Review of Rachael Harrison’s “If I Did It” at Greene-Naftali
Rachael Harrison is one the best contemporary sculptors around and this outing at Greene-Naftali, titled, “If I Did It” after O.J. Simpson’s title for his unreleased book, shows her at the top of her game. The sculptures here, each titled for a famous man, hewed closely to her typical formats – generally lumpy, stucco-ed, brightly painted, misshapen quasi-formalist sculpture adorned with kitschy knick-knacks, as well as a long rebus of photographs of sculptures depicting faces. The results here were nonetheless surprising in new ways.
Typically, these pieces all present a number of contradictory ideas about space and how radically different sculptural motifs, using a free-associative approach to meaning, can be juxtaposed. Each element seems to mock our tendencies to read them in familiar ways. Does it matter how beautiful, formal, well-crafted, or whatever, an abstract element is if there’s a can of “Arnold Palmer’s Lite Half & Half Ice Tea/Lemonade” nestled into one of its crannies (or that this can makes its appearance in a sculpture titled “Tiger Woods” – get it, “half & half”?)? It does, but only because the efficacy of a punch-line is mostly determined by its set-up. Part of the can’s jolting incongruity is that it suddenly becomes a formal element, as well, forcing you to think about what this ridiculous thing looks like i.e. utterly bizarre.
Elsewhere these tricks achieved mixed results. A tall roughly rectangular monolithic sculpture with a thermostat mounted on its side was titled “Al Gore”. Painted in both warm and cool tones, it initially seemed like a joke about color “temperature”, but the title reduced it to a one-liner. Likewise, a piece titled “Fats Domino” with a can of Slim-fast set on top is sculpturally impressive but the “Fat/slim” pun is a little grating. Another, titled “Johnny Depp”, painted in metallic gold paint and violet which included a large hoop ear dangling off it was more subtle and convincing. The clashing shades of fake gold were stunning, vulgar, off, and mesmerizing all at once.
A ring-bound book of Harrison’s source material and inspiration here also provided insight into her practice and offered unusual clues to her sculptures’ significance. A quotation from the enlightenment philosopher John Locke for example, describes how “complex” ideas derive from simpler ones: how the simple ideas of “red” and “sweet” together might form the complex idea of a “sweet, red apple”. Aside from offering an analogue for Harrison’s practice (where complex elements would seem to combine in mounting complexity) it also provides an alternative explanation for the funny Styrofoam apples appearing elsewhere on a couple of her sculptures (and, therefore, a concomitant comment on her tendency to deflate complex meanings back to the comical incidentals of particular forms – as if John Locke was a guy who wrote about apples). Whatever else apples might signify, a Styrofoam apple (with an apparently real bite taken out of it) is nonetheless, like Ms. Harrison’s sculptures as a whole, an ineffable, marvelous oddity unto itself.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Another Old Review - Ann Craven's 400 Paintings
Review of Ann Craven’s 400 Paintings at Gasser & Grunert
Originally Published in Artillery Issue 5
Ann Craven has a tendency to repeat herself. In the past this has meant re-painting an entire show with a single adjustment: doubling the size of the canvases. Last year in a show of featuring 15 nearly identical paintings of deer, she scattered empty beer cans all over the gallery and provided free beer for visitors during gallery hours – a concept created in collaboration with the painter Josh Smith and titled “Deer and Beer”. This time around she’s painted the moon, 400 times, from life over the course of a single month – each painting identical in size and scale. A concurrent show at the Cincinnati Art Center featured a series of 400 duplicates –paintings that she made from the 400 originals. As an added twist, in a nod to Felix Gonzalez Torres, two stacks of small posters were placed on the floor. One was a reproduction of a painting from the original series, the other, a reproduction of a painting from the series of duplicates.
The 400 moon paintings stretched around the room in arrangement which might be called salon-style though it also resembled a sort of fragmented, off-kilter grid and also called to mind the word “constellation”, given the celestial subject matter. Each of the relatively small, square canvases presented a fresh variation on her theme - ranging from nearly monochromatic, to cloud-obscured views, murky concentric circles of fog, moody glimpses through skeletal silhouettes of tree brances, and several elegantly efficient treatments of yellow or orange crescents.
With her narrow set of constraints and carefully limited palette, Craven exploits seemingly every possibility available and reminds us that, for as long as it’s there, people will always stare at the moon and invest its image with Romantic, emotional, poetic, and meteorological significance. Adjacent paintings grouped roughly into themes. The appearance of a single bold stroke representing a moon-obscuring cloud felt brazen and thrilling next to a stretch of nearly austere crescents. Her paint handling in each was both light and self-assured – towing a fine line between loose and controlled, though erring on the side of too loose, and was reminiscent of both Katz and Richter, yet distinctly her own.
At any rate, her method of repeating herself may have less to do with the encyclopedic array of art-historical references which she’s incorporated into her work and more in common with a musician practicing a simple melody in order to assimilate its subtleties into physical reflexes. And while her various conceptual maneuvers are generally well-considered, I did wonder, as I haven’t actually seen them, if the trick of reproducing 400 paintings is absolutely necessary. But this is beside the point, by tying together ostensibly disparate practices and ideas, Craven isn’t simply trying to convince us of her own cleverness (or how inside of art history she is), but rather to channel the inchoate joys of art, art history, and (while deigning to dismiss the issue with sly, humble irony) the ever-effulgent possibility of the new.
Originally Published in Artillery Issue 5
Ann Craven has a tendency to repeat herself. In the past this has meant re-painting an entire show with a single adjustment: doubling the size of the canvases. Last year in a show of featuring 15 nearly identical paintings of deer, she scattered empty beer cans all over the gallery and provided free beer for visitors during gallery hours – a concept created in collaboration with the painter Josh Smith and titled “Deer and Beer”. This time around she’s painted the moon, 400 times, from life over the course of a single month – each painting identical in size and scale. A concurrent show at the Cincinnati Art Center featured a series of 400 duplicates –paintings that she made from the 400 originals. As an added twist, in a nod to Felix Gonzalez Torres, two stacks of small posters were placed on the floor. One was a reproduction of a painting from the original series, the other, a reproduction of a painting from the series of duplicates.
The 400 moon paintings stretched around the room in arrangement which might be called salon-style though it also resembled a sort of fragmented, off-kilter grid and also called to mind the word “constellation”, given the celestial subject matter. Each of the relatively small, square canvases presented a fresh variation on her theme - ranging from nearly monochromatic, to cloud-obscured views, murky concentric circles of fog, moody glimpses through skeletal silhouettes of tree brances, and several elegantly efficient treatments of yellow or orange crescents.
With her narrow set of constraints and carefully limited palette, Craven exploits seemingly every possibility available and reminds us that, for as long as it’s there, people will always stare at the moon and invest its image with Romantic, emotional, poetic, and meteorological significance. Adjacent paintings grouped roughly into themes. The appearance of a single bold stroke representing a moon-obscuring cloud felt brazen and thrilling next to a stretch of nearly austere crescents. Her paint handling in each was both light and self-assured – towing a fine line between loose and controlled, though erring on the side of too loose, and was reminiscent of both Katz and Richter, yet distinctly her own.
At any rate, her method of repeating herself may have less to do with the encyclopedic array of art-historical references which she’s incorporated into her work and more in common with a musician practicing a simple melody in order to assimilate its subtleties into physical reflexes. And while her various conceptual maneuvers are generally well-considered, I did wonder, as I haven’t actually seen them, if the trick of reproducing 400 paintings is absolutely necessary. But this is beside the point, by tying together ostensibly disparate practices and ideas, Craven isn’t simply trying to convince us of her own cleverness (or how inside of art history she is), but rather to channel the inchoate joys of art, art history, and (while deigning to dismiss the issue with sly, humble irony) the ever-effulgent possibility of the new.
Old Reviews - Matthew Ritchie's "Universal Adversary" at Andrea Rosen
There's more posts on the way but in the meantime I'm going to post a few old reviews here. These are things that I've had published a while but aren't on-line. Here they are.
Elwyn Palmerton
Matthew Ritchie's Universal Adversary at Andrea Rosen Gallery
Matthew Ritchie's recent show "Universal Adversary" began with a lightbox mounted outside the gallery featuring a quotation from Ezekiel: "their appearance and their work was as if a wheel within a wheel" it began and then continued "their rings full of eyes, round about them as four". The quote aptly evoked Ritchie's visual style and cosmological inter-disciplinary approach to art-making in addition to establishing his installation's quasi-religious tone of apocalyptic foreboding. Inside the gallery, the combination of a row of prismatic light-boxes (in which the images of ascending figures changed and dissolved depending upon your viewing angle), his swirling Arabesque latticework ("drawing" as architectural intervention), and the muted Earthy tones of the paintings created a cathedral-esque vibe – a tone amplified by an audio recording of a monotonous voice - the titular "Universal Adversary", presumably - intoning a litany of disaster scenarios that sounded as bureaucratic as it was ominous; the exhibition's title was lifted from a government report listing 15 threats to the U.S. population.
The overall effect was relatively tranquil, almost meditative – ironically so, considering his sprawling, chaotic aesthetic and paranoiac narrative – perhaps a reflection of how comfortable we are with the media's near daily hysterical pronouncements. In this sense, Ritchie's take on this sort of trendy religious/apocalyptic content was one of the more nuanced, lucid, and original interpolations of this recently popular theme.
The paintings, for their part, still feel like they contain the essential juice of his enterprise. This time around they're more painterly but they still contain his familiar diagrammatic flourishes – e.g. directional arrows, equations, and black outlines – as if his language will always remain an uncomfortable hybrid of contradictory devices - stuck somewhere between the picturesque and the schematic. The four shown here were redundant enough to suggest a series of stills rather than effectively independent paintings. His framing methods also, by focusing more on scale and density of information than on composition, accentuate the cinematographic as well as cosmological impulse in his work – as if he's alternately zooming in and out on a single, infinitely large and detailed, entity.
Given this tendency, one might expect more from the videos: two pixilated/grainy animations depicting atmospheric beachscapes or marshlands in mostly sepia and brown tones. Video ought to provide Ritchie with room to explore and reveal more of his inherently kinetic world but, unfortunately, he only manages to animate it. In a way, they're less cinematic or dynamic than the paintings; they're flurries of visual noise over static backgrounds – essentially an animation cliché: moving figures over a stationary ground.
Still, Ritchie's rigorously conceived world always elicits a combination of perplexity and wonderment – even when he fails to reveal enough of it. That he's flirting with its destruction is a tantalizing, amusingly ironic, and seemingly inevitable prospect, but the results felt timid: an atmospheric evocation of impending doom, an ambiance of paranoia, and the calm before the storm rather that the cataclysmic shit-storm that Ritchie's obviously capable of conjuring up. I guess we'll have to wait to see what comes next.
Elwyn Palmerton
Matthew Ritchie's Universal Adversary at Andrea Rosen Gallery
Matthew Ritchie's recent show "Universal Adversary" began with a lightbox mounted outside the gallery featuring a quotation from Ezekiel: "their appearance and their work was as if a wheel within a wheel" it began and then continued "their rings full of eyes, round about them as four". The quote aptly evoked Ritchie's visual style and cosmological inter-disciplinary approach to art-making in addition to establishing his installation's quasi-religious tone of apocalyptic foreboding. Inside the gallery, the combination of a row of prismatic light-boxes (in which the images of ascending figures changed and dissolved depending upon your viewing angle), his swirling Arabesque latticework ("drawing" as architectural intervention), and the muted Earthy tones of the paintings created a cathedral-esque vibe – a tone amplified by an audio recording of a monotonous voice - the titular "Universal Adversary", presumably - intoning a litany of disaster scenarios that sounded as bureaucratic as it was ominous; the exhibition's title was lifted from a government report listing 15 threats to the U.S. population.
The overall effect was relatively tranquil, almost meditative – ironically so, considering his sprawling, chaotic aesthetic and paranoiac narrative – perhaps a reflection of how comfortable we are with the media's near daily hysterical pronouncements. In this sense, Ritchie's take on this sort of trendy religious/apocalyptic content was one of the more nuanced, lucid, and original interpolations of this recently popular theme.
The paintings, for their part, still feel like they contain the essential juice of his enterprise. This time around they're more painterly but they still contain his familiar diagrammatic flourishes – e.g. directional arrows, equations, and black outlines – as if his language will always remain an uncomfortable hybrid of contradictory devices - stuck somewhere between the picturesque and the schematic. The four shown here were redundant enough to suggest a series of stills rather than effectively independent paintings. His framing methods also, by focusing more on scale and density of information than on composition, accentuate the cinematographic as well as cosmological impulse in his work – as if he's alternately zooming in and out on a single, infinitely large and detailed, entity.
Given this tendency, one might expect more from the videos: two pixilated/grainy animations depicting atmospheric beachscapes or marshlands in mostly sepia and brown tones. Video ought to provide Ritchie with room to explore and reveal more of his inherently kinetic world but, unfortunately, he only manages to animate it. In a way, they're less cinematic or dynamic than the paintings; they're flurries of visual noise over static backgrounds – essentially an animation cliché: moving figures over a stationary ground.
Still, Ritchie's rigorously conceived world always elicits a combination of perplexity and wonderment – even when he fails to reveal enough of it. That he's flirting with its destruction is a tantalizing, amusingly ironic, and seemingly inevitable prospect, but the results felt timid: an atmospheric evocation of impending doom, an ambiance of paranoia, and the calm before the storm rather that the cataclysmic shit-storm that Ritchie's obviously capable of conjuring up. I guess we'll have to wait to see what comes next.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
New Kwik-E-Mart in Times Square
Not sure if this art or what exactly, but who cares. Everyone should go check out the 7-11 on 42nd St. that's been transformed Quik-E-Mart (it's between 8th and 9th).
Here's a flickr set of photos of a similarly transformed store in Burbank, C.A.:
http://flickr.com/photos/rdr07/sets/72157600590001691/
It's pretty amazing. You can purchase any number of products hitherto-unavailable outside of the fictional world of the Simpsons. Grab yourself a Squishie, some Buzz Cola, or Krusty O's. The whole atmosphere is incredibly entertaining. The employees are even wearing official "Kwik-E-Mart" garb. I especially love the "fake" ads which say things like "They don't call them Don't Nuts", "Our Hot-Dogs are Filled Bunly Goodness", and best yet "Buy 3, for the Price of 3".
Best Promotional Movie Product Tie-in Ever.
Here's a flickr set of photos of a similarly transformed store in Burbank, C.A.:
http://flickr.com/photos/rdr07/sets/72157600590001691/
It's pretty amazing. You can purchase any number of products hitherto-unavailable outside of the fictional world of the Simpsons. Grab yourself a Squishie, some Buzz Cola, or Krusty O's. The whole atmosphere is incredibly entertaining. The employees are even wearing official "Kwik-E-Mart" garb. I especially love the "fake" ads which say things like "They don't call them Don't Nuts", "Our Hot-Dogs are Filled Bunly Goodness", and best yet "Buy 3, for the Price of 3".
Best Promotional Movie Product Tie-in Ever.
Archive of Reviews
Here are some things that I've written that you can find on-line:
Noah Fischer's "Rhetoric Machine"
Anthony Burdin's "Anthony's Revenge"
Michael St. John "I'm a Child of Divorce, Gimme a Break"
Matt Bua and Jesse Bercowitz, "The Largest Bowie Knife Ever Made"
Oliver Payne and Nick Relph's "Sonic the Warhol"
Nicole Cherubini
Tara Donovan, "Untitled (Plastic Cups)"
Michael Bell-Smith
Review of Space Boomerang at the Swiss Institute
Also, I've written about Dana Schutz for Art Review for the new issue (July/August).
You can read it on Art Review Digital.
I also write for a magazine called Artillery, a free L.A. based publication, on occassion. A few galleries in Chelsea and maybe in Brooklyn put it out so pick one up if you happen to see it.
Noah Fischer's "Rhetoric Machine"
Anthony Burdin's "Anthony's Revenge"
Michael St. John "I'm a Child of Divorce, Gimme a Break"
Matt Bua and Jesse Bercowitz, "The Largest Bowie Knife Ever Made"
Oliver Payne and Nick Relph's "Sonic the Warhol"
Nicole Cherubini
Tara Donovan, "Untitled (Plastic Cups)"
Michael Bell-Smith
Review of Space Boomerang at the Swiss Institute
Also, I've written about Dana Schutz for Art Review for the new issue (July/August).
You can read it on Art Review Digital.
I also write for a magazine called Artillery, a free L.A. based publication, on occassion. A few galleries in Chelsea and maybe in Brooklyn put it out so pick one up if you happen to see it.
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