We’ve been to see quite a few shows in the past couple of days. Andra Ursuta was on show at the New Museum with an ambitious installation of geometrically faceted rock-climbing walls assembled from bone-colored panels dotted with colorful, penis shaped handholds and footholds. At the Guggenheim was a new group show, ‘But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise’, which involves ideas about origin, ideologies of architecture, and the politics of migration. A work that stuck out was Hassan Khan’s ‘Bank Bannister’; a sculpture is a reproduction of the handrail outside the downtown Cairo headquarters of Egypt’s Banque Misr, the first bank in the country to have been Egyptian-owned. It’s an object of huge socioeconomic implications in its intimate association with a major financial institution.
The new Lisson Gallery was slightly disappointing with Carmen Herrera’s minimal, abstract paintings but we’ll allow it considering she’s over 100 years old and continuing to make new work! Amish Kapoor had a show of his droopy, fleshy painting style canvases, which aren’t our favorite works of his but we’re hoping that another show of his will appear soon enough! Felix Gonzalez-Torres has his infamous painted word portraits, proposing the idea of what it means to take on the responsibility of curating and how releasing certain controls creates infinite possibilities. ‘Songs and the Sky’ is a thoughtful way of presenting images and sounds, side by side. Artists and musicians were chosen who had taken inspiration from the medium that they did not consider their own. Yorgo Alexopoulos was showing a collection of digital renderings, photographs, and filmed footage. The most mesmerizing, being the works with translucent screen, meaning that the film behind could be seen whilst another film was being played, physically, over the top. Definitely was fun to think about the idea of physical Photoshop layers within these digitally focused compositions. Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili had produced some fairly ghostly photographs in which she wasn’t just staging the surfaces, but the conditions of photographic representation; images appeared to have been photographed, printed, physically edited, then photographed again.
Eric Pickersgill had a show that sounded fairly promising on paper, presenting research about the connectedness of the world due to phones, but in the end it manifested in very obvious photographs of people posing in positions, which are suggestive of using a mobile phone. Christoph Girardet and Matthias Muller presented a show titled ‘Cut’, included is a film, which combines material from 95 films involving incisions, scars, and blood. They’ve played on the word ‘cut’ to talk about the idea of film; film operates by bringing separate parts together. A ‘cut’ is the means by which clips are joined together, and the video here is produced entirely through cuts between clips and cuts to black. Seeing the big deals of the art world is always entertaining so we couldn’t miss seeing Cecily Brown, Jeff Koons and Charles Ray all in one building. All the works in the show nod to youth or nostalgia, especially Koons’ legendary steel inflatables. The urge to reach out and touch them is always immense. Stephanie Syjuco was exhibiting a Google sketch up model painted with black and white stripes to mimic the camouflage of the WWI battle ships. It definitely brought up strange thoughts about hiding and how history has caught up with us somehow. Bill Adams, Michael Assiff, John Gordon Gauld, Ignacio Gonzalez-Lang, JODI, Barbara Kruger were all involved in an exhibition titled ‘Open Source Indicators’. This is referring to an American research program of which the goal is to analyse mass public data as a predictor of significant societal events. Michael Assiff’s work was printed on the vent covers for the gallery, this introduced interesting ideas about ‘things that already exist in the gallery’ and making those ‘things’ into the work itself. It relates back, slightly, to Hassan Khan’s ‘Bank Bannister’, the difference being that he was making the object into an artifact as opposed to attempting to integrate it into the workings of the gallery.
William Leavitt’s exhibition was a number of heavily domestic installations that combine furnishings, sculpture and paintings with the occasional addition of video and slide projection. The results resemble these mysterious old skeletons of Hollywood stage sets but simultaneously seem almost futuristic in their composition. And finally we saw Betty Tompkins’, ‘WOMEN Words, Phrases, and Stories’. The show began with an email she composed asking for synonyms for or words that might describe women. The resulting work is a thousand paintings, which involve the words she was provided with. She is not proposing an answer so it’s probably more of a simple catalyst for conversation about today’s gender oppression.
An idea we recently had whilst perusing a museum shop was art being on postcards. Postcards are typically sent without an envelope and have illustrations or photos on that reflect the place they were sent from. Once a postcard has a piece of art on it, that piece of art becomes a symbol for the place. This idea is only very early in its development but we’re thinking about having one of those spinning postcard racks and the images on them will be works by us. This process will, in a way, make our works into a sort of icon but as the same time very throw away. Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction definitely plays a big part in what this work is suggesting.
