Lara Schnitger @ Anton Kern

Lara Schnitger's current show at Anton Kern is a gothic perversion of the already perverse Baroque. The presentation features creepy paintings, unstable sculptures, and a flawlessly executed web that catches the works like flies in a trap.

Schnitger is perhaps best known for her fabric constructions that are part fantastic dada, part Surrealist uncanny, and part Snuffleupagus. They hulk and tower like the Skeksis in The Dark Crystal. The work on view, Azurite Folly (2009) is part peacock, part starry night, part carnival tent, and part oven mitt.

The paintings range from pretty to disturbing. Woman with a Crow (2009), Schnitger's recasting of Picasso's eponymous work gives the composition an ethereal, magical quality. Instead of presenting simplicity and a sense of the earthy, this work is a study in delicacy. The crow becomes a landscape of the night and the woman's shoulder is cast as intricate doily. But Cupidity (After Bronzino) (2009), in its redressing of Bronzino's sexually-inflected work as an orgy of animality, is a little obvious in its modern transposition of an Allegory of Lust (what the National Gallery calls An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, 1540-50).








The best part of the exhibition is the installation, for which Schnitger has created a black snowflake web that references the theme of femininity pervasive through the works on view through its material: hosiery.

"Vernissage" a fancy word for "Opening"

I have a small gripe: the word "vernissage." I'm not exactly sure when this word started to replace the more adequate and appropriate "opening" but armory week was filled with vernissages. "Oh, it's the preview!" a friend of mine said. "Ah! The Pre-View." Now that's a word that makes sense--the first view or view before the view...well, it kind of makes sense. What's the etymology of "vernissage"? It's French of course (which makes it fancier), from 1912, and it refers to the day before an exhibition's official opening when artists were able to put the finishing touches on their paintings and then varnish them (vernissage comes from varnish). There's not much varnishing going on at these private previews, just plain old beer and sometimes $12 glasses of wine. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy a good vernissage now and then, I'd just prefer to call it the preview...and I will. 

Also, a weird thing I MUST comment on is VernissageTV. I would love for someone to explain to me this blog's merits, but honestly, it's truly ridiculous! I cannot imagine anyone watching this stuff. Boredom is an understatement. If only VernissageTV were an artwork on the ennui of the art world, then it would be high satire and awesomely funny, but as is, it's an exercise in patience. Check it out right before you get into bed.

A few quick thoughts

So I said I'd say a few words on the two other works on view at the Boiler Room: Yoon Lee's JFK and Jonathan Schipper's 215 Points of View, and since I like to do what I say I'm going to do, here goes.

Lee's painting is dramatic, with its skeins of looping paint artfully choreographed across the surface of the 20-ft length of PVC paneling. The sense of energy and dynamism is impressive, and I appreciate the gesture toward the narrative through the title, the word "JFK" conjuring momentous unplanned disaster and violence. Yet, in this particular work the gray geometrical architecture that contrasts with the colorful curved lines evokes anonymous corporate architecture or, given the context in which this work was shown, as-yet-unfinished luxury Williamsburg condos. Is it that such architecture itself is the perpetrator of violence or the recipient? For though both title and composition might indicate disaster, they might just as well suggest youthful hope and promise, unbounded energy and joy. Although I actually quite like Yoon's painting and the way in which it draws on a video-game aesthetic, I worry that it's too close to mainstream graphic tee-shirts sold at Urban Outfitters.

Schipper's work is quite an attraction, and despite an awkward conversation with the artist in which he asked me repeatedly which way I would twirl the globe to uncoil the cord, which was twisted (not knowing he was the artist, I kept insisting that I was fine with the cord the way it was and that it needed no untwisting [see cord at left]), I was generally intrigued. The 215 surveillance cameras on the globe shot footage, feeding it back through the monitors, and viewers spent some time trying to locate which camera corresponded with which screen, and not a few enjoyed spinning the entire work in one direction or another (leading to the cord troubles alluded to above). The interactive element, whether actually condoned by the artist or not, was one of the best aspects of the work and heightened its ability to incite inquisitiveness. The sense of totalizing surveillance was underlined by the perhaps a-tad-too-obvious symbolism of the globe, but this heavy-handedness was softened by the object's beauty and its ability to encourage interest in how surveillance technologies work, and how insidious they can become. On its own, the work is a strong one. If the artist hadn't snipped "did you take physics? did you go to college? then tell me how to uncoil the cord?" I might have liked it more. alas.

Addendum. Apparently I did not speak to the artist....and hence I'm quite glad that I can now safely say I liked the work, as no personal affront was incurred.

Boiler @ Pierogi

The gallery with the bar-none tastiest name (Pierogi) opened an annex, the Boiler, on March 7. Located on 191 North 14th Street in Williamsburg, Boiler is part of that genre of art spaces that have the smell of cement, earth, and hardwater that people are most familiar with from their basements, or, if they live in New York, where they (might) do their laundry. Other fine examples include the most recent Whitney Biennial's use of the Armory Building's nooks and crannies, and PS1's moist bottom floor. If it's leaking and smells like mold, it's a hot place to display and promote art.
Boiler's location is particularly wonderful for its adjacency to Gutter. Who doesn't want to view some art and bowl a few? Boiler showcased three works: Tavares Strachan's The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want (Arctic Ice Project), Yoon Lee's JFK, and Jonathan Schipper's 215 Points of View.

Strachan, who is soon to show at the ICA in Philadelphia, transported a 4.5 ton ice block from the Arctic, storing and displaying it in a glass-walled freezer. The project obviously invokes thoughts about global warming and ice-shelf melting, and it not without a touch of irony that the freezer is solar-powered. Though here the sun keeps cold that which elsewhere it melts, and thus a balance between freezing and melting appears to be maintained, the containment is still a futile process, with the situation being somewhat analogous to the misguided attempt to cool an apartment by leaving open a fridge door.

Formally, the ice block seems quiet and dare I say it, mysterious, with various cracks and colors ranging from blue-black to cerulean. It entrances and beckons like the ocean. Possessing an obvious unattainable beauty (the two so often being intertwined), it rests safe in its container.

But the project is more than just a conceptual gesture visualizing both distance and the loss such a displacement symbolizes, for flying above the freezer are Strachan's self-referential flags modeled on those flown by Arctic explorer Robert Peary. This is a signal to issues of authorship and identity. It is no coincidence that Strachan's piece is reminiscent of Marc Quinn's series of Self sculptures (begun in 1991). In Quinn's work the artist's visage, molded out of his own frozen blood, is contained in a freezer. The self for Quinn is contingent and momentary; it holds together only due to its surroundings and circumstance. Pull the plug...and the self disintegrates or rather, it melts like ice.

Tavares's references to the negotiation of self are more oblique, although on one level, pull the plug on the Arctic and we're all gone. To tease out the nuances of Strachan's work one must engage in the pursuit of history and the telling of stories (Strachan's titles themselves are nearly tomes): Peary claimed to be the discoverer of the North Pole, but whether or not he was remains an issue for debate. Another man, Frederick Cook, was most likely the actual discoverer; his overshadowing a story all its own. This claim to authorship and how certain people or places are overlooked in history is what makes the ice block a signifier of the social. Strachan, from the Bahamas, transported the ice block there and displayed it for children (overlooked art appreciators). The Bahamas, an island often overlooked for being anything other than a beach spot becomes in this movement the prime recipient of Strachan's art. His movement draws attention there instead of immediately to the New York art world. Subsequently, the block was further displaced to New York for the Boiler display. Here, a screen next to the freezer gives weather measurements in the Bahamas, quietly inserting this alterior narrative of an other place, another environment into Brooklyn, reminding us to not just look into the ice but outward to the world.

Strachan's cold heraldic block (with its literal heraldic flags) signals the entanglement of self, nation, and environment.

Soon...thoughts on the two other works at the Boiler, those by Lee and Schipper.

Top image: Boiler 

Middle: Detail of Strachan's work with Yoon's reflected in the glass.

Bottom: Michael Hall, Stamatina Gregory, Tavares Strachan

Patterns of Growth: Good in Concept, So-So in Practice

Patterns of Art @ NURTUREart (curated by Susan Ross and Melissa Staiger) has a great premise: the growth and connections occurring in nature and between generations. Growth of ideas, growth in artistic practice...it sounds optimistic and fruitful. And its nice to see a diverse exhibition focusing on painting and women's practice, including young artists just setting out in their careers and octogenarian veterans.

Unfortunately, Patterns of Art feels a bit old-hat, and not in a good way. A lot of the paintings seem thoughtfully executed, but generally forgettable. One series of small square paintings is beautifully reminiscent of the work of Vasily Kandinsky, but not overly memorable. Monique Ford's much larger canvases exude a primal sexuality, which is complimented by the garish color palette. Beatrice Wolert's cut and frayed spools of thread (with undertones of violence) very obviously draw on the tradition of artworks that reference women's work and images of the vulva (a la Judy Chicago), but do so in a manner that manages to be both slightly disturbing and comforting.

The strongest work is by Amy Kupferberg, whose 21 (2006) is harsh and delicate. From afar, her repeating pattern of hexagons reference concrete or industrial tiling, but up close, the rigid forms are revealed to be masa paper burned with an arc welder. The delicate translucency interrupted and scarred by holes, brings to mind decrepit city blocks or even wounded skin (a distant relative of Alberto Burri's Sacchi). As my boyfriend pointed out, the hexagons also brought to mind the cells of honeybees (those pollinating drivers of growth for both wild plants and cultivated crops), and the burned cells their recent mysterious disappearance. Whether or not any of these interpretations were intended by the artist is irrelevant. Kupferberg's union of the decayed and the living is artfully executed, and encourages patient observation and allusional thinking.

On view through March 28. 910 Grand St. Brooklyn, NY 11211

Both images: Amy Kupferberg, 21, 2006. Photo: SemperArs

Thoughts: Photorealism

Photorealism is a truly amazing moment in the history of Western painting during which artists, in a variant of Realism, based their paintings on photographs. Occurring during the late 1960s in the United States and somewhat in Europe, artists focused on photographs and photographic advertisements that showed items of popular culture and consumption, esp. cars.

Scholars of Photorealism have focused on the movement's connection to Pop art (it its focus on pop culture), to the tradition of realism (both stylistically and in its reflection of the new American consumer landscape), and to the rise of the popularity of the snapshot camera. It has been suggested that Photorealism reflects the banality of the landscape despite the fact that some artists actually painted photographs of members of their family (very un-banal subjects).


All of this is most likely true. However, I was thinking that one thing that I don't believe has been discussed is what the act of painting a photograph says about "the photographic." What I mean is that to take a snapshot photo in the late sixties is to "snap" an image...it is over in a second. It captures and freezes a moment, eternalizing it for the length of the existence of the film or printed photo--this comment isn't new, it's standard in the history of photography. To translate a photograph into a painting is to slow down the photographic moment even further and to preserve it to an even higher degree on the more indestructible medium of canvas. The gesture is by turns boring, neurotic, loving, and even fetishistic. If loving, the photographic is conceptualized as insufficient at extracting and preserving. If boring or neurotic, it is seen as is incomprehensible, necessitating obsessive repetition.

Also interesting is that Photorealism, while compounding the freezing element of the photographic, acts in a reverse direction. It takes place in time. It thereby reinserts the synchronic photograph back into the diachronic. Photorealism, at least that of artists like Robert Bechtle or Richard Estes, thus re-animates the dead photograph, resisting its pull, and yielding something even more unyielding. It is thus a kind of exercise of and on futility.




Photo: Robert Bechtle, '61 Pontiac, 1968-69. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchase, with funds from the Richard and Dorothy Rogers Fund © Robert Bechtle

Actually popular art: Bolt

So Bolt isn't exactly "high art" or "mass art" or possibly "art" at all, but searching for the "correct" word is rather semantic at best and truly pointless at worst. Bolt is most definitely a film...or a movie...or an animated feature. It is also the production I found myself planted in front of with my family during Thanksgiving away from NYC.

Thankfully, Bolt the dog is adorable. Those wide kitten eyes from Puss in Shrek2 are a near perma-feature of this white-furred, giant-headed furrball. (In fact, the fascination with "cute eyes" is a truly bizarre phenomenon that perhaps reflects some desire for the ability to look at others and find them truly non-threatening, even welcoming. The GAZE is met, returned, and fully open.)

But aside from "the gaze," Bolt the movie tells a completely implausible story that unfolds like this: Bolt is chosen from a shelter by a young girl named Penny (homage to Inspector Gadget anyone?) and raised inside a televison studio to believe he is a super dog who every day rescues his beloved Penny (who truly does love her dog) from an evil green-(cat-)eyed man. One day, much to Penny's dismay, the studio stages Penny's abduction to raise ratings and Bolt is prevented from saving her. Desperate to find her, Bolt escapes the studio confines, falls in a box, and gets shipped to New York. Yadda yadda yadda, he heads back West with the help of a cat and a hamster, learns he is NOT a super dog, learns how to be a regular dog, then saves Penny from an actual death when a Hollywood studio catches fire, and the whole group ends up together as a family.

That's the cheesy version. The version that makes anyone with any cultural studies training cringe and of course...dismiss. Yes, the movie ends in a ridiculously happy ending with all ends neatly bowtied. Yes, it is ironic that the movie is about movies being false, etc. etc.

However, Bolt is also genuinely touching tale.

Why? Because as Disney's (granted highly market-tested) foray into mirroring the contemporary American family, it posits the possibility of the hybrid familial unit predicated on adoption. The varieties of adoption and types of families are exhibited by the various characters: Bolt himself is a shelter puppy who never knew his parents. Mittens the cat was abandoned by her own family and is distrustful of humans and others in general. She is forcefully "adopted" by Bolt, and only over time comes to view him as her new family. Rhino the hamster (whose name itself hybridizes the creature by adopting a cross-species reference) has a fine home life, but actively chooses to leave his current family behind to become part of Bolt's. And finally, Penny, who has a mother but no father (unusual for many Disney films which are based on the killing or absence of the mother figure, e.g. Bambi) and ends up creating her own new family by adopting all three animals.

Such a diversity is refreshing in a children's movie.

Also interesting (as well as a bit of a stretch) is Bolt's story's relation to that of U.S. IF one can accept that possiblity that in some ways Bolt the dog stands for the United States, then Bolt the movie is about the waning and death of its power and the realization that what power it had was impotent. It is also about the nation's wish for a final demonstration of true power and redemption.

Bolt is under the impression that there is danger everywhere, he is so convinced that he becomes paranoid. (More importantly, Disney sets it up so that Bolt has been tricked into being convinced there is danger. He has also been tricked into believing he is omnipotent.) Bolt will do anything to save Penny from the perceived danger. Bolt and Penny are divided from one another. Bolt, over the course of many hard knocks, realizes that he is not a super dog, but a regular dog. Still motivated by his love of Penny, he decides to reunite with her regardless lack of superpowers. Finally, he is given the opportunity to save her from a real death, redeeming both himself and her and reuniting them.

Replace "Bolt" with the government of the United States and "Penny" with the concept or notion of the United States as a country and you have an abstracted (borderline conservative) parable about the how the Iraq war rent the nation from itself, and the country's desire for its sense of self to return.