Review of Wade Guyton at Fredrich Petzel as published in Artillery
There was something grim and stultifying about Wade Guyton’s installation at Fredrich Petzel. The floor was laid with black painted plywood and the paintings on the wall are all nearly all-black monochromes, made by repeatedly feeding the canvases through an inkjet printer. As the card for the show, depicting 6 inkjet printer cartridges, also seemed to indicate, this was obviously some sort of a heavy-handed statement (about mechanical reproduction, the monochrome, or the gallery context, perhaps) but it hardly seemed worth trying to parse out.
Mostly though, it just reminded me of all the “boys in black” type of art from recent years and how dated those stylistic quirks already seem. The surfaces of Guyton’s printer paintings are so flat and dull as to be effectively dead (presumably on purpose though, I suppose). As I stood in the gallery I soon found myself staring at the walls and ceiling of the gallery, admiring an unusually elegant sprinkler system. If the purpose of this art is to make us aware of the physical circumstances of the gallery context, it certainly worked. After that, there’s nothing left to do but leave the room.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Mike Williams
Review of Mike Williams “Cancuned and other Paintings from 2007” at Canada Gallery as published in Artillery
In Mike Williams’ painting Tom, a bearded man holds a stick of Tom’s of Maine deodorant which, strangely, appears to be dispensing a bearded face that resembles the man’s own. The bearded man seems curious but ambivalent while the deodorant-face is appears to be quite jovial. Normally this type of surrealistic scene – one concerned with the body and its funkier processes – would evince some trace, at least, of anxiety– but not here. The message is simply the reminder we all have bodies and that its messy processes are just a part of life.
Williams, anyway, does seem to sincerely love these types of surrealistic devices and employs all sorts of similar tricks to good effect. In one painting, a dog in a small room reaches almost to the ceiling. In another, an anthropomorphic frog-like Heineken bottle writhes on the floor in front of mysterious silhouetted figures. What separates this from art-historical Surrealism, is that Williams knows that it’s not possible to see these formal devices as a way of channeling subconscious imagery – at least, not anymore - since, at this point, they’re more likely to just channel art-historical Surrealist gimmickry. At any rate, sometimes a painting of a frog-like Heineken bottle with green anthropomorphic appendages is just a frog-like Heineken bottle with green anthropomorphic appendages. –Likewise, sometimes a cigar really is a phallus.
What makes Williams paintings so affable and entertaining is that he seems to be comfortable with either inversion of this syllogism. Like any art, it might very well be about his subconscious, but he also knows that these Surrealist tricks are just conventions to play with for effect. In a way, these paintings are about this process of self-consciousness itself. They seem to say, regardless of what we do and our intellectual justification or rationalization for doing so, it’s still, nevertheless impossible to know that “subconsciously” we don’t have other (even, possibly, contrary – motivations for doing so) - and then acknowledges with a wink and a nod that, well then, yes, obviously there’s nothing that we can do about that then, now is there?
Surrealism aside, what really seems to carry his paintings is their detail obsessive quasi-pointillist mark-making. The aforementioned dog-in-a-room, for example, is less compelling for the goofy surrealism and amusing scale-shifts involved than it is for its lustrous painting and the specificity of his visual language. The dog’s coat, is comprised of deep brown’s, burnt sienna, and yellow ochre, all modulated with an array of subtle, rich hues that nearly glimmer in the dog’s fur (or on the surface of the canvas). Here, as in the unctuous crystal ball in “The Duchess of Tareyton”, I think that I can best see what Williams is going for: a type of furtively obsessive mark-making that’s neither “filling in”, nor modeling, exactly (nor “Obsessive Compulsive); but rather, a complex exploration of the line between representation and abstraction; and a search for the hidden place where material transforms, mysteriously, into a new type of sign.
In Mike Williams’ painting Tom, a bearded man holds a stick of Tom’s of Maine deodorant which, strangely, appears to be dispensing a bearded face that resembles the man’s own. The bearded man seems curious but ambivalent while the deodorant-face is appears to be quite jovial. Normally this type of surrealistic scene – one concerned with the body and its funkier processes – would evince some trace, at least, of anxiety– but not here. The message is simply the reminder we all have bodies and that its messy processes are just a part of life.
Williams, anyway, does seem to sincerely love these types of surrealistic devices and employs all sorts of similar tricks to good effect. In one painting, a dog in a small room reaches almost to the ceiling. In another, an anthropomorphic frog-like Heineken bottle writhes on the floor in front of mysterious silhouetted figures. What separates this from art-historical Surrealism, is that Williams knows that it’s not possible to see these formal devices as a way of channeling subconscious imagery – at least, not anymore - since, at this point, they’re more likely to just channel art-historical Surrealist gimmickry. At any rate, sometimes a painting of a frog-like Heineken bottle with green anthropomorphic appendages is just a frog-like Heineken bottle with green anthropomorphic appendages. –Likewise, sometimes a cigar really is a phallus.
What makes Williams paintings so affable and entertaining is that he seems to be comfortable with either inversion of this syllogism. Like any art, it might very well be about his subconscious, but he also knows that these Surrealist tricks are just conventions to play with for effect. In a way, these paintings are about this process of self-consciousness itself. They seem to say, regardless of what we do and our intellectual justification or rationalization for doing so, it’s still, nevertheless impossible to know that “subconsciously” we don’t have other (even, possibly, contrary – motivations for doing so) - and then acknowledges with a wink and a nod that, well then, yes, obviously there’s nothing that we can do about that then, now is there?
Surrealism aside, what really seems to carry his paintings is their detail obsessive quasi-pointillist mark-making. The aforementioned dog-in-a-room, for example, is less compelling for the goofy surrealism and amusing scale-shifts involved than it is for its lustrous painting and the specificity of his visual language. The dog’s coat, is comprised of deep brown’s, burnt sienna, and yellow ochre, all modulated with an array of subtle, rich hues that nearly glimmer in the dog’s fur (or on the surface of the canvas). Here, as in the unctuous crystal ball in “The Duchess of Tareyton”, I think that I can best see what Williams is going for: a type of furtively obsessive mark-making that’s neither “filling in”, nor modeling, exactly (nor “Obsessive Compulsive); but rather, a complex exploration of the line between representation and abstraction; and a search for the hidden place where material transforms, mysteriously, into a new type of sign.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Review of Mike Nelson's "A Psychic Vacuum."
Mike Nelson’s: A Psychic Vacuum, sponsored by Creative Time is the latest addition to a genre of installation art that attempts to create either replicas of “real” spaces (or fabricates fictional though hyper-realistic spaces out of “real” stuff), while usually adding a clever surreal or conceptual twist. This territory has included Christoph Buchel, Justin Lowe, Gregor Schneider, and Christian Tomaszewski. Schneider, for example, once turned part of Barbara Gladstone’s Gallery into a sepulchral parking garage while Lowe recently created a replica of a typical New York City bodega within Oliver Kamm’s 5BE Gallery.
With the Lower East Side’s derelict Old Market, Nelson’s been supplied with a massive ready-made, a picturesquely decaying building which he’s transformed into a sprawling, quasi-Lynchian labyrinthine installation filled with decrepit musty rooms, salvaged junk, and bits of Americana. Entering, initially, into a filthy derelict Chinese food restaurant and passing through its back kitchen, visitors subsequently encountered, among other things, a long bar with a few scattered stools, mausoleum-like walk-in freezers, and a cavernous room filled with drifts of sand piled up almost to the ceiling. One little room appeared twice, almost duplicated although one could notice odd subtle differences in some of the details.
Nelson’s particular flair, actually, is for these little dramatic moments. By controlling pacing (almost like a film editor) through the size, scale, and arrangement of these spaces and selecting the odd details that create mood (like a great set designer) he creates a lot of momentum and drama out of our own movements and turns particular discoveries into “moments”. My favorite part was trying to learn my way around, to mentally map, the densest part of the installation - a convoluted tangle of small rooms near the middle of the installation. Still, without a commitment to sculptural form or a discernible narrative, the whole project falls back on a type of realism which becomes, in essence, tautological. Things here are representations of themselves (not unlike film-sets, actually, which are similarly partial). The room of sand at the end invokes the grandeur of the desert and initially feels fraught with archetypal symbolism or otherwise psychologically loaded (and maybe it is), but these implied meanings are never fully consummated in any specific, meaningful way. Sometimes a room full of sand is just a room full of sand.
But the larger problem with A Psychic Vacuum was that it was so intent on creating a sense of dislocation and realism that, paradoxically, it seemed to constantly assert its status as art - like how bad Photo-Realist painting is constantly reminding you of just how impressively well it was painted. Inside, I wandered around, nearly lost, and yet, still found myself visualizing my location in terms of the intersection outside the building; as if the whole installation (regardless of all of its little shocks and amusingly disorienting features) was – far from being a vacuum – rather, a black box: a discrete location within a categorically definable “art” experience or place, (literally speaking, on the corner of Essex and Delancey) – and more defined by its context than defining it.
With the Lower East Side’s derelict Old Market, Nelson’s been supplied with a massive ready-made, a picturesquely decaying building which he’s transformed into a sprawling, quasi-Lynchian labyrinthine installation filled with decrepit musty rooms, salvaged junk, and bits of Americana. Entering, initially, into a filthy derelict Chinese food restaurant and passing through its back kitchen, visitors subsequently encountered, among other things, a long bar with a few scattered stools, mausoleum-like walk-in freezers, and a cavernous room filled with drifts of sand piled up almost to the ceiling. One little room appeared twice, almost duplicated although one could notice odd subtle differences in some of the details.
Nelson’s particular flair, actually, is for these little dramatic moments. By controlling pacing (almost like a film editor) through the size, scale, and arrangement of these spaces and selecting the odd details that create mood (like a great set designer) he creates a lot of momentum and drama out of our own movements and turns particular discoveries into “moments”. My favorite part was trying to learn my way around, to mentally map, the densest part of the installation - a convoluted tangle of small rooms near the middle of the installation. Still, without a commitment to sculptural form or a discernible narrative, the whole project falls back on a type of realism which becomes, in essence, tautological. Things here are representations of themselves (not unlike film-sets, actually, which are similarly partial). The room of sand at the end invokes the grandeur of the desert and initially feels fraught with archetypal symbolism or otherwise psychologically loaded (and maybe it is), but these implied meanings are never fully consummated in any specific, meaningful way. Sometimes a room full of sand is just a room full of sand.
But the larger problem with A Psychic Vacuum was that it was so intent on creating a sense of dislocation and realism that, paradoxically, it seemed to constantly assert its status as art - like how bad Photo-Realist painting is constantly reminding you of just how impressively well it was painted. Inside, I wandered around, nearly lost, and yet, still found myself visualizing my location in terms of the intersection outside the building; as if the whole installation (regardless of all of its little shocks and amusingly disorienting features) was – far from being a vacuum – rather, a black box: a discrete location within a categorically definable “art” experience or place, (literally speaking, on the corner of Essex and Delancey) – and more defined by its context than defining it.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Judi Wherthein's Corporate Logo Review
My review of Judi Wherthein's show "Corporate Logo" at Art in General is up on Frieze on-line.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Carter Mull Review on New Frieze Site
My review of Carter Mull's show "Ethics of Everyday Fiction" at Rivington Arms is up on Frieze's newly launched web-site. This new site will feature on-line exclusive short reviews of shows while they're still up. What a concept! I'm really happy to be a part of this new feature as my reviews usually don't see the light of day until months after the show is already over and nearly forgotten. So check out my review and go see Carter Mull's show for yourself!
He's also in two pretty good group shows. Practical F/X is at the uptown Mary Boone gallery and the other, "Post-Retro", is at Brooklyn Fireproof in Williamsburg. They're both worth checking out.
He's also in two pretty good group shows. Practical F/X is at the uptown Mary Boone gallery and the other, "Post-Retro", is at Brooklyn Fireproof in Williamsburg. They're both worth checking out.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Banks Violette
My Review of Banks Violette's recent shows at Team and Barbara Gladstone as it appeared in the most recent issue of Artillery:
There’s something about Banks Violette’s strategy of melding high and low (Minimalist sculpture with the aesthetics of Death Metal) that I find a little obvious. It’s as if his high art credentials are meant to validate the cultural slumming while the sub-cultural cachet of death metal injects crusty old forms with a jolt of intensity or an air of authenticity. In actuality, it feels more like an exercise in stylistic genre-blending than invention - averaging out into something safe and accessible rather than remaining either rigorous or marginal.
It’s a given, anyway, that the monolithic and serial forms of Minimalism are symbolically kin to tombstones. Infusing Minimalist tropes with death metal theatricality is both obvious and almost campy in its literal take on the genre’s latent symbolism. Violette wants his art to be about big issues (death, morality, etc…), but the work’s marriage of these disjunctive forms is so jarring that it’s impossible to see beyond their function as art-historical or cultural signs.
A work featuring fluorescent tube lights hanging askew and large black wooden beams in a rectilinear formation is obviously meant to recall Sol LeWitt’s Variations on Incomplete Open Cubes (as well as Dan Flavin’s use of fluorescent tubes, and Donald Judd’s - or Liam Gillick’s – commercially fabricated objects), but these are intentional over-deliberate references rather than assimilations of those artists work. It also presents what seems like an obvious metaphor for entropy that doesn’t embody this quality in its presence: entropy as an image rather than a product of process. This effect makes his work feel more like commercial product than sculptural form. It also makes his work’s take on death (itself a product of entropy) seem a little tepid.
Violette’s work is best seen in comparison to other emerging artists working in similar territory. The Neo-Gothic werewolf sculptures of David Altmejd and the rock-inflected chaos of Anthony Burdin’s videos are, respectively, more complex, visceral, and less amenable to art-historical parsing. Violette also draw heavily on Damien Hirst’s melding of Minimalism with death-inflected subject matter but lacks the accessible clarity that Hirst, at his best, can achieve.
Despite his obvious intentions to deal with serious issues, his work’s most striking effect is art-historical. As an extension of Minimalist-derived techniques for using commercially available materials and procedures in art, Violette shows how the planes and surfaces of Minimalism could become the scaffolding of a rock concert set or the more complex articulations of musical equipment. The variegated knobs, swiveling arm, and tripod-like structure of a cymbal stand are closer in form to one of Judd or Flavin’s “specific objects” than we might normally think. Unfortunately, this formal innovation say too little about Violette’s ostensible content - death, morality, homicide, or death metal subculture - but it is an accomplishment, however short it falls from realizing his larger ambitions.
There’s something about Banks Violette’s strategy of melding high and low (Minimalist sculpture with the aesthetics of Death Metal) that I find a little obvious. It’s as if his high art credentials are meant to validate the cultural slumming while the sub-cultural cachet of death metal injects crusty old forms with a jolt of intensity or an air of authenticity. In actuality, it feels more like an exercise in stylistic genre-blending than invention - averaging out into something safe and accessible rather than remaining either rigorous or marginal.
It’s a given, anyway, that the monolithic and serial forms of Minimalism are symbolically kin to tombstones. Infusing Minimalist tropes with death metal theatricality is both obvious and almost campy in its literal take on the genre’s latent symbolism. Violette wants his art to be about big issues (death, morality, etc…), but the work’s marriage of these disjunctive forms is so jarring that it’s impossible to see beyond their function as art-historical or cultural signs.
A work featuring fluorescent tube lights hanging askew and large black wooden beams in a rectilinear formation is obviously meant to recall Sol LeWitt’s Variations on Incomplete Open Cubes (as well as Dan Flavin’s use of fluorescent tubes, and Donald Judd’s - or Liam Gillick’s – commercially fabricated objects), but these are intentional over-deliberate references rather than assimilations of those artists work. It also presents what seems like an obvious metaphor for entropy that doesn’t embody this quality in its presence: entropy as an image rather than a product of process. This effect makes his work feel more like commercial product than sculptural form. It also makes his work’s take on death (itself a product of entropy) seem a little tepid.
Violette’s work is best seen in comparison to other emerging artists working in similar territory. The Neo-Gothic werewolf sculptures of David Altmejd and the rock-inflected chaos of Anthony Burdin’s videos are, respectively, more complex, visceral, and less amenable to art-historical parsing. Violette also draw heavily on Damien Hirst’s melding of Minimalism with death-inflected subject matter but lacks the accessible clarity that Hirst, at his best, can achieve.
Despite his obvious intentions to deal with serious issues, his work’s most striking effect is art-historical. As an extension of Minimalist-derived techniques for using commercially available materials and procedures in art, Violette shows how the planes and surfaces of Minimalism could become the scaffolding of a rock concert set or the more complex articulations of musical equipment. The variegated knobs, swiveling arm, and tripod-like structure of a cymbal stand are closer in form to one of Judd or Flavin’s “specific objects” than we might normally think. Unfortunately, this formal innovation say too little about Violette’s ostensible content - death, morality, homicide, or death metal subculture - but it is an accomplishment, however short it falls from realizing his larger ambitions.
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