Artist Bill Viola has a show of work from two decades titled Bodies of Light, at James Cohan Gallery, through Dec 19. He sat down to talk about his work last week.
You had a residency at WNET a long time ago?
The first time I did something at WNET was in 1976; I did a piece called Four Songs that had to do with the passage of time, death, resurrection, but in a slightly different way than I deal with those topics now. It was broadcast on television. The first time my work was seen by large numbers of people, it was not in a museum, it was on NET, then it got syndicated and went to other public TV stations. I was involved with the TV Lab from around ‘75 thru maybe ‘81. That’s how I learned how to edit with high end professional equipment.
So many people have large format HD screens at home now… it’s a readymade format for your work.
I totally agree. The advent of flat screens have reconnected video to the art forms that since the beginning of video I’ve felt it was connected to. The flat screen confirmed all that, and the connection between the moving image and painting. That’s what plasma screens have allowed. And people like Jim and Jane Cohan (of James Cohan Gallery) get artists’ work on a wall in a portable format, which is what the original notion of painting was—frescoes, or cave paintings. People in the late middle ages were able to travel much farther than ever before, and they wanted to take their little icons with them. So artists painted icons, and the paintings started to grow, and eventually it eclipsed fresco. read more
To be trapped in Soho in a hellish, multi-room environment that has been, or is, inhabited by mutants or delinquents—this might occur once in a blue moon, but twice in one week? Yup. (And I’m not talkin’ about Topshop.) Once at Here Arts Center, where Los Grumildos was on view last week, and again at Deitch Projects’ Wooster Street space, where Jonah Freeman/Justin Lowe’s Black Acid Co-op is up through August 15.
“Grotesque. Charming. Sordid. Tiny.,” is how the installation by Peruvian artist Ety Fefer is concisely described on the postcard for Los Grumildos, part of Here’s puppetry program. Foot-tall puppets—hybrids of humans and crustaceans, with lobster claws, scorpion tails, and extra limbs—in individual terrariums “play” various instruments, their herky-jerky movements driven by small motors. read more
In the summer, the art world reverts to a kind of school semester mentality. Galleries shut on Saturdays if they’re even open to the public (and even then, close altogether in August), and often mount group shows based on whimsical themes. Museums, however, are obliged to stay open and service the hordes of visitors, but even they may tend to show art of a less academic nature, such as photography, or graphic or industrial design. With featured installations by two artists, the New Museum has managed to strike a balance between preferred summer art mediums and a historically and politically relevant conscience. David Goldblatt’s photographs of apartheid/post-apartheid South Africa occupy two floors, and Emory Douglas’ graphic designs for the Black Panthers fill another. read more
It seems fitting that an exhibition of Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare’s work is being shown at the Brooklyn Museum, located in a borough where more cultures meet daily in the Atlantic/Pacific subway station than in high season in a trading port of call.
A signature of Shonibare’s work is the use of Dutch wax fabric, African-inspired, vibrantly colored and patterned yardage goods produced in Europe and sold in Africa and elsewhere. The fabric is a rich and effective symbol for the intersection of cultures, from a sociological standpoint and commerce-wise. Shonibare (who, not insignificantly, uses the honorary title MBE after his name) creates elaborate colonial costumes with the prints, boldly mixing them and sparing no detail. read more
There’s a lot happening on Museum Mile these days. Among many highlights, the Met just opened their new American Wing, with a cascade of period rooms and galleries of decorative and functional objects orbiting around the huge Charles Engelhard Court, an atrium showcasing sculpture and stained glass. And up the street, the Guggenheim is celebrating its 50th anniversary with an overview of work by its dad, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959).
At first glance, the two seemed only tangentially related, tied by opening date and only the broadest of tags. The Met’s new American atrium holds some familiar sculpture and stained glass, but the sparse installation also served as a reminder of how Euro-centric the museum’s holdings are. The many cases of household items—pewter, porcelain, silver—are now sandwiched in a relatively glamourous mezzanine between the court and Central Park. read more
If Francis Bacon’s (1909-1992) artwork were a movie, it would no doubt captivate that mythical “ideal” demographic—males 18-49. His work is scary, brutal, graphic, hallucinogenic, and muscular, like so many blockbuster films nowadays. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. That’s partly why the Met’s retrospective of the British artist seems in tune with the moment. The exhibition, on view through August 16, was curated by Gary Tinterow of the Met, and Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens of the Tate Britain, London.
Walking through Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, it’s striking how many of Bacon’s 66 paintings on view seem very familiar already. Perhaps it has something to do with how accurately he portrayed nightmares of the subconscious, or how quickly those images immediately shot into the part of the brain that files fear. read more
Yayoi Kusama, born in 1929, has been a fixture in contemporary art circles for decades, and rightly so. Her obsessive canvases (“infinity nets”) and humorous, eye popping installations allow her work to traverse the verdant median between rigorous abstraction and loosely knit narrative. That her personal backstory, dealing with dark psychologial impulses and obsessiveness, manifests itself in her work and makes it all the more rich. Her popularity, in fact, is so widespread that her work suffers a bit from overexposure, even predictability. It can fit in just about any group show for the reasons above.
That’s partly why her current show at Gagosian is so impressive. read more
Roxy Paine, whose new installation Maelstrom sits atop the Met Museum’s roof through October, has long fooled us with his hyperreal sculptures of plants, fungi, and trees. Real and “art” specimens were indistinguishable, except that his renditions never died—although he has captured luscious produce in a half-rotten state. He’s also dealt with modern art and commerce issues with his sculpture and painting machines that churned out “masterpieces” at the push of a button.
His stainless steel trees of recent years have ranged between elegiac mimicry, critique, and irony. Context is all important for outdoor sculpture. A corporate plaza provides a completely different subtext for a tree sculpture than does Central Park. And the trees themselves have evolved from believable structural imitations to far more expressionistic, allusive branch webs. read more
One of the more fascinating developments in contemporary art over the past 10 or 15 has been rise of a new, far-flung class of artists from China, India, Latin America and the Middle East. Though obviously varied, these artists all use techniques borrowed from the Conceptual and Minimal Art which first emerged in the United States and Europe during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and thus, their work does share certain characteristics: It tends to take the form of very large and dramatic installations, often created with found or recycled objects. Photography, video and film are likewise often incorporated. More to the point, while the work appears to be Western on the surface, it is rooted in the artist’s particular culture of origin, and usually mixes biography with larger historical or social referents. This work, in other words, represents the first art movement that is the direct result of globalism, and not surprisingly, these artists have become a staple of international art fairs and surveys like the Venice Biennale. Adel Abdessemed, whose show “Rio” is currently on view through May 9 at David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, is a good example.
Abdessemed, who was born in Algeria in 1971, is ethnically a Berber. He left his country in 1994 for France shortly after the start of a decade-long period of political upheaval precipitated by the Algerian military when it canceled elections won by the Islamist party in 1992. Recently resettled in New York, Abdessemed continues to spend part of his time in Paris, and his work could be easily interpreted as an allegory of his peripatetic life. Telle mère tel fils (which translates as “Like Mother Like Son”), for instance, was created out of the nose and tails sections of three commuter airliners; connected by a tunnel made of white felt, the piece twists and turns like a giant serpent. read more
It’s hard enough for anyone to make sense of historical events as they unfold, but imagine trying to create art out of them. That is, of course, what political artists try to do, though not without the danger of succumbing to tendentiousness. For the past three decades, however, Jenny Holzer has managed to avoid this pitfall precisely because she’s generally avoided references to current affairs. Instead, she’s focused on the broader issue of how language itself is used a political tool. Thus, her signature “truisms”— “strong sense of duty imprisons you,” “an elite is inevitable”—deconstruct the dynamics of authority by aping its voice; yet they don’t really say anything. That is the genius of her approach.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of “Protect Protect,” the 15-year survey of Holzer’s work now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through May 31, is that much of it departs significantly from her usual reliance on ambiguity. While the show features plenty of the L.E.D (Light Emitting Diode) installations for which the artist is rightly famous, it also includes oil on linen paintings based upon redacted government documents that pertain to our invasion of Iraq and the war on terror. There are, for example, field reports of civilian killings, as well as a letter from a father pleading for leniency for his soldier son about to be court-martialed. There are fingerprints and handprints of suspected terrorists and enemy combatants. Though heavily censored, the meaning of these papers are abundantly clear. I contacted Holzer, and she was kind enough to answer a few questions about this material via email. read more
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