PS122: Temporary Distortion, "Welcome to Nowhere (bullet hole road.)"

Welcome to Nowhere (bullet hole road.)

Leaning against the walls of the stage, a group of actors waits for audience members to take their seats. The actors could be hanging out at a pool bar, the women looking sexy in their shorts and tight fitting clothes, the men wearing Western attire: a cowboy hat and a plaid shirt. The evocative costumes contrast the setting for the performance, which does not give away any particular place. At the center of the stage, a large sculpture made of plexi glass, monitors, cables, microphones and lights awaits to be awakened by the performers. What we are about to experience will be mediated through the technically complex sculpture in the room, and the installation, together with the actors, will be responsible for creating the world of the performance, both visually and aurally. The lights go out, and the quite whispers (amplified through microphones) of a woman and a man set the mood for the intimate performance to follow.

Soon enough, Temporary Distortion’s latest production, Welcome to Nowhere (bullet hole road), lulls you into its eerie, quiet rhythm. Similarly to previous productions by the same company, Welcome to Nowhere mixes video and live performance, exploring what it means to bring the two together on stage. Referencing avant-garde theater work by Richard Foreman, Elizabeth LeCompte, and Robert Wilson, Temporary Distortion takes its own stab at form and at dealing with multiple media on stage. This particular production is at once still and on the move. Every time the actors speak, a small spotlight focuses on their face as they bring microphones to their lips and whisper to each other and to the audience. While the film overhead shows a couple on a road trip, or a highway extending for miles in the dark, the actors stand still underneath the screen, only moving in order to replace each other. At times the images of the video come in sync with the lines of the actors, creating a ghostly echo effect, as the actors double themselves in the film. The actor’s stillness is very helpful for the audience’s vision, as we are free to concentrate on the film’s development without too much distraction from action by the actors. At the same time, the rhythm of the video itself allows the gaze to drift back and forth from screen to actors, giving one the chance to enjoy the live performance as well as the moving imagery above.

The violent and sexually charged plot of Welcome to Nowhere is told in whispers and through evocative images, creating an atmosphere at once seductive and chilling. In the story, Hunter and Wyatt reminisce over a traumatic event that occurred during a road trip in the West of the United States. Both with them and through the recollections of the people involved in the accident, we are invited into an emotional and spiritual landscape, an experience of travel and search. Yet we are never tricked into forgetting that we are in a theater. The installation at the center of the stage serves as a constant reminder of the active choice by the actors to enter the “theatrical machine” in order to present the audience with the story. At the same time, the box-like sculpture is reminiscent of a transparent confessional, in which the apparatus of communication is made explicit for everyone to observe, and through which the actors are in control of their performance (the light switches and the microphones are all operated by the performers.)

Welcome to Nowhere succeeds in creating a relationship at once intimate and distanced from the audience. In the design of the piece, the elements of sound, film and live performance come together organically, working with rather than against each other, and creating a harmoniously dissonant performance. Temporary Distortion is working with exciting new possibilities in theater, merging different artistic element on the stage without concealing the technical machine that makes it all possible. If you are interested in seeing something new, don’t miss their future performances!

Visit Temporary Distortion for future performances:
http://www.temporarydistortion.com/

P.S. 1 MoMA: “WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution.”

Current chief curator of drawings at the New York Museum of Modern Art and former curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Connie Butler is the woman behind WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, the newest exhibition to focus on the work of feminist artists both in the United States and internationally. Unlike Global Feminisms, an earlier exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum that concentrated on art made since 1990, WACK! deals with the period 1965-80. Also unique to WACK! is the wide range of artists showcased in the museum: over four hundred works in all media by 120 artists, collectives, and collaborations.

In this exhibition, Butler has brought together a wide range of international women artists who exemplify the issues and questions raised during the heat of the women’s movement in art. In the title, Butler speaks of a singular feminist revolution, however the work of these different artists highlights the complexity of the notion of a “feminist artist” and reminds us that multiple revolutions were going on simultaneously. While someone like Faith Wilding worked on her Crocheted Environment (1972), giving new meaning to crochet work and distancing herself from what had been traditionally considered the proper materials with which to create art, other artists focused on their own body and performance as women artists. Orlan’s Le baisier de l’artiste, (1977), for instance, engages in a conversation about what it means to be a woman, more specifically a woman artist, and the social expectations projected onto women as both saints and prostitutes. In other work, issues of race and nationality take the forefront. For Lorraine O’Grady, being a Black woman artist in 1970’s United States called for action, and her questions and problems with the limitations of her role in art brought to life Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. On the other hand, national issues inform the overtly political work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, as she deals with the tragic coup that resulted in the death of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973.

In addition to showcasing different feminisms and feminist art trends, the exhibit also brings up the issue of identity politics in respect to the extent to which artists themselves identify as feminist artists. Take, for instance, artist Marina Abramovic, who has repeatedly refused to be considered a feminist artist. Her work, however, is on exhibit at WACK!. While many of the artists at P.S. 1 have explicitly identified with feminist movements and taken clear political stances in regards to women’s rights, a lot of the work on exhibit focuses emphatically on questions relating directly to art: medium, form, subject, etc. In this sense the exhibition itself becomes an arena to ask questions about art, aesthetics and politics. For exactly this purpose, P.S. 1 has organized a useful series of programs and events that go with the exhibition, such as the installation organized by the feminist genderqueer artist collective LTTR, in which people come together to talk about feminist aesthetics, art, identity politics, and what feminism means for different people.

Overall, WACK! offers an extensive space for discussing questions of feminism(s), politics and art, both literally, (all three floors of the ex-public school are dedicated to the exhibition) and metaphorically, as each artist deals with different ideas and concerns. At the same time, bringing the works of so many important and lesser known artists together is a great contribution to establishing the radical and influential contribution of work by women artists in the 1970’s. Regrettably, Butler’s decision to organize the exhibition thematically does not always work so well, probably because the theme of each grouping of works is never made explicit to the visitor. Along the same lines, it is unfortunate that no context is provided for either the artists or the works themselves in the rooms where they are exhibited, especially for some of the more conceptual pieces. The lack of information, however, is somewhat countered by the incredible work invested by Butler in bringing together such an impressive collection of works. With irony and playfulness, as well as through anger and violence, WACK! presents an important occasion to review work that has revolutionized how we think about art today, making a trip to Long Island City especially attractive.

P.S. 1 MoMA
February 14 - May 12, 2008
http://www.ps1.org/

David Zwirner: “Christopher Williams. For Example: Dix Huits Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 7).”

American conceptual artist and photographer Christopher Willams has designed a press release as puzzling and self-reflexive as the works on show at the David Zwirner Gallery from February 14 to March 29, 2008. Williams, who was born in Los Angeles in 1956, works mainly with photography to ask questions about the medium itself, and in the press release he reproduces some of his artistic process by exploring the process of writing about the exhibition. In the “program”, Williams presents the future viewer with a series of “starting points” through which to make sense of the show. As the writing starts over and over again from a different perspective, Williams makes short allusions to some of the ideas addressed in his work, until the writing breaks down into an analysis of artistic production itself.

Williams’ program, similarly to his photography, seeks to expose the commercial process through which art is packaged and marketed. As he writes, “artistic production functions as advertising for the order under which it is produced. There will be no other space than this view according to which etc…” Similarly, photography for Williams is mainly associated with its commercial purposes. In response and in order to resist this function, Williams creates photographs that challenge to viewer to think more critically about the process of photography, as well as the function of photographic images in society.

Aesthetically, Williams’ images have the high quality typical of commercial work, yet the subjects of his work are always more complex than what the image seems to give away. Williams’ exploration of photography happens both mechanically, as he dissects cameras and lenses in a way reminiscent of Damien Hirst’s dissected animals in formaldehyde, as well as conceptually. Unfortunately, because of the self-reflexive quality of the press release and the absence of a well-informed guide in the gallery, his work remains cryptic to the unfamiliar eye. For instance, a woman wearing only lingerie and a Gambian man holding a camera pose for two separate photographs, but how can we place them in the context of Williams’ work without more information than the image itself?

The display of the images in For Example: Dix Huits Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 7) is reminiscent of a game of Memory, where players have to look for the double of an image: a lot of the photographs on display come with a double in a different corner of the gallery. While the effect of the display is exciting for the viewer, once all the images have been matched and the quality of the photographs acknowledged, we are left with little to engage with. In other words, in this exhibition Williams participates in the reproduction of a “commercial viewing experience”, as spectators observe the quality of the images but have a limited understanding of Williams’ concept.

We might have to wait for an advanced “Google image search” to learn more about Williams’ subject choices, but would he agree to our searching? Maybe next time Williams should avoid including the word “lessons” in his title: while his word choice is, of course, ironic, his attitude is more pedantic than what he might want to acknowledge.

David Zwirner
February 14 - March 29, 2008
http://www.davidzwirner.com/

Harris Lieberman: “Ohad Meromi: Who Owns the World?”

A 2004 MFA Columbia School of the Arts graduate, Ohad Meromi is an Israeli artist who lives and works in New York City. His latest installation at the Harries Lieberman gallery consists of two videos, each about twenty minutes long, and a large spatial construction that takes up the main room in the gallery. The two videos are displayed very differently from each other. In the back room, The Exception and the Rule @ Schitopolis is projected onto a wall, with sound from the film surrounding the viewer and simultaneously playing in the main room of the gallery. On the opposite side of the gallery, right up a glass window, a small television with a pair of earphones sits low on the floor, looping The Exception of the Rule @ Trois Gaules.

Through this set up, the two videos spatially frame the construction in the main gallery, a large architectural sculpture that looks like a 1:1 model of a strange apartment. Through the construction, , Meromi sets the mood for the whole gallery, as viewers are immediately confronted with the empty wooden frames that divide the space. Walking into Who Owns the World feels a lot like walking onto the set of a theatrical production, with modernist looking props lying around the space: some costumes on hangers, two blue foam sculptures like decorative objects, some spools of yarn and a guitar decorated with orange yarn balls. Meromi uses bright red, green, yellow, blue, pink and orange stripes to decorate the wooden structure, creating a sense of playfulness that contrasts the minimalist design of the construction. The spatial organization of the structure is reminiscent of a house, with a common room, a bedroom, a closet and a workroom.

So what are we doing, divided between two videos and an installation that looks like a theatrical set? In this exhibition, Meromi explores both the medium of video and that of interactive sculpture, but apart from some shared aesthetic choices in both videos and construction, the three projects do not work with each other to create a coherent show. In an interview, Mermoni explains his choice for both video and installation as a way to contrast the “institutional nature” of installation with the way video plays with narrative and time. By showcasing both the installation and the videos, Meromi exhibits a a wide range of interests and influences: from modern dance and the Fluxus movement, to Classic Greek Drama revivals and modern colonial Israeli history. Yet while his work brings together all these elements in a new combination, the exhibition itself feels too much like a mixture of influences and not enough like the World of its title.

Harris Lieberman
February 16- March 15, 2008
http://www.harrislieberman.com/

David Zwirner: “Luc Tuymans: Forever, The Management of Magic.”

Forever (2008)

The latest works by Belgian artist Luc Tuymans are currently on exhibit at the David Zwirner gallery. The exhibition, entitled Forever, The Management of Magic, focuses on Tuymans’ exploration of the American phenomenon of Disney. Tuymans approaches the Walt Disney Company from the perspective of ideology, taking images of and from the world of Disney and opening them up for political interpretation. In each painting, Tuymans chooses a subject that explores an aspect of how Disney produces and manages the concept of magic, while upholding American family values and the glory of American industry.

In Forever (2008), for instance, Tuymans focuses on a scene from Disney’s The Carousel of Progress, an attraction for the 1964-1965 New York World Fair. The fair celebrated American domestic developments and the history of electricity, and in the painting one can immediately discern a refrigerator and, possibly, a dishwasher. At the center of Forever, behind a large curtain that seems to be made of light, the ghostly outline of a human sits at a desk. The human figure contrasts the familiar domestic appliances, creating a tension between what is visible and recognizable, and the hidden action behind the curtain. The hues of white and blue, which define the painting, give the whole scene a haunting feeling: who is the man behind the curtain? What is he doing in this American kitchen? Is he even a man? Is he a ghost? The size of the painting itself (68.75x70in) makes the image more realistic, as though we were looking through a window into the private doings of a man in his kitchen. Yet the stillness of the image, together with the cool colors in which it is executed, communicate an eerie calm that speaks more to nostalgia and death than to a quiet domestic moment. Is this the ghost of Walt Disney himself, working behind an opaque curtain which mystifies the viewer and protects Disney’s secrets?

Throughout the exhibit, Tuymans plays with the size of his paintings. Most of the gallery space is filled with large oil canvases prevalently in hues of grey, blue and white. However, the show also encompasses smaller works in the hallway and the back rooms. Relevant to all the paintings is Tuymans’ reliance on previously existing materials such as photographs, urban plans, or film stills, from which to develop the images on the paintings. On one hand, Tuymans focuses on realistic images that inspire figurative and representational work. Yet Tuymans simultaneously isolates the subjects of his paintings from their context, creating a separation and distance that give the paintings abstract valence. Take, for instance, the smaller paintings in the back room. These are dissections of the urban planning of particular areas of Disneyland. Visually isolated from their context by the lack of labels, the choice of organic colors, and the soft brush strokes, the paintings look more like biological diagrams of cell structure than the blueprint for urban development.

In line with past works by the artist, Tuymans’ Forever, The Management of Magic explores political themes through distance and memory. Forever evokes in the viewer feelings and responses somewhat paradoxical in relationship to the subject matter. In these works, we are confronted with the magic of Disney viewed from a critical perspective that resists being manipulated by entertainment and media. While Tuymans’ works have a mesmerizing magic of their own, they explore the structure of that same enchantment, reflexively looking at the images used by Disney in the corporate construction and management of the company's ideology.

David Zwirner
February 14 - March 22, 2008
http://www.davidzwirner.com/

Walter De Maria: The New York Earth Room, 1977

In the heart of SoHo, now one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Manhattan, most of the second floor apartment of 141 Wooster Street has been completely covered in 22 inches of earth. Originally a three month temporary exhibit, Walter De Maria’s Earth Room became a fixed exhibition in 1980. At this time, it was taken over by the Dia Art Foundation, which focuses on the preservation and initiation of art projects which are not economically feasible. Since then, an average of 35 people walk in daily to experience De Maria’s earth sculpture: from art connoisseurs to people who sit in meditation and earth lovers.

I happened to see the Earth Room for the first time on Valentine’s day. For the occasion, a woman had decided to pay tribute to De Maria’s work by filling the staircase landing with flowers, both fake and real, as well as by making her own contribution to the sculpture itself: a little grey-green bush about a foot high had been placed in the earth when I first saw De Maria’s soil landscape. It was quickly removed by the receptionist at the foundation, who told me somewhat timidly: “This is how it’s supposed to be.” Although the bush was gone, there still remained next to me a little blue table with a red vase filled with fake roses and poppies, making me feel as though I were sitting on the more manicured and embellished side of the apartment, in contrast with the starkly minimalist expanse of soil in front of me.

Valentine tributes aside, De Maria’s earth sculpture is especially interesting as an experience of the senses. The sculpture is not immediately visible for visitors, so the first experience of the piece relies mainly on senses other than vision. Immediately, on walking inside the apartment, the air has a different quality to it. It is humid, and the space smells reassuringly damp and earthy. The temperature of the space itself is very comfortable, regularized naturally by the soil and without the use of heaters.

Once the earth does come into view, however, the combination of the white walls and naked light bulbs in contrast with the dark brown solidity of the earth is somewhat breathtaking. It is also surprising and surreal to enter a clean apartment building with wooden floors and aged staircases, to discover a space covered in an element belonging to the outdoors and to nature. I laughed as I imagined real estate agents in New York outraged at 3,600 square feet of precious SoHo floor space completely covered in soil.

Watered and raked once a week in order to keep it like it was during its first exhibition, the earth also has something barren about it: its richness and wetness contrast the fact that there is nothing growing out of it, no visible life. Furthermore, the soil is not meant to be walked on or touched, creating a particular tension in the viewer who can look, smell, and feel the air around her, but not come into direct contact with a material suddenly made sacred as De Maria’s art work.

Earth Room combines De Maria’s work as a minimalist, conceptualist and land artist. In this sculpture, California born and educated De Maria brings together contrasting elements to create a surreal and soothing experience for the body and the mind. On one hand, the sculpture presents us with a great sense of solidity and stability, the rich and heavy earth packed evenly in the contained space of an apartment. Yet because of its nature as a site specific work, Earth Room also constantly changes in its implications and the way it can be approached by viewers. If you find yourself shopping for shoes in the neighborhood, do not miss the chance to rethink where you are and visit 141 Wooster Street.

The New York Earth Room
Wednesday-Saturday
12-6pm (closed 3-3.30pm)
Open each year September through June
http://www.earthroom.org/

Metro Pictures: “Catherine Sullivan: Triangle of Need.”

I walked into Metro Pictures knowing nothing about the work I was going to see, so I ventured asking one of the two receptionists behind the tall, minimal, reception table at the entrance, “what do you think about Catherine Sullivan’s work?” I have made similar inquiries repeatedly in my gallery visits, searching for more information than that provided by the press release. My questions usually lead to a few moments of discomfort and three or four short sentences pretty much paraphrasing the material already available on the artist. Yet this time, to my surprise, I found a very enthusiastic and involved interlocutor, ready to share with me the complex world of Catherine Sullivan’s Triangle of Need. Probably one of the receptionist’s greatest concerns was that I do not try to make sense of any of her work, as he warned me that there was no narrative and that actors spoke in an incomprehensible language designed for the piece by sound composer Sean Griffin. After his detailed briefing on the highly choreographed and well researched style of Sullivan’s work, he sent me on my way, pointing to the entrance door, and quickly correcting himself: “Although Sullivan would never tell you where to begin!”

With a brief introduction to Sullivan’s work, then, I walked into her three-room installation prepared for chaos and abstraction. Yet, while Sullivan’s looped videos do cause some confusion on first impact, the highly choreographed actions of her actors and the rhythm of her work, soon give away a high degree of sophistication. Not surprisingly, Sullivan, who was born in 1968, has trained both in acting and the visual arts in two important institutions: the California Institute of Arts and the Art Center College of Design. Her work, which focuses both on video and performance, explores the conventions of theatricality, as she picks apart the elements that make up performance, highlighting uncertainty and transformation. In one of the rooms of Triangle of Need, for instance, three separate screens play three different videos in black and white. Some of the elements in the videos, such as the Chaplinesque bowler hat worn by different performers, or the cut of the suits, create a vague sense of familiarity with the scene: we discern recognizable visual cultural elements. Yet soon, two Neanderthal like figures walk across one of the screens, as a woman in a tiara talks straight into the camera in incomprehensible sequences of consonants and vowels. The moment a scene appears to make sense, gain some meaning, a destabilizing element takes the spotlight and shifts the balance on the screen.

As a dancer, I was most intrigued by Sullivan’s body language. Known for cooperating with choreographers and dancers as well as artists across other art fields, in two of the three installations Sullivan has worked closely with the actors to create a vocabulary of gestures and movements reminiscent of what you might see in a mental institution, or in a room of autistic and paraplegic individuals. This is particularly true in a sequence filmed at the Vizcaya estate, an Italian Renaissance style estate built in the 1910’s by James Deering. Sitting around a dining room table, actors speak in Griffin’s language, while their eyes roll, their bodies contract and collapse, and their limbs move through the air in expressive yet incomprehensible movements. The actors, who sometimes seem to see each other, in fact rarely communicate directly except through touch.

This expressive body language greatly contrasts what I found in the last room of the exhibition I visited. In a smaller room than the first two, an old projection machine screens a single film with alternating scenes of a figure skater dancing on ice and images of Quinciñeras having their pictures taken out in the gardens of Miami. While the dissonant sounds of the installations nextdoor bleed in through the walls, this smaller room is relatively more quite and gentle than the first. Even visually, the single screen is easier to handle than the three and four multiple screens of the preceding installations. In the extreme juxtaposition of the last room with the first, I found myself highly conscious of Sullivan’s design of the exhibition, and spent some time hypnotized by the ice skater’s spinning before making one final transition, back into the streets of Chelsea.

Metro Pictures
February 7- March 15 2008
http://www.metropicturesgallery.com

Galerie Lelong: “Converge: Works by Ana Mendieta and Hans Breder, 1970-1980.”

In Converge: Works by Ana Mendieta and Hans Breder, 1970-1980, the artistic relationship between performance and body artists Ana Mendieta and Hans Breder is explored through a wide range of films, photographs and original documentation. Mendieta, born in Cuba in 1948, was exiled to the United States when she was only thirteen, recruited by the US run Operation Peter Pan which claimed to save children from indoctrination by the Cuban Communist government. In the US she earned a BA from the University of Iowa and then two MFAs, one of which in the Intermedia Program at the same university, founded by Hans Breder. The relationship between the two artists was both academic, as student and teacher, as well as personal, as lovers, and went on for several years. Although the two did not collaborate by co-authoring works, they used each other in their works. Breder, for instance, would take photographs of Mendieta as she posed for him as “body sculpture” by the water, or use her as a model in the same place where she would create one of her silouetas. In pieces like Ocean Bird Wash Up, on the other hand, Breder did the camerawork for Mendieta’s film of herself floating in the turf, her body covered in feathers.

At the Galerie Lelong, most of the works on display have Mendieta as the subject. For those unfamiliar with the work by the two artists, this makes it sometimes hard to discern Breder’s work from Mendieta’s. Unfortunately the gallery did not place labels next to the images, but rather numbers in reference to a hardcopy key available to visitors. The design of the exhibition itself, therefore, supports a mild confusion about whose works were whose, highlighting the convergence of the artists’ works. At the same time, however, Mendieta’s bolder explorations of social taboos and her transgressive performances make her stand out against Breder’s more surrealistic photographs. Some of Breder’s photographs, for instance, focus on Mendieta’s eroticized body, using a mirror to cut Mendieta’s body at the torso and reflect her lower body at different angles, creating a cluster of legs with no head. Furthermore, in Breder’s photographs of Mendieta’s naked body reflected in water, we find a stillness and poetic sensibility quite different from Mendieta’s provocative and raw style.

In contrast with Breder’s somewhat romantic lens, Mendieta’s explorations bring to the forefront the ephemeral, changing, and bloody nature of the body. In her siluetas, Mendieta sculpts her own silouhettes in the environment using different materials. The show itself opens with an photograph of one of Mendieta’s signature siluetas, where she has sculpted her own silouhette into sand, which has since dried up and partially deteriorated. While the silouetas camouflage and merge into the environment in which they have been created, other works by Mendieta play on the juxtaposition of elements that do not easily blend into each other. In her Facial Hair Transplants, Mendieta applies a fake beard to her face, made of facial hair from her friends (such as Breder’s.) In an untitled piece from 1978, eight colored photographs show a naked Mendieta with diagrams of the human anatomy projected onto her, her naked three dimensional body bringing the projections to life. Here scientific objectivity is visually challenged by the subjectivity of Mendieta’s own physical shapes and form.

While Breder’s work is an important context to the development of Mendieta as an artist, their styles and artistic sensibilities diverge greatly. By displaying works by the two artists simultaneously, the exhibit at the Galerie Lelong offers a space in which the differences between Mendieta and Breder can be contemplated, making “convergence” somewhat of an ironic title.

Galerie Lelong
January 31 - March 1, 2008
http://www.galerie-lelong.com/newyork/fr_newyork.htm

Paula Cooper Gallery: “Hans Haacke”

I was at the Paula Cooper gallery looking through one of Hans Haacke’s well known works, Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), when two women in their fifties walked into the same room and started to scrutinize the piece with vigor. Where they interested in buying the piece? Did they come to the gallery specifically to have a first hand look at the controversial piece which had previously caused the cancellation of Haacke’s exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum? The answer came several minutes later, as one of the ladies asked the receptionist what Haacke was trying to say with the piece. The quiet receptionist offered something along the lines of “exposing exploitative transactions in the real estate business in 1970’s New York,” when the woman, referring to the real estate business owner, called out indignantly: “I’m his daughter!” and left the gallery.

The whole scene had something quite comedic about it. There was not enough of an audience to receive the lady’s exclamation with the shock it commanded, and the receptionist and I were left alone in the gallery to contemplate what had just happened. Yet the incident seemed most appropriate in relationship to the work of an artist as politically involved as Hans Haacke, giving both the receptionist and I a chance to observe live the strong reactions evoked by his works in viewers.

Conceptual artist Hans Haacke was born in Cologne in 1936 and has lived in New York since the early 1960’s. Although based in the US, Haacke has presented his work internationally, often creating provocative pieces that challenge viewers to look deeper, focusing on the concept of change to create works that are both political and sociological. In the latest show, works from various times in Haacke’s career come together in the three rooms of the Chelsea gallery. In Photographic Notes, documenta 2, 1959 (1959), a series of photographs shows middle class Germans of all genders and ages dealing with one of the first exhibitions of modern art after WWII. The images show people involved in different activities, from observing a painting to playing with a toddler, with a backdrop of works by artists such as Mondrian and Kandinsky. In these photographs, Haacke highlights the importance of the relationship between an artwork and the context in which it is received, focusing on the interactions between viewers and works by presenting the wide spectrum of ways in which the two engage with each other.

In addition to his 1971 New York real estate critique and Photographic Notes, Haacke presents three more works. Two of them, Trickle Up (1992) and Mission Accomplished (2005), are placed between the gallery's two main rooms. A battered couch with an embroidered pillow and a ripped print of an American flag, the works reference the White House with irony and an overt critique to the Bush legacy in the United States. The third piece, one of Haacke’s earlier works, Wide White Flow (1967), offers a welcome abstract intervention amongst the politically engaged works in the gallery. In Wide White Flow, a piece of light, white fabric covers the entire floor of the gallery’s largest room. Four fans incessantly blow air that keeps the fabric floating in waves, and one can easily become mesmerized by the changing patterns of light and shadow created in this sculpture of air and fabric.

Overall, Haacke’s works at the Paula Cooper Gallery do not work so harmoniously with each other. Their context varies greatly, as does the media through which the concepts are explored. While the exhibit offers something of a mismatched combination of his pieces, however, it also demonstrates the wide range of the artists’ interests and questioning. And with some luck, you might run into another of the outraged interpreters of Haacke’s work.

Paula Cooper Gallery
January 11 - February 16, 2008
http://www.paulacoopergallery.com

El Museo Del Barrio: "Arte ≠ Vida"

All the way up on 104th street, looking over the upper east corner of Central Park, I recently visited El Museo Del Barrio for the first time. El Museo is New York City’s only museum focusing on Caribbean, Puerto Rican and Latin American art. Founded in 1969 in East Harlem’s Spanish speaking neighborhood, the museum seeks to educate a wider public on the cultural experience and history of the Latino community in New York City. Born in the context of the civil right’s movement, El Museo has been politically engaged since its outset, supporting a sense of “cultural pride and self-discovery” in its neighboring community. It seems only appropriate, therefore, to have discovered it through its latest and highly politically involved exhibition, “Arte ≠Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas 1960-2000.”

Curated by Deborah Cullen, director of curatorial programs for El Museo, “Arte no es Vida” focuses on the documentation of performative acts by artists all over “the Americas:” whether Latinos in the United States, or artists from different countries in the central and southern parts of the continent. On one hand, the exhibit works as a contemporary art show, displaying performance art by artists from the second half of the twentieth century through oral histories, photography, primary documents from the time, and videos. Especially in the first half of the exhibit, works and their authors are presented in relationship to a particular artistic practice, such as “signaling,” “destructivism,” and “neocentrismo.” This level of contextualization defines the pieces within the sphere of contemporary art, placing them in line with wider artistic attitudes.

On the other hand, “Arte no es Vida” also works as an educational display dealing with the turbulent political history of the continent in the four decades from 1960 to 2000. Each of the pieces on the floor could not exist outside of the specific context for which it was created: whether in relationship to desaparecidos’ missing bodies, as in the section entitled “¡Junta No!,” or as a commentary on environmental pollution, such as Nicolás García Uriburu’s water colorations. The aesthetic choices of the artists speak directly to the issue they are addressing with their work. As a result, half of the experience of the works relies on the awareness of the viewer/participant of the issues addressed by the artist. In other words, the exhibit, while displaying art, also demands of the spectator a degree of awareness that goes beyond aesthetic appreciation and relies on historical and political insight.

In “Arte no es Vida,” El Museo offers an exhibit both valuable for its contributions to the world of contemporary art, as well as useful in raising awareness about political and social issues at the heart of Latin American history. Coherent with the museum’s mission, the exhibit provides a space for discovery as well as an important collection recording some of the most difficult and fleeting work to document: performance art.

El Museo Del Barrio
January 13 - May 18, 2008
http://www.elmuseo.org/