1. Jean-Luc Godard, The Spirit of the Forms, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York
Near-complete retrospective of a profound body of visual art spanning the last half century. Godard is unmatched in understanding cinematic form, probing the intersections of subjectivity and politics, culture and history.

2. Chantal Akerman, Maniac Shadows, at the Kitchen, New York
Akerman’s mixed-media video installation extends her work on the complications between self and other—specifically mother. The autobiographical piece juxtaposes interior and exterior spaces, evoking tension between confinement and vulnerability. As in her classic films, the imagery is mundane, yet presented at a remove. The piece gets at the fundamental obliqueness of identity.

3. Dickinson/Walser at the Drawing Center, New York
A revelatory presentation of Emily Dickinson’s poem manuscripts on scraps, predominantly envelopes, and Robert Walser’s unique “microscripts.” Dickinson’s pieces, which are mostly legible, are astoundingly experimental in their interplay between the visual, the material, and the linguistic. The exhibition opens issues of visuality and textuality, the haptic and the conceptual.

4. Mike Kelley at PS1, Long Island City
Kelley’s work made a huge impression on me in my early twenties—the way he used psychoanalytic, feminist, and semiotic theory along with punk aesthetics and working/middle class American vernacular culture. Seeing this retrospective, especially the second and third floors, still had the same surprisingly emotional impact. Kelley goes to the painful and abject, and it resonates.

5. Ad Reinhardt at David Zwirner, and Richard Aldrich at Bortolami, New York
A strange pairing of painting shows I first saw on the same day. Not only were Reinhardt’s brilliant cartoons, paintings, and photography shown in one exhibition, but an extraordinary thirteen of the “black” paintings were beautifully installed in one room. We could move among the paintings at different distances and realize how particular each ostensibly similar one is, opening awareness of the endless oscillations and revisions involved in perception.

Aldrich’s work is increasingly about the relay of vision across pieces rather than within the bounds of an object. This show also operated across temporal interstices in memory: a second installation of mostly different work replaced the first for ten days during the run. I found the show often baffling, while evoking a challenging, and moving, sense of contingency.

See top 5’s from other NY Arts contributors here.

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Brian Getnick: Art for me is a way of joining thoughts that might not belong together in any other discourse. When you make art, you can actualize these thoughts into forms and create models where they are indisputably united. I like that stubborn insistence.

As far as my family is concerned, I’ll start with Halloween. We would start sewing costumes in early September. There’s a picture of me as an 8-year-old howling at the camera in a green tunic, swim goggles, witch nails and a felt rat sewn to my chest. Obviously, I was rat-man. I almost never wanted to be a recognizable character. When the holiday was over, I would make small figures with fabric and florist’s wire drawn from the world I had inhabited in costume, playing out stories around the house and in the woods. I never wanted the fantasy to end.

LO: What’s your working process?

BG: Play is my process. When I begin working on a performance, I make an object, mask or costume and start activating it by moving inside it or handing it off to a collaborator. For The Pest Horse, a performance I’m doing with Bryatt Bryant this August, I hand him the horse bodies and say, “Give me two performances.” It can be as simple a directive as that. He intuitively knows how to make something come alive and find out how it wants to behave. We record what he comes up with, we try it again, and eventually whittle it down.

LO: Where did you go to school and how did that effect your artistic development?

BG: I got my MFA in the Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The department’s philosophy of encouraging the intuitive and pleasurable process of experimenting with materials gave me the breathing room to grow. Five years after getting my MFA, I went back to making plays with figures and costumes. 

LO: What are the ideas in your work?

BG: Memory, control, freedom and the body. In the total sensorial experience of my performance work, I want these subjects to weave in and out of visibility and articulation. My first desire is to mesmerize the audience with how the sculptural bodies that I make come alive, later fall apart, and how they behave in general. What they interpret this interplay to mean is up to them. That is a type of research that I couldn’t get if I simply installed my costumes as static sculpture in a gallery. I could only theorize about what the audience’s response would be. When I first moved to LA, I performed exclusively in queer nightclubs. The audience would shout back, walk away, and participate unexpectedly. No one felt cowed into submission by the pressure to interpret. They came to the club for pleasure and I wanted to give it to them. If they walked away entertained I was happy. If they absorbed some of the nascent content later, that was even better.

LO: You are a performance artist who also creates sculptural objects. How is performance different from making objects conceptually for you as an artist?

BG: My sculptures often take the form of theaters nested inside other things: a hog’s head, a prison, or a decrepit airport, for instance. I think of the theater’s architecture as a body or an extension of the architect’s body, which implies that the audience is being digested by the play. My performances are the inverse; all the fantasy is attached to the body and surrounded by the audience.

LO: What is it like to be observed as a performing artist, and to also be observing the audience?

BG: It feels like a political moment to be the center of attention. I feel that pressure. What am I saying in this arena? What are my values? I think this is why I tend not to perform as myself but as other things and with other people. I’m not interested in presenting a singular representation of selfhood. I’m not interested in the audience reifying me in a cult-like way. I’m interested in showing the audience a system of reorganizing or exploding the self into multiple, independent beings. I also prefer to have the audience mobile and unseated if possible, so that they can choose to see what they want, or to leave.

LO: What kind of reactions and impressions have your performance works engendered from audience members?

BG: My friend told me once that she thought of my performances as “home-school kabuki theater,” and I like that. My work has a lot of absurdist elements, so laughter is one of the first responses I get in galleries. Artists come to galleries prepared to scrutinize forms and analyze their meaning. I get this too. It’s hard to shut off the politic and history-seeking part of my brain, but with performance, the opportunity is to experience art bodily. The analysis is important, but it can happen later, or at certain moments within the total experience.

LO: Why do you think art is important to people and to the world?

BG: Art offers models of ways of being that are at best, deeply, internally researched. This is so important in the era of social media determined identities. I’m speaking here not of all art which, of course, can use social media as a material or a vehicle, but specifically of the fabrication of objects and of live performance. Solid things are derived at a slower rate and that gives you time to fantasize about an audience or ignore the possibility of an audience. I don’t think that can happen when you make things for the web.

LO: What advice would you give an artist who has just arrived in NYC and who is not sure where to begin?

BG: I would say: Consider measuring the energy expended on seeking prestige with the effects that it has on your body and your creative output.  Instead, find a community of people who will support you making your work and find places where you can experiment freely. I live in LA where the rent is low and the pay-off for experimentation and collaboration is very high. What I would suggest to the New York performance artist is to visit LA. I run a performance art journal and platform called Native Strategies with my partner Tanya Rubbak. If you’re a performance artist reading this and are thinking of visiting LA, look us up if you want an orientation. nativestrategiesla@gmail.com

LO: Who are you favorite artists and why? 

BG: There are so many. I love Asher Hartman who is more of an experimental theater director and works closely with an ensemble of perfomers who have worked together for over five years. Hartman tends to collide narratives and switch the identities of his characters in the script. The language he uses is often very dense and chaotic but because of the strength of his ensemble, the abstraction in his narrative(s) become grounded through the obvious humanness of the actor’s relationships. I just saw Glass Bang by Hartman, which is about violence, real estate, and ghosts. I also love Mike Kelly’s Day is Done project. He made this parallel universe of ghosts, vampires, virgins, pagan rituals, and bits and pieces from a pseudo biography all extrapolated from high school yearbook photos. It’s a template for someone like me who starts his process by making objects and then finds the performances inside them. I also have found precedent in his writing for the way I treat subject matter, how it comes in and out of focus in my work. In an Art21 interview he talks about beauty in relationship to a deliberate confusion between different contents: “I think what I make is beautiful … because terms and divisions between terms are confused, and divisions between categories start to slip. That produces what I think of as a sublime effect, or it produces humor. And both things interest me.”

LO: What are your upcoming projects?

BG: I’ve started color-coding my yearly output. What I’m presenting at Station Independent Projects this summer is the culmination of a year’s production of green performances and objects. I realized I was coloring work in 2012 when I was making Memories, a performance in which a big puppet’s limbs and head are controlled by dancers and musicians in blood red costumes.  I decided to research how color resonates for my work by starting this year by consciously choosing a color.

I think of intuition as faith in finding substance in darkness. For the next several years I’ll be coloring that void until I have the complete works of the rainbow.

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I had mixed feelings entering the dark space of Bicocca; not about the show, I had mixed feelings about myself. A part of me wanted to see the works, but most of me wanted to see the person, the artist who killed himself at the peak of his career. I didn’t want the voyeuristic side of me to overtake my curiosity, but I also hoped I could grasp a hint of a reason for suicide. I have lost some friends and artists in this way, so I kind of looked at this show with sadness and curiosity.

Kelley was working on a major retrospective that was to travel Amsterdam, Paris, and many other venues until he committed suicide. This exhibition can be seen as a compendium to that show, with ten of his major installations, largely unseen in Europe. The seminal works chosen by Emi Fontana and Andrea Lissoni show not only the complexity of his art making process, but also the continuity of his process. Most of these works are from the decade of 2000, a time following a period where serial bodies of work seemed to be rare. The preceding decade seemed to have formed a void of ideas that was hard to be fulfilled. In a sense, however, Mike Kelley did fill this void, especially with the theatrical side of his work, now that performance art seems to be all over the place in the art world.

On a more personal level, I love the irony in most of his work. There’s an utter sincerity where elements are displayed in what seems to be a haphazard organization, but there’s always an overriding consciousness that tells you there’s nothing random in his presentation. He’s quite old school in the way that each symbol is approached and expressed, but what these symbols mean is not the core point of the work. There’s something very emotional in how he’ll take someone’s memory and then “recreate the people” that were in this photograph. For example, he would pick a photograph from a random yearbook and reconstruct and re-enact the staging of the photo, making it up in his own [original/twisted?] mind. He was very good at casting these characters so that they seem to really be a copy of the original, posed in a sarcastic manner.

There’s one piece, Rose Hobart II from 2006, that from the outside appears as a sort of a big geometrical sculpture, until the guard tells you that you can actually go inside it. You take off your shoes and enter this tiny tunnel, dark and covered in carpet. There is a sound that takes you into a weird atmosphere, and at the end there’s a tiny light: you look through it and you see scenes from the movie Porkys. I’m not sure what it was like in 1981 in the US, but in Italy at the time it was considered something of a trash movie, almost so bad that it was good. So you’re into this construction, and you’re running out of air, and you see these naked teenagers, and guys behaving terribly. Everything is slowed down, and there’s this eerie music, but it feels kind of good, and you really don’t want to leave. I don’t know how long I stayed there when I visited. I was at peace, and I think Mike Kelley wanted us to feel this way. It kind of made me grasp the “Americanity” of his work.

Another work in the exhibition shows a video of a performance in Germany, Runaway for Interactive DJ Event, together with the installation of a platform strewn with dolls’ clothes and accessories. You can see him dancing around and displaying sexual ambiguity as a will of the artist: in this kind of work, Kelley portrayed the true artist’s undecided nature in our postmodern climate. His message is universal not only because he shows how indecisive an artist can be (about his past, about his gender, about his behavior, and about his strength), but also he shows us how indecisiveness is a part of ourselves in any aspect of our life. I believe that looking at Mike Kelley’s work from a psychiatric angle is very limiting perspective, although there’s a strong part of his psychosis that is displayed in his work. I don’t think this is the most valuable part, nor do I think his suicide is important in the understanding of his complex body of work. This swirl of philosophical indecisiveness is what I got as the strong Mike Kelley statement. In a way, I think we’re all Mike Kelley, really.

By Stefano W. Pasquini

hangarbicocca.org

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