Nezaket Ekici
Kopfsonate
Claire Oliver
513 West 26th Street
The extremely short press release gives the impression that Nezaket Ekici’s video installation Kopfsontate is supposed to represent a bodily exploration of music; but what I see is nostalgia. Up the stairs in the loft gallery at Claire Oliver, the wall space is painted black and a sequence of eight, flat-screen televisions hang horizontally across one side before a row of low, black benches. The windows and stairs on either end make the gallery feel like it has been deliberately removed from the rest of the world; as though it exists as a moment instead of a place. The video itself is a multi-channel repetition of Ekici drowning herself in the Black sea. Each screen offers the same endless expanse of deep purple water receding into the distant horizon of blue mountains under a pale, cloudy sky. In the midst of this eternal landscape Ekici, choreographed to a piano sonata, submerges and reemerges in each screen in time with the notes. This action repeated on multiple screens at a time has a sense of creating the notes as much as representing them.
What sets the piece apart from a simple act of choreography, though, is the rewind. It is clear right from the top what a lot of theater this is; a woman with bound breasts and water-logged hair sticking to her face, drowning herself again and again to sappy-soft music? It's easy to write off as some sort of feme-fatal/feminist gobldy-gook at best. But the rewind is the element that changes the conversation. Instead of just submerging forward in time, Ekici winds back and undoes her actions on one screen while living them on the next. The visual effect hits like some notes are an act of remembering, trying to remember, or even regret, instead of allowing a forward motion to continue. While the music may move on, this woman is restricted to one moment. The notes drag Ekici back into herself, and in time: binding her actions, drowning her ambitions.
And that is nostalgia as it happens in life. We move forward in each moment within time and space while simultaneously reliving our experiences internally. We drown in our own sense of longing, loss, hope, desire, and any number of other evocations that give us pause, and pull us inside ourselves. In living, there is no one moment of complete submersion or complete consciousness, just a sequence of multiples and interpretation and flux. Living is experiencing and remembering; and the way those two acts inform each other. Time is the music we apply to measure our progress.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Americans, Now and Then
Robert Frank
“Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
September 22 – January 3, 2009
If time has made any impact on The Americans since its initial release 50 years ago, it has been to reinforce the perceptive genius of Robert Frank. In and era when America was content to exist in a passive-aggressive state of denial about its racial issues and confused cultural identity, Frank’s camera found the moments that articulated both so completely that the images still resonate. Today, however, despite their often charged nature, they represent a nostalgic America: artifacts from another age, ripe for reevaluation.
The Met’s take on the iconic book, titled “Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans,” is both reevaluation and extended cut. The show leads in with several images from Frank’s previous studies in South America, England and France, that cast light on his early development. In these rough prints, Frank is already learning to use selective focus to isolate a figure, create plunging angles to drive the scene, and crop so that the photograph feels like a moment in time. Another early highlight is his application for the Guggenheim fellowship that funded the production of The Americans and his massive, continental road trip. This document doesn’t do much to cast Frank as a great writer, but coupled with the letter of recommendation from Walker Evans and promises of a book deal, it’s clear that even then, getting a grant was more about politics than artistic practice.
But politics or no, what is more interesting now is the marvel of how Frank could have known, could have seen in those fleeting moments between sight and shutter release exactly how to make tension visually potent. Photographs like Trolly—New Orleans, 1955, of a segregated trolly car with white women and children taking priority seating over African Americans, still hang with a tangible feeling of revelation. Again, in Charleston, South Carolina, 1955, where a resigned African American nanny holds a white baby in her arms and looks away into the distance, the message is just as unassuming and intense as it was 50 years ago. The contact sheets with multiple variations of these iconic shots, and the wall of test prints point to how calculated Frank really was when it came to getting it just right. What he created was more than momentary perception, but meaning that builds and takes its time until realization breaks like a cold sweat. Frank knew that significance is something that can’t be forced; it only happens when you let it unfold.
So 50 years later the legacy of The Americans is not the work, but actually the man. Frank is present in this show in a way he never could have been with the original book: his process, his judgments, his intentions. In his later years, Frank grew frustrated with the eventual success of his creation and sought to subvert it by symbolically destroying it in a series of film performances, which play at the very end of the exhibition. In spite of him, his visual essay is stronger than ever, and with that strength, his vision of America becomes our history.
“Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
September 22 – January 3, 2009
If time has made any impact on The Americans since its initial release 50 years ago, it has been to reinforce the perceptive genius of Robert Frank. In and era when America was content to exist in a passive-aggressive state of denial about its racial issues and confused cultural identity, Frank’s camera found the moments that articulated both so completely that the images still resonate. Today, however, despite their often charged nature, they represent a nostalgic America: artifacts from another age, ripe for reevaluation.
The Met’s take on the iconic book, titled “Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans,” is both reevaluation and extended cut. The show leads in with several images from Frank’s previous studies in South America, England and France, that cast light on his early development. In these rough prints, Frank is already learning to use selective focus to isolate a figure, create plunging angles to drive the scene, and crop so that the photograph feels like a moment in time. Another early highlight is his application for the Guggenheim fellowship that funded the production of The Americans and his massive, continental road trip. This document doesn’t do much to cast Frank as a great writer, but coupled with the letter of recommendation from Walker Evans and promises of a book deal, it’s clear that even then, getting a grant was more about politics than artistic practice.
But politics or no, what is more interesting now is the marvel of how Frank could have known, could have seen in those fleeting moments between sight and shutter release exactly how to make tension visually potent. Photographs like Trolly—New Orleans, 1955, of a segregated trolly car with white women and children taking priority seating over African Americans, still hang with a tangible feeling of revelation. Again, in Charleston, South Carolina, 1955, where a resigned African American nanny holds a white baby in her arms and looks away into the distance, the message is just as unassuming and intense as it was 50 years ago. The contact sheets with multiple variations of these iconic shots, and the wall of test prints point to how calculated Frank really was when it came to getting it just right. What he created was more than momentary perception, but meaning that builds and takes its time until realization breaks like a cold sweat. Frank knew that significance is something that can’t be forced; it only happens when you let it unfold.
So 50 years later the legacy of The Americans is not the work, but actually the man. Frank is present in this show in a way he never could have been with the original book: his process, his judgments, his intentions. In his later years, Frank grew frustrated with the eventual success of his creation and sought to subvert it by symbolically destroying it in a series of film performances, which play at the very end of the exhibition. In spite of him, his visual essay is stronger than ever, and with that strength, his vision of America becomes our history.
Reaching In and Reaching Out
Hung Liu
Apsaras
Nancy Hoffman
September 10 – October 31, 2009
Loss, expressed through reverent mysticism, is on view in Hung Lui’s show at Nancy Hoffman. Her large-scale oils hang like silent effigies to the living, documenting a wide range of moments that are presented to an omnipresent observer like prayers. Painting from photographs in the wake of the cataclysmic 2008 Sichuan earthquake that shook China and cost hundreds of thousands of lives, Liu creates portraits that say less about any one individual and more about the universal emotions of fatality that surface when life crumbles around us.
Liu’s often paint laden canvases represent a play on the Chinese Social Realist style she was trained in. Instead of choosing idealized settings and figures to represent the betterment of the Chinese people, her large scale canvases focus on individual moments of humanity. In Mirror, a young girl’s self-reflection is captured in the midst of the devastation that was once her room as she mindlessly combs her hair in the mirror attached to the front of her destroyed armoire. The quality of the paint application is what gives the scene its sentiment with soft, streaky, luminosity despite heavy, painterly, smudges. The canvas becomes an ephemeral surface, the patterned wreckage of the room emanating in bright pastels all around the placid central figure; a break from the chaos. The right two feet or so of the canvas is given over to a bloody, red panel with a black circle—a Buddhist symbol of rebirth—hastily posited in the center and hovering over a mess of black slathered below it. The panel adds a sense of immaterial resonance through its abstraction, a metaphysical contrast to the details of the physical in the majority of the painting.
Liu continues in this vein, the circle reprising itself in red in the background of a funeral march, as a group of weary soldiers carry a cloth-wrapped body up a steep hill of rocks. The circle leaks pale streams over the men’s heads, as though blessing their efforts. It shows up again in a series of small digital illustrations featuring the faces of children often seeking comfort in the arms of parents and older siblings, their small faces unable to comprehend the weight of the decimation around them. In another series, she paints the faces of subjects praying, crying, physically damaged, and hiding as small Apsaras, the Buddhist spirits of fallen heroes, drift around their heads.
Liu takes on a forceful, traumatic subject, but the delicacy of her touch on the lives in these moments is what speaks. She uses her paint as a tool to mediate the overwhelming horror and lay it to rest.
Apsaras
Nancy Hoffman
September 10 – October 31, 2009
Loss, expressed through reverent mysticism, is on view in Hung Lui’s show at Nancy Hoffman. Her large-scale oils hang like silent effigies to the living, documenting a wide range of moments that are presented to an omnipresent observer like prayers. Painting from photographs in the wake of the cataclysmic 2008 Sichuan earthquake that shook China and cost hundreds of thousands of lives, Liu creates portraits that say less about any one individual and more about the universal emotions of fatality that surface when life crumbles around us.
Liu’s often paint laden canvases represent a play on the Chinese Social Realist style she was trained in. Instead of choosing idealized settings and figures to represent the betterment of the Chinese people, her large scale canvases focus on individual moments of humanity. In Mirror, a young girl’s self-reflection is captured in the midst of the devastation that was once her room as she mindlessly combs her hair in the mirror attached to the front of her destroyed armoire. The quality of the paint application is what gives the scene its sentiment with soft, streaky, luminosity despite heavy, painterly, smudges. The canvas becomes an ephemeral surface, the patterned wreckage of the room emanating in bright pastels all around the placid central figure; a break from the chaos. The right two feet or so of the canvas is given over to a bloody, red panel with a black circle—a Buddhist symbol of rebirth—hastily posited in the center and hovering over a mess of black slathered below it. The panel adds a sense of immaterial resonance through its abstraction, a metaphysical contrast to the details of the physical in the majority of the painting.
Liu continues in this vein, the circle reprising itself in red in the background of a funeral march, as a group of weary soldiers carry a cloth-wrapped body up a steep hill of rocks. The circle leaks pale streams over the men’s heads, as though blessing their efforts. It shows up again in a series of small digital illustrations featuring the faces of children often seeking comfort in the arms of parents and older siblings, their small faces unable to comprehend the weight of the decimation around them. In another series, she paints the faces of subjects praying, crying, physically damaged, and hiding as small Apsaras, the Buddhist spirits of fallen heroes, drift around their heads.
Liu takes on a forceful, traumatic subject, but the delicacy of her touch on the lives in these moments is what speaks. She uses her paint as a tool to mediate the overwhelming horror and lay it to rest.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Another or An Other?
Janine Antoni
Luhring Augustine
Up Against
September 12-October 24
In Up Against, Janine Antoni pulls at the frayed edges of the female identity string both figuratively and literally. It starts with a single squared 15 inch digital c-print of a dark-haired baby in pink clothes, sitting in her high-chair using her orange plastic spoon to feed the belly button in the middle of her mother’s protruding stomach. Next, a slightly larger c-print called Conduit offers a fantastical view of Antoni holding a phallic, copper gargoyle in two hands under her hiked-up dress to pee through onto the New York skyline from the top of a skyscraper. The facing wall is lined with a row of crotch-height white podiums that support an oxidized collection of these gargoyles leering off the right hand corners. Subsequently, a darkened tunnel leads to a spot-lit, lead wrecking ball, damaged from use and ruminating in the wake of a hazel-brown eye projected on the back wall, which blinks to the sound of each wrecking ball hit; a sound that reverberates through the entire exhibition. Finally, in a crucifixion and a pièta called Inhabit, Antoni dominates the last room in a life-size print, her body harnessed at the crux of splayed white ropes which suspend her figure over a child’s room. On her lower half she wears a doll house, her legs cutting through the delicate, modern rooms like fleshy tree trunks. On the adjacent walls, two blurred prints selectively focus on a spider web which decorates the doll house’s tiny kitchen, complete with a live, brown spider.
At first, this progression and ubiquitous symbolism can feel disparate, and leave a viewer disoriented and annoyed. The gratuitous sexual references? The soft focus on motherhood? More religious symbolism? Another woman blathering on abstractly about what it means to be a woman? But does reinterpreting ever really get old? From the line of the baby’s orange spoon to mother’s round stomach and the curving stream of piss, to the lines and circles of the wrecking ball and iris, and finally the webs, Antoni isn’t just trying to re-define the old universal symbols of divine femininity —she’s stringing it all together. This show is quiet, resonant, subversive, sweet, mystical, and nurturing. It embodies the need to hold it all together in the face of feeling torn apart by what defines us. Antoni refuses and accepts all that she is Up Against, and it is refreshing to not have to choose.
Luhring Augustine
Up Against
September 12-October 24
In Up Against, Janine Antoni pulls at the frayed edges of the female identity string both figuratively and literally. It starts with a single squared 15 inch digital c-print of a dark-haired baby in pink clothes, sitting in her high-chair using her orange plastic spoon to feed the belly button in the middle of her mother’s protruding stomach. Next, a slightly larger c-print called Conduit offers a fantastical view of Antoni holding a phallic, copper gargoyle in two hands under her hiked-up dress to pee through onto the New York skyline from the top of a skyscraper. The facing wall is lined with a row of crotch-height white podiums that support an oxidized collection of these gargoyles leering off the right hand corners. Subsequently, a darkened tunnel leads to a spot-lit, lead wrecking ball, damaged from use and ruminating in the wake of a hazel-brown eye projected on the back wall, which blinks to the sound of each wrecking ball hit; a sound that reverberates through the entire exhibition. Finally, in a crucifixion and a pièta called Inhabit, Antoni dominates the last room in a life-size print, her body harnessed at the crux of splayed white ropes which suspend her figure over a child’s room. On her lower half she wears a doll house, her legs cutting through the delicate, modern rooms like fleshy tree trunks. On the adjacent walls, two blurred prints selectively focus on a spider web which decorates the doll house’s tiny kitchen, complete with a live, brown spider.
At first, this progression and ubiquitous symbolism can feel disparate, and leave a viewer disoriented and annoyed. The gratuitous sexual references? The soft focus on motherhood? More religious symbolism? Another woman blathering on abstractly about what it means to be a woman? But does reinterpreting ever really get old? From the line of the baby’s orange spoon to mother’s round stomach and the curving stream of piss, to the lines and circles of the wrecking ball and iris, and finally the webs, Antoni isn’t just trying to re-define the old universal symbols of divine femininity —she’s stringing it all together. This show is quiet, resonant, subversive, sweet, mystical, and nurturing. It embodies the need to hold it all together in the face of feeling torn apart by what defines us. Antoni refuses and accepts all that she is Up Against, and it is refreshing to not have to choose.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Generation Everything
The Generational: Younger Than Jesus
The New Museum
April 4 – July 5, 2009
On the elevator ride up to the New Museum’s 5th floor to start my descent through the many levels of the exhibition, I overheard a conversation between the two forty something hipsters behind me. The woman was describing how a mutual friend had caught his wife in an affair by searching through her phone records. As we all stepped off the elevator she said, “I never in a million years would have thought to do that! I mean, isn’t that extraordinary?” I immediately thought to myself, I absolutely would have thought of that - I’ve seen it done a thousand times before, and realized abruptly that, that may very well be what separates my generation from hers: the smug cynicism of a “have it all/seen it all” mentality.
In The Generational :Younger than Jesus, this youthfully condescending attitude is well represented to the inclusion of little else. The show contains a mash-up of pop culture with various styles from the history of 20th century art, without much thought to the meaning of either element. Born in 1980, I am the median age for artists in this targeted group show and I felt a shameful connection to the fragmented, confused, cluster-@$*%! on display. We are a generation that has been taught to do it faster, like the group AIDS-3D’s OMG Obelisk, which tries to generate a conflict between a popular text message abbreviation and ideas about worship and religion through a stoic black rectangle topped with glowing letters, surrounded by odd little glow ended line sculptures that comes off as cheesy and simple minded. We are a generation who has been taught to look to the past, like Josh Smith’s wall gridded with poster-like paintings that represent little more than a teenager’s willful reinterpretation of abstract expressionism or Chu Yun’s contrived meditation on vulnerability through a series of drugged, sleeping women; an archetype in the history of performance art. We are a generation who has been taught to embrace technology, evident in the pervasive amount of video and web based art which ranges from Faye Driscoll’s tiny screen full of pointless, vogue, stop motion dance to Cory Archangel’s glib, wall consuming, blue photo-shopped screen, to Anna Molska’s weird, homo-erotic, wall projection of buff men in almost nothing but archaic soldier’s helmets arbitrarily pushing around large geometric pieces to an equally arbitrary soundtrack of upbeat bleeps.
The show stopper, however, is Ryan Trecartin’s centrally located video/sculpture piece which turns the tables by commenting on youth culture in a way that psychologically encompasses the failings of his present company. Sibling Topics (Section A and Section B) is a deeply satirized vision of reality tv, my space, and their self-indulgent solitude, that looks a lot like a bizzaro episode of MTV’s The Real World; a show our generation was raised on. The characters are ridiculous to the point of ingenious with their painted, gentrified faces, excessive slang, and slothful over attention to fashionable, self centered, emptiness. Set in two rooms, ludicrously overstuffed with fragmented, mismatched furniture and items that feel like a packrat’s first one bedroom apartment, the piece’s insanity is pitch-perfect. Trecartin succeeds where others fail because he uses the short hand of a generation to describe it instead of pick it apart.
But in the end, even all of these observations on generational attitudes and tendencies through the filter of this show are unreliable. Doesn’t it seem a little soon to be summing up an entire generation that has just barely moved out of its parent’s basement? And The New Museum’s method of weaning out “the” artists through the recommendations of curators seems more like a bad commentary on the failings of our art system’s tendency toward commodification and authoritative elitism than a faithful documentation. The set up is contrived to sell museum tickets to a generation of egocentric consumers, who are guaranteed to love the attention.
The New Museum
April 4 – July 5, 2009
On the elevator ride up to the New Museum’s 5th floor to start my descent through the many levels of the exhibition, I overheard a conversation between the two forty something hipsters behind me. The woman was describing how a mutual friend had caught his wife in an affair by searching through her phone records. As we all stepped off the elevator she said, “I never in a million years would have thought to do that! I mean, isn’t that extraordinary?” I immediately thought to myself, I absolutely would have thought of that - I’ve seen it done a thousand times before, and realized abruptly that, that may very well be what separates my generation from hers: the smug cynicism of a “have it all/seen it all” mentality.
In The Generational :Younger than Jesus, this youthfully condescending attitude is well represented to the inclusion of little else. The show contains a mash-up of pop culture with various styles from the history of 20th century art, without much thought to the meaning of either element. Born in 1980, I am the median age for artists in this targeted group show and I felt a shameful connection to the fragmented, confused, cluster-@$*%! on display. We are a generation that has been taught to do it faster, like the group AIDS-3D’s OMG Obelisk, which tries to generate a conflict between a popular text message abbreviation and ideas about worship and religion through a stoic black rectangle topped with glowing letters, surrounded by odd little glow ended line sculptures that comes off as cheesy and simple minded. We are a generation who has been taught to look to the past, like Josh Smith’s wall gridded with poster-like paintings that represent little more than a teenager’s willful reinterpretation of abstract expressionism or Chu Yun’s contrived meditation on vulnerability through a series of drugged, sleeping women; an archetype in the history of performance art. We are a generation who has been taught to embrace technology, evident in the pervasive amount of video and web based art which ranges from Faye Driscoll’s tiny screen full of pointless, vogue, stop motion dance to Cory Archangel’s glib, wall consuming, blue photo-shopped screen, to Anna Molska’s weird, homo-erotic, wall projection of buff men in almost nothing but archaic soldier’s helmets arbitrarily pushing around large geometric pieces to an equally arbitrary soundtrack of upbeat bleeps.
The show stopper, however, is Ryan Trecartin’s centrally located video/sculpture piece which turns the tables by commenting on youth culture in a way that psychologically encompasses the failings of his present company. Sibling Topics (Section A and Section B) is a deeply satirized vision of reality tv, my space, and their self-indulgent solitude, that looks a lot like a bizzaro episode of MTV’s The Real World; a show our generation was raised on. The characters are ridiculous to the point of ingenious with their painted, gentrified faces, excessive slang, and slothful over attention to fashionable, self centered, emptiness. Set in two rooms, ludicrously overstuffed with fragmented, mismatched furniture and items that feel like a packrat’s first one bedroom apartment, the piece’s insanity is pitch-perfect. Trecartin succeeds where others fail because he uses the short hand of a generation to describe it instead of pick it apart.
But in the end, even all of these observations on generational attitudes and tendencies through the filter of this show are unreliable. Doesn’t it seem a little soon to be summing up an entire generation that has just barely moved out of its parent’s basement? And The New Museum’s method of weaning out “the” artists through the recommendations of curators seems more like a bad commentary on the failings of our art system’s tendency toward commodification and authoritative elitism than a faithful documentation. The set up is contrived to sell museum tickets to a generation of egocentric consumers, who are guaranteed to love the attention.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
In the End.
Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867–1947)
Self Portrait, ca. 1938–40
Oil on canvas; 30 x 24 in. (76.2 x 61 cm)
Collection Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Purchased 1972
© 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
www.metmuseum.org
Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
January 27 – April 19 2009
Pierre Bonnard’s interior paintings from the last twenty years of his life are so lusciously radiant it is easy to get caught up in the color and miss what is insubstantial, and more important. Like Monet, whose late works leaned toward belligerent, linear insanity due to his failing eyesight, and Louis Wain whose illustrations of cats turned into sinister, kaleidoscopic patterns as he succumbed to schizophrenia; Bonnard’s late in life works feel more like a charged descent from his more famous earlier works. This collection represents distortion at the hands of depression and loss, not ingenuity through bright palate.
Much like the work of Matisse, who was painting in a similar style during this same period in history, Bonnard’s paintings from this late period are more about patterns than subjects. The difference between someone like Bonnard and someone like Matisse, however, is that while Matisse focused decidedly on using his abstraction definitively, with distinct, bold colors, heavy outlines and a concentrated simplicity; Bonnard is comparatively messy, hazy and indecisive. It is the repetitive actions of his messy lines and bold colors that force his subjects into an oblivion of abstraction. In The White Interior, for example, the bent figure (assumably Bonnard’s wife Marthe) is nearly indistinguishable from the floor; the salmon-navy speckles of the rug synonymous with her clothing. The table, doors and windows jut out in blinding, but muddled white competing in intensity with the dark blotches of plant life outside and in, while the lighter outlines of the dishware on the table barely resist a dappled unity with the tablecloth. The effect is aggressive, but so universally aggressive that no one element separates itself from the whole; there are no centers of interest, just one big mess of equally active lines and colors competing with each other in a way that is visually stimulating and mentally exhausting.
Despite the pervasiveness of subjects such as bowls of fruit and food, books, papers, furniture and plant life, Bonnard’s people are the most interesting. In Flowers on the Mantelpiece at Le Cannet a woman stands with her back to us, hand on the mantelpiece dissected by the edge of the canvas. Her face, turned only slightly inward, as if resisting a glace over her shoulder, suggests her tense awareness of the viewer’s eyes on her. In Before Dinner, two female figures stand to the back and the side of the canvas, looking dartingly downward and away, also aware of a viewer whose eyes they shamefully refuse to meet. Each figure is pushed into the background behind huge tables of food, overly detailed bouquets of flowers and immense windows. They hover, alienated from themselves and each other, around the edges of the interiors of their lives; conceding their significance to the inanimate objects that represent them.
Finally, and most tellingly, are Bonnard’s paintings of himself from the very final years of his life. Each of the medium sized paintings features Bonnard cropped just below the shoulders, staring back at the viewer. His sunken features and upturned eyebrows punctuated by the mottled, dysfunctional mess of his hands. He is a pathetic creature. These paintings lack the color variation so predominant in the rest of the show, mainly comprised of fleshy tones in pasty pink and sallow yellow. Bonnard’s pained face fades into the color of the background as though he is disintegrating before the viewer’s eyes. In the context of these paintings this show seems less about Bonnard’s last move toward sumptuous, overwhelming abstraction than it is about his feelings as a man at the end of his life. His beloved wife gone, his resources waning, his health failing, he painted his life as he saw it—as a unity of ordinary things estranged from, and blurring into themselves and then, into non-existence. The work is hard on the senses for its assertive abstraction and movements toward immateriality, but keep your eyes on the canvas and you’ll see Bonnard’s ability to immortalize his own decline in a way that stands outside of time.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Defining Absence
Yoshitomo Nara
February 28 – March 28, 2009
Marianne Boesky Gallery
I’ve been wondering for a little while now why Yoshitomo Nara’s work is so unsettling. Large cartoon paintings of little girls with jelly bean heads, sculpted bob hairdos, and oversized eyes hardly seems like subject matter that should evoke uneasiness. They look more like the diary drawings of an eight year old girl with all their variations of sass, boredom, violence and silliness, than the latest additions in the career of a middle aged Japanese man.
The front two rooms of the gallery are filled with drawings and paintings large enough to fill a mantle piece, small enough to fold up and put in your pocket, and everywhere in between. The drawings are more active with evocative text like, the massive “Rock’n Roll The Roll” in lipstick red graffiti featuring a lumpy headed girl with hips angled out strumming her little figure-eight shaped guitar. The tops of her eyes slanted down and her frowning line mouth half open indicates her aggressive concentration, while action lines and musical notes project out from her. Coffee table book sized drawings in pencil feature girls in plain outlined square dresses with half circle poesy collars and blank backgrounds. They arbitrarily sit in a chair, wear a round nose and whiskers, and stare from underneath a heavy shock of long line hair with words like “Creep” and “NYC” around and on them. In poster sized acrylic paintings the girls are cut off just below the white collar and stare silently through vacuous circle eyes of blue-grey or emerald-gold or stick out a pink tongue from a disk slot mouth under the curved lines to indicate closed lids. The back room is even more off-putting with two cobble wood shingled turret cottages, one filled with colorful stuffed animals and a roof pointing up through the ceiling, the other broken or burned off at the top housing a small living space with a tiny desk, drawing materials and radio/cd player. A painting fills the back wall of the stuffed animal cottage looming over the interior space like an alter the toys worship and in the other small drawings, stuck up haphazardly, seem like the products of the non-existent occupant.
Despite the variety of poses and the subtle variation between size, detail and action, these little girls always have one thing in common: their monumental absence. The exhibition feels like a voyeuristic peek into a culture of little humanoid creatures who could be gone for an hour or forever. They stare at us through images made mostly of simple lines that indicate feelings but their eyes, actions and dwellings are empty of anything but semblance. The rooms of the show are sterilized, desensitized, filled with sentimental objects that have been stripped of their sentiment. It makes me uneasy but intrigued by both the creatures themselves and what Nara might be saying about our ideological, image hungry culture through them: in the absence of something real in life, emotion or depiction what is there? Does it do us harm or pleasure?
February 28 – March 28, 2009
Marianne Boesky Gallery
I’ve been wondering for a little while now why Yoshitomo Nara’s work is so unsettling. Large cartoon paintings of little girls with jelly bean heads, sculpted bob hairdos, and oversized eyes hardly seems like subject matter that should evoke uneasiness. They look more like the diary drawings of an eight year old girl with all their variations of sass, boredom, violence and silliness, than the latest additions in the career of a middle aged Japanese man.
The front two rooms of the gallery are filled with drawings and paintings large enough to fill a mantle piece, small enough to fold up and put in your pocket, and everywhere in between. The drawings are more active with evocative text like, the massive “Rock’n Roll The Roll” in lipstick red graffiti featuring a lumpy headed girl with hips angled out strumming her little figure-eight shaped guitar. The tops of her eyes slanted down and her frowning line mouth half open indicates her aggressive concentration, while action lines and musical notes project out from her. Coffee table book sized drawings in pencil feature girls in plain outlined square dresses with half circle poesy collars and blank backgrounds. They arbitrarily sit in a chair, wear a round nose and whiskers, and stare from underneath a heavy shock of long line hair with words like “Creep” and “NYC” around and on them. In poster sized acrylic paintings the girls are cut off just below the white collar and stare silently through vacuous circle eyes of blue-grey or emerald-gold or stick out a pink tongue from a disk slot mouth under the curved lines to indicate closed lids. The back room is even more off-putting with two cobble wood shingled turret cottages, one filled with colorful stuffed animals and a roof pointing up through the ceiling, the other broken or burned off at the top housing a small living space with a tiny desk, drawing materials and radio/cd player. A painting fills the back wall of the stuffed animal cottage looming over the interior space like an alter the toys worship and in the other small drawings, stuck up haphazardly, seem like the products of the non-existent occupant.
Despite the variety of poses and the subtle variation between size, detail and action, these little girls always have one thing in common: their monumental absence. The exhibition feels like a voyeuristic peek into a culture of little humanoid creatures who could be gone for an hour or forever. They stare at us through images made mostly of simple lines that indicate feelings but their eyes, actions and dwellings are empty of anything but semblance. The rooms of the show are sterilized, desensitized, filled with sentimental objects that have been stripped of their sentiment. It makes me uneasy but intrigued by both the creatures themselves and what Nara might be saying about our ideological, image hungry culture through them: in the absence of something real in life, emotion or depiction what is there? Does it do us harm or pleasure?
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