IJ: Your work examines war, and also seems to be in dialogue with the generation of Expressionists that emerged after World War II, like Francis Bacon and Giacometti. At that time, both Existentialism and Expressionism materialized as a reaction to the horrors and carnage that ensued throughout Europe.
LD: Yes, my work is very much about mediated imagery of war, and contemporary mechanization. With my entire adulthood being post 9-11 in the age of the Internet, I can view whatever I want to view—but I also know that it comes from a highly abstracted source. We all have near and distant points of entry.

IJ: At first I was thinking about how there’s this Post-modern distance and detachment in your work, but then I realized that Francis Bacon was also very detached. We always seem to interpret the past through our own skewed perspective in the present.
LD: What’s hard for us, especially with the post-nineties identity ideas, is that we want a straight line between someone’s identity and the themes that they talk about. It’s a laziness I think, on our part, because we are in a world of free-association. Boundaries are continually crossed. I am a woman, who grew up in the Midwest believing that I could do everything that the boys could do. I played sports and made art. These two things existed for me in a similar fashion. I helped my dad make furniture in his woodshop. I grew up next to the wrong side of the tracks … I was just barely on the right side. I grew up believing that boundaries are permeable. I still believe this very strongly. We’re artists and we can talk about whatever we want.

IJ: I agree with you, and there’s a certain artifice in everything.
LD: Exactly, you know what is it to be empathetic … it’s really to build a fantasy, and imagine what being inside that world would be like, and that’s how you forge some sort of idea of empathy. I aim to get into this space via my making process, which is highly performative. My process isn’t a narrative; it is a construct. Granted, although the formal or emotive ideas are coming to my imagination via the consumption of actual, real events. However, I’m learning about these events via the Internet, so the drama and consequence are very mediated by that point.

IJ: There is a lot of anonymity in your work, and it’s not as much about you, as it is about the ideas taking center stage.
LD: It is so strange. What does authenticity actually mean and whose definition do we follow? In the history of art, we push the boundaries of authenticity, and I think that’s our job in a way. I am advertising my contemplation and reflection, and using my art as a billboard or a commercial. However my work is sculptural, always out of a performative formal intervention of play and aggression. My work has to be dirty in a way that is hard for a screen to capture. I use a lot of wood and leather. Leather is literally skin, and I can cut wood like flesh. I use yoga mat material as well. Yoga mats to me symbolize a synthetic, contemplative space. I believe that yoga mat material is much more durable than the indulgence that happens on top of it.

We all have different ways in which we deal with United States’ involvement in various conflicts. As an American, I think that everyone has his or her own different ways of avoidance or acceptance, curiosity or bewilderment. For me, through making things, I can start to navigate my feelings and ideas about my own involvement or lack of involvement. I want to cut things up, and put them back together. I want to sand the surface and leave it raw.

IJ: How do themes of identity inform your work?
LD: When you were saying that my work is anonymous, that makes me think of vacancy. I really like the vacancy of video games, these landscapes where you may see a character hiding around the corner with a gun, but their face is always blurred. Yes, throughout my adulthood we’ve seen the destabilization of many of the countries in the Middle East and Central Asia. We’ve been directly involved in that destabilization. While I’m thinking a lot about that, there is a kind of vacancy, in the destruction, and fighting for freedom. What is freedom? Does the United States define freedom? No, we only define freedom for us. We don’t define it for everyone else. So, that emptiness or that void, all of those things that I don’t know about, leave such a wide space for me to creep on in, and make up my own ideas and forms.

IJ: How do you think our time period collectively is different than the Vietnam era?
LD: In comparison to the Vietnam Era, the contemporary American public doesn’t really know how to protest (in a traditional sense) anymore. Putting our bodies in a certain place and having our voices collectively heard seems futile in a way, when we can connect so fast via social media. There is the idea of “slacktivism,” that’s come about through the Internet. Is it slackitivism if you’re thinking about something?

IJ: It’s similar to the idea of the coffee house revolutionary.
LD: A coffee house revolutionary seems a little hippie-dippy to me … And, I guess so does Vietnam Era protest at this point. Do we have to hurl our bodies in mass, with a bunch of other bodies, out onto the streets, or read poetry by candlelight? Potentially. What I want to know is how does the art world deal with these ideas? How do we deal with these things formally in a way that we can communicate content? I definitely don’t think that it is productive to turn a blind eye because our identity isn’t so directly related to certain ideas. Our identity is a collective identity at this point. Period.

IJ: It can also be solipsistic, too, to assume that you can only speak about your own experience through your own eyes.
LD:  I mean, we are always speaking through our own experience through our own eyes, but it’s what other people define as an acceptable narrative that can be limiting.

IJ: The push toward identity politics in art is a remnant of the nineties. A lot of work was focused on that at that time.
LD: Yes, absolutely. It’s like the Francis Alys piece where he drips the paint line on the disputed boundary between Israel and Palestine. I wonder what would have happened if that hadn’t been the real boundary? What would have happened if he had constructed a space, and symbolically drawn that line? How would that piece have changed?  That’s just as interesting and valid of a way to communicate an idea—to use art as a staging area to open up a conversation.

IJ: That brings it back to Francis Bacon and the theatricality of horror and pleasure.
LD: Absolutely. Using the boxing ring as an arena for contact, or the contorted face as a highway for exaltation.

IJ: Your work is so much about the fragility and impermanence of the human being.
LD: Thinking about the disintegration of the body and the fragility of the body, really made me realize that we’re just these membranes filled with goo … towers with too many hinges. And what does a membrane filled with goo symbolize, a very thin veil holding in a very fluid bunch of ideas.

IJ: Yes. The most realistic depictions of humans are usually the least realistic.
LD: Yes, completely. When I think about Picasso’s Bathers, really it’s just these balls touching other balls! That’s a really funny but honest way to think about how fleshy and architectural forms interact.

IJ: You do riff off of Modernism a lot, the comical qualities, the gesture, the feet do look like Picasso, there’s a relationship with Cubism.
LD: Yeah, it’s mining this vocabulary that I’ve been interested in ever since I was a little kid, which is how do artists and artisans represent forms in a synchronous manner?  It would be neglectful to say that Modernism and Cubism are strictly Western Constructs. Provisionalism leads to many of the same solutions.

IJ: There’s this violence, directness, and quickness to the way you do things. They’re very gestural, and your approach makes sense with the content, because I think that when work dealing with conflict becomes too finessed or too pretty, it hides the content with the veneer. Like sugar coating a pile of shit!
LD: Sugar coating a pile of shit, would be a triumph, actually! My process is really physical, and I never finish things, in a traditional sense. I always leave things so it could be used for another piece, or deconstructed even further, or if it fell out of a window you could still set it back up, and the bruises wouldn’t ruin the form.

IJ: That’s a Duchampian idea.
LD: It’s incredibly Duchampian, and I’m really interested in the wear and tear of a readymade. While I rarely use a store bought, readymade item, I’m interested in the readymade affectation that comes as a result of contact in any sense. Obviously, the main contact in my work is myself to the materials, but if other things should happen along the way, it’s definitely a point of contemplation. I don’t always heal it and fix it, and sometimes the scars are part of what make the work honest.

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It must have been pure coincidence that I saw The Painter first, followed by The Deliveryman (both 2013). As causality remains an a priori faculty of our mind (for those who care, there is some Kant to be consulted here), and as video can be seen as the medium par excellence to play with causality (Fischli/Weiss’ iconic Der Lauf der Dinge being perhaps the best example of this), it seems only right to assume the arbitrary order in which the viewer finds the videos is deliberately left to play out with each visitor anew.

The Painter shows us a woman absorbed in the rather brutal process of applying paint on a large stretched canvas using an oversized mop, her brush strokes swooshing like relentless waves hitting the shore. Using a cleaning device, the painter ironically smudges and stains nearly every surface she encounters, including her own clothing. Both canvases end up as gray-white-beige non-paintings, the kind of which relatives we are ashamed of would say: “my 6-year old daughter makes better art that this.” And behold, a jump cut offers us the sight of a child’s drawing hanging on the painter’s studio wall: a horse carrying a little girl on its back and leaving behind a trail of manure.

The painter, Renée Levi, is a real-life artist, and Nashashibi’s invasion of her studio evokes those documentaries on the life and work of artists made in the mid-twentieth century, when it was still okay to think of the artist as a solitary genius. Or when it was miraculous to see Picasso draw a charcoal dove on a piece of white paper in The Mystery of Picasso (1956, Henri-Georges Clouzot). The idea that we could learn about art through close observation of the way it is made seems rather naïve amid today’s post-studio practices. Yet Nashashibi pointed her camera at this very classic trajectory where art takes place: on the axis between production and reception.

The Deliveryman shows a package being delivered at Objectif Exhibitions, upstairs, in the office. The package delivered could be one of the paintings, unstretched and folded for transport, although nothing indicates The Painter was shot prior to The Deliveryman. And besides, the enigmatic package is never opened, and as the title points out, the focus lies on the DHL deliveryman, not the delivered goods. Or is it? With the formalities of handing over the package out of the way, the deliveryman finds himself in need of relief, and delivers a generous quantity of liquid discharge in a corner of the courtyard. In a striking Jeff Wall-esque tableau we see on the one side the aforementioned art administrator—played by Objectif Exhibitions director Chris Fitzpatrick—sitting at his desk, while on the other side of the shot, divided by a wall and conveniently blinded windows, the deliveryman is having a long and clandestine wee. Nashashibi ends this little tranche de vie with a well-framed close up of the wetted bricks and pavement, silent and ephemeral witnesses of the conducted misdemeanor.

In the most simple yet poignant way, having climbed the stairs back up to the ground floor, the visitor is confronted with the almost exact same view as the tableau just described. Although the audience has passed through this space before, upon return they are faced with the set of one of the videos just seen. And indeed, that guy who signed the DHL form is sitting at that same desk. Is this a performance? Surely many visitors are tempted to investigate the courtyard for traces of the deliveryman’s urinal transgression.

Is Nashashibi taking the piss out of us? Isn’t it all on the verge of not meaning anything at all? Or is it all too much of a self-indulgent portrait of the art world, scatology from studio to exhibition hall? The open-endedness saves it. The making of the paintings, the delivery of both package and pee: it all passes through human hands. The same goes for the child’s drawing and the signature of the arts administrator on the DHL form. The indexicality of these acts points towards the other end of the camera, where a non-fictional artist and curator plotted these two videos featuring their own alter egos. Although both videos would work in other settings as well, as a duo they surmount their own inherent narrative and visual quality by their ingenious installation. This smart and playful contemplation on the tension between sites of production and presentation is present twice, simultaneously enforcing and short-circuiting itself: it is felt in the pairing of The Painter and The Deliveryman, as well as in the spatial experience so subtly imposed on each visitor.

By Samuel Saelemakers

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1. Picasso Black and White at the Guggenheim Museum, New York
“Picasso Black and White” was the first ever exhibit to explore the master draftsman’s use of black-and-white tones throughout his prolific career. Comprised of 118 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, with a large number of masterpieces, as well as 38 rarely and five never-before-seen works borrowed from family and private collections. “Color weakens,” said Picasso, purging it from his art in order to highlight structure and autonomy of form.

2. Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store & Mouse Museum/Ray Gun Wing at MoMA, New York
This exhibition, organized by Achim Hochdorfer, Curator of the Ludwig Museum of Vienna and Ann Temkin, MoMa’s Chief Curator constitutes the largest-ever presentation of Oldenburg’s earliest witty and gritty expressionistic sculptures, arranged within an immersive, oversized environment. The sixth floor gallery was filled with his sculptures and in the atrium a room shaped like a Ray-Gun and another like a Mickey Mouse Head was filled with art objects made from materials such as chicken wire, plaster, burlap, papier-mâché and newspaper were finished off in enamel paint.

3. Paul Delvaux at Blain/DiDonna Gallery,  New York
Paul Delvaux (1897-1994) a mini retrospective of a major Belgian Surrealist whose last exhibition in New York was at the Julien Levy gallery in 1947 and it culminated in scandal. Back then Delvaux’s work created quite a stir; despite good reviews, the police raided the show, and all of the artist’s pictures were confiscated and declared obscene. Delvaux’s erotic art does not offend anymore; instead it attracts an aesthetic scrutiny in the course of a drastic re-evaluation. In that exhibition twenty hypnotic oil paintings and watercolors made between the mid-thirties and the mid-sixties adorned the walls of the uptown gallery.

4. Jindrich Styrsky Dreams at Ubu Gallery, New York
The story of Jindrich Styrsky (1899-1942) depicts a meteoric, renaissance-like figure who in less then two decades influenced surrealist artists and poets in his native Czechoslovakia, Paris and around the world, and also inspired Ubu’s owner, Adam Boxer, to introduce the artist’s magical masterpieces in three one-man shows and six group shows over the past two decades. His outstanding and varied oeuvre includes numerous book covers and illustrations for surrealist publications in Prague. Friendly with Andre Breton, he is credited as a pioneer of surrealism in art, literature, photography and theater in Prague as well as Paris. That small exhibit was an opening of a window on his dream-like art and life.

5. Drawing Surrealism at Morgan Library and Museum, New York
The grand retrospective was a scholarly researched, academically presented overview of an impressive 165 works on paper by 72 artists who shared their subconscious visions. Of course, surrealism proved to be not just a fashionable, passing trend in art, but a whole attitude toward life, for some even a way of life. For others, surrealism was a spiritual activity, representing the unrepresentable, visualizing forbidden dreams, exposing repressed desires. Erotic originality, collage imagination, dreams traveling and a whole plethora of imaginary beings and places made this exhibit a trip into otherworld.

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

The post Valery Oișteanu’s Top 5 Exhibitions of 2013 appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Image courtesy of Eleven Rivington Gallery

Eleven Rivington presents the first solo exhibition of French artist Anne-Lise Coste. Coste’s collection of large black and white canvases are her impulsive work of abstract expression reflecting the political idea of Picasso’s highly praised masterpieces.

June 20- August 9, 2013

Eleven Rivington Gallery
195 Chrystie St, New York

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Vito Schnabel presents a collection of artwork from mid-century to present day working artists whose projects raise questions about the norms of conventional perception and behavior. DSM-V, the exhibition’s title, is short for The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Hovering over this exhibition is a reflection on the collapsing distance between audience and artwork.

The show is held at the historic Farley Post Office on 31st Street and 8th Ave, across from Madison Square Garden.

Artists include Nancy Barton, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Stefan Bondell, Carol Bove, Joe Bradley, Cecily Brown, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Daniel Buren, Francesco Clemente, Dan Colen, George Condo, Jesse Edwards, Urs Fischer, Ron Gorchov, Mark Grotjahn, Alex Israel, Sergej Jensen, Rashid Johnson, Terence Koh, Harmony Korine, Sean Landers, Hanna Liden, Nate Lowman, Piero Manzoni, McDermott & McGough, Adam McEwen, Bjarne Melgaard, Pablo Picasso, Theo Rosenblum, David Salle, Borna Sammak, Julian Schnabel Josh Smith, Dash Snow, Betty Tompkins, Oscar Tuazon and Andy Warhol.

DSM-V
The Future Moynihan Station
421 8th Avenue
New York, NY 10199
through June 4, 2013
vitoschnabel.com

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