Marian Goodman Gallery. Eija-Liisa Ahtila: “Where is Where?”, (2007) and “Fishermen (Etudes, No 1)”, 2007.

On screen, a military squad shoots and kills Algerian civilians in an attack during the middle of the night. In the next scene, a Nordic looking woman goes to visit her preacher. She says she feels guilty because someone has died. The preacher tells her she should accept God’s forgiveness, and the woman replies: “I don’t understand how I can be forgiven for what happens to other people.” And not just to other people, but in other places and historical periods. The woman’s perplexity about human suffering and guilt, well represents some of the issues confronted by Where is Where? (2007), Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s latest video installation.

In this four screen dramatic film, the Finnish artist brings together the story of three boys living in Algeria during French colonial times, and the story of a European poet in her forties. In the film, Ahtila juxtaposes the violence that took place in Algeria in the early 1950’s, with the attempts to make sense of history of a European outsider. The film begins at the present moment, but the story of the three children becomes increasingly important, culminating in the murder of the French child by the two Algerian children. While the story of the three children is based in a real event, Ahtila’s frame places the incident in a greater context than the Algerian-French conflict. The tragic and violent events, experienced and filtered through the perspective of the poet, become starting points for an understanding of current conflicts between the Arab worlds and the West, as well as metaphors for exploring the ideas of violence, death and war.

In addition to contrasting two stories from different worlds, Ahtila places the viewer at the center of the installation, symbolically involving the spectator in the narrative. During the film, the European poet is not alone in asking questions and looking for meaning. As the screens around the viewer switch imagery and move from one narrative to the next, the viewer finds herself constantly looking around, wondering, asking: “Where is that voice coming from? Where are we now? Where will this go?” Like the poet, and mirroring the title of the work, the viewer of Ahtila’s work is provoked to look for answers by the design of the installation as well as by its narrative.

In Where is Where?, Ahtila makes of a 2 dimensional film, a three dimensional experience. Caught in the middle of the action on the screens, viewers are simultaneously given the possibility to look elsewhere and choose a new angle from which to view the events unraveling. In contrast with her multi screen installation, Ahtila’s other piece on show at the Marian Goodman Gallery, Fishermen (Etudes, No 1) (2007), offers a simple, one screen documentation of fishermen attempting to defy stormy weather to go out fishing on their boat. Fishermen displays the first in a number of studies on fishermen Ahtila plans to develop in the future.

Together, Ahtila’s new works create visual and aural environments that absorb the viewer, while raising painful questions about human relations and the violence and struggle that define history. Although the two pieces vary greatly in subject and form, Ahtila’s poetic sensibility comes across in both of them, providing a welcome perspective that resonates with Scandinavian rhythms and aesthetics.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila
Marian Goodman Gallery
http://www.mariangoodman.com/
Through April 30, 2008

The Project. Coco Fosco: “Buried Pigs with Moros”.

Coco Fusco.

In line with her ongoing questioning of war and torture methods, Coco Fusco’s latest exhibit at The Project focuses on the Moro Insurrection against the US occupation of the Philippines. The first American war against Islamic people, the insurrection was also the first time American military confronted suicidal warriors, juramentados, who were ready to give their lives in the battle against Christian infidels. Faced with opponents who were not afraid of death, U.S. officials had to devise a different tactic to
prevent the juramentados’ attacks. Legend has it that under the leadership of General “Blackjack” Pershing, the army devised a method of killing that proved intolerable for the juramentados’ religious beliefs. Not only were gun bullets dipped in pig’s blood, but the juramentados were buried facing away from Mecca and covered with pig entrails. Apparently, the pig blood method was very effective, and has circulated as truth among post 9/11 military and intelligence experts, as well as among U.S. senators.

In Buried Pigs with Moros, Fusco explores American military tactics that deal with extremist opponents. Born during the Vietnam War and having lost a brother in a 1980’s Special Forces covert mission, Fusco has been questioning war and war politics in a lot of her recent work. Her video, Operation Atropos, and her performance A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America, have been selected for the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Both works deal with the new role of women in the military. Her focus on war and war strategies in Buried Pigs with Moros, then, is nothing new. Yet the way she has chosen to present Buried Pigs with Moros places the viewer in a rather different role from her work in performance and video.

The exhibition is divided into two. The first room displays a collection of historical artifacts and memorabilia relating to the Moro Insurrection. There are a five minute clip from The Real Glory (1936), a letter written and signed by General Pershing regarding the pig blood method, and various articles and annals from the time. In this first room, we are exposed to the literary and visual language used by Americans to deal with the question of the Moro insurrection in the early 1900’s. Next door, a disembodied audio installation dramatizes a university lecture by a former Special Forces member and security expert. The lecture focuses on interrogation methods and the use of torture. It was given in 2005 and was posted on Wikileaks in 2007. As the lecturer gives his talk, words that reiterate or clarify his language are projected onto a dark wall. The words function both as echoes and as subtly differently repetitions of the concepts the voice is dealing with. The effect is haunting, as the voice relentlessly advocates the use of torture and we are offered visual reminders of what the lecturer is talking about.

With the display and the audio installation, Fusco creates a juxtaposition of two historical archives that places the viewer in the position of researcher rather than spectator. While the organization and choice of the artifacts on display depends on Fusco, viewers are given the possibility to discover history at their own pace. Fusco’s critical perspective is clear, yet the exhibition does not have the feel of a patronizing political statement. By accosting the two war tactics and letting the viewer engage personally with the material, Fusco leaves a lot of space for personal discovery and reflection.

Coco Fusco: Buried Pigs with Moros
The Project
http://www.elproyecto.com/
Through May 2, 2008

Mary Boone Gallery: “Liu Xiaodong”.

Liu Xiaodong, Sky Burial (2007)

“China's hot young artists well schooled in market savvy”, reads a recent article by David Barboza on the Herald Tribune. The article, published on April 1, 2008, discusses the pros and cons of the highly market oriented and very prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Barboza tells us that the school’s faculty boasts of several millionaires, and that its alumni consist of some of the most successful contemporary artists from China, including Liu Wei, Fang Lijun and Zhang Huan. Given the strong link between art and market established by the Academy, it might not be surprising, to discover that artist Liu Xiaodong has chosen Tibet, the latest tourist destination for Han Chinese, as the subject for his most recent paintings. Both an alumni and a member of the faculty at the Academy, Liu’s work is currently on exhibit at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York, where his two large, multi-panel paintings, proudly take up gallery space.

The first work, entitled Qinghai-Tibet Railway (2007), is composed of five panels, each 98” by 394”. The painting represents two Tibetan nomads walking their horses across the Tibetan plateau, as blue skies fade behind them, and they are met by the looming grey skies of industrialization. Behind the nomads, the new train that connects Beijing to Lhasa advances, unstoppable. While the painting suggests the tragic results of China’s influence and development plans in Tibet, there is something else at play in Liu’s work. The fluid style of his painting suggests a kind of romance with the Tibetan culture, an objectification that resigns itself to the disappearance of a people while glorifying their past existence and environment. Similarly to the attitude of American colonizers towards Native American tribes, Liu’s painting at once glorifies and denies the complexity of Tibetan culture and history. In the painting, the two men with their horses are at once beautiful and defeated. Although they are on the forefront of the painting, they are passive, and all the action takes place in the background. And what to make of the rainbow in the midst of the grey skies? How quickly are these Nomads to expect better times and better weather?

The second painting on exhibit, Sky Burial (2007), romanticizes Tibetan landscapes and rituals, without giving them much power or complexity. As some Tibetans look over their shoulders at a group of vultures dismembering a carcass, the viewer is allowed to contemplate the beauty of the fertile valley beyond the violence taking place among the birds. In other words, Liu creates a seductive vantage point for the viewer (and potential buyer) of the work. In contrast with the first work, in Sky Burial all the action takes place in the front, but the spectator is allowed to look away from the deadly scene and be reminded of the beauty and harmony of nature around it.

The work of Liu Xiaodong might offer great satisfaction to a country eager to turn Tibet into museum material. Through his subject and style of painting, Liu manages to create attractive scenarios that only superficially allude to the violence of history, providing relief for a public interested in forgetting and romanticizing the history of Tibet and China. While Liu’s art will no doubt prove very marketable back in China, one hopes that the West has experienced enough cultural objectification in its own history not to be easily fooled by Liu's pleasant lines and landscapes.

Mary Boone Gallery
http://www.maryboonegallery.com
Through April 26

Zach Feuer Gallery: “Tamy Ben-Tor”

Born in 1975 in Jerusalem, Israeli artist Tamy Ben-Tor moved to New York City for her MFA at Columbia University (2006), and has lived and worked there since. Ben-Tor’s latest works are currently on show at the Zach Feuer Gallery in Chelsea, where her provocative videos are projected on one gallery wall and on three separate TV screens. Ben-Tor’s performances are known for being “fiercely funny” (Artnet Magazine), yet during my visit to the gallery, the only other person laughing apart from myself was my friend Kathryn Shearman, a performance and sculpture artist based in Ithaca, New York. Within the gallery, her laughter became a constant reminder of the silence of the other spectators. Why such silence?

One reason might be that while Ben-Tor deals with very sensitive issues by using humor and irony, she is also always reminding us of the tragic and dark elements that inform her characters. In her most recent videos, the Holocaust comes up again and again in different stories and in her performances. In a section of the film projected on the gallery’s wall, Ben-Tor transforms herself in an older Hassidic woman with very ugly teeth who talks somewhat nonsensically about not leaving Egypt and the contribution of Jews to the greatness of America. The character is hilarious: partially annoying and partially wise, a caricature of someone familiar and yet completely absurd. The woman, reminiscent of a witch from a children’s fairy tale, performs with a bleak, post-apocalyptic forest in the background, a setting which gives a sober tone to the whole piece: a reminder of the tragic historical landscape that has given rise to the American Hassidic community.

In the same film, Ben-Tor takes on an Eichmann-like character with hexagonal glasses, a man who can only speak unintelligible words. This black and white section of the film brings us back to Eichmann’s post WWII trials, in which he repeatedly attempted to deny responsibility for sending Jews to concentration camps. Simultaneously, however, Ben-Tor’s facial expressions and the overall performance of the character are reminiscent of a minor character in a slapstick comedy, making the section more confusing than funny. Throughout this exhibition, Ben-Tor uses forms that are light and familiar: comedic caricatures, fairy tale characters and story lines, children’s music, etc. The subjects of her work and her approach to each piece, however, create a contrast that inhibits pure laughter in the viewers.

Video might also create a sense of detachment that is somewhat counter productive to emotional investment. While, for instance, a live performance plays off of the spectators’ energies, Ben-Tor’s films are looped and keep going independently of the reactions of the viewers. The two TV screens have headphones for listening, so that people become aurally isolated from the rest of the gallery every time they engage with one of the TV films. In addition, in the large room where one film is projected onto the wall, sound is not so good, and many of Ben-Tor’s words are lost. Maybe as a result of this, it is harder for viewers to become completely involved in the artist’s playful performance and in her subtle use of language and sound.

At the same time, Ben-Tor’s performances and visual compositions are so overwhelming that it might be a lot to ask of an audience to remain light hearted. Even in the lightest piece of the show, in which Ben-Tor impersonates a very busy character from the contemporary art world, the tone and rhythm of the piece is quite aggressive. In the piece, Ben-Tor heavily references not only the vocabulary of the contemporary art world (“this panel,” “it’s a local project,” “it’s a community project”, “it’s political”, “let’s close the deal,” etc.) but also the attitude and manner of an overly busy, overly dramatic, and email addicted contemporary art persona. Ben-Tor’s Warholian character, (white wig, pink shirt, light blue background), cannot seem to stop emailing and leaving voice messages. In what is basically a soliloquy that lasts about ten minutes, Ben-Tor confronts the viewer with a nightmare of modern communication that finally leaves the character exhausted and slows down the video as well.

In her work, Ben-Tor brings to the forefront racial, ethnic and historic stereotypes, creating characters and stories that are abstract and specific at the same time. Unfortunately, the exhibition currently taking place at the Feuer Gallery cannot recreate the same energy and dynamism present in Ben-Tor’s live performances, yet her video work is still successful in confronting the viewer with powerfully nonsensical performances. Ben-Tor’s experimentation with video is promising and has the potential to open up new questions about performance art on film.

Zach Feuer Gallery
http://www.zachfeuer.com/
Through May 3, 2008

Andrew Kreps Gallery: “Peter Coffin: You Are Me”

Peter Coffin’s third solo exhibition at the Andrew Kreps Gallery welcomes you in with a suite of prints, Untitled (Designs for Colby Poster Co.), each one defined by three bright colors merging into each other. Traditionally the prints serve as the background for posters such as those promoting rock concerts and revivals, but Coffin has chosen to highlight the color combinations as a design in and of themselves. As a result, the office of Andrew Preps is festively surrounded in color, setting the mood for the playful exhibit that follows. Color, in fact, defines the other two pieces on show at the gallery. In the main room, an industrial conveyor reminiscent of a miniature rollercoaster carries a bunch of colorful balloons through space. The noisy and heavy metal conveyor contrasts the light and brightly colored balloons. Apparently, at the end of each day the balloons are carried to the street and released, as though freed after a day of work. Although visually the piece is powerful, it is somewhat saddening that an artist as interested in nature as Coffin should commit the faux pas of releasing helium and plastic into the atmosphere for the duration of his exhibit.

The balloons are not the only part of the exhibit to leave the interior of the gallery. Coffin has created a sound installation that plays Incidental Music each time office staff hits a key on a computer keyboard. The sound is then played outside the gallery through a speaker on top of the entrance. (Unfortunately the installation was not working when I was there.) Another part of the installation involves small sounds played in the background of a conversation when someone calls the gallery (you can give it a try: 212 741 8849). Both these installations are interesting as they reflect the artists’ involvement in the space in which he is exhibiting as well as in the interaction of the gallery with its viewers and neighbors.

The most mesmerizing work on exhibit, however, can be found in the back room of the gallery. There, thirty monitors piled on top of each other in five rows of six, display video clips of animals at play in both domestic and wild settings. The monitor wall is extremely colorful and constantly changing, as each clip appears and disappears at different time intervals. Some of the images are incredible: dolphins playing with their own air bubbles, monkeys cartwheeling their way down the side of a hill, a turtle chasing a cat over and over again. The piece is seductive and critical at once. On one hand, the animals look beautiful and playful, enjoying themselves both in the wild and in captivity. Yet the monitors are reminiscent of the cages in which we contain these animals, as well as of the anthropomorphic mental frame of mind through which we are used to looking at them. The rhythm of the clips showing in different monitors and the variety of the animals and movement on display, capture the viewer into a frenzy of scopophilic pleasure, and the artist cleverly overwhelms us with images so that the pleasure is never comfortable.

In his exhibit, Coffin creates different worlds of contemplation that are at once formally satisfying and critically engaged. The space at Andrew Kreps gives the viewer a chance to become immersed in each world and take the time necessary to engage with the rhythm and length of each piece. Coffin’s use of color and movement is captivating, make sure to set aside some time to just sit down and contemplate.

Andrew Kreps Gallery
http://www.andrewkreps.com/
Through April 26, 2008