the signals from anything are not necessarily forthcoming, where people perceive the present, not the past.

Read more of Jala Toufic’s “The Contemporary Is Still Forthcoming” in e-flux Journal 28

by Adair Kleinpeter-Ross

“I consider space to be a material. The articulation of space has come to take precedence over other concerns. I attempt to use sculptural form to make space distinct.”

–   Richard Serra

In Junction / Cycle, his newest show at Gagosian Gallery on 24th Street, Richard Serra proves, his power to meld space in a significant and striking way. The exhibit is composed of two sculptures, “Junction” and “Cycle,” but the monumental size of both prohibits the awareness of much distinction between the two, which flow together in a maze of steel. 

Impressive in and of itself is the technical feat of installing the pieces, both of which rise almost to the top of the ceilings in the gallery. The pieces create a maze within the space, one through which the viewer can wander in order to experience the work more directly. Made of Serra’s signature weatherproof steel, the sculptures are a brilliant, orange-rust hue. The rendering of the color upon the steel is dynamic, with streaks and lines that move up and down the surface of the steel to create the appearance of texture. In fact, the bright orange color, combined with the narrow and twisting spaces created as one walks through the piece, produce a vista reminiscent of the narrow canyons in Arizona of the same shade of orange.

The two pieces, and the experience they create as a whole, stay true to Serra’s aim to use space as a material. As one walks through the paths created between the steel, it is the manipulation of space that is more striking than the walls of steel themselves. As the walls bend, so does the space contained within them, which creates a violation of the viewer’s spatial expectations. As one wanders through the sculptures, the experience becomes one based on all five senses; the narrow space between the steel walls invites touch, the sound within the space is echoed and morphed, and the heavy steel walls, impressively, makes the viewer the most cognizant of the air around them. 

 

Gagosian Gallery is located at 555 West 24th Street. Richard Serra Junction / Cycle will be on view through November 26th. 

by Zoe Harris

Olaf Breuning’s“The Art Freaks”, on view at Metro Pictures from September 23 to October 29, appears at first to be an unabashed art-historical pastiche. The exhibition is comprised of twenty-odd photographs, each of them featuring a nude model  (generally female) painted to appear like the artwork of a certain famous modern or contemporary artist, and each titled by the artist’s first name.

The series as a whole plays out like a witty slice of institutional humor and the fun of Breuning’s photographs lies in the uncanny familiarity of these images and the concurrent ‘familiarity’ by which he refers to these famous artists in the works’ titles. All of the biggest names make an appearance, from Vincent (Van Gogh) to Takashi (Murakami), but the forms through which these artists’ “marks” can be detected vary greatly. The viewer is practically begged to scour the portraits one at a time, looking for the telltale sign of its referent—most often the body stands in for the artist’s canvas (Wassily and Pollock, for example), and sometimes it is transfigured into a symbolic object connected to the artist in question (Andy’s bananas, Martin’s frog), however Breuning’s strongest points come when he directly engages with the models’ bodies as contingent to the artist/artwork themselves.

For Yves, Breuning painted a nude female body International Klein Blue, as if she was to perform one of Klein’s Anthropométries (1960). The body is at once the body of the artist’s performance and also representative of the indexical mark left by the body. Not to mention the ‘signature’-ness of Klein’s specific shade of blue as a symbol for the artist himself—the image is ripe with referentiality and fluidly engages with a transmutation of body, artwork, and sign.

With Richard, Breuning has painted a female model copper, and her face covered by Serra’s face. Frida, Joseph, and Vincent also engage in this attachment of the artist to their body (!) of work. This iconization and embodiment of the artist and his or her best-known image(s) is both direct and at the same time, extremely bizarre to encounter. The history of art is built with—among many other elements—strands of appropriation and reference to other artists’ works connecting different movements and generations. It is very rare that an artist will directly appropriate the image of another artist, as an act of this kind of constructive appropriation or pastiche. It is, the exhibition’s title suggests, somewhat “freakish”—it is a Frankenstein’s monster of association and symbolism, the viewer’s deconstruction of a work of art, its making, and its maker. Pastiche itself is a not just a signature of Breuning’s own practice, but also, as suggested by Frederic Jameson, specifically characteristic of so-called ‘postmodernism.’ Breuning draws the viewer’s attention to the often bizarre, often hilarious possibilities of pastiche, and its role in art-making: not just acting as a reference, but to establish a dialog surrounding the politics of art-historical canonization and commercialization of art on the one hand, and on the other, the “genius/mind” of the artist and the “body” of their art.

Metro Pictures Gallery is located at 519 West 24th Street. The Art Freaks runs through October 29, 2011. 

by Rachel Valinsky

Installation-narratives—narratives about the process of creating personal narratives or histories which also construct History—are on view in Tris Vonna-Michell’s debut at Metro Pictures. Vonna-Michell’s installations composed of photographs, written texts, video work, sound recordings, and various ephemera form an archive: a collection of documents and objects which have taken part in a historical process or event. They are also temporal markers of themselves, indicators of the progressive alterations that Vonna-Michell’s installations have undergone throughout their various re-iterations and re-presentations in different institutions.

Vonna-Michell explores the possibilities of language as collections of syntactic units that can through their assemblage and co-existence become material and physical manifestations of a story.  hahn/huhn (2003-ongoing) and Leipzig Calendar Works (2005-ongoing) combine to form a new sound edit which deals with the peaceful demonstrations of East Germans in Leipzig in 1989 leading up to fall of the Berlin Wall and the re-unification of Germany. Finding Chopin: Endnotes 2005-2009 chronicles the artist’s search for and research on the French post-war concrete and sound poet, independent publisher, graphic artist, and occasional gallerist who was also Vonna-Mitchell’s neighbor in Paris. The search began during a visit to Kurt Schwitters’ home and reconstructed “Merzbau,” when the artist asked his father why he was born in Southend, England and was told to find Henri Chopin – he would have the answer.

This particular piece, which has been altered and reworked since its inception and throughout its various installments, is a veritable archive of Henri Chopin’s (1922-2008) life and work, as well as a record of Vonna-Mitchell’s inquiry into his very origins and the creative and narrative process that resulted from it. The work speaks of a documentary and archival impulse, which is simultaneously rendered inadequate by the uniqueness and ephemerality of the installation and the self-reflexive text, which is part of the piece. One folding text panel elaborates:

“I knew that the images, whether sheets or slides, would soon lose their meaning, seven or twelve minutes, time would still escape me. Gradually images started declining, in the sense of carrying an affirmative reason for existence, in terms of a sequence. Simultaneous to the disintegration of certain images, the objects I had collected began entering the frame.”

In the same way that Chopin’s concrete poetry evolved into experiments in performance, Vonna-Mitchell takes the photo out of the frame and the words off the page. His work brings language and photography into the tangible world of objects and into the realm of the spoken word and performance art. This ambiguous status as potential indexical referents accentuates a temporal nature. Their significance to the viewer is shaped by his or her ability to apprehend particular objects, form associations, and connect the elements to each other. Following in the Duchampian logic of the viewer completing the work through his interaction with it, Vonna-Mitchell invites the viewer to take part in the performative process of interpretation and meaning-production, working with concrete objects as materials with which to reconstruct a now immaterial story.

A few streets away, at Zach Feuer Gallery, Karen Cytter’s Video Art Manual claims that the disappearance of language creates a romanticized view of history. Imbued at once with a certain material presence and temporal absence, Vonna-Michell’s installations both enter into and challenge this logic of romanticization. His exploration of how words, expressed in different media (written text, photographs, recordings, videos, objects…), may combine to form an inherently historicized and historicizing language, also generates a certain auratic texture, one which embodies the ambiguous stance between fact and fiction which characterizes Vonna-Michell’s work.

Metro Pictures is located at 519 West 24th Street New York NY 10011. Tris Vonna-Michell’s works will be on view through 10/22.