review by Janet Bruesselbach

Apparently every five years PS1, MoMA’s converted-school extension in Long Island City, has a huge group show featuring local artists. While this may be only the second Greater New York, they seem pretty intent on the historicity of the thing. One of the biggest contradictions of having a “local artists” show in this city is that most of the artists will be either immigrants or part-time residents. Perhaps the joke is that the entire world is really Greater New York.

PS1 is disorienting. It’s nice to have another context besides Art to see art in, but the elementary school vibes throw things weirdly and I always feel like I’m missing something. But hey, it’s one of those “pay what you want” places, so the only thing you have to lose is your time and maybe a buck.

Okay, so the worst thing is that there’s too much video in this show. Video is by nature a selfish medium, not only because it demands time but because it requires technological support. I thought I would feel more envy of the artists included and wonder why I wasn’t included, or wonder why I wasn’t curating. I felt a twinge when I saw that one of the videos included someone I knew in college, but I didn’t feel any of that envy at the show, because I wouldn’t want to be the person who had made or chosen these things. I hate cool people.

This is the retrospective room.

It became one of those “find a redeeming thing” games. Individually most of the pieces had something going for them, or, at least, those that weren’t goofy videos. If there isn’t something funny about art, if there isn’t a joke to “get” or “buy” about it, I tend to skim over it, maybe just because I’m biased against romanticism and transcendence.

Then again, maybe this show could use some transcendence. Artists are perverts. The walls were full of glory holes. At all levels, for all sizes and shapes of perverts! And yet, two rooms had “adult content” warnings, for when things were more than bluntly suggestive. The whole thing is a dirty joke and the biggest influence on my entire generation has been internet porn. But maybe that’s just me? And why don’t I like the filth more? I usually do.

DETEXT was an installation that shaped the show. I only later found out that DETEXT had removed the “con” from what it was doing, intentionally, and that all the phrases in giant letters in hallways were excerpted from spam messages. The museum has 4 levels (0, 1, 2, 3) and it seemed like the level of innuendo in the phrases corresponded with the levels.

Here are some things I liked:

Tommy Hartung is good conceptually but I get the feeling he outsources the craft. Some drawings a friend did for him weren’t very crafty, either.

Michele Abeles’s photography

Ishmael Randall Weeks had a very scientific feel.

Nearby on the second floor, and whose label I couldn’t find (making them all the more confusing) were a couple of museum-style stands with bits of archaeological-looking artifacts in them, but all pretty obviously made out of contemporary cheap materials. The artifacts were mostly fimo clay.
Everything by the Atlas of Radical Cartography in a third floor hallway also had a research feel that fit very well in the school building. I particularly remember copies of maps with “latino” and “america” labeling two general (and reversed) areas of the Americas which had been given to people crossing the Mexico-U.S. border and undergone evident wear. There were “maps” there with significant research behind them that remind me of how awesome Jen Dalton is.

Ashley Hunt: “The rich can be rich because they got tired of being poor.” That reminds me. If you haven’t been listening to David Byrne’s Here Lies Love you should.

This is going to look really dated in 5 years, Debo Eilers. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Brody Condon’s video of a smurf tribe finally makes that wooden sculpture outside the Hamburger Banhof make sense.

An artist with the hip-as-dick name Liz Magic Laser displayed her purse taken apart by a surgery and dissection robot, the “Da Vinci System”.

Hank Willis Thomas’s isolation of depictions of blacks in mainstream magazine ads filled a room and held our attention for way longer than anything else. If nothing else it showed that progress is never continuous and always double-edged at least.

David Brooks is a rainforest conservationist.

Some of the only painting featured included Dave Miko and Leidy Churchman, whose “Three Beards” reassures me that there is nothing more macho than two cocks in your ass.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation can always be relied upon to be sickeningly hip, filling one room with artists’ genitals and another with a pedestal exchange program, “Perpetual Monument to Students of Art”, in which clean sculpture pedestals are substituted for used ones from local schools throughout the show. It sort of looks like the holocaust memorial in Berlin. Anyone who’s done gallery installation will like stuff like that. All the jack-off-in-a-box glory hole installation elements, not so much.

Aki Sakamoto’s “skewed lies / Central Governor” had a great steampunk, participatory mood and kept the basement feeling like a paranoid secret center of operations we children had illicitly discovered. Also there was goldleaf.

And uniforms:

My date said “I feel like my time has been raped”.

The “Shadow Play” Paintings of Debra Drexler at HP Garcia

In Drexler’s large oil on linen canvases at HP Garcia, swathes of color float and submerge upon a gray middle ground, suggesting an intermediary realm between water and air, consciousness and dream. Her colors appear to float on, or rather within, reflecting pools of aether, forming sometimes recognizable natural elements such as roots and branches, flowers, or even birds. With an almost musical painterly lyricism, her palette of bright pinks, reds and oranges and violets derives organically from the flora and fauna of Hawaii, where she makes her home. Against the gray open-slate backdrop, which also connotes a formless state of semi-consciousness, these colors move and spark, recede and burble. Though the brighter colors recall her celebrated “Gauguin’s Zombie” series (and of course Gauguin’s own gorgeous Polynesian palette), the tone here is moody and reflective, prompting an instant association with Monet’s Water Lilies and other aquatic works. The deliberately abstracted brushwork, however, acknowledges the practice of AbEx masters such as Joan Mitchell and especially the later works of Willem de Kooning, streaky and bright, painted over or emerging from a veil of mostly gray feathery brushstrokes, a shadowy realm which also serves as a metanym for the uncertain but creative field between painter and viewer.

In her catalog essay, Lisa Paul Streitfeld sees Drexler’s figural motifs as evocative of archetypal Jungian emblems, such as the deep roots of the tree, the flying bird of the spirit, and particularly the Shadow(s) we all battle in our attempts to subsume the ego, tapping into the power of a collective unconsciousness. For Strietfield (and apparently for Drexler as well) these paintings themselves serve as metaphors of spiritual transformation, much as the processes of the alchemists did for Jung, with shamanic echoes of healing and self-sublimation. Drexler attempts to map the points at which might certainty might break though the murk of uncertainty, or joy emerge from anxiety (Think Beethoven, or Joy Division(?), just as daylight breaks through a shade of branches. In the large double-canvases such as “Poesis Through Forked Branch” or “Dissolution into Joy”, a triumphant chord of awareness is carried by the sheer verve and skilled coloring of the paintings themselves, emerging from the struggle and chaos of the multicolored but mostly grayish striations of what appears a muddled, middle ground.

One can also see in these works a kind of synecdoche for the state of contemporary painting in general, echoed in Drexler’s cryptic statement: “Form offers roots but is sticky with entanglements”. Her paintings evince conflict as well as some resolution of the flux between figural and abstract, chaos and deliberation, the cosmological or spiritual and the stubborn, even seductively terrestrial. Behind and even with the dazzling colors of paradise lies a grey miasma of mundanity (and the gray matter which must sort it). A gray area that also defines a point of departure. The figural elements (un)certainly function as metaphors, even in their inchoate and airy forms. Like the most powerful abstract paintings of the last century, reproductions can only provide a crude chart of her stratagem; the luminosity of the oils themselves, along with their deft application can really only be truly appreciated in person. These are rare works, which show an artist struggling with and for the spirit.

—Michael Carter

HP Garcia Gallery

580 Eighth Avenue @ 38th Street (7th Floor)

Gallery Hours: Tues- Sat 1 - 6 pm

212.354.7333

By Vedan Anthony-North

With a name like “2010” you don’t really know what to expect when heading to the 2010 Whitney biennial. Unfortunately, you don’t really know what to think about the exhibit after leaving either. Though the theme of “2010” is justified by the curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari in the exhibit’s introduction as purposefully having “no theme” but rather representing the tenor of a generation, the biennial came across as scattered, disjointed, and lacking cohesion.

Walking into the Whitney Museum, the incoherent intentions of the exhibit came across almost immediately. While some of the artwork spoke to the political and social tensions of our time in direct and effective ways, such as Curtis Mann’s inventive After the Dust, Second View (Beirut) in which bleach is strategically used to conceal portions of photographs (found on Flickr) of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah to create the illusion of an explosion, these powerful pieces were frequently followed by disappointing compositions whose attempts to articulate the frustrations of the time fell short.

Pieces such as Ania Soliman’s confusing NATURAL OBJECT RANT: The Pineapple, a collection of twenty-six photomontages (one for each letter of the alphabet) dedicated to the pineapple and it’s relationship to consumerism and colonialism seemed to reach towards an exploration of politics, yet the seemingly random subject (the pineapple) and the equally arbitrary decision to use the alphabet as a means of examination, left me distracted rather than focused.

Bonami and Carrion-Murayari peppered these outright politically explicit pieces with more abstract artwork that had a similar success rate. While some artists attempted to explore the process of production and perspective through the manipulation of a medium, others took a more direct approach. Scott Short’s engaging painting Untitled (white), reflects the illogical patterns of human perspective. Using the technique of photocopying photocopies, Short forcefully makes one question the permanence of interpretation. Conversely, R. H. Quaytman’s series of paintings and silkscreens entitled Distracting Distance, Chapter 16 which all focus on the architectural design of a window in the room of his exhibit, works with line and an established landscape to draw the viewer into the subject of perspective. Unfortunately, Quaytman’s predictable use of optical illusion and fails to offer anything new to the discourse and is easily forgettable.

The disconnected nature of the biennial is not to say that the entire exhibit failed, and you will surely be both stunned and impressed by some of the more powerful, expressive and fascinating instillations executed by talented contemporary artists. “2010” simply falls flat in capturing the political and social moment in which we are living. Instead of acknowledging the apathy of (some) American youth growing up in a video-game culture, the stalemate of our partisan politics or the impact of two wars on all our lives, Bonami and Carrion-Murayari attempt to jumble anything and everything that can be interpreted as reflective of our time into four floors of art. Ultimately, it is too easy to say that the generation of 2010 lacks a theme; every age of creation has motif and time will tell that 2010 is no different. Unfortunately, the collection presented at the Whitney does not reflect the essence of “2010”.

by Claudine Aime

Within the hustle and bustle, nestled in Midtown Manhattan’s highly corporate district, it would be easy to miss any form of artistic expression, but New Yorkers are no stranger to the eclectic collage of art, music, and pop culture that their city has to offer. Deep in Bryant Park, hidden among the trees, a large yellow cubic platform stands. There are women dressed in summer dresses, on top of it moving erratically. It may at first seem confusing, but that is exactly artist Kate Gilmore’s intentions, in her pedestrious and colorful art spectacle. Cleverly named “Walk the Walk”, was more than just women walking idly, it was her expression of the everyday movements and actions shared by many of the surrounding office employees. It embodies mobility and progression in a fast paced workforce.

As many artists have learned before, igniting interest with public art is no easy task, but Kate Gilmore, along side with Public Art Fund, have managed to spark cognition in the minds of many of the observers. From May 3, 2010 to May 7th in Bryant Park from 8:30 to 6:30, 7 women shuffled along in the 100 square feet cubicle 8 feet off the ground wearing bright canary yellow dresses and beige shoes in a pattern that resembles systematic chaos. Perplexed by the sight, a 29-year-old Met Life employee went during his lunch break to investigate the display; only after reading the synopsis did he fully understand what was behind the artist’s vision. When asked his opinion he stated “the exhibit is a good and clear representation of the daily grind.”

Just a glance alone wouldn’t suffice: to get the clear picture, a full experience of the piece and its many dimensions, one would have to examine not only the exterior but the interior of the structure as well. Following the yellow theme, on each side of the brightly colored cubicle there are entranceways allowing on-lookers to enter in from four directions. When walking into the cubicle you are bombarded with the cacophony of the footsteps above, mimicking the sounds you are likely to hear in office and apartment buildings. The footsteps became more than just the sounds of a group of people pacing, but an intricate dance-like pattern that the women navigated effortlessly. In an interview with one of the performers, Sophia Stoll explains that one of their tasks was to convey personality and emotion without the exchange of words. “We communicate with each other by stomping our feet.” Since they were not allowed to speak to each other, stomping became their own intimate form of non-verbal communication. Walking about in a 100 square feet area for 5 hours a day was a difficult task for them to do without speaking, so physical expression became useful as a social outlet.

Aside from the visual enjoyment of watching these young women perform on this vibrant cube in a shady setting in the park, is there more to “Walk the Walk” than just a simulation of the work force or a pessimistic depiction of the monotony behind it? Is it just “our life as we know it”, worker drones confined to stifled expression, or is the message deeper? Kate Gilmore said it best during our impromptu interview, stating “even though they’re in this one little space and not much is happening they are actually really navigating each other in a goal base way. If it wasn’t goal-based then they would just be going around in circles, but they’re not, so while they’re still confined to this space, they’re still having to maintain their own identity and space in this very generic environment.”

By: Andrea Scrima

“Untitled” by Melvin Way, 2001. Ink on paper, 3″ x 9″

“Plan B” by Walter Sipser, 2009. Ink on paper, 11″ x 14″

From “2555 Days” by Andrew Castrucci , 2003-2010. Pen, pencil on paper, 6″ x 9″

When does dawn occur: when the first bird makes itself heard; when the sun rises above the horizon? Or when the lights of the Empire State Building are turned off? While a wry humor underlies many of Walter Sipser’s drawings, this effort to pinpoint what is essentially amorphous becomes a poignant conceit that carries throughout the exhibition “One More Thing” at Bullet Space.

The works of the four artists Andrew Castrucci, David Hammons, Walter Sipser, and Melvin Way share an ambiguous relationship to the present tense. Contingency replaces causality as the dominant mode of perception; external phenomena are painstakingly recorded in an effort to make sense of the nonsensical and to find meaning in the arbitrary.

Sipser’s drawings reveal a brilliant, preposterous logic. His detailed and numbered diagrams, inventions, and prosthetic devices recall, in their poetic absurdity, the pseudophilosophical movement of Jarry’s pataphysics and offer a glimpse into the inquiring mind as it seeks to evade the aporia of its own existence. In “Note to Self,” a To Do list consisting of nothing but these same three words is drawn in the manner of an elaborate, time-killing doodle; in another drawing we are “Lost at Sea,” with the words of the title looming large on the page in a kind of mental haze consisting of small ink marks that look like imperfect mechanical copies rather than originals. While the humor in Sipser’s work belies a disquiet with the dumb fact of being, his drawings often allude to an underlying order of things in an allover of superimposed shapes drawn in dotted lines and resembling a cross between cookie-cutter and typographic glyph—evoking notions of normative roles, uncertain identities, and individual aberration. Some of the drawings consist of single letters drawn in a sans-serif font and enclosed in a circle; isolated from their alphabetical context and transformed into cryptic symbols, they become drained of meaning in an unexpected inversion of the utterly familiar that contrasts with the black silhouettes of composite shapes in other drawings. While Sipser seems to be saying that the solipsistic mind arrives at erroneous conclusions, and he has some of his drawings notarized as though in an effort to find objective proof of his own existence, the artistic outcome is nothing short of amazing. Yet when we learn that his map-like drawing “Plan B,” which depicts an inky path from home to gym to breakfast, is based on a real-life occurrence, the stakes suddenly become very high: the word “breakfast” is written in dotted lines as the path is redirected to the words “stabbed” and subsequently to “Bellevue,” narrowly escaping the “afterlife” in dotted lines at the top of the page.

Andrew Castrucci’s visual approach to the ineluctable fabric of existence presents us with the notated evidence of the everyday. Seven years of date book pages—“2555 Days”—are arranged in a grid on the wall. In an apparent effort to keep track of various subcategories of obligation in a concatenation of overlapping dates, times, places, and things that need to be done, Castrucci color coded many of his entries, producing what are essentially filigree word drawings in black, red, and yellow.

The shorthand of an artist’s and art instructor’s life: SVA classes, rent calculations, studio visits, student critiques; building materials to be purchased, framers to be paid, video edits to be scheduled; endless lists of make-up classes, portfolio reviews, application deadlines, Fed-Ex shipments. Tax due-dates. And again and again, “Call Goshen, call Goshen, call Goshen.”

Castrucci’s decision, after the fact, to classify these pages as art is a revealing act, one that emphasizes the process and reconfigures notions of purpose, statement, and the “finished work.” The art in this case is the sediment of life lived in real time: the tracks in the mud, the remains adhering to the inside of the coffee cup—an accrual that is the diametric inversion of Hanne Darboven’s scrawled notations representing a calendar time that bears no direct relation to the actual process of making the work.

Oddly, an entry on November 14, 2007—“Whitney, Kara Walker”—led me to recall that this was a day I’d also visited the exhibition on one of my trips to New York—and run into Andrew outside, in front of the African masks. I had my niece with me at the time, there were urgent things to talk about, and so all I could do was say Hi—and can we get together next time? Contingencies, serendipity, and my own life looping back on itself somehow, peculiarly ensconced within Castrucci’s quotidian diagrams. And emerging from these skeins of purpose an occasional cry: “Three Important Things: Sleeping, Eating, Keeping Warm.” “Protein, Vitamin C, Meat.” And then, on November 17, the utterly improbable juxtaposition of the words “Shakespeare” and “Wet suit,” connected by an arrow. Castrucci’s work has the somber hilarity of the Readymade, a Duchampian quality that shifts the emphasis away from the work of art to the receptive, reflective state of mind.

Of which state David Hammons is a master. Standing between street vendors for his now-famous 1983 performance at Cooper Square in New York, “Bliz-aard Ball Sale,” Hammons offered neatly sculpted snowballs for sale, arranged, amusingly, according to size. The work demonstrated two things: that anything can be commercialized, given the right context; and, less profanely, that anything can be perceived as art, given a commensurately receptive state of mind.

Hammon’s piece at Bullet Space questions the idea of artistic authorship. The original work it is based on, “Global Fax Festival,” was shown ten years ago at the Palacio de Cristal del Retiro in Madrid. Five fax machines were secured to the ceiling, actively transmitting faxes of drawings sent from around the world, which curled, broke off like falling leaves, and twirled to the ground. In New York City, A Gathering of the Tribes became the main source location for sending over 3,000 faxes during a live musical performance by Butch Morris and subsequently throughout the rest of the exhibition’s duration. Hammon’s work at Bullet Space consists of a video of this piece accompanied by a selection of photocopies of the original faxed drawings scattered about the floor, artifacts of a work made by friends and strangers all over the world, crystallizing in a single location like an intersection of fleeting trajectories.

Melvin Way was discovered by Andrew Castrucci in a drawing workshop Castrucci taught at a men’s shelter on Ward’s Island in 1989. Over the following years, although Way’s mental health problems led him to a series of different shelters around the city, he and Castrucci remained friends. Way’s idiosyncratic notations—scrawled in ballpoint pen on paper and cardboard in an encyclopedic accumulation of obsessive abbreviations—consist of chemical, molecular, mathematical, and metaphysical formulas hinting at an alchemy of the troubled soul. Occasionally, he inserts words: “Soft Soap, Gum Shoe, Sleuth … Intrigue, Espionage, Sabotage, Comedy.” Or: “Homicide, Suicide, Effect … Defect, Adaptation, Eradication.” Although the works come across as tirades, there is a cool sense of control, sophistication, even indifference. Here too, the question arises as to the nature of the deliberate artistic act—as in the works of Sipser, Castrucci, and Hammons, we are looking at another category of urgency altogether. The artist is more than anything else a human being, and the artistic gesture an act of resistance against the unknowable, death, and being.

“And One More Thing”
Bullet Space
292 East 3rd Street
New York, NY
10009
Hours: Fri 3–6 p.m.; Sat/Sun 1–6 p.m. or by appointment.
Tel.: 347 277 9842

Andrea Scrima is an artist and author; her first book, “A Lesser Day,” has just come out with Spuyten Duyvil Press.

Visit her website at:http://www.andreascrima.com

Publisher’s page: http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/fiction/lesserday.html

Read a review of “A Lesser Day” in The Brooklyn Rail: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/04/books/small-wonder

Janet Bruesselbach responds to Chavisa Woods and Art Less on The Girleye Show.

Thank you for wrapping your superior minds so attentively around this tawdry project. So I think what’s coming together is an awareness of the tension between feminisms. Namely, a contention of how best to address Laura Mulvey’s legacy and the “male gaze”: do we subvert the supposed dominant paradigm by rearranging the organs, or nullify the her mere Freudianism by proliferating the other configurations that had always appeared?

This namely comes to light when A notes that there’s nothing in many of the photographs that indicates authorial gender: “Slowly, we come to understand that it is the essence of the radical (and a slap in the face to both Laura Mulvey and the men whom she rightly criticized) for these photographers merely to portray their subjects with the variegation natural to two (or more) humans playing in the light, linked and loving through a camera lens, and nobody shunned or stopped or subjugated by the process at all.” This is the nullifying side, analogous to moderate feminism, arguing variations of style as genderless. Whereas a radical could say that in order to reveal that such disembodied art inherently oppresses, we must actively pursue unfamiliar forms, we might also claim the paradigm by majority, or reverse the unfamiliar into the canny.

Though not the only strategy, I was drawn sometimes in images to what I knew, not historically specifically, but of the conventional uses of stock photography, the myths it proliferates, and the role of women in generating and managing these images. Part of what I try to get at with “formal queerness” concerns an interest in professional interactions between women. This isn’t necessarily “linked and loving” or without power dynamics and communication errors. It is perhaps related to my interest in understanding what “generic” is to me personally and how it differs from how similar people see it.

So yes, this gets to A’s best point: the collection is regrettably mono-ethnic. It’s unfortunate considering Tribes’s mission of diversity. I’d all too easily turn this into a parody of Stuff White People Like in honest self-defense. I guess I didn’t find any photographers of color, and Marie’s stranger on the subway became a token to highlight the unfair consistency.

To address the other criticism A made, of the subjects’ gender, which she already de-polarized fairly well: the focus of the show narrowed in the making. At first, I was considering photographers of a range of genders, although always addressing feminist issues. Without actually prodding at gender boundaries, we might take femaleness or femininity or whatever the as-opposed-to-what theme is here for granted by limiting it to cisgender. Cassie may have re-titled several photos to negate gender-identified names, hopefully not out of a depersonalizing pressure from me, but to let the androgenous continuum decouple from the models’ names. Even trans men are girls too. My only regret is an accidental exclusion of transwomen.

Perhaps I’m keeping too specific here, and perhaps we’re all happier spared my nitpicking on content and symbol. The show’s faggot-coined shadow title indicates a parodic encouragement of the medium’s (being bodies and cameras and everything that surrounds them) more confrontationally radical interpretations. Yet the actual title is a take on the show-within-the-show (The Girlie Show, sold by the inclusion of a funny black man) on 30 Rock, whose protagonist has lately been the feminist feminists love to hate. Treating a diversification as a simple inversion still invites a complication of the sexual politics involved: Does the subject possess the artist if their autonomy penetrates the lens, as Chavisa suggests? When each image is the evidence of a different reinterpretation of a seemingly limited set of givens, we can see either something only these women could do, or something anyone (or thing!) could do. Is anyone insulted if I’m more excited, and intend more of a compliment, by the second?

A girl eyes GIRLEYE: WOMEN LOOKING AT WOMEN by Art Less (April 2010)

All too often, looking at a collection of fine art “women regarding women” pieces is like inspecting a crèche of Tracy Enim clones. When you’ve seen the Enim originals, you know that this cannot be an easy sight to behold. Perhaps inspired by a collective misreading of Audre Lorde, certain feminist fine artists of the late twentieth century indulged a tendency to chuck out technique in its entirety, with the unfortunate, and predictable, result that many pivotal artworks of that movement come off rather worse in the looking than in the retelling. It is thus with great joy that I report that the photographs in Girleye: Women Looking at Women are by and large gorgeous, but also acutely conscious of sexual politics. (Fiiiiiinally!)

Instead of trouncing technique and tradition by, say, sculpting vulvas out of used car parts and calling them art when the spackle is dry, many of the artists of Girleye have instead chosen to (mis)appropriate the techniques and styles of their most misogynistic forebears for their own, empowered ends. In particular, the young, preternaturally skilled Lauren Goldberg channels the surrealist misogynist Man Ray through her photographs Disconnect and Distance.

That Ms Goldberg has even thought to rework Man Ray instead of, say, posing for him as a model would have constituted, from Man Ray’s or his contemporaries’ points of view, a radically feminist act. Isn’t progress grand?

Meanwhile, the sensitive and gifted Cassie Olander conjures Imogen Cunningham’s Triangles and similar carnal landscapes through her photograph “Unity”.

Cunningham was, of course, a woman as well, so the homage initially seems uncomplicated. When the viewer, however, realizes that “Unity” teasingly, almost coyly depicts two nude women locked in a soft embrace, it becomes clear that Olander is repurposing Cunningham’s lauded and, by now, canonical means to send a still unconventional, perhaps radical message.

With LES, Anne Marie Hansen kills her father with rebellious joy and an almost mathematical elegance. The image is simple, powerfully so. A drunk girl in a tacky gold bathing suit dangles a bunch of grapes before her open mouth. The crook of her elbow suggestively obscures the head of a young man standing just behind her. The viewer’s gaze comes to rest on his not-yet-distended swim trunks.

With this image, Ms Hansen lays waste to Magritte, American Apparel ads, real pornography and countless other misogynistic portrayals of women reduced to their capacity as passive sex-recipients . . . by using their motifs and techniques to shoot a message of female sexual hunger straight down our hungry maws. (My father was quick to note that Hansen has reworked surrealist painting The Rape as The Grapes. Let the artist make of this what she may.)

Many other photographs in the set are simply beautiful portraiture. Amanda Palmer (making one of several cameos) has bad sunburn. A pair of nimble clowns practice what looks like acroyoga. Swimmers dot the surf like foam. Progress shows subtly, like light through a lattice. Slowly, we come to understand that it is the essence of the radical (and a slap in the face to both Laura Mulvey and the men whom she rightly criticized) for these photographers merely to portray their subjects with the variegation natural to two (or more) humans playing in the light, linked and loving through a camera lens, and nobody shunned or stopped or subjugated by the process at all. Most of all, that we cannot tell by any trick that these photographers were female is, upon (another) reflection, a most gorgeous happening.

Where, then, the rhymes and reasons to this set? There are many. We can start with the most unsubtle geometry exploited to great effect by the expert artists whose work is featured here—or perhaps, given the show’s very particular theme and patterning, by their curator. To put it bluntly: sexually evocative arcs and swoops and circles, punctuated, or punctured, by the occasional blunt or slender pole, abound in the collection. The vivid plethora of ovoid-and-spike figurings conjure an almost subliminal, spooky mentation reminiscent of Charles Burns’ Black Holes, which turned the vulva-shape into a repeated signifier of horror, a foreshadower of doom nested in appearances of the unexpected—such as a dissected frog’s back, a cut wrist, a lake where children skinny-dip. (Really, if you haven’t read a copy yet, you must—it’s the rare graphic novelist who can make the vulva into a Lovecraftian destroyer of worlds, and absolutely terrify you to pieces with it, and then make you cry.) I leave the viewer to pick his or her own incautious, revelatory path through the darkling bogs and brambles that litter the track of Girleye with a beauty, and a stillness, and danger.

Additionally, and flowing nicely from my bogs’n’brambles metaphor if I do write-so myself, bathing imagery pervades the show. Including the web-only images, roughly one sixth to one seventh of the pieces either allude to bathing or actually feature a nude lady bather or set of bathers. Factor in the joyous lesbian kissing, lesbian sex, and—let’s face it, people—lesbian hairstyles on display in several of the other photographs, and the images of happy women cavorting in water take on a rawer, sexier connotation.

In fact, the show seems to posit the old Radicalesbian message that one of the most authentic ways for women to relate to one another happily as women is by the art of sexual love. In Anne-Marie Hansen’s “Naughty”,

a seemingly drunken reveler tilts a frenemy’s chin toward hers in a parody of sexual love, a parody that conceals revulsion. Immediately, for your own psychological wellbeing if for no other cause, contrast this deeply discomfiting (though beautifully done) image with Beth Hommel’s soothing Kiss,

a gentle expression of adoration between women who are real lovers, at least for the moment the camera saw.

Speaking of sex, or politics, or merely the bonds imposed, displaced, ignored or adored by the act of looking: a teasing kind of bondage pervades the images of Girleye. Cassie Olander wraps one subject in a dress of loose bondage tape marked “DANGER”, and another in what looks like a symbolic bracelet of packing tape about the upper arm. Allison Green wraps two nude females against one anther in a web of loose bondage tape that looks a bit like toilet paper or crepe streamers. One thing is clear—these bonds aren’t holding anybody anywhere. Are they jokes, suggestions, denials, teases? On or of the viewer, always—the bondage never holds the subject, in these photos. Greene also photographs two straight lovers turned away from each other in a scarlet bed, a strip of pure white tape pasted across their snuggly bods. The photographer seems to suggest that the bonds—of love, sex, of matrimony, for all we know—that hold these lovers together are as flimsy as the tape she has strewn atop them. (A commentary on the “sanctity” of marriage? Or just of young lusts?)

One rather wishes that curator Janet Bruesselbach’s work had been featured in this show. Indeed, the images seem to have been selected so that, en masse, they resemble one of her massive artworks. With her physics-defying, anatomically incorrect oil orgies and other acts of sly painterly nihilism, Bruesselbach has assembled a career out of teasingly cinching and severing the ties of artist to subject, subject to viewer, male to female, armpit to elbow and whatever else you can think of, always with an eye to disassembling old theory and provoking transformation. The child of two eccentric physicists forever rusticating in one of the more precarious reaches of the rarefied Malibu wasteland, Bruesselbach understands difference with anything but difference, and from more angles than even her most multiply valenced works could invite you, dear Reader, to contemplate.

So it is surprising and perhaps offensive, with all the above dimensions of diversity in mind from both curator and photographers, that all the subjects of Girleye (minus one) are white. One doubts that the artists of Girleye have conspired to constrict the scope of femininity to a single, whitewashed point. Rather, the show evidences by strong implication that the photographers simply don’t hang out with many people who aren’t white. Even Hommel’s Mail Order, a seeming send-up of (Third World, usually nonwhite) mail-order brides, features a white subject as the mailed party. The only actual nonwhite subject in the entire set appears to be a stranger to the photographer (Hansen in this case). Most other subjects meet Ms Hansen’s gaze with ease, evincing familiarity if not friendship. Her lips parted slightly, this subject gazes straight ahead, meditating to the music on her iPod as she wills the subway ride to be over. She appears to be a stranger whom Hansen happened to snap on a long train ride. The image is remarkable for its ordinariness, its emotional opacity. Hansen never knew her subject’s story and, therefore, we viewers will never know it, either.

Another note on difference: one wonders if artist Cassie Olander’s male-presenting subjects Liz and David (and I mean to mark the subject named David especially) would especially desire their images used in a collection of women who are nominally looking at women. The above are also two of the only brooding subjects in the entire show, and their haunted eyes shy from the camera’s shutter, leaving us only with the impression of hunched shoulders and obsessively pomaded hair. Hardly a representative image of butch or—more appropriately—trans moodiness, unless these two just started on their testosterone regimen, in which case, of course, all bets are off (just kidding!). I for one am willing to believe that Ms. Olander accurately captured sad moments in the lives of these two subjects, and from Olander’s other, also beautifully felt work must believe that Olander selected these moments, not to portray transmen as a sad breed generally but to show us the sadness of the falling cherry blossoms, as they happened to fall.

Maybe David and (probably) Liz are not transmen in the first place, but playful young women who happened to butch it up for their respective shoots. Maybe, maybe. But maybe not. What if they are transgendered? What if they really aren’t women? What if they hate the very idea of being included in this show? Well, have I got an interpretation for you.

Noted drag warrior and gender obscurist James St James writes wisely in his novel Freak Show (if you will allow me, dear Reader, to extend and wriggle a bit in this authorial stretch) that the transfolk of our society are trammeled and trashed by the violent misapprehensions of our culture, but the very chains (of thorns or flowers, of iron or of gold) that yoke transfolk into endocultural conflict enable them to act as revolutionary agents, and aching reminders of the impermanence of “fates”.

If this were a slightly academic article and not a (bl)o(g)nanism, I’d write some lameass transition phrase like:

If my interpretation of St James is to be believed, we may celebrate Girleye’s inclusion of transmen—not for the men’s futures qua men, but for the intersection of their futures with their girlish pasts. Or, to misappropriate the oft-appearing Amanda Fucking Palmer, girls will be girls will be boys with no warning. Such transitions imply a potential for our own . . . into boys, into women, into whatever the hell we want, be it sexes or genders or any of the manifold wondrous identities that lie not between our legs but in our lives.

Trans is Latin for across, after all. It would be great if transmen, biowomen, and everyone in between could appreciate the plenitude of identities open to them throughout their lives. And that’s just what this show is for. Let us embrace David, Liz, and all the rest with open arms and mouths and water-forms, and hope that perhaps they like us, too, just a bit at least . . .

On that note, let us close by oh so gleefully misusing a monster quote from that master of misuse, and of potential-play, Donald Barthelme, masquerading here under the voice of a woman impregnated with a fetus by three men—in our interpretation, a woman who becomes us, impregnated with transformative potential by the girls of Girleye:

The engendering force was, perhaps, the fused glance of all of them. From the millions of units crawling about on the surface of the city, their wavering desirous eye selected me. The pupil enlarged to admit more light: more me. They began dancing little dances of suggestion and fear. These dances constitute an invitation of unmistakable import—an invitation which, if accepted, leads one down many muddy roads.

I accepted. What was the alternative?

9

Chavisa Woods on the Girleye Show

        Entering ‘World Feminisms’, the inaugural exhibition for the Elizabeth Sackler Center at the Brooklyn Museum, some years ago, I overheard a fifty-something white suit whispering to his viewing partner that he was “So tired of women trying to pass their bodies off as art.” I wondered, but unfortunately did not ask, what the man thought of endless centuries of men “trying to pass” women’s bodies off as art. John Berger, speaking of the use of the female body in classical nudes noted, “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Berger claimed that a man’s presence in an image was suggestive of what he was capable of doing to you, while the woman’s presence was suggestive of what she would or would not allow to be done to her.

        The artists in the Girleye Show make no apologies for ‘trying to pass their bodies off as art,’ simultaneously occupying spaces as object, appearing- yes, being watched- yes, yet actively so. These women are watching themselves being watched, but not as a suggestion of what they might allow to be done to them; they watch themselves being watched as an acknowledgement of what has been done to them, and, like the subaltern abjuring their position by speaking, through the appearance of active acknowledgement, they suggest what they are capable of doing to you, the viewer and, more importantly, what they are capable of doing to and for themselves.
I have always interpreted Berger’s quote as not only speaking of identity of the art object, but also of the identity of the female viewer looking at themselves as passive art objects. In Lauren Goldberg’s “Looking Glass”, a woman leans into the viewer, peering through a magnifying lens, her right eye dominating her gaze. Berger’s formational notion is exemplified with an ironic twist, the object of the art is not quite watching herself being watched, but watching the viewer watch her; a subtle but volatile difference. In this piece, the audience is acknowledged and challenged.

        The socio-historical relevance of the content of the pieces included in the Girleye show might be the first thing one notices when entering the exhibition, but it definitely will not be the last. The structure and skill pervading the anatomy of the photographs pull the pieces beyond a political narrative steeped in, for some, (not for me), a daunting haze of feminist identity politics, into a complexity of diverse narratives and visual constructions. If not, how could they ‘pass their bodies off as art’ so convincingly?

        Beth Hommel’s Palms and Knees catches the viewer with a stunning play of light on water. The black and white ripples of the wave outward from the center create perhaps an ominous flower, the stigma (flower’s center) of which being a woman drowning, or perhaps she is reaching out, being born from the center of the thing so indicative of a flower, which also posses a stigma of another sort. These invocations inferred simultaneously are not necessarily the ultimate culmination of the work; an immediate and lasting visual image.

        This image is a departure from the other of Hommel’s works included in the exhibition- for instance, Caress, which shows the torsos of two women in muffin-like dresses enjoying an intimate embrace, and Kitchen, displaying two woman in a kinetic moment of passion in front of an open refrigerator door; photos presenting a narrative between two characters whose relationships to one another are cast in as unambiguous a light as the vibrant colors saturating the print.

        Cassie Olander mediates on texture, using skin as her canvas in two pieces, Silver and Vulnerability. Ultimately she presents us with compelling and resolute portraiture in Reaching, Contemplative, Bubbly, and Danger. These are obviously not snapshots, but simple scenes set to capture the character of the subjects, which she has done clearly, simply, with incisive precision. In all but Danger, you walk away with the feeling of having been privy to something very intimate of the subjects. With Danger, a nude woman wrapped in police tape, the statement made is indicative more of the person as an identity than the identity of the person, yet not any less relevant than the former.

        Anne Marie Hansen, on the other hand, has depicted, beautifully, human movement and photographic motion with what appear to be a series of unrehearsed snapshots. Swimmers depicts, as you can guess, four women swimming. The shot is rendered from high above, a godlike position of viewing. This black and white image recalls tales of sirens. Miss Mercier is a snapshot of a woman covering her face with a scarf, the top half of her face obscured by a hat. Her eyes are smiling at us. This is a seemingly simple scene. The narrow slot through which the eyes gaze is reminiscent of a veil, yet the covering of her face creates a greater intimacy and provocation than would have been present if her full face had remained un-obscured.

        Finally, Lauren Goldberg presents us with a series of lush images, some snapshots, some constructed scenes. The line present throughout all of the images is the vigilance of the artist. Whether rehearsed or on the fly, Goldberg has captured the exact moment, the exact scene that will invoke a complex visceral response, while remaining loyal to a contract of beauty so often broken when content borders on disturbing. I shy away from calling the images poetic. They do not rhyme. There is no final stanza. Rather, they are each a series of chords stuck at once, creating a discord in which the mind is able to find some harmony. I will not describe them to you, but make especially sure to view Distance, Stairs and Crying Statue.

        In the Girleye Show, woman act, women appear and disappear, watch you watching, watch themselves being watched and know what they can do. Janet Bruesselbach has brought together a robust group of artists whose works compliment one another, while promising that around the next corner you will find a new and varied angle from which to approach the art you are currently practicing; the art of looking.

The first day, March 10, of member previews of the Marina Abromovic retrospective at MoMA, Steve Cannon asked me to take him up there to say hello to her. He remembered interviewing her by email eight years ago when she spent 6 weeks living in three exposed, spartan rooms at Sean Kelly gallery for House with an Ocean View.

In “The Artist Is Present”, on MoMA’s second floor, he understood she would be present, and therefore wanted to present himself to her and mention he’d interviewed her.

“The Artist Is Present” consists of Marina sitting at a table, for three months of MoMA open hours, in the middle of a large open space under massive lights from four corners. Museum attendees are invited to individually sit across from her. She does not speak. She barely emotes. She sometimes rests and shifts when she needs to.
When we got there, there was a line to sit with the artist. We didn’t notice the line, and when the middle-aged tourist who had been placidly staring Marina down got up, I tried to guide Steve out there. Naturally the next person in line moved faster and we retreated. It would have been very curious to have heard and seen Steve trying to engage the Present Marina: the perfect communication of the blind with the mute.
The power of many of her works does derive from her visual impact as a tall, very striking, seemingly ageless woman, and the long dress she wears during The Artist Is Present emphasizes that. Yet performance art is a field whose aesthetics derive very little from visuality itself and can primarily consist of description. Some of Marina’s best works are rejected proposals. Many are explicitly self-destructive or masochistic to the point of the audience having to call 911 to revive the artist. The best, indeed, rely on trust games with the audience. Documentation is the form in which performance art becomes present and possessable by museums. This means it’s more perceptible to the blind than almost anything else that has grown from the Visual Art field (touchable sculptures and sound installations still cling to a certain visual-spatial approach), at the expense of reliance on the verbal.
The rest of the retrospective fills the sixth floor. MoMA makes a point of announcing that this is their first performance art retrospective. It’s also a great deal of attention given to a female artist, one who is, as she puts it, the “grandmother” of performance art. In the seventies her work was done in collaboration with German partner Ulay, and the documentation makes it seem that she was the more passionate and dedicated to the interventions they staged, higher profile, the brains of the operation. My favorites are those done with no props, or few, like AAA AAA AAAA (in which they scream louder and louder at each other) or one in which they slap each other. Perhaps the best-known is “Rest Energy”(video), consisting of Marina holding a bow with Ulay holding an arrow cocked in it towards her heart. The best of these were videos - only the less dangerous are reperformed in the retrospective, prompting accusations of a declawing by historical institution. Marina and Ulay’s relationship was their work and vice versa, and their collaboration ended through hiking along the Great Wall of China towards each other and then separating. In her maturity, Marina’s performances and films tap her Slavic roots and often include dedications and reperformances of other artists’ work.
Marina’s own work is reperformed in shifts by an army of the body-aware. One of the best is that in which she and Ulay stood naked in a narrow doorway facing each other, while everyone who entered the gallery pushed past them. In the reperformance the gap between them was made large enough to pass by without turning sideways, which Marina was uncomfortable about, but arguably the average body passing through in 2000s America is larger than that in 1970s Europe - a suggestion that, when I brought it up, was considered a bit taboo. When Steve passed through between his two dates, we suggested he face the woman and we the man. He gently stepped on the man’s feet and rubbed noses with the woman.

The most interesting part of this was peoples’ expressions as they came through. A camera crew shooting a feature film documentary on Marina noticed us, and later interviewed Steve and the female performer about experiencing art after losing his sight. “Do you smell them?” were among the stranger questions. My co-date Hilary Maslon answered: “He smokes, he can’t smell anything.”
In his usual humor, Steve claims that he writes about art easily by just saying what the artist says. One element of this show was that the art itself could potentially react to how I was describing it - although the performative discipline is not to do so.
The performer enjoyed, as I would too, the occasional jostling and scratches, that provided some relief from standing in one place for two hours or more. After all, when you’ve set yourself up to break down your physical boundaries with strangers, violation is the best possible thing that could happen, and yet distance reasserts itself as it must. The prescriptiveness of the verbal documentation and proposals convey far better than any warm analysis the numinosity, zen or shamanistic qualities of Marina’s art.

(crowd-sourcing)
Having met David Hammons twenty tears ago (if not more), I know his motto has always been, how to stay ahead of the game.

On a personal level, I’ve always thought of him as someone who never followed trends. His ideas about art have always been something new and different.

              For example, at one point he was selling snowballs on the corner of St. Marks and 2^nd Ave, and at another time he took telephone poles, and placed basketball goals atop the poles, which he showcased in an empty lot in Harlem. He called this piece, Higher Goals.

              Then, at one time, while sitting at an opening at a Gerhard Richter show at the MOMA, David said he wanted to do a show at Tribes. When I asked him what the content would be, David was quiet and said nothing. He instructed me to leave what I had on the wall, and said he would be by the next day.

              The next day he came by, took a newspaper, rubbed it against the wall where the frames were, producing an outline on the wall. This process took him less than an hour. He shook my hand and said, “I’m ready.”

              The next day, Robert Storr, who was the chief curator of contemporary art at the MOMA, and Jack Tilton showed up wanting to know, ‘where was the art. David called it invisible art. Unfortunately for them, there was no art to be taken from the walls.

              It was then six months later that he repeated the same process down at Ace Gallery, leaving the whole space devoid of art objects, with a woman sitting at a computer, next to someone playing the violin. That was the art.

              It was somewhere around this time that I introduced him to Mireia Sentis, who wanted him to do a show in Spain. He had no idea as to what he would show, or how much he could charge the institution. 

              She explained that his show would take place in the Crystal Palace in Madrid, which the Spanish had built to collect flowers from the Philippines. Meanwhile, Mr. Hammons had been invited to produce a show in Poland. He sent them a fax announcing the date of his arrival in Madrid.

              It was right then and there, he hit upon the Idea of the Global Fax Festival. Aside from A Gathering of the Tribes, David contacted an array of other galleries and institutions, which had shown his work over the last twenty odd years.

              And on opening night, during a thunderstorm in Madrid, he had people sending faxes from all over the world. The faxes rained in from fax machines which were suspended from the ceiling of the Crystal Palace, while Butch Morris was performing written and improvised music. The faxing went on for an entire month. That is, whenever artists, writers and musicians dropped by Tribes, we had them shoot a fax over to Madrid. The same was true for the other participating institutions.

Over the course, over 10,000 faxes were received. From those, a book was produced, including over 300 faxes from all over the globe. Some artists whose work can be found in the Global Fax Festival booklet include: Andrew Castrucci, Butch Morris, Sarah Fergisun, Giuseppe Gallo, Jack Tilton, Alecia Romero, Amy Ouzoonian, Amiri Baraka, Stanley Whitney, Elana Oscar, and many others. Pieces include drawings, prints, manifestos, news articles, poetry and more. One piece features a sketch of Dali’s famous mustache. Another is simply the word, BUSH! with the exclamation point illustrated as a noose.

              Originally, when Mr. Hammons got wind that the show would take place in a glass enclosure, he thought it would be a good idea to use sledge hammers and stones to destroy the entire space. But the Spanish government had disagreed. Global fax festival was plan B.

His latest foray; he was invited to do a show in Vienna. He came up with idea of smells. He would fill the space with various odors, and this would be the show.  Mr. Hammons has always been one who thinks of making art out of nothing, and nothing seems to be his forte.

Two very young painters have a show together at a gathering of the
tribes. Both took their MFA’s in 2009 from the New York Academy of Art
in TriBeCa, where the emphasis is on training students to paint, draw
& sculpt figuratively, just like the Old Masters (and like the Royal
Academy & French Salon painters of the 19th century, and the academic
branch of surrealism in France in the 1930s). Both these young
painters appear to have learned their lessons, as can be seen in
“Philip J. Hardy/Michael Gibson: Language Paintings” (through January
29). Gibson is still struggling to find himself, although some of his
pictures display sound academic technique, among them “Enter the Red
Shirt” and “They’re Year Five Thousand.” Hardy has not only mastered
academic technique, but is beginning to have ideas about how to employ
it, utilizing a blond palette & fanciful themes that resemble an
ultra-contemporary version of say, Rene Magritte. In only one instance
(among the nine paintings on view) would I say that Hardy’s technique
is inadequate to convey his ideas, but many of his images are
haunting, including “Transcendent Cars,” in which small automobile
float amid clouds, “Flying Pig,” a porker with wings, and “Pigggy,”
which shows another pig, this one under a bridge, with a wheelbarrow &
foliage. Most impressive is “Toad Lover,” a symphony in greys and
browns. It depicts a monstrously large greige toad in a greige
landscape with a smaller greige toad on his shoulders, while strapped
to the head of the smaller toad is a little house with light shining
out of its windows.

Roni Horn aka Roni Horn

Whitney Museum of American Art

The welcome mat laid out by Roni Horn and the Whitney, a collection of ninety-six color photographed portraits of the artist’s niece (This is Me, This is You 1998-2000) wastes no time with gentle introductions to the show’s primary theme. It would be difficult not to ask: “Who is that?” We are thinking about identity already. But this is too simplistic. Even for the conceptual cynics.

For Horn, it seems it is not enough to ask the intuitive questions about identity. It is about seeing beyond the constricted sightlines from which we have been conditioned to perceive of identity; that it is a constant distinction between people, things, places and ideas. To go beyond this Horn thoughtfully yet subtly asks us to consider the element of time as a factor within the identity equation.

In the work titled a.k.a. (2008-2009) fifteen pairs of photographs line the walls of one gallery. Each pair consists of a portrait of Horn, one of her in her youth while its mate depicts Horn as she approaches maturity. Carefully chosen, the body language in each image echoes the other, whether it be a slight head tilt, a cocked shoulder or a glint in the eyes, almost as a signal to the viewer that it is still her throughout, as the hairstyles change, as the face weathers, the overall appearance becomes more masculine. Through these images Horn has invited us to witness the fluidity of her own identity as she ages.

Presenting the often-overlooked element of time, and not pushing it on the viewer is a cheeky tactic. One that, for me at least, once figured out was quite rewarding. All of a sudden “I got it.” Or so I thought.

Figuring out the time component wasn’t enough. I was still searching for something within the identity equation. Finally, I had to let it go for a while. As I meandered through the second floor, passing the ninety-six portraits resting eagerly on the entry wall, I encountered selections from Bird. Six pairs of medium-size photographs taken of the rear heads of taxidermied owls, mallards and other fowl. In this gallery, as with a.k.a. it’s almost instinctive to read the collection by registering each pair as single elements that form a sort of narrative when (and if) pieced together. I hesitate to say that they form a story of sorts, but it’s difficult to deny that Horn is aware of our conditioned response to put together a story when presented with fragments. We make connections. It’s what we do.

And no sooner was I thinking this than the words serendipitously flowed from the mouth of a gallery guide to my ears: “when you see different kinds of work in a room, she is asking us to make the connection. That is really thoughtful of her.” Well, yes. It is thoughtful of her. Horn’s solicitation reminds us that seeing and looking are not mutually inclusive.

Take the great echoing expanse of the main gallery on the fourth floor. It’s almost too easy to miss White Dickinson (2006), six aluminum cast rods leaning tenderly against white walls. The white rubber text inserted into the broadsides quietly delivering opening lines from Emily Dickinson poems. Solemn lines express thoughts on perception, on being: “Nature is so sudden she makes us all antique”; “News of dying goes no further than the breeze, the ear is the last face.”

Because of the positioning, in order to fully view with the piece, you have to engage with it; to not let it’s statements end the conversation, but be the openers. Start a conversation.

Accompanying White Dickinson in the gallery is Pink Tons (2008), a 4’ x 4’ x 4’ sculpture of solid cast pink glass. In this room, where I felt to get swallowed by the coolness and calmness of my sparse surroundings there was no doubt a lot of room to think.

While Roberta Smith assigned the pairing of these two pieces as the embodiment of Horn’s “penchant for hushed preciousness”, I don’t think the undertone here can be so easily summarized. It’s difficult to pin it down, but in the end, does it really need to be pinned down? It’s a process of looking with your mind and feeling through the ideas by connecting elements with which you have very little acquaintance. You are now a participant in the conversation.

The intersections of time, connection, and the exploratory process of reevaluating our concepts of identity seem to be at the crux of Horn’s retrospective. It certainly is a lot to think about, and it definitely is not easy.

However excited I am for the reminder and the challenge Horn has presented, I cannot escape the feeling that this overall message can be lost in the directives coming from Horn: “see those, read this, move your body through this space.” But maybe we need a little push, hushed coaxing to wake up our sensibilities. Or maybe it’s too much to take in at once. Connections surely will be missed. I am certainly still considering the relationships. Still contemplating the possibility that identity is not a constant fixture.

As an experience, I would liken the show to a personal ad. File it under missed connections:

You: the prominent retrospective of a living artist; works spanning 30+ years; garnered the love and adoration of curators and theory-phile intellectuals.

Me: but a humble neophyte to the realm of late-minimalism; perhaps a fan of large exhibitions that get a lot of press; maybe I’m the kind of audience member you love most: the true blood art lover – passionate and postulating wild sometimes fantastical explanations for why this and that are laying near each other, but ever careful not to overstep my boundaries for I know that you have intentions. You have created this experience for me. And so I digress. Can we meet up for a sip? Perhaps near the River Thames. Or perhaps, I don’t try too hard to see beyond what’s placed in front of me. I think that art is a tool for the practice of looking; you know using your eyes beyond just seeing? Making the connection between visual, mental and sometimes if I’m lucky, emotional pleasure or (also if I’m lucky) disdain. But in this narrative, I cannot reveal the truth. Because, in all honesty, I don’t know. At any given moment I occupy all or none of these identities.

The barrier of self-consciousness wasn’t quite breached the first time, but you’ve left me thinking and wanting more, so let’s give it another go.

Roni Horn a.k.a. Roni Horn
Whitney Museum of American Art
On view November 6 2009 – January 24 2120