VOLTA10
June 16–21, 2014
Viaduktstrasse 10
Basel
Switzerland
voltashow.com

Guest of Honor Preview
Monday, June 16, 10 am – 12 pm
VIP / Press Preview
Monday, June 16, 12 – 2 pm
Public Vernissage:
Monday, June 16, 2 – 8 pm
Public Hours:
Tuesday, June 17 – Saturday, June 21, 12 – 8 pm

See more at: gallerylog.com

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Brazilian artist Duda Penteado is excited to announce the launch of his new book.

“Art can not be empty, because the history of humanity repeats itself and is frightening. It is up to the artist to manifest himself through his work, and bequeath an interpretation of his time, a message.”

Duda Penteado is a multimedia artist who has lived between the United States and Brazil for almost 20 years and works with performance, video, installations, murals, sculptures, paintings, and other visual practices. In recent years Duda has devoted much of his work on important issues of peace, globalization, diaspora, dual citizenship, and other geopolitical and social phenomena of the twenty-first century. This year, Duda returns to his hometown of São Paulo, for the launch of his new book on Wednesday, May 21 at 7p.m. at the Book Store Cultura.

The post Duda Penteado’s New Book Is Set To Launch appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Mahalchick began by guiding us all through a series of deep breathing exercises, instructing us to breathe deeper and deeper with each passing round of measured breaths. Once the artist felt the room was sufficiently calm and relaxed, he directed our attention to a work that had been hanging over his right shoulder. The wall work was what appeared to be a found blanket stretched over 36 by 42-inch stretcher bars. It depicted the tranquil scene of a golf course on a sunny day; trees, grass, and sand traps extending all the way to a far away body of water in the distance.

From here Mahalchick guided us through a visualization exercise. After all closing our eyes, we were instructed to choose four objects from what we could remember within the gallery and place them strategically within the blanket landscape. Mahalchick walked us through the sunny environment, past each object until finally recognizing the form of someone we once knew far off in the distance. As we drew closer to the recognizable figure, we were instructed that it was someone we had once deeply admired, even possibly loved. As we drew still closer, we were told that soft music began to rise and float through the air, and it did.

Collectively opening our eyes as we realized we really could hear music, we came back to reality to find that Mahalchick had disappeared. The opening phrases of The Cure’s “Pictures of You” was slowly rising from concealed speakers in the rear of the gallery. The artist soon emerged again completely transformed, hair fully tussled, white face paint hastily applied with deep, dark eye make-up, and sloppy red lipstick. We were suddenly in the presence of Robert Smith himself.

Videographer/editor Nick Rymer. Footage Courtesy of Louis B. James.

He belted out the lyrics to the song, giving a compelling live performance in an earnest voice that occasionally quivered over what may have been honestly palpable nerves. Stooping at one point near the end of the tune, Robert straightened back up with a children’s record player and album in hand. He then set up shop where he had made his way to a free electric socket near the front window of the gallery. Without saying a word, Smith plugged in the device, set the record, and dropped the needle. The crowd looked around with anticipation as the fuzzy crackle of the first sounds from the vinyl floated through the room, wondering what unpredictable sonic element was in store for us next.

It turned out to be a children’s movement and calisthenics record from some forgotten time just beyond the scope of memory (for myself anyway). A space naturally cleared for Smith in the crowd as he performed every movement described by the jovial, old-timey exercise instructor. The artist swung his hands to their full wingspan, did deep waist bends, and jumped as high as he could from the ground, sending moderate reverberations through the feet of the more than slightly amused crowd. We shared grins of astonishment and unbridled joy, each one of us immediately relating to some ridiculous childhood memory or another.

By time the needle found the end of the record, Mahalchick/Smith had worked up a healthy sweat, working hard and deserving the healthy round of applause we all afforded him as the piece came to an end. Though the message of the work was slow to reveal itself, and many may have been tempted to dismiss it as performance for performance sake, I feel that the real meat of the work came in sharing a playful experience with friends and strangers. It was an experience that reminded one of their youth and that we should all pay tribute to those who came before us. Not a single person walked out of Louis B. James without a smile that night, and I think maybe that, in and of itself, was the most sizeable triumph of the work.

By Matthew Hassell

The post Michael Mahalchick at Louis B. James appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Wandering around and slightly bored on a Saturday afternoon, I found myself at Katzman-Kamen Gallery in Toronto. There I saw a large photograph depicting a young woman with skin painted white holding a strange metal wire form in front of her face. It was an unsettling portrait with elements that didn’t belong together. Then in 2012, NY Arts Magazine included a similar image in its list of young artists to be watched. Meryl McMaster was young, talented and seemed to have a unique imagery at her disposal.

In Toronto’s CONTACT 2013, she had a solo show, titled In-Between Worlds, which honored her mixed background. Both of her parents are from Saskatchewan; her father is Plains Cree and her mother is of British, Scottish, and Dutch heritage. “This always caused conflict for me and posed a challenge in presenting them as a synergistic strength, not as a struggle between opposites.” said McMaster.

Identity has been the central theme in her art from the beginning. The Second Self series (2010-11) reconsiders portraiture by incorporating drawing and sculpture into the photographic image to evoke a world that is not normally seen. McMaster was influenced by New York Times illustrator Saul Steinberg’s work Le Masque, and especially by his idea that everyone wears masks, either real or metaphorical. The head is the embodiment of our self-perception and is often misrepresented. McMaster wanted to show the real and the masked self of a person in one image. She asked friends to draw blind-contour portraits of themselves. Then, using wire, she created sculptures that were exact replicas of these drawings. She painted her models’ faces white, to make them “naked,” and suspended the blind-contour wire versions in front of them. In this way she created dualistic images, which appear confrontational and challenging while at the same time light-hearted and playful.

In In-Between Worlds McMaster focused her interest on historical and tribal identity in order to express her mixed heritage through different symbols. In Brumal Tattoo, she constructed a sculptural, armor-like garment of pinecones. The figure is beating a large drum. Historically, Europeans used “field music” to control troops on the battlefield as well as for entertainment. In Native Canadian culture, the beating of a drum represents the beating heart and the soul. The braided, many different patterned fabrics show the merging of her two ancestries. “Brumal” means wintery and “Tattoo” means either a signal sounded on a drum or a permanent mark on the skin. The sound and vibrations leave patterns depicted in red paint splattered on the landscape and on the body. For McMaster it is a tattoo of the past, present, and future.

Nature is a great influence on McMaster. From her teenage years on she has been exploring and working in Canada’s remote natural landscapes. As part of these trips everyone had to learn to survive by going through a “solo” experience in which they were left by themselves with only a little food and shelter supplies for 3 days. For McMaster it meant not only being bored because she was not allowed to bring anything with her (eg. a book or music) but she was also scared at times as her imagination ran wild listening to all the forest noises, especially at night. “Following the struggle of seclusion, I began to feel a sense of empowerment. It was these moments of being both in the group, as well as alone in such a harsh foreign environment that profoundly affected me and changed how I see the world.” said McMaster. Reflecting on this experience, she discovered many similarities to the vision quest in which Plains Cree youth go out alone into the wilderness, and, through a combination of isolation and fasting, try to find themselves and their life direction.

Some of the photographs in In-Between Worlds are a further embodiment of this transformation. She gave the images dream-like qualities as she remembered odd and unexplainable situations from her “solo” experience. In Terra Cognitum, the concentric circles depict a topographic map overlaid on the artist’s body and on the ground representing the colonization of the land and McMaster’s connection to it. The small colorful seed beads she used were part of traditional Cree clothing as well as currency during the colonial period. She intentionally left out sections of the map to reference her ongoing exploration of herself.

All the images are “staged” photographs. While photography is McMaster’s primary medium, she often incorporates other artistic media, including sculpture. This synergy creates a surreal, augmented imagery. In-Between Worlds was photographed in Ottawa in the middle of winter using natural light. McMaster is the model in all of these photographs. As she explained, “I inserted my own body into visual spaces that reflected both the inspiration I felt from my time alone in nature as well as the concept of being ‘betwixt.’”

McMaster’s stories might have their roots in both native and colonial tales but in the end she dreams up hybrid heroes. Then she gets into their skins, dances with the spirits, and creates her own myths.

By Emese Krunak-Hajagos

The post Meryl McMaster: In-Between Worlds appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Sarah Gold: This is an introspection on Ben.
Ben Vautier: Introspection… This is a nice word ‘introspection’. I’m looking at myself in the mirror and I‘m hoping I change, and the more I look at myself, the more I see a stupid old man who is always the same and cannot change. So, art is change, but we cannot change; we are just the same.

Karlyn De Jongh: I think you are too afraid of change. You do not seem to go into reality, you do not act.
BV: I would be a serial killer, if I could change. I would kill humanity.

SG: Why would you kill humanity?
BV: Because all humanity is ego. We cannot get rid of ego.

KDJ: What do you mean, ego?
BV: Ego means you cannot get rid off thinking, I, I, I… I want this, I am there, I am here. Je suis, je suis, je… Always ‘I’.

KDJ: But you are, your work is about that. You are ‘I’.
BV: But I do not want to be. That is why I want to become a serial killer.

SG: Are you a jealous person?
BV: I am jealous of other artists, never of women. Not ‘never’, really… I say I am not jealous, but maybe I am jealous of my wife fucking with someone else, that could be… It excites me, it excites me but at the same time that it excites me, it gives me anguish, both… It goes up and down.

KDJ: So why are you jealous? Is it because you cannot do it yourself?
BV: Because you do not want to do it with me. No, no… It is because I cannot do it myself. I am jealous, because… it’s complicated.

SG: Are you afraid?
BV: We are always afraid. Afraid of being oneself, afraid of death, afraid of losing or not being who we want to be, afraid of wanting to be another.

KDJ: Who do you want to be?
BV: I want to be truthful. I just want to find the truth and to say, “I am not a liar.”

SG: Do you think, you have been truthful in your life?
BV: No, I have been a liar. You know, once George Brecht told me he liked a painting in which I wrote, “I am a liar.” I said, “why do like that painting?” He said, “Because it is not true, you are not a liar! And if it is not, and if it is the truth, then you are not a liar. So, to write ‘I am a liar’ is a truthful sentence.”

KDJ: Can you still look in the mirror and be serious about yourself?
BV: When I look in the mirror, I … I once did a piece called Mirror Piece, in which I looked into the mirror, hoping to see myself change. But it takes a lot of time. Now, when I look at myself in the mirror, I have bags under my eyes. When I was young, I did not have bags under my eyes.

KDJ: But that is a visual impression. Can you look at yourself in an human way? Are you proud of yourself?
BV: No, I always see the same. I suppose, I always see the same ego.

SG: If you have to choose one: art, sex, truth. Which one would you choose?
BV: Truth!

KDJ: What does it mean, ‘truth?’
BV: I do not know.

SG: What is the most elementary emotion you have?
BV: Anguish. Not knowing what to do.

KDJ: Not knowing what to do? Or not daring to do?
BV: Not knowing. Anxious. Looking for. Worrying. Thinking of.

SG: Where do you think this comes from?
BV: Survival. Art survival.

KDJ: Is art about your survival?
BV: Yes.

SG: Is it survival of the fittest?
BV: It could be.

KDJ: Are you fit enough, Ben?
BV: No. Truth is sometimes against survival.

KDJ: Are you afraid? Of yourself?
BV: I am tired. I want to go to sleep. I have been afraid, but not of myself, no. I want to go on, continuing…

SG: Who am ‘I’?
BV: I do not know. I’m tired.

KDJ: Who is Ben?
BV: A boring artist, who is looking for something new and does not find it.

Ben Vautier, Introspection, Truth, Sex & Art, 2013. Art project with Karlyn De Jongh & Sarah Gold. Photo Credit: Global Art Affairs Foundation.

KDJ: Is there a difference between I and Ben?
BV: Who is I? Who is behind there? We are all the same in a way. A mirror is … I wonder who discovered the first mirror and what he thought when he saw himself for the first time. He must have said, “what is that?!”

KDJ: I think you are trying to avoid giving an answer.
BV: Yes

KDJ: Why?
BV: I do not know the answers. I am not so clever. I do not know the answer.

KDJ: After fifty years of performance, of making art, can you not give an answer to the question ‘what is ego?’
BV: I can show off, that is all. To know ‘why’ and philosophy is too complicated this morning.

SG: We spoke about your mother yesterday, tell us about her.
BV: My mother was very, very important to me, because I lived with my mother and she used to say, “Ben, the only thing that counts is the truth, the truth, the truth!”

KDJ: What did she mean?
BV: She always used to meet her friends and play bridge together, and my mother used to make horrible fights between them, because she used to say, “In the name of the truth, I must tell you that you went with another man and your husband does not know it!” So, they were horrible stories!

KDJ: If you cannot say now who ‘I’ is, can you tell us: who is the other?
BV: Who is the other? On a morning like this, I am not a good philosopher. I would love to talk with you about it. The other is always. You cannot be someone else, but another. Marcel Duchamp once said, “c’est le regardeur qui fait le tableau.” This means, “the man who looks at the painting, makes the painting.” Then you always need another to exist; a big one to become small; a rich one to be poor; a poor man to be richer; a strong man to be a weak man. You always need another, you cannot be alone. You are beautiful, because there are girls who are—I suppose—less beautiful. You are tall because there are people who are less tall, because there are little people. In a world full of little people, maybe one of the little people would be a giant compared to some other little people. So, to be another is always to be in comparison with others. And let’s say in art, we have those who succeed in bringing something new and those who repeat themselves and are not new enough. We are fighting to try to find newness. We are trying to find something that makes our difference. If I am different from the others, people will say, “I recognize it! That is a Ben!” Or, “I recognize it! That is a Rembrandt!” So to be, to exist, is to be someone in comparison to the others. But maybe today it is interesting for artists not to look like one another, but to (on purpose) look like everybody. So that is another simple art, too. But then they also cannot get away from being different. When John Cage says, “Everything is music.” At the same time he is changing the games, the world’s games. In previous times composers had a certain personality. The personality of John Cage was to open up a window through which everything else could pass.

KDJ: If it is like you told us that ‘ego is jealousy.’ I am not a jealous person. Do I still have ego?
BV: Maybe you do not know your jealousy sometimes. I think, jealousy is culturally different. Maybe. I do not know, I can’t tell you. For myself and I think for most artists when they look at another artist, they think in their mind, “Oh, that’s good! I would have liked to have done it.” So, “Oh that’s good, I can do better” or “that’s not good, mine is better.” It’s a way of ‘the other.’ It is a degree different in jealousy, it is the presence of the other. There could be jealousy in a way, when you say, “I did this! He took my idea. Why did he get success and I don’t, and I did it before him?” So, there I would say is a more condensed jealousy. But that is always, for example when you go into a show and you look at the work, you think, “That is good! I would have liked to have done that.”

KDJ: So when you see some writing and you know that you have done it before, then the jealousy starts? Or how does it work? I think you have a very strong tendency to prove yourself. You want to prove that you were there first.
BV: That was true. I even used to write texts, but now it’s different. Now it is 2013, and I have changed. These days I am pleased when somebody recognizes what I did, and I am less anxious than before. It is not becoming more ‘zen,’ but it is about taking life as it comes. Now, I do not bother as much. But when I was 30 or 40… Now I am 78. I think time has changed me a bit.

KDJ: But now we have been speaking with you the last days for this PERSONAL STRUCTURES Art Project and you mention it very often. So, that would mean that during your 30’s and 40’s, you must have been impossible!
BV: No no, it is that time, Lu-ci-di-té. Lucidité means… Sometimes you meet people who reject art. I say: “be lucide”. Do not tell yourself stories! You can say: “I’m not jealous.” Others might say, “I don’t care. I do this for God. I will pay for others to help humanity.” I say, “be lucide”. Your ego is there. You are in front of the world. You react to the world. To be lucide, means to be aware.

SG: You just mentioned God, do you believe in God?
BV: Yes, I could believe in God. But I am closer to being an atheist than to believing in God. But still when I look at science and we are talking about the Big Bang, and we are talking about our ego presence, then I think there is an interrogation point.

KDJ: So you did not throw God away completely? You threw him out of the country, but then you were traveling quite a bit and took him back home?
BV: He does not look like me and he does not do bad things. He is a kind of … I have some theories … I do not know. I cannot tell you … It is a mystery. But I had to take him away. But there is a mystery in the words ‘life,’ ‘survival,’ ‘ego,’ ‘reproduction,’ ‘time,’ ‘space’… and if you put all of these words together and combine ego with time and space, you only get an interrogation point. You do not get an answer. To see time, space, ego, survival … these ‘things’ exist. But the ‘why,’ the ‘when,’ ‘how’… We don’t understand them.

SG: Are you fine with not knowing?
BV: No! I’m always trying. But you see… When Copernicus said that the world is round; and when Newton said that the world has gravity; and Einstein said the world is time; then Hawking said something about the black holes and that the universe started many millions of years ago and before that was a Big Bang; each one has given an explanation. Then came another explanation, and another one. Today we have the explanation of the quantity. The world is full of explanations.

KDJ: What is your explanation?
BV: My explanation of the universe is a funny one. [Ben starts drawing] My explanation of the universe is that there was—at the beginning of time—an ejaculation. Just as when I fuck. This ejaculation contains ego, reproduction, survival. Now, what happened before, I do not know. But I feel that the world today is an expansion. The universe expands, the galaxies … This is the ejaculation of ego. Why do I see ego as more important than galaxies? It is because ego contains the explanation of these galaxies. I mean to say that we need the ego of Hawking to say this-and-that about the world, we need the ego of Einstein, we need the ego of Freud, we need the ego of Heidegger, we need the egos of the ones who spend their time explaining things. So what do we have? We have the universe, which is full of explanations. These explanations come from ego, because Einstein was jealous of so-and-so. All these egos are there.
That interests me as a theory. I’m actually trying to find the particle of ego, which I want to be able to scientifically find. And then I will call it ‘particule de Ben’ [Ben’s particle]. And people will be able to say: “Of course, the particule de Ben! C’est très important!” And it is all a joke! But somebody will see the particle of love, which is very important too!

SG: So what you drew here, that is all? Everything?
BV: Yes, it contains all. The ‘particle of ego’ means lucidité. It means ‘introspection’. You cannot speak of ego unless you know what it is made of. What is ego? Ego is the name of jealousy, ambition, wanting to be, not wanting to be, lucidité, lucidité over the others. What means ego? We come back to my famous verse [Ben searches the right plate out of the collection he made that day.) This one! And it becomes this one! How did the ejaculation come? It comes from an ego, which was all alone in the universe. There was nothing. And he met another ego by chance, we do not know how they met. He became very angry and started to fuck the other one. And then… bang! … The ejaculation! The bang of two egos gave the ejaculation.

KDJ: Are you afraid of sex because your ejaculation is not as powerful as this one?
BV: Yes this one is very powerful … But I have two children and five grandchildren.

SG: This was such an intense ejaculation that he must have died after his ejaculation and we do not want that to happen with you, of course.
BV: This one? Yes! But I have another theory. Today we have the extremes, the extreme world. We have the extreme big and the extreme small. We are losing this sense of knowing where is the middle. So, I was thinking, if you take your brain … Your brain is full of billions of neurons. It could be that my ‘ejaculation of ego’ has led to tons of other egos that are ejaculating too. So, we have not one universe but we have many universes. I’m still working on this. It is very complicated.

By Karlyn De Jongh and Sarah Gold

The post An Introspection with Ben Vautier appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

At the time I had been interviewing others for my work, and thought I had struck upon a golden opportunity to observe and analyze myself with roles reversed. Reaction time. Discomfort. Statements. Body language. Things only I was responsible for. I glanced through the window again at a guy sitting cross-legged during his apparent interview. As a rather shy and insecure person at times, I shrugged it off. Harmless. “Where do I sign this thing?”

By this statement I authorize free-of-charge, indefinite use of the film recording featuring my image and voice, and the use of such recording for artistic purposes.

A crewmember called me into the small space, propping the door with his foot. Once in the gallery, I was pointed to a spot on the floor where I should stand. Three to five cameras were adjusted to film me, lights flicked on and pointed, and a woman who I assumed was the artist glanced at my form while propped on a low equipment trunk. I passed a wordless moment by watching the many screens flash to my left with video art and documentation of performances past. I noticed my shirt was wrinkled and didn’t fit in the most flattering way; I wondered how much I weighed that day. I feigned carelessness as I straightened my posture as slowly and discreetly as possible, waiting for the questions I would answer. Language is a vaulting, something you leap into and get lost in with your tongue.

I have to say, there is nothing wrong with me. I am not falling in love. I have no illness. I feel sorry for the inactivity of my legs. I listen to a part of myself I’d like to kill off. I am the body that turns food and dreams. I start something and look away.

“Whenever you are ready,” Ms. Kozyra said. I looked blankly. “Go ahead, we are waiting.” She nudged on, speaking with an accent. I felt as if I had jumped in a cold pool, my body prickling at the sandpaper feeling of bubbles rushing against skin. It was apparent they were expecting me to perform, turning the tables of our little interview into a stage. At the time I was going to stress management sessions on the Upper East Side. I had just learned a new breathing technique to nip an oncoming panic attack in the bud. So I did that. In for five seconds, out for ten. In for five, switch off the fight or flight mechanism, out for ten. In for five, eyes open to the cameras but glazed over, out for ten. The pressure of being put on the spot felt like I was gathering every embarrassing moment I’ve had in my life like crumbs in a wide skirt. In for five, how long could I play this off, out for ten.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure in one of the videos make a gesture, so I imitated the gesture. Then I imitated the gesture again, imitating myself this time. I kept this up for a while until I felt I could bend my knees slightly into a squat. At this point a few minutes had passed so it felt appropriate to say something. “Something,” I said. “Something.” I squatted some more. Then a force outside of my body shrank me into the corner, like a zipper. Now I’m in the corner, I thought. I pliéd, struck the floor, contracted, and addressed the bystanders filming me on their iPhones through the window. I moved fast, slow, considered and made decisions in a moment. Can movement become inhuman, or only more human?

I start to feel life. I feel my hands around the corners of it like a package I cannot see, that will never open. Only the feeling of opening a gift every day. Seeing then doing, doing then seeing, doing and seeing at the same time; doing and seeing that action.

I enacted just about every genre of body movement memory I had; hunching over my desk during a test, winning a backstroke race, climbing stairs, fifth grade honor choir with that African song I still remember, ballet, and the modeling class I took that one time. I mined movement I learned from High school musicals, shaking hands, Shaolin Kung Fu self-defense classes I took at the local community college, and Martha Graham techniques. It seemed the only way to adequately deal with the awkwardness of the situation was to relinquish making any sense at all, and instead eek out every last bit of experience I had synchronized inside of myself.

The creation of man is a few inches between fingers on a ceiling in Rome. This is called Sistine, which sounds more like a lovely death, or watching a small child learn what to do and how to do it.

I thought of poise, of stature. I must have been at it for 10 minutes. Before I knew it, they had stopped me. Ms. Kozyra began to ask me questions, but I’d already done something I didn’t know how to say. “Thank you. What made you prepare this performance for me today?” I stood there, out of breath.

“Well actually, I was just walking by on my way back to work from an errand.” Her eyes widened. “You mean you just improvised? Do you know I am auditioning for my upcoming film in order to cast the role of myself?” That part was hazy for me. “I’ve done many things in life for my art. Difficult things. Do you think you could do difficult and dangerous things in order to replicate my life on screen?”

I asked her what dangerous things. “I have killed a horse. Would you kill a horse for art?”

Um. “I think conceptually I could. But physically, like actually—in reality—to be honest, I’m unsure.”

“How far are you willing to go in order to receive the role of Katarzyna Kozyra? Do you have the ability to reenact my performances so truly and honestly that they become yours? Would you change your gender? Would you wear a fake penis and beard in order to illegally enter a men’s bath and film yourself secretly?” I nodded yes, of course.

After a slew of other intense questions, I began to think she was rather excited about me, that I was a real prospect for her film and that somehow I would win this thing right off the street. They thanked me and ushered me out the door, Kozyra assuring me they would be in touch in case they decided to cast me for the part. I flew back to my internship and recounted the whole experience to the curatorial assistant.

A few weeks passed and it became obvious the “film” she was casting for would never materialize; that her project, Casting, at Family Business was indeed the actual performance. Even so, something about the experience of believing in something and the enacting of sheer improvisation ignited a force in me. I had put myself on display as for art’s sake.

I have long wondered if it’s possible to maintain a mode of being that exists apart from physical experience. Through my improvisational performance, I felt that somehow I had addressed the puzzling dynamic between the inner and external space and the constant battle we face reconciling the two each day.

With the selfie, we deliberately place our bodies and faces in relation to the person scrolling, clicking, and masturbating on the other side of the screen. We make “posts” of ourselves with the recognition of humor and vanity and yet with it, a lack of concern. We consciously build an image, our outstretched hand reaching to curl back around into ourselves. The marble busts and bronze figureheads of the contemporary society are our peers, celebrities, and role models putting themselves on display everyday; rather than chiseled into a moment, attached to a base, and installed in the town square. We invent our own image as patriots in an act of patriotism. We find what is self-like and stare it down.

Partial view of Cynthia Rowley’s 2013 Fall Line. Image courtesy of the author.

I recently attended Cynthia Rowley’s Spring 2014 presentation, my first ever New York Fashion Week event. For one hour, the attendees had the opportunity to regard lovely clothing donned by models standing in a row, absolutely still, on black theatre box bases. Like many other fashion shows, the models stared out, on display and towering above us like the Hall of Famous Missourians honored for their achievements and contributions to the state. They represent supreme proportions, a future ideal, trajectory, the “mode.”

I think about environments where we go to see and be seen: bars, after parties, gallery openings, the clustering of humans with similar physical traits and unending arrangements of differences. The way we flaunt our appearances while countless thoughts pass through the mind in one moment, and another moment, and then another. The force of the patterns we draw, repeat, follow, and share with one another. The feeling and fear of failure that can be transferred to one another, felt—though sometimes indescribable—and seen physically through posture. Poise. The fact that I can feel empowered by my jewelry and clothes. We contort ourselves; we adorn ourselves—yet we are still so bewitched by our bodies. We constantly obsess over what we are made of and how we can push the limits physically. We ask who we are and we look for ourselves in others, seeking reflections of ourselves.

Self-representation is something we usually become aware of at a young age. It’s presence and relevance ebbs and flows with time. Every night when I finally turn off the lamp and decide to open the door to sleep, I face my being: a body in the dark; the grossness of its volume; the sag and tug of its misalignment. Let’s face it; you’d do plenty just to get out of your skin. You’d use your bones as a ladder to climb out of this lumpy world of gentlemen.

My heart runs so fast and my breathing falls short falls, short falls. I am a total collapse of self. A solvent. There is nothing in here to find. I don’t want my memories. I don’t want my heart. I don’t trust my body.

Thankfully, art empowers and celebrates the body as a form. The idea of presenting oneself as spectacle is often discussed. One of Kozyra’s famous video installations, Bathhouse (1997), was filmed inside a women’s bathhouse with a hidden camera. On tape, the women engaging in personal hygiene seemed to naturally assume the same postures that figures from old masters’ paintings held.

So what about the body as temple, the body as public space? Will we begin to consider those who take selfies to be social practice artists—just like how we now deem anyone who groups things together a “curator?” Really, what does the empty white gallery externalize about ourselves? What sort of temple are we building each time a new alternative space, public theatre, and well-curated instagram account appears on our radar?

I like to ask lots of questions; let them layer and build into a rock formation called belief and then let the earthquake of experience break it apart. I know my heart is a place where people can live—like that one song deep and wide that I find in the darkness. If I could only reach in and find the location of my soul (which wrestles all night with the sense of forever, and can’t be determined, unlearned, or reversed) I’d be ready for you in the first person. But right now I’m going to bed, and I know where I’ll be when I get there.

By Olivia Smith

The post Igniting a Force: Impromptu Self on Display appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

In order to achieve an expression of pure sensibility, Dadson’s work creates a dialogue with the objective and natural world. The three large photographs Black Dune, Black Barbed Wire and Black Garbage depict a certain suburban landscape in Vancouver, where the artist has previously intervened, covering select parts with a biodegradable black paint. Like a large sinister shadow, the dark color covers the sand, the grass, the plants, and the discarded objects lying on the ground. The black veil seems to cancel the space and, by absorbing the light and the sounds, it becomes an image in which the sense of desolation of this unbuilt, almost desert area is increased.

It reminds one of a shore, covered with tar and oil, or a natural landscape, cruelly transfigured by a fire. The black section is a sort of temporary square cut out into the landscape, which can still admire through the original colors remaining at the edges of the photographs. We recognize the ochre sand, the green plants and the blue sky. This action of negation is not addressed against the nature, whose regeneration slowly removes all of its traces, but is a way to investigate the concept of natural limits in relation to time, and also to space.

These works are the result of an exploration of the city and show how painting can be a physical presence, able to give new meaning to its anonymous boundaries as well as redefine the architectural setting of the open exhibition space.

The large-format abstract works on canvas are hung on the walls (Make Up) or leant on the floor of the gallery (Rundown), in a manner that expresses an attention to their sculptural quality. They are composed of many layers of different colors lying beneath the white or black tint, which represents only the last coat of this multi-layered surface. The other colors appear in transparency on the scraped monochromatic surface and at its edges, where we can see both the rough canvas and the complicatedly rich texture formed by the colors, sometimes applied directly from the tube.

The paintings can be admired from a frontal perspective, but also from a three-quarter view, where we become aware of the complex process that led to their material thickness. This is especially true of the Re-stretch series, a small series of paintings which can be seen to consist of all the range of colors of the rainbow. Frontally, we perceive only a white square that references a frame, smaller than the canvas, delimited by an accumulation of color noticeably thicker at the edges. All of this is then surrounded by the rough linen canvas. In the large-format paintings, the same tension between inside and outside is created by the color spreading out towards the edges, exceeding the limits of the painting space. In both cases, we see a blurring of the boundary between the fictional space of representation and reality.

A performative behavior, mindful of the gesture exposed by the American Abstract Expressionism, is at the core of Dadson’s creation. The rhythm of the paintings reflects the temporality of the action that has produced them; in the process of layering the memories of his visual experiences, they become absorbed and preserved. The work includes the vibrations of the action painting of Jackson Pollock, but also the physicality of the object ‘s presence in Robert Rauschenberg’s combine paintings. In Dadson’s work the accumulated matter transforms the canvas itself in an object which inhabits the real space, with the brightness of Mark Tobey’s white writing paintings. The colorful marks that appear, especially on the corners on the top and at the bottom of the canvases, reveal traces of the urban landscape, with its illegible graffitied walls, while the shape of the works reminds one of overlapping advertising posters.

Not Titled Yet, displayed in a separate room, consists of four sheets of paper representing four different stages of the same process, dealing again with the concept of time. The black color on the white paper, the almost square shape, the diagonal folds, the black cross that appears as the result of the whole composition, all point to the indivisible unity and coexistence of subject, matter, technique, support and process; leading once again back to  Suprematism. The sequence of drawings, in its simplicity, is an essential gesture which contains all the seeds of possible developments in Dadson’s work. It is the starting point of a system which generates a repertoire of shapes, distortions, displacements, cancellations, accumulations, and superimpositions.

By Sara De Chiara

The post Andrew Dadson’s Suburban Suprematism at Galleria Franco Noero appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

The process in question, or the “Quick Fix” aspect of the title, involves an ingenious portable device used to produce molten iron for the on-site repair of railroad tracks. The contraption itself, used all over the world, resembles a mini-keg of beer sitting on a small stand with an inverted cone screwed on its top acting as a smokestack. As is his distinct approach to art making, Hefti discovered the technique within the scope of his far-ranging, savant-like research into the technical processes that produce many of the basic, often taken-for-granted material substrates of contemporary existence. This interest in, and desire to disrupt, could be thought of as “subliminal materialism.” The notion subtends Hefti’s output, inserting a grain of sand into the modern mental vaseline that takes for granted the involvement of such a technical process as the welding of the train tracks as we sail across them.

The “Remix” part of the performance is where things get moving, and potentially splattered in 1200 degree liquefied metal. Inside the narrow, boutique retail sized gallery, Hefti has directed an army of assistants to push and pile the tons of tawny sand into a small mountain that peaks just under the ceiling’s fluorescent strip lights. Occupying the space like an earthwork on Adderall, the absurd inner-city-mountain is not purely a form for consideration, but rather a technical apparatus that will be used in the main event.

As the crowd gathered at the opening performance, forced to stand in the street due to the gallery’s repurposing, Hefti crawled up and down the mound, using lengths of wood and trowels to impress mysterious channels into the sand in the manner of an ancient alien glyph. The channels are in fact, containment paths for the flow of viscous iron that will erupt from the thermite chamber perched at the top of the slope. Donning a silver protective suit and gold-shielded helmet not unlike the kind worn by volcanologists into an erupting crater, Hefti scaled the mountain to ignite the apparatus before making a hasty retreat to a few meter’s distance, shovel in hand. With an effervescent cascade of white sparks and rollicking stream of smoke, the apparatus shot the molten steel from its chute, boiling down the zigzagging channel. The small gallery space was blindingly illuminated in stroboscopic light. Hefti traversed alongside the descending flow, coaxing the iron through the final chicane with his shovel, where it came to congeal at a cigar-shaped end glowing orange. The assembled crowd vigorously applauded both the successful cast and their own survival as witnesses.

Raphael Hefti, Quick Fix Remix performance detail, 2013. Image courtesy of Ancient & Modern Gallery.

After a few minutes rest Hefti returned with a garden-hose to accelerate the cooling process.  As he doused the now-cast iron in the sand channel, the remaining molten orange turned graphite-blue beneath a tremendous cloud of metallic scented steam. The iron still extremely hot, he grasped the long fragments with a giant pair of forceps, wrested them from the channels and placed them vertically, like great spears, in the sand near the gallery’s opened street entrance. An ad-hoc shelf made from plasterboard and crudely attached to the gallery wall was also used to display smaller pieces of casting.  The space was then left as is—striking a nearly parodic counterpoise between discrete white walls and the detritus of an industrial-scale experiment.

Crucial to Hefti’s performance is to understand it in a lineage of attempts to reconcile the scale of urban gallery space to the demands of the artist’s paths of investigation. Just as Walter De Maria’s 1977 New York Earth Room, effectively ridiculed the niceties and constraints of the white cube as a format for the presentation of art, Hefti’s Quick Fix Remix draws us back to many important spatial and productive relations. At a moment when many small galleries find themselves endlessly on the road at a hyperbolically proliferating schedule of fairs, Hefti returns to the specific locale, using its modestly scaled but prime metropolitan location as a node for something really happening. In doing so, he performs an argument for presence that many had thought disappeared into an infinity of teenage Tumblr accounts. One suspects that despite the fact that nearly every viewer of the performance was overcome by the urge to record it on their smartphone, that upon reviewing the images and videos at some remove, a profound distance will be felt. This distance will be a reminder of the concealed ontic webs of the contemporary experience, a preemptive follow-back.

By Paul Kneale

ancientandmodern.org

The post Raphael Hefti’s Quick Fix Remix at Ancient & Modern Gallery appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Brent Birnbaum: Certainly. I was collecting and saving things before I was making art. I just knew I was attracted to certain objects and I would save them. I wasn’t sure why or what I was going to do with them.

IJ: You have the largest collection of Vanilla Ice memorabilia in the world. A few years ago you held a performance as Ice Ice Maybe, your incarnation of Vanilla Ice’s alter ego.  Many of your ideas seem to emerge from the objects that you collect and are drawn to.

BB: It’s a combination of the objects I collect and the particular space I’m invited to do a show. The venue for Ice Ice Maybe was an old Tower Records and I knew 2010 was the 20-year anniversary of Ice’s To The Extreme Album. It was an alter ego but also an homage to my love of camp. My recent performances have been moving in the opposite direction involving just me, or me with one object, and addressing very different concerns than the kitsch.

IJ: It seems that lately your work is shifting from the spectacle of pop culture to more existential themes of life and death as well as questions of meaning and purpose.

BB: Very true. My interest has shifted. I spent a lot of time thinking about objects that are not used in an art context and objects that other artists have not used. It’s been a good run, but I’ve just become more interested in existential questions and even formal issues.

IJ: You have an upcoming museum solo show at Casino Luxembourg, called Ride (W/) The Wind. You mentioned that the show is based on Einstein’s definition of insanity, could you talk a little more about that?

BB: Sure, his definition is repeating the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. I combined that with another phrase, which is “wearing the world like a loose garment.” I see Einstein’s definition of insanity as a real negative force. The museum show is designed like a labyrinth. There are nine rooms and you must pass through them all once you enter, in order to exit. All of the rooms are going to look very similar, just in different colors. It’s supposed to be disorienting giving the viewer a sense of repeating the same thing over and over again.

Then the other phrase is the positive force, wearing the world like a loose garment. Which actually goes back to your first question about collecting things. I’m at this transition, and wearing the world as a loose garment is about letting things flow through you either physically or mentally. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, after moving to the Rockaways. Before I had been living in Greenpoint for eight years where I had been able to amass really large collections of things. I went through a purge where I filled two dumpsters and threw out sixty boxes.

IJ: So it’s almost a show about duality.

BB: Yes, that’s a good way of putting it.

IJ: Your idea also reminds me of the idea that all painters paint the same painting over and over again or Ad Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings, where each painting at first glance appears to be the same, but under further inspection reveals a work of great nuance and variation.

BB: When you say that the show is about dualities, it is. And the title, Ride (W/) The Wind, is referencing the ups and downs of our life. We all have the highs and lows. We are always living in the dualities.

IJ: Yeah, because nothing is ever perfect. Things are always off.

BB: Or you feel really good about one thing and really shitty about another, and everything just flows. The nine rooms are a microcosm of people’s lives. It starts with references to childhood and it ends with references to death. It covers everything in between; in rooms two through eight, it talks about your dream job, how much money is in your bank account, your sex life, lying, cheating, stealing, and it ends referencing the afterlife and what you think happens to you when you die.

IJ: Audience participation is really important to your work; a lot of work doesn’t consider the viewer’s experience to the same degree.

BB: I feel like I’m more in the Tino Seghal camp. I need other people to complete my projects. My desire to do performance lately has stemmed from my curiosity of engaging with strangers and combining that with my art making practice.

IJ: So there’s a lot of chance and improvisation that comes together in the performances. There’s this variable that you have no control over.

BB: Yes, there’s no foreseeing what comes out of my mouth or how I react. I like that risk, this unknown territory with an art show. The participatory direction I’m moving in is more into the unknown area where I’m not as controlling with how I want the outcome to be.

IJ: Much of your work seems to be about defining and redefining these patterns and meanings in the world. You come up with these elaborate systems and you often position one system against the next. Before you were doing these intricate, maximalist installations and collages, whereas now you’re going toward a more minimal idea. It seems like the idea of dualities not only exists in the upcoming Luxemburg show, but is also a recurring thread in your work.

BB: Yes, I get excited by exploring new territory and new modes of working and not just for myself, I’m also excited by other artists who are pushing the boundaries of how art can be made, like Nate Hill, Ryan McNamara, and I previously mentioned Tino Seghal, of course.

What I like about performative work is that the history is still largely unwritten and there’s more opportunity for me to explore so many more different areas and possibilities.

The post From Kitsch to the Coffin: Irena Jurek talks to Brent Birnbaum appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

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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