These past couple of days have been pretty gallery heavy so we thought we would just go through them all to work out what was what. Walter De Maria’s notorious ‘Earth Room’ is amongst the things we’ve seen. The aspect that I think we were most stunned by (and is probably the same as most people) was the smell from it; you can actually feel the air get thicker as you approach the huge bed of soil.
‘Chronology 20160424 / 41°-74°’ was an exhibition by Pippo Lionni & Qasim Naqvi. It’s a call-and-response style work with Lionni creating paintings to visualise the noise and Naqvi producing sounds the in some way reply to the paintings. Something we warmed to was this graphic score that some how represented the synthesizer’s pitch and durational settings – not something we could quite de-code but an noteworthy diagram none the less. We also saw a show by Nathlie Provosty, which was a selection of abstract paintings that were supposedly about how humans are unable to see certain colors. However, to us it felt like she was just using this idea in an attempt to fain some sort of philosophical perspective when in actual fact she just wanted to make some paintings. ‘The Horse Who Drank Beer’ was another show by Pedro Wirz. A funny title that we would have enjoyed to spill over onto works but unfortunately not. Displayed were sculptural objects that mimicked materials of some sort of ‘dream world’. Something that we were actually enjoyed despite only stumbling across it was Arash Hanaei’s exhibition ‘Capital Complex’. He show’s us a history of advertising in Tehran’s public space in two way, one featuring billboards and another one murals with war heroes and martyrs. After the Iranian Revolution and during the Iran-Iraq war, propaganda images took the place of advertisements for foreign products. Ever since the latter began making their way back into the cityscape, they have coexisted with the other, political images and texts, often displaying slogans with similar language. A very well thought-out juxtaposition.
Jean Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet’s show was called ‘Films and Their Sites’ and is comprised of film still sequences, videos and annotated scripts. It attempts to shed light on the couple’s meticulous and formally innovative adaptations of works by important figures of Western art and literature. It’s a very dense show, which requires a fairly broad, pre-existing knowledge of their previous films. This isn’t a negative aspect, far from it; it’s just a very theory heavy exhibition. The Propeller Group were showing a film at James Cohan which featured a number of beautiful rituals which all seemed to revolve around death and how the living honour those who have passed. It’s a beautiful film, full to the brim with excitement and desirability, regardless of its inner sombreness. Seeing work by tutors is always fascinating to us; seeing teachers as ‘real people’ regardless of their position in your own life feel almost essential or at least in the world that we’re in. Ross Knight is a tutor of ours and was showing a series of sculptures in a show titled ‘Human Stuff’. The pieces all alluded to objects with practical application due to their anthropometric shapes when in fact they had no such properties. The viewer is caught between recognising the items and realising they’ve never seen them before; readymades without the ‘ready’. Another tutor of ours, Yael Yanarek, had an exhibition revolving around narrative construction and the various mediums, which can aid such a venture. Half of the show made complete sense to us; archiving using a range of tools from notes on a computer to objects collected over the course of a journey. However, there were a number of paintings, which didn’t seem to fit this model of storytelling and their presence was ever explained.
Cory Archangel had an excellent show on featuring a drum machine in the centre of the gallery space alongside a pair of raised speakers facing in opposite directions. For 24 hours a day until the close of the exhibition, the speakers will blast out the rhythm pattern to ‘Sucker MCs’ on loop. Allowing it to just exist by itself is the same sort of minimalist gesture as some of his other works involving just the clouds from the game Mario. The audience is invited to fill the gaps of these endless, repetitive works.
The Kitchen is showing ‘Performance Capture’ by Ed Atkins. Using performance capture technology he asked 100 people to read a section of a script he’s produced. He then puts all their facial expressions, voice intonations and hand gestures into one virtual figure. As we watched the rendered body narrating this story we caught glimpses of Google searches, a poem and just a general mash-up of hoarded language. The figure feels a bit like a creative bin; not only are the phrase he’s saying fairly nonsensical but as the film progresses he looks more unwell, skin changing colour and eyes becoming bloodshot.
Martin Klimas was showing his sonic sculpture series; a number of photographs that come in pairs. One of them being an explosion of colour created by a speaker, the other people the set-up of the synthesiser that produced the sound. The clever aspect of these works is that the sound is never heard, only suggested or hinted at by employing a different sense. Steven Baldi is a photographer but the works we were mostly intrigued by at his exhibition were these panels that have been wrapped in green cloth and framed in aluminium. Each of them is a scaled down version of each gallery wall. The green is suggestive of the potential of this space; it awaits input. They form this void that allows the physical attributes of the works to take a back seat to what the audience might bring. Thomas Ruff’s new show features large-scale photographs of archival media clippings from American newspapers that relate to the theme of space exploration. There’s this idea about the press and how a story is more important than the reality, which draws a nice parallel to going into space; to most of us it’s just a dream but that doesn’t stop us from enjoying the story. There was a bizarrely formal nature to ‘Edited Monument Avenue of the Americas’ by Andres Durán that almost made us feel strange about finding it highly amusing. These important historical figures completely obscured by skyscraper inspired blocks. But there is specificity to this; he focuses on monuments of Latin-American heroes on 6th Avenue called Avenue of the Americas. This Avenue was renamed as Avenue of the Americas and many statues of Latin American liberators were installed on it but it’s likely that few people in the city know the identities of those statues. This raises questions about the construction and understanding of Latin American Identity and about the validity of commemorative monuments in the contemporary city.
Peter Freeman had a show devoted to Dimitrije Bašičević. It focuses on a number of exhibitions he was involved with over the years. Our favourites were when he converted the whole space into a strange showroom/office room, improvising pedestals out of fridges and filing cabinets. We were disappointed by a show by Mike Kelley and our feelings can be summed up in an early line of the press release, which reads ‘this body of work demonstrates his return to the medium following a 15-year span of performance, multimedia and installation art.’ Basically, ‘remember that whole time when Mike Kelley was doing all that interesting stuff? Well he’s stopped now and gone back to making “proper art”.’ Charles Gaines’ music based works that unite a score by composer Manuel de Falla from his opera about a tragic story of a love affair doomed by social mores and class differences and a speech by Stokely Carmichael (a Black Panther Party member and civil rights activist), in which Carmichael advocates that African Americans refuse to serve in the Vietnam War as an act of self-determination in the face of oppression. It creates this strange kind of ballad for the enduring history of race-class inequalities. Cardiff and Miller’s exhibition ‘The Marionette Maker’ manifests itself as a crazy mini environment within a caravan that houses numerous characters. The interior of the trailer reveals an imaginary world of a puppet maker. You’re able to walk around and peer in from various angles each giving equally fantastical in their appearance. Last, but certainly not least, is Stan Douglas’ film installation ‘The Secret Agent’. It is shown on multiple screens, each scene shot from different viewpoints or played out alongside other incidents happening somewhere else at the same time. This is beautiful and poetic way to tell a story; highlighting how a story is constructed beyond the events that might be ‘interesting’ to watch. Despite the severity of the content of the film (war and terrorism) it’s feels fairly odd that the overall atmosphere hovers between melodrama and melancholia. It’s a film, which has been meticulously woven together and employs a brilliant strategy of introducing the two halves with ‘two weeks before’ and ‘two weeks later’. This creates a cyclical structure where there’s no ‘real’ beginning; a perfect loop.
