March 2004
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WORD FROM THE PUBLISHER
Thank you for visiting TheNewYorkArtWorld.com, the internet companion
for
the monthly printed magazine, M / The New York Art World.
This is of course a very busy month in New York, with the opening
of the
Whitney Show, important art fairs and countless supporting events
including
private visits to major art collections (arranged by The Armory
Show VIP
Services.
In case you plan to visit The Armory Show (March 12-15), please
note that
our magazine will have a booth at the fair, booth# 92-L02 (the
first booth
at the entrance to the fair on pier 92). Perhaps you might like
to stop by
and introduce yourself, and pick a complementary copy of this
month's issue.
Best wishes for an exciting, art filled month of March!
Cover Caption
- Andrea
Morganstern Daikini Dance, 2003. Oil on canvas 30 x 36 inches.
- Courtesy:
Kimberly Venardos & Co., New York
-
News
Film Festival
The 11th New York Underground Film Festival (NYUFF) takes
place March 10 –16 at the Anthology Film Archives (see Film
Review on page 16). For more information and a full schedule of
events, please call 212.505.5181 or visit: www.nyuff.com
Final Eight Weeks
MoMA will be presenting its final film and media program
at The Gramercy Theatre next month, April 7. The closure of MoMA
Gramercy is the first in a series of staggered closures at alternate
venues, as the museum prepares to return to its familiar address
on West 53rd Street (in a new building), later this year. For
the weeks remaining at the Gramercy Theatre, MoMA Gramercy has
put in place an ambitious film program, which is posted at: www.moma.org
New Gallery
Susan Conde has a new gallery in Chelsea, which opens
its doors next month. (see Chelsea Listings)
Name Change
Linda Durham Contemporary Art is now called Lemmons Durham
Contemporary Art. (see Chelsea Listings)
The National Academy of Design Museum is now called the
National Academy Museum. (see Uptown Listings)
Art Fair
The Armory Show 2004: The International Fair of New Art
will take place March 12-15, 2004 on Piers 90 and 92 in New York
City. An Opening Night Preview Party benefiting the exhibition
fund of The Museum of Modern Art takes place on Thursday, March
11, 2004. For more information, please visit: www.thearmoryshow.com
The hotel art fair called scope is scheduled to take
place this month, March 12-15, 2004, at Hotel Gansevoort, New
York. The newly completed Hotel Gansevoort is located at 9th Avenue
and 13th St. For more information, please visit: www.scope-art.com
In Fond Memory
The exuberant art dealer and champion of emerging artists (and
other humanitarian causes) Monique Goldstrom, died last month,
February 12th, at Roosevelt Hospital, New York. She is survived
by her husband, Gianfranco Caiazzo, her son, Michael, and her
daughter, Chantal Claret. Monique was also a friend to this magazine,
and we’ll miss her.
- Art
Review
Big and Small / Anita Shapolsky Gallery
- By MARY HRBACEK
-
 E-Mail
This Article
- This
salon-style group show, which fills two floors of Anita Shapolsky’s
town house gallery with abstract paintings and bronze sculptures;
produced in gestural, color fields and geometric styles, presents
a diverse overview of non-representational art.
The show’s historical underpinnings derive from the early
twentieth century art, when artists in war ravaged Europe drew
a correlation between the industry of war and the heady logic
of “rational thought,” and subsequently sought new
ways to channel mass emotions; innate aggressive instincts, into
visible forms. The act of “direct painting” was seen
as filling a basic human need to communicate across national national
and culture-specific boundaries. Today, we understand this as
abstract art.
Some twenty-three artists are featured here, including among them,
Nicolas Carone, Buffie Johnson, Ernest Briggs, Lawrence Calgagno,
Peres Celis, David Crum, Joseph Fiore, Antonio Tapies and Clement
Meadmore.
Standouts in the show include Nicolas Carone's mysterious Untitled
(1959), whose subtle palette of pinks and gray blue hues rearranges
the figure; with the torso separate from the adjoining abstracted
lower portion of the body. Michael Loew’s Off Balance Rhythm
(1978), oil on canvas, employs small stripe-like rectangular shapes
in soft lavender, coral, pale mint green and melon over a large
creamy off-white ground. The shapes move over the surface in a
rhythmic, musical composition that recalls Dutch painter Theo
Van Doesburg’s work.
In his round mixed media canvas, Perez Celis’ Plano Astral
(1986), utilizes overlapping dark triangles scarred with a variety
of linear markings; arranged in a field of warm red, bronze and
subtly brushed orange hues that suggest African influences. Similarly,
Lawrence Calgano in his painting entitled Forest, (1949), uses
multiple overlapping dark strokes and short, cropped squiggles
over a warm ochre, coral and pink-cream textural ground. This
work evokes the enigma of an undecipherable, archaic language.
David Crum's small-scale Untitled (2002) acrylic on canvas presents
a highly personal image, comprised of wide ribbon-like semi-transparent
brush strokes on a cream and mocha trapezoid that rests on a black
background. In two small bronze maquettes entitled Furthermore
(1999) and Frolic (1997), Clement Meadmore uses thick, rope-like,
curled forms that create interesting
“in-between spaces”. These sculptures bring an understated,
anchoring presence to the show.
As a survey of second generation Abstract Expressionists, this
exhibition presents an impressive range of moods, poetic rhythms,
emotions and spatial relations, that are conveyed through the
works on their own merit; without any imposed limitations of figurative,
literal subject matter.
Through 3/27.
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- Jan Dunning / 31 Grand
By LILY FAUST
- E-Mail
This Article
- This
curious show, appropriately titled, Eerie, looks at the shared
boundaries between fact and fiction. Utilizing pinhole photography,
which is one of the earliest known methods of capturing images,
Dunning creates a visual juncture where improbable dreamscapes
materialize into colorful reality. Her photographs depict mostly
mythological, hybrid creatures that are caught in the process
of transformation; or exist in their own right, isolated in fields
and wooded areas. Through the layering of clashing images and
the juxtaposition of “arrested” movements, Dunning’s
photographs work as convincing portraits of a cross-section of
the mythic unconscious.
Arachne (2003), a color pinhole photograph, shows a woman lying
on ruddy autumn leaves, set against a background of viridian trees.
In Greek mythology, Arachne was a maiden who challenged Athena
to a weaving contest and was subsequently transformed into a spider.
Dunning re-creates Arachne as a “spider,” with four
legs and four arms, a feat achieved by using two-staged posing,
visually capturing the arms and legs in the slow take of the pin
hole camera’s long exposure. In the creation of this mythical
being, the artist compresses both present reality and the collective
past into her own, personal framework. By borrowing from ancestral
stories handed down across the centuries, she links the imagined
to the actual, nudging the viewer along with documentary-like
“evidence” of that past.
Similarly, Woman with Two Heads (2002) depicts a woman whose neck
is attached to two heads, each turned to the other side. A mirror
placed at the upper section of the photograph reflects the image
of the young woman, as if to reiterate its veracity. Distinguished
by a composition that constructs the pictorial space in an even
balance, the photograph is classically informed. The red damask
upholstery on a nearby chair whose corner sticks into the picture
frame; together with the woman’s soft flesh tones and the
subtle, diffused lighting, give this work an unmistakable aura
of seduction. The fictive mutation, in this charged setting, seems
almost mundane.
The exposure time in these photographs varies from 30 seconds
to two minutes, yet a great deal can become persuasively evident
in that brief moment. The prints have a grainy, misty look, a
result of the pinhole camera’s ability to capture increments
of movement over an extended length of time. The slightly off-focus
appearance helps to convey alternative truths of imagination;
the images come alive as believable evidence of that which does
not exist.
Not all of the prints in the show are driven by myth, however.
Some have the formal quality of traditional still-lifes. Utilizing
the same method of pinhole photography, for example, three works,
Raccoon, Pheasant, and Small Brown Bird employ the subject matter
of dead or dying animals. These prints, interspersed throughout
the exhibition, serve as contrasting images that introduce (or
conclude) the transformation process depicted in the rest of the
works on view. Raccoon, a photograph of an apparent road-kill
scene, shows the lifeless body of the animal lying on its side,
its face to the camera. The yellow divider line on the road, adjacent
to the carcass, extends into the horizon; a firm marker of physical
nature. The death act, and subsequent onset of decay, though not
visible, is implied. The physical is challenged by the course
of its own logic; birth, growth, and death. And the artist, as
if paying earthly homage to her mythical creatures, plays with
the visible, revealing and concealing what “is”.
Through 3/14.
Ed Note: 31 Grand is located at Thirty One Grand Street, Williamsburg
Brooklyn, New York 11211. Tel: 718.388.2858
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- Vincent Desiderio / Marlborough
By NICOLLETTE RAMIREZ
- E-Mail
This Article
- Desiderio,
an artist whose figurative paintings garnered much attention in
the 1980s, presents here three triptychs and several large and
small paintings in a highly organized exhibition of more recent
work. Of the three triptychs, Pantocrator, (2002), which translated
from Greek means “Ruler of All,” stands out for its
poetic resonance between all three panels. The left panel shows
a nude woman in the shower, obscured by a transparent curtain
covered with colorful images of fish. The subtle color and texture
of the woman’s skin shows through the curtain, the shape
of her back and buttocks clearly visible as she immerses herself
in the watery world.
The center panel depicts a spaceship against the backdrop of outer
space; filled with multi-colored stars, the lens of the extraterrestrial
vessel's huge mounted camera trained on the viewer. In the third
panel, a Byzantine chapel’s colorful cream and green geometric
patterns and brick red conical top create a harmony that evokes
the original Renaissance chapel, Santa Maria del Fiore. It’s
as if these three panels speak of past, present and future; encompassing
the human body, technology and art.
This past-present-future (human body-technology-art triumvirate)
is also seen in the triptych Academy, (2001), where we see an
old man in a house robe lying among open art books strewn on the
floor. He is bandaged around his waste, and stares vacantly into
space. In the middle panel a young female nude, full-bodied and
youthful, stands with her palms facing up, against a stark black
background. The third panel depicts the skeleton of a baby, seen
as if through
an x-ray.
The centerpiece of the show, Cockaigne, (1993-2003), presents
an aerial view of a dinner scene (after the dinner), in which
the remains of the meal; bones, red wine, broken bread, stained
linen, empty cups and plates, are depicted with an attention to
detail that calls to mind a Vermeer painting. There is a perfection
to this work that is echoed in its use of circles. From the center
of the work, and moving centrifugally outward, the leitmotif of
the perfect circle can be seen in the table, the candle holders,
the plant, the plates, cups and books spread out around the table.
Mysticism pervades Sleep, (2003), a work in progress. In this
panorama of sleeping nudes, Desiderio depicts the figures in various
poses of rest in a muted palette of greys, whites and pinks. This
theme is continued in White Dress, (2003). Here, the sleeping
subject, a woman whose body forms a gentle diagonal from her head,
on the bed, to her foot which touches the floor. The balanced
composition is further enhanced by the symmetry of the the woman’s
arm, which is bent at the elbow, and her opposing leg that bends
at the knee. The color palette of this painting (subtle earthy
green wallpaper, brown wood, white dress) creates a mood of summer
siesta.
The combination of Desiderio’s skill as a painter, and his
contemplative vision of time and space in the daily rhythm of
human activity, gives this work an epic dimension.
Through 2/7.
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- Andrea Morganstern / Kimberly Venardos & Co, Inc.
By MARY HRBACEK
- E-Mail
This Article
- Utilizing
both representational and abstract images to convey an apparent
spiritual belief in a unity that underlies all forms in nature,
Andrea Morganstern’s new series of oil paintings, dubbed
Nature's Pulse, reflects this artist's understanding of a world
that is intended to be in a constant state of flux or transformation.
She expresses this idea through forms that are conversely amorphous;
in a perpetual state of creative transformation.
The four subjects of the work included here range from bamboo
stalks set in varying spatial relationships to each other, oak
trees (from New York’s Central Park), birds in flight and
abstract works that display cracks, breaks and fissures in varying
textured media. These recurring networks of shapes emulate the
growth process that underlies change, transition and regeneration
found in nature and developed in art. They are unified by a feathery
moss-like pictorial ground.
Morganstern carefully hones her means of expression to a few carefully
modulated colors and precisely painted forms. Employing a mottled
pictorial ground in all of her works, she relies on purely visual,
non-verbal means to communicate her perception of unity in nature.
By avoiding specific details, and by isolating the forms from
identifiable surroundings, she allows her subjects to remain open
to interpretation. For example, eliminating the surface pattern
in her closely cropped oak trees accentuates the appearance of
animal heads with eyes that seems to peer curiously at the viewer
(at least this viewer). She employs glowing creamy tones that
produce harmonious color relationships with her green and turquoise
pictorial grounds.
In another group of paintings Morganstern focuses on a few bamboo
stalks, varying the spatial relationships between the stalks and
alternating their colors; sometimes using pale yellow-green, and
in another painting, deep Prussian blue. The stalks are related
visually only to each other and to the meticulous, tempered hues
that comprise the pictorial space. With no other visual references
offered, these images seem mysteriously isolated. As she adjusts
her color choices for the stalks, however, the emotional expression
varies accordingly; the forms may stand out clearly, or recede
to a deeper pictorial space.
Morganstern employs the same type of sophisticated differentiated
ground in abstract paintings that display patterned cracks and
fissures. These elements establish patterns, which readily move
the eye through the pictorial space. When the lines transform
into larger shapes, they begin to resemble insects or tiny soldiers
rather than cracks or breaks. They are metaphors for the changes
caused by time and weather to human beings, plants, animals and
the larger physical world.
Rift, split, or disjunction are some words that add clarity to
the meaning of the term "fissure." Instead of making
use of an emotionally expressionistic approach to the concept
of change, Morganstern takes a lyrical look at the stirring of
new directions. Paradoxically, she entirely avoids accidents;
no distress or anxiety is to be found in these paintings, only
attunement to the natural processes. While her works display an
affinity with time-worn surfaces in, for example, the classical
ruins of Greece or Pompeii, they retain a fresh, contemporary
component. She appears, instead, to be more interested in the
organic growth processes that are found in the cycles of nature
and the changes that develop gradually over time; from exposure
to the elements.
The painting, Four Green Bamboo (2000), presents four pale yellow-green
stalks set at varying distances across the pictorial space. The
muted image elicits a soothing, emotional response. The two
New York Oak (2001) works both depict luminous, whitish yellow
trees that evoke associations with joyous, curious animals. Using
a more intricate abstract language in Canticle of Creatures(2004),
Morganstern employs sensitive warm, golden and turquoise hue relationships,
and tiny cracks, that imply the small linear soldiers found on
ancient Grecian urns. Similarly, in From the Marsh (2004) a purple-green
background, with large orange fissures, moves the eye readily
through the pictural space. Her paintings of soaring, almost identical
birds suggest a distant glimpse that feels as if they are being
seen from an aerial perspective.
The themes in evidence here involve an idea of freedom and the
nature of change; gradual change that takes place slowly, even
imperceptibly, over a long period of time. This is not about emotional
upheaval, or the strain that one might be inclined to associate
with a changing world; rather, this work lives in the quiet alterations
that occur within the corridor of time passing, somewhere between
the biological and the spiritual.
Through 3/13.
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- Lee Boroson and Ward Shelley / Pierogi Gallery
By NICOLLETTE RAMIREZ
- E-Mail
This Article
- This
tongue-in-cheek, conceptual show consists of two projects, Contrails
and Clusters, by Lee Boroson, and a performance and sculpture
by Ward Shelley entitled We Have Mice. Shelley “lives”
inside a specially built wall in the gallery for the duration
of the show, only coming out at night to eat, and so on. He is
visible via video monitors set up in the gallery space. Shelley’s
daily routine consists of adding pieces to his ever-growing sculpture;
which includes a chair, a hanging model of a man made from found
objects, aphorisms written on paper and stuck to the nearby walls
and a mechanically driven series of artworks (akin to a rotating
picture sign), called Famous Artworks You’ve Never Seen.
Each of these “Famous Artworks” is maneuvered (in
turn) into viewing position in a small opening carved into the
gallery wall for this purpose.
Boronson’s Star Project reconfigures stars, planets, galaxies
and asteroids from a photographic map of the universe by sucking
the "space" out of them, so that they coagulate into
atomic formations. Set in the center of the picture, these colorful
clusters of light contrast with the white void on which they have
been set; thereby questioning assumptions of what space is. In
another work, Contrails, Boronson has constructed forms out of
hollow glass spheres, reminiscent of the crystallization that
occurs under certain atmospheric conditions in clouds. Mounted
high above, they affect a sense of walking among the clouds.
The juxtaposition of these two artists’ works, in this combination
of performance art and visual art, produces a creative tension
between the celestial and the earthbound that feels like an authentic
Art Happening from another era.
Through 2/9.
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- Rita Ackerman / Andrea Rosen
By JOYCE KOROTKIN
- E-Mail
This Article
Recalling the psychologically potent and eerie landscape of Surrealism,
Rita Ackerman’s fourteen new paintings are like dreams bordering
on nightmares in which reality has gone awry. Imagery here stems
from the murky, interior psyche, and is informed by collisions
between the metaphors and symbols of fairy tales, myths, the Brothers
Grimm, Aesop’s Fables, Shakespeare and Brecht; indeed, between
anything and everything that one absorbs into the fertile unconscious,
where it takes root and feeds the imagination. Falling untidily
into the juncture between imagination and reality, Ackerman’s
imagery displaces and disguises recognizable elements, which then
re-emerge in portentous, sinister situations full of inexplicable
symbolic meanings.
Ackerman’s images are as allusive as they are elusive.
In Shaman, a top-hatted figure in a black coat reminiscent of
the perverse Kundera in Cabaret, sits on the crouched buttocks
of a half-man half-beast about to devour a baby. Amalgams of different
styles and techniques, ranging from expressionist impasto to the
smooth, mirror-like surfaces of Dali, co-exist with the light,
stylized touch of Florine Stettheimer, or with Ackerman’s
own earlier work of highly stylized cat-like bad girls doing bad
things.
In Dance of the Wild Hunt, this is particularly evident. A translucent
thinly washed scrim of shimmering, incandescent orange-yellow
flames culminate in an expressionist puddle of red and yellow
blobs that become a burst of flames. Against this backdrop, delicately
painted, ethereal maidens — the bad girls recapitulated,
perhaps — dance in the woods, nearly nude with liquor bottles
balanced on their heads.
Sometimes normalcy is only slightly skewed, but psychic inference
is heightened, as in the chilling Fassbinder. In this homage to
the eponymous filmmaker, a topless woman hovers, smoking, in a
dark alleyway, a pile of spent matches illuminated in the darkness
at her feet. Her cigarette tip is lit as if with a flame from
Hell.
Listen to the Fool’s Reproach is perhaps the most emblematic
of this series of charming but disturbing works, with its shrouded
figures in white surrounding the Fool as the skies open, threatening
to engulf all into heaven or hell. Simpleton or Seer, the Fool
(Ackerman’s alter ego?) stands poised to see the truth through
veils of confusion.
Through 1/17.
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- Ian
Wallace / American Fine Arts
By JACK SAVAGE
- E-Mail
This Article
Vancouver based photo-conceptual artist Ian Wallace, whose huge
canvasses explore the tension between abstract and figurative
art in the 20th century, invites a closer look at this issue in
a selection of work called the Barcelona Series. The series was
originally created for a group show that toured Barcelona and
Madrid in 1992, and addressed the then just emerging debate over
globalization, displacement and the relationship between architecture
and the individual. The current show, which is built around essentially
the same work, serves to deepen our understanding of these same
issues, with the benefit of hindsight.
Since the mid 1980s, Wallace has shown a penchant for juxtaposing
the seemingly opposite genres of abstract painting and documentary-style
photography. His color photographs of construction sites in Barcelona
show laborers erecting sleek, modernist structures that would
soon house athletes competing in the 1992 Olympics, which was
held in Barcelona; and which marked a crucial turning point for
the city. The photographs are laminated onto canvas, with broad
areas of white painted on one side of the image, so as to create
diptychs. Separating the images from the non-images are vertical
stripes of wood grain, in a metallic tone.
At first glance, these works appear to be dispassionate documentary
portraits of urban life, examining social issues such as poverty,
displacement and the pervading perception of a loss of national
identity (which often accompanies such global redevelopment projects).
But the individual works actually comprise only one half of the
diptych, playing against monochromatic fields of pure abstraction.
Wallace’s diptychs and triptychs pick up the thread begun
by Cubists and Constructivists; not by eradicating the “tyranny
of image,” but instead by accepting the inevitability of
the representational image in art, and then using it their to
their own ends.
Through 3/20.
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- John
Waters / The New Museum
By JACK SAVAGE
- E-Mail
This Article
- The
success of John Waters’ films from the 1970s, such as Pink
Flamingoes (1974) and Desperate Living (1975), which chronicle
the eccentric lives of people who more or less function in the
margins of American society, propelled the once underground filmmaker
into a decidedly un-underground spotlight. Though not quite ready
(or willing) for mainstream, Waters has always managed to keep
one foot in the art world and the other in Hollywood.
This show at The New Museum in Soho, (see Soho Listings) dubbed
Change of Life, has the quality of a retrospective, in that the
viewer is treated to an abbreviated survey of Waters’ output
over the years; three rooms in the exhibition run continuous loops
of his early films, like Eat Your Makeup and Female Trouble, while
elsewhere in the show his sculpture and a few large installations
are also presented.
But the real focus of this exhibition is Waters’ photography.
He is said to have “stumbled” into photography while
looking for a film-still from one of his early black and white
films. When he couldn’t find the image that he was looking
for, he screened a video of the film and photographed his own
“film-still”. The process proved somewhat addictive,
however, and Waters has since taken to photographing images from
movies and TV as well; with all of the inquisitive zeal of, say,
an Alice in Wonderland, who happened to bring along her camera.
Like his films, Waters’ photographs explore themes of celebrity,
mass media, voyeurism and crime. In this series of color film-stills
(shot from the screen) he appropriates scenes from popular entertainment
classics, which he re-arranges into different sequences that yield
entirely new narratives. In doing so, Waters depicts a kind of
parallel universe in which droll and often sordid stories are
played out against the looming backdrop of Tabloid America.
For example, in the photo series, INSANE (2001), Waters pays homage
to 1970s era made-for-TV movies, which tackled “taboo”
subjects such Anorexia, drug addiction and mental illness. The
results are disturbingly funny; we see long forgotten TV actresses
tied up on gurneys, screaming in hospital corridors. In PEYTON
PLACE, Waters utilizes shots of rushing streams, frozen lakes,
and New England church steeples to evoke Studio Era symbols of
sexual arousal.
Taking on the big screen, Waters’ LANA BACKWARDS (1995)
presents a series of glossy color prints of the 1950's film legend,
Lana Turner, who is depicted here in varying optical depths of
field, with her back to the camera. This austere composition foreshadowed
the formal techniques of Ingmar Bergman; the Swedish auteur whose
films would challenge the Hollywood star-making machinery. Pursuing
this theme further, Waters’ DOROTHY MALONE’S COLLAR
focuses on a detail of the Hollywood starlet’s sartorial
trademark (yes, her collar), ignoring the rest of her identity.
A keen observer of film history; while at the same time, one of
the medium’s creative lights, Waters knows which side of
the Looking Glass is more fun.
Through 2/14.
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- Frank
Dituri / Rosenberg + Kaufman Fine Art
By JOEL SIMPSON
- E-Mail
This Article
Moonlit scenes are notoriously hard to photograph, yet they are
among the most haunting of images. Frank Dituri set out to capture
the subtle dark grey on darker grey scenes in an earlier show
at this gallery (Rosenberg & Kaufman Fine Art), called Lux
Lunae, or “light of the moon”. Some of those images
are reprised in this new show.
This time, however, Dituri manages to confront the ambiguity of
things almost seen (possibly imagined) head on, leaving his figures;
a face, a head of hair, a child and in one case an ironic sunflower,
blurred in the foreground. These are time exposures, after all,
and humans cannot be expected to stand still. His cornfields and
tree shadows on snow, partially splashed with moonlight, capture
a preternatural stillness; reminding one that the meadows and
woods that give us so much pleasure during the day endure other,
more solemn, patient phases. We rarely linger when we catch a
glimpse of them under these circumstances; the night is too full
of uncertainty, even fear, unless we give ourselves over to it,
flexing our aesthetic muscles or defying mythographies of loosed
chthonic forces.
This series of photographs is essentially Dituri’s invitation
to do just that. Here, light takes on a new role. Now, rather
than blurred foreground figures against well-defined moonlit backgrounds,
Dituri blurs entire images, thereby directing our attention, for
example, to the negative spaces among tree branches. He thus effectuates
a foreground/background reversal, in which the shape and tone
of skylight becomes the subject.
Blurred photographic subjects practically comprise a distinct
school. But photographers who employ this technique usually do
so to generalize or iconicize a subject. Dituri, however, uses
blur in a more aesthetically urgent way, consigning the trees
to the background and making the forms of abstract light the new
subject. There is nothing new about finding abstraction in nature;
what is new is that Dituri finds it not in objects but in backgrounds.
If the trees had been in focus, we would have strained to see
their details and missed these light forms.
He goes beyond trees in a few striking images. The Reader, for
example, depicts a luminous open book (hand-held) against a dark,
subtly nuanced background. Blur renders print irrelevant and invisible;
one sees only the page, and it appears as a light source, a virtual
beacon. Dituri had used this technique in an earlier image depicting
a cyclist stopped across the road. But here he concentrates the
effect; as well as the viewer’s mind.
Through 3/13.
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Michael
Mulhearn and Gary Haven-Smith / Reeves Contemporary
By JACK SAVAGE
- E-Mail
This Article
- This
two artist show; abstract paintings by Michael Mulhern and stone
works by sculptor Gary Haven-Smith, invites a dialogue about contemporary
abstract art and its predecessors, while also looking at the basic
building blocks of painting and sculpting.
Mulhern’s bleak, oversized canvasses are a long way from
the Abstract Expressionist and Action Paintings of the 1950s and
60s, where lines and colors and forms were angry, decisive and
forthright. These paintings seem to be all about what is not there.
Under a nearly uniform aluminum surface, hints of decisive linear
form are glimpsed between wide brushstrokes, which threaten to
close off the painting.
Using aluminum pigment, Mulhern paints gestural labyrinths, tracing
over line drawings in charcoal and black acrylic. The resulting
silver images look monochromatic and minimalist from a distance,
but when observed closely, they reveal frenzied networks of lines
underneath that are partly obscured by the over-painting. As such,
these paintings suggest a synthesis of object and surface.
Haven-Smith’s massive stone installations, created from
naturally occurring elements near the artist’s studio in
New Hampshire, interact, visually, with the hulking stone installation
pieces. His large, "found" stones bear traces of their
original form; vertical structures honed and buffed to a glassy
sheen on one side, but left raw and untouched on the other. If
Mulhern’s paintings are about paint and painting, then Haven-Smith’s
works convey a similar consideration of what it means to sculpt
in stone, going beyond the idealized, art historical notion of
“releasing” the figure therein.
Through 3/16.
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- Film Review
- 11th New York Underground Film Festival / Anthology Film Archives
By LILY FAUST
- E-Mail
This Article
- With
a full roster of film documentaries, experimental art films, features,
shorts, installations, live music and multimedia shows, the 11th
New York Underground Film Festival illuminates the screen once
again at the Anthology Film Archives. Picked from over 1,500 submissions,
this year’s selections chart diverse viewpoints; including
films rich in attitude, social and poetic justice, erotic and
homoerotic textures, debauchery and sociopolitical, issue-oriented
film and video work by emerging filmmakers. Notable for its support
of the outer fringes of independent cinema, the New York Underground
Film Festival is a particularly important event in both the international
as well as the local avant-garde circuit.
The festival opens with the U.S. premiere of Certain Women, directed
by Bobby Abate and Peggy Ahwesh. Based on the 1957 Erskine Caldwell
pulp novel of the same title, this melodrama takes a keen look
at the lives of four women who have to struggle against provincial
values in order to stake personal and sexual boundaries. Mocha
Jean Herrup’s A Few Good Dykes, which will have its world
premiere here, documents a clandestine, lesbian mock military
unit where attire and attitude rein supreme.
And the delightful Icelandic documentary, In the Shoes of the
Dragon, by Hronn Sveinsdottir and Arni Sveinsson, offers viewers
a spontaneous run of the beauty pageant catwalk through the eyes
of its protagonist, the filmmaker herself. Ms. Sveinsdottir entered
the 2000 Miss Iceland Pageant as a contestant to explore and experience,
first hand, issues of individual identity versus notions of gender
and beauty. The film offers an intimate portrait of the filmmaker
as contestant / woman, confronting her need for individual control,
and her need to win. In the Shoes of the Dragon was banned in
Iceland, due to a lawsuit by the pageant organizers, but it won
the Best Documentary at the Eddas, Iceland’s National Film
Awards.
Roddy Bogawa’s experimental documentary, I Was Born But…
also premises identity as a factor of assimilation, and focuses
on the Asian-American experience and punk culture of the 1970s
and 80s. Featuring an original score by Chris Brokaw (of punk
the bands Come and Codeine), I Was Born But… will premiere
at the Closing Night of the Festival, Sunday March 14th.
The program also boasts a series of road movies, in which filmmakers
pursued various kinds of
travels in the United States to convey facets of life in America.
Standouts among these films include: Unknown Passage: The Dead
Moon Story, by Jason Summers and Kate Fix, a documentary about
the punk band, Northwest, mostly shot on tour; Goldstein: The
Trials of the Sultan of Smut, by James Guardino, a documentary
that follows the notorious publisher of Screw Magazine (a porn
tabloid that has since folded) through a civil lawsuit brought
against him; and This Ain’t No Heartland, by Andreas Horvath,
in which the Austrian filmmaker travels through the American Midwest
in an effort to learn what “everyday Americans” think
about the war in Iraq.
One exceptional film in this category is the the factual and even-toned
documentary, A Certain Kind of Death, by Gover Babcock and Blue
Hadaegh, which looks at the fate of individuals who die without
any next of kin. Following the un-sentimental trail of clues right
up to the point of their terminated mortal existence, beginning
with the death scene (lonely little hotel rooms, dingy bachelor
pads), the documentary follows every aspect of the bureaucratic
circuit; from the coroner’s office to the morgue, and so
on, giving pause to our own fleeting mortality.
On the lighter side of death (so to speak), there is Giuseppe
Andrews’ Tater Tots, (German for “Killer Deaths”).
This film is actually more typical underground material.
A low-budget, foul-mouthed comedy, Tater Tots introduces us to
two heroin addicts who “trip” through a universe run
-amok- by a Charles Manson look-alike.
Some of the film artists whose works have been selected for the
New York Underground Film Festival have also been selected to
participate in the 2004 Whitney Biennial; among them, Cory Arcangel,
Bradley Eros, Deborah Stratman and Sam Green.
Green’s documentary, The Weather Underground, nominated
for a Best Documentary Oscar, was featured at last year’s
festival. Also participating in this year’s Whitney Biennial
is James Fotopoulos, whose hypnotic blend of video and film, Esophagus,
and his 16 mm film, The Nest, are among the feature-length works
presented in this year’s festival.
Esophagus simmers on prolonged visual and aural perceptions that
subtly shift to imply altered states of consciousness. Bordering
on alienation and paranoia, the work is constructed as a succession
of segments that ruminate on pure sensation. It utilizes electronically
“drawn” lines, and articulates conversation in robotic
monotone, enhancing and distorting the conventional toward the
absurd and the neurotic.
In contrast to Fotopoulos’ fictive terrain, the real-time
“wonders” depicted in Whole, by Melodie Gilber, presents
a disturbing look at individuals who obsess about becoming amputees;
documenting those who have, indeed, “successfully”
maimed themselves
This year’s festival also includes new shorts by filmmakers
Guy Maddin, Seth Price, Kelly Reichardt, Matt McCormick, Bill
Brown, George Kuchar, Naomi Uman and Ian Svenonius. A live music
and video show featuring the group, People Like Us, with London
based artist Vicki Bennett, and another band, Tree Wave, are among
the added attractions. Tree Wave, from Dallas, Texas, is comprised
of vocalist Lauren Gray and programmer / artist Paul Slocum. Slocum
creates electronic instruments by hacking into and reprogramming
antique computer technology, including, among others, an Atari
2600, which doubles as a hypnotic image-generator.
3/10 through 3/16.
Ed Note: The Anthology Film Archives is located at 32 Second Avenue,
New York, NY 10003. (By subway: take F/V train to 2nd Ave. stop)
Tel: 212.505.5181 www.anthologyfilmarchives.com
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