Installation view, Brad Troemel's Pre-Career Retrospective 2009-2010

Stolen from thejogging.tumblr.com, "Artificial Rock Tag" 2010

The curators at Extra, Extra could have decided to merely project his tumblr site rather than use print outs.  The show, by printing the pieces, displays an idea of the art object.  When viewing artwork in person there is an aura an art object projects that creates a reaction.  This is the beauty of art that the internet could never replace.  The object Brad makes may not even exist to begin with, then it’s blogged and finally printed out.  This makes the art object 3rd removed from its actual origin.  Imagine instead of standing in front of an Anish Kapoor sculpture you are standing in front of a print out of an Anish Kapoor sculpture.  The beauty, the aura would be lost.  Another show I saw recently that recalls this mindset was Urs Fischer at the New Museum, “Marguerite de Ponty“.  On the second floor entitled, “Service à la française”, he had a gallery full of objects that were screen printed onto mirrored cubes.  The objects; shoe, lighter, cheese, exist in real life as 3D.  By appropriating them and then screen printing them onto cubes they become, 3D, 2D, 3D objects.  I should also mention Fischer had cardboard cut outs like, “Ashanti”, which takes this further, a 3D, 2D, 3D, 2D, 3D object.  Most people I spoke to were either annoyed or disappointed by Fischer’s second floor, which I thought, of course.  And I enjoyed the objects even more because of this natural reaction. Considering Brad’s work exists online, it’s about this removal. His artwork is able to resonate and actually gets even better each time it’s copied–it’s nature is conceptual. Urs Fischer’s art objects are quite expensive though, whereas, the act of printing Brad’s work suggest they are free.

Stolen from thejogging.tumblr.com and resized using GIMP, "We Flip Off an Animal Together" 2010

In “Pre-Career Retrospective”, there are quite a few middle fingers.  In one image a group of middle fingers flip off a black cat and in another, a foot is flipping you off.  A partially censored bean bag chair gives sentiment to the hilarity of censorship in general. Of course, there’s a banana.  There are a number of photoshopped images, other ways of lying and appropriating art through the net.  There’s no telling if an installation marked “Triangular Door” actually happened.  There’s also a stone carving of Thomas Knoll’s name spelled incorrectly, twice; Thomas Knolll, Thomas Knolll.  Thomas Knoll and his brother, Johnn Knoll, are the developers of Adobe Photoshop. As Brad pulls numerous references from art he does so equally in trends found while surfing the web. Shenanigans in the form of photoshopping are among them.  Like for instance this giant spider(?).

Stolen from thejogging.tumblr.com, "Setting a Dove Free in Target" Performance 2009

There’s video too.  The clips are short performances by the artist himself, ranging from physical feats pertaining to craft like a half court shot to tricks with microwaveable popcorn. Practice makes perfect.  By way of poking fun, there’s an underlying theme in both the videos and images that denounces the idea of commodity.  This solidifies his interest in a free art market, observing art by means of a website.  For example, one performance entitled, “Sprint”, takes place at a strip mall where Brad exits the “Back to Bed” shop and sprints to “AT&T”.  Some of the clips evoke the movies “Jackass” and “Jackass Number 2″, in which skateboarding daredevils from West Chester, PA, perform juvenile stunts.  Brad trumps “Jackass”-es by supplying the art form.

You can go to Extra, Extra this month to see the show or you could go to Brad’s tumblr.  This is where the true allure of this show lies, in the boundary of experiencing art through a physical space, an organization and the internet, a conceptual space that’s still in it’s adolescence. If you think about, they’re talking about changing the way art is made and exhibited reminiscent of the Fluxus art movement.  Brad’s work depends on using the accessibility of collaborating via the world wide web and creating work outside the structure of what would be considered the art environment.  His artwork beholds the charm and wit of work made during Fluxus’ stride, but has the attention span of the average web surfer, like us. What if the internet existed in 1962?  Artists have been learning a new medium through interacting online allying new spaces to support them.  Brad takes this route through Web 2.0 employing his tumblr blog and without today’s thriving D.I.Y. galleries–another essential element that flourished during the Fluxus’ era— there would be no way to see Brad’s work by means of context. A gallery makes you spend time with the artwork, conceptual or not. Online most people do not spend more than 3 minutes on one website. Most of the artwork we see is through the latter. And like I said before, the art object can be a beautiful thing.

On view, NOW, show ends March 29th.
Extra, Extra 2222 Sepviva St.
Philadelphia, PA 19125.
Gallery Hours, Fri-Mon 12-4pm.
Check their website for updates, there will be a video up of Brad Troemel’s artist talk.
eexxttrraa.com
Full disclosure, I’m performing at extra, extra next month

Urs Fischer, Service a la francaise, 2009, silk screen on mirrored-chrome steel

This show about reality and unreality in the art world and life, doesn’t quite do it with the panache of some of his bigger, bolder moves. Instead in one installation it looks more like Bloomies on the Bowery, filled with mirrored cubes that reminded us of David Altmejd and Matthew Monahan with merchandising display cases and emphasis on decay. But death where is thy sting-a-ling-aling in these pristine, fussy surfaces? For someone who is clearly such an object maker, these objects in that second floor installation–Service a la francaise–are merch for collectors. We don’t want to fault Fischer for wanting to make some money, but get back to making trouble, Urs, please.

Urs Fischer, Untitled, 2009, cast aluminum and paint

Known for his architectural interventions, Urs’ architectural intervention on the 3rd floor is timid. Lowering the ceiling by two feet doesn’t even feel like a dropped ceiling, let alone an intervention. You have to know a priori that an intervention has taken place. The two objects in the room are swell, however, as objects, and the thought in the room is engaging. The melting piano–made out of aluminum–won our hearts as a great object of surprising materials.

Urs Fischer, Coupadre, 2009, fishing line, croissant and butterfly

Same for the moon over Miami croissant with butterfly sculpture, which uses a real croissant and real butterfly. The surreal tableau might have been more satisfying to a person alone in the room–as if encountering some artist holed up in a romantic cave creating romantic art, suggested our compadre Cate.

Urs Fischer, Marguerite de Ponty (right) and others, 2006-08, cast aluminum, 157.5 x 110.25 x 102 3/8 inches (de Ponty dimensions)

The giant –what to call them?–bone-turds? on four are the most successful pieces in the show. In fact the whole installation on that floor is good. The scale and aluminum material brought to mind Richard Serra, and of course Rodin and Dubuffet’s Hourloupes. Fischer’s method is pure bad boy. Take a piece of clay, give it a squeeze, and then scale it up from hand size to 216 inches tall (that’s the biggest one)–almost 20 feet tall. The pieces all have confusing people-name titles like Miss Satin and the Mallarme pseudonym Marguerite de Ponty.

Urs Fischer, Frozen Pioneer (right), 2009, cast aluminum and paint

Fischer suggests people in multiple ways, not just with names. There’s a lovely melting street lamp–pink, in cast aluminum, that’s like a person. And a pink birthday cake sculpture hovers above a subway seat–still another person. It’s the pathos of life–from decoration to digestion.

Urs Fischer, The Lock, 2007, cast polyurethan, steel pipes, electromagnets (the cake floats)

The whole show is theatrical, a space to walk into and absorb and interact with. Fischer’s big point seems to be about relationships–of people to each other and to the world around them. It’s not that life sucks. It’s just that it has shopping and death, birthdays and skeletons.

Although we found a lot to criticize in this show, we think it’s worth seeing. It’s populist in a more satisfying way than Jeff Koons. It takes into account the glitz and the harsh realities at the same time.

Fischer is an important artist with big bold moves (the catalog, “Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole,” shows some of them). On the other hand, the work here is quiet and contemplative compared to his wall smasher at the 2006 Whitney Biennial and his 2007 concrete smasher, You,  at Gavin Brown, his gallery in NY.  You won’t find Mr. Destructo in this particular show.

After years of knocking ourselves out on each trip we take to New York, we have finally calmed down a little. This time we didn’t walk until we dropped. And this time we didn’t try to see everything from the Bronx to the Battery to Bed-Sty.

The top attraction of going to New York was Roberta’s friend photographer Madelyn Roehrig (see post). She was visiting MoMA and the Whitney. But we decided it was the Whitney’s Rudolf Stingel exhibit that appealed the most. For all that anticipation of an interesting show, nothing prepared Roberta, Madelyn and me for the experience we had when we walked off the Whitney elevator into Stingel’s foil-coated insulation board installation–the foyer to the one-floor exhibit.

The room was illuminated by a single ballroom-scale chandelier, its light multiplied by the foil walls and ceiling. The walls, scarred by the graffiti of whoever passed through and had the urge to write, dig, draw or embed, seemed baroque and heavily patterned, although the marks were random. The walls within reach were marked by visitors to the Whitney. The upper-level panels, taken from a similar installation at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, were marked by visitors there. (Chicago MCA organized the exhibit and MCA Curator Francesco Bonami curated it).

Rudolf Stingel, June 28-October 14, 2007, Whitney Museum of American Art
Photo by Sheldon C. Collins.

The extravagance of the scarred and mirrored walls was spectacular. Both decorative and architectural, they conveyed the concept of skin and what’s under it; they represented desecration and scarification of art and the museum space, while providing the disorientation and infinity of mirrors–the total effect was razzle-dazzle for the body and the brain.

I just want to say I loved all of Stingel’s paintings, too, but it was the installations that knocked me over.

The other amazing space had a mirrored floor and on each wall, a gold painting with baroque wallpaper pattern. Once again, a conversation between skins and bodies and architecture and sumptuous decoration made us almost lose our bearings. The mirrored floor felt like a window into deep space that threatened to let us drop through. The walls and ceilings were suddenly on the floor, in the reflections. And walking on all these things felt like a desecration–like walking on art. The museum embargo on walking on Carl Andre’s minimalist metal rugs made stepping out onto the deep space mirrors all the more transgressive. It is here where the decorative and the rarified meet the body that Stingel walks his way to questioning the layered roles of art, architecture, decoration.

Untitled, Rudolf Stingel, 2000, Styrofoam , Each: 48 x 96 x 4 inches (120 x 240 x 10 cm); Overall: 96 x 96 x 4 inches (240 x 480 x 10 cm), Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Stingel, by the way, was born in Italy, and spends part of his time there and part in New York, and bringing that Italian love of baroque decoration and extravagant surfaces is an important part of Stingel’s art. On the other hand, he’s not afraid of employing the Home Depot DIY aesthetic at the same time that he’s unafraid of conceptually moving walls to floors and floors to walls.

What used to be a floor, a besmirched white rug from the artist’s studio, Stingel mounted on the wall–wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling. It looked like a painting and it even looked a little like a paint-splattered concrete wall. It also looked like what it was–a dirty rug. Of course Jackson Pollock came to mind, not just for the splatters, but for the location of the work while it was being marked. But, unlike Pollock, it was more about the change in location. Amazingly, it didn’t look like it didn’t belong where it was!

And “drawings” of footprints stomped into on white styrofoam slabs also hang on the wall but must have been an action on the floor. While we were in this room, we bumped into Pphiladelphia Museum of Art contemporary art Curator Carlos Basualdo and his wife. Basualdo expressed an interest in the repetitive motions involved in creating some of Stingel’s work.

Rudolf Stingel, Untitled, 1993, Oil and enamel on canvas, 99 ¼ x 66 1/16 inches (252.1 x 167.7 cm), Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Although Stingel covers a pristine white museum wall with a dirty white rug, he does not come off as merely outrageous, or even as silly. I totally bought into everything he showed here, even the older work in the show, like the scarred and pitted silver-coated paintings with the colors seeping out from underneath. They are made with a predetermined process. But honestly, they’ve got a whole lot more to say than any Jules Olitsky color field painting that I’ve ever seen. Stingel totally gets the surface, and, unlike Olitsky, he gets what’s underneath, and he relates it all to the body–his body and how he makes the work, our body and how we stand in relation to the work, and to the world we live in.

Rudolf Stingel, Untitled (After Sam), 2005 – 2006, Oil on canvas , 132 x 180 inches (335.3 x 457.2 cm), at the 2006 Whitney Biennial, with Urs Fischer’s installations

In the last Whitney Biennial, a Stingel black-and-white self-portrait, Untitled (After Sam)–i.e. after a photograph by Sam Samore–seemed almost conventional hanging next to Urs Fischer’s hole-in-the-wall and candle installations. But in the context of this show and Stingel’s own assault on the museum’s walls, the work looks really great. After this exhibit, I’m looking for Stingel to be all over the place.

Post-Minimalism and Post-Photoshopism and Post-Illustratorism have all joined forces to abhor the straight line and perspective, abhor the mass produced, abhor the slick perfection and abhor the uniformity that Minimalism and computer graphics–and advertising–promised. Those were the formal issues that struck me silly when I walked into Slought to see The Day After, an exhibit of work by recent MFA graduated of Penn, Tyler and PAFA.

To put it another way, this show is sad and angry, a declaration of innocence lost and dreams tucked away. The Day After is literal in these students’ lives, the day after they have been shot out into the art world from their protected MFA experience; and it’s figurative, the era after 9/11, when the American Dream has collapsed and the American self-image of righteousness, under the Bush administration, has been swept away by the Cheney-Bush-Addington axis of evil (see Jane Mayer’s article in the July 3 New Yorker).

There was a lot to like in this exhibit, and a lot to think about. Some of the work I’d already seen at the Penn MFA exhibit at the Icebox–Wil Medearis‘ Alex-Katzian self-portraits, Pernot Hudson’s blurry family portraits of Boehm birds and other pricy porcelain knick-knacks–but most of it was new to me.

exterior view of Corridor, by Amy Walsh

Amy Walsh’s ramshackle jumbles of random cartons offer peepholes into evocative, familiar spaces–factory loft and city lights, corridor with doors and a window to a blue sky, a building that is either being gutted and rebuilt or has been abandoned before completion, a staircase, a curtain over a doorway. I had thoughts of Urs Fischer and Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Miraculously, the miniature spaces still bristled with ambition and boldness. I loved this work.

one of the peephole views into The Visitor, by Amy Walsh

What I saw plus what Roberta said about boxes (post here) brought me to the thought that sculpture had changed focus from beautiful exteriors to vulnerable interiors. The exteriors shout, “Can you get past my warts and see me for who I really am?” Walsh is a PAFA grad. (Here are links to my and Roberta’s Flickr sets).

an untitled piece by Blaine Siegel in the window of Slought Foundation

A bristly exterior also covers PAFA grad Blaine Siegel’s sculpture in the front window of Slought, a video screen peeking out from a shingled cave of torn styrofoam and corrugated cardboard. The rough materials and caveman quality reminded me of Thomas Hirschhorn. Siegel’s Gobdiddlymuck monster also dares you to love (Roberta described and photographed Siegel’s Gobdiddlymuck monster so nicely that I’ll just refer you again to her post).

Untowards (09) by Anna Neighbor

Tyler grad Anna Neighbor’s blurry, penumbral “Untoward” photographs–of the part of a chandelier above the lights and a picture of loneliness personified in a double bed with one empty pillow–also dare to show the unlovely and the unloved. Also from Tyler, Joe Protheroe’s deliberately unperspectival, cartoony-crude paintings seem like rebellions against Photoshop, and from PAFA, Max Maddox’s abstractions of crusty gestures dare you to admire their unloveliness. Maddox’s marks made me think of Anne Seidman’s early, Zen gesture paintings–utterly different and yet also challenging and bristly.

a shot from The Baby, by Tricia Lopez

Tricia Lopez’s DVD “The Baby” also demands love for the unlovely, but she puts the beauty on the outside and the ugliness within. A beautiful woman, with a voice distorted to sound deep and disturbed, begs another beautiful woman to accept and love her hurt, broken inner baby. I wondered if this video was influenced by the identity theft commercials, in which an innocent victim channels the voice of the thief.

An Appearance of Comprehension, by Michelle Le Claire

Even Hudson, whose paintings of fine family tschotschkes retain some of the attractiveness of the originals, is putting his family jewels on the line, questioning the values they represent and in a way challenging this part of himself that he isn’t so sure he likes. The tiny photo-shaped drawings of childhood innocence lost by PAFA’s Michelle LeClaire also feed into the American Dream and the ugliness beneath the false romanticism of our past.

A Slow, Still, Dying, by Brent Wahl

I thought at first that Penn grad Brent Wahl was marching to a different drummer. His DVD A Slow, Still, Dying of an immobile man bleeding out in front of your eyes though, again raises the issue of what’s on the inside, what’s on the outside, and just how vulnerable a human being is. This one is right on the edge of 9/11 thinking, the man looking so tough and soldier-like with his shaven head, stoically sitting as the blood seeps out.

The two outlyers were Medearis and Tyler grad Timothy Belknap.

I’m not so sure about Medearis, who puts himself and his girl in a Ralph Lauren social drama. I can’t tell if he loves Alex Katz and Ralph Lauren and these are sincere fantasies, or if the clay-colored skin serves as warning that the fantasy is false and the social aspirations may not be so attractive.

front view of Red Dumpster With Strap-On, by Timothy Belknap

Marching to a different drummer is Belknap. He has gussied up his high-gloss Red Dumpster With Strap-On in a way that emphasizes its perfection as an industrially manufactured product, as a machine (the works are beautifully put together and visible on the inside) and as a toy. He uses its interactive, pristine white-plush drumstick to draw attention. I stepped on the little treadle, waited a little, and sure enough the drumstick pounded the dumpster. Even though I wondered about the sexual implications of a Strap-On, I couldn’t help but think that for Belknap, innocence and optimism were not yet lost.

On the other hand, the dumpster also brought Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum to my mind, its stealth subject matter of false innocence and moral blindness suddenly flipping my view on the dumpster. This might not have crossed my mind in some other context–and with another group of curators who wear their intellectual and political hearts on their sleeves. Osvaldo Romberg, Aaron Levy and Jean-Michel Rabaté’s choices, when I got done coalesced, into a political vision that transcended the personal stories each of these students had to tell.

Just Whitney
Philadelphia artist Zoe Strauss’ Biennial 2006 submission steals the show.

At the heart of the Whitney Museum’s Biennial 2006 lies a small dark room where bright images flash on the wall in a slide show of photographs by Philadelphia artist Zoe Strauss. The quiet chapel of light and love for humanity amid the raucous sea of negativity that is this year’s Biennial steals the show. Strauss’ humane photographs of crack addicts, the poor, broken buildings and Mummers behaving badly will make you cry or laugh. With bittersweet beauty Strauss lays bare the human comedy. (Be sure to click the artist’s name to go to her website/blog/flickr sites and see more of her images.)

Zoe Strauss’s McDonalds from I-95, taken post-Katrina, when the artist visited Mississippi to help with the clean-up.

Hosting more than 100 contemporary artists, Biennial 2006 is notable for angry art and art that flaunts the rules of marketplace commodification. This is art made out of passion more than the desire to sell itself to the highest bidder. It’s like the anti-art fair: Nonprecious materials abound, and there are more installations than you can shake a paintbrush at. This art doesn’t want to follow you home like a nice puppy dog. But of course even the papier-mache boulders will sell for thousands of dollars because they’ve been Biennialized.

At the press preview Whitney curator Chrissie Iles acknowledged the tetchiness of much of the work, saying the show is very much about the here and now-our time of world upheaval and economic and ecological uncertainty. Laissez-faire capitalism is our world and laissez-faire curating permeates the art world. Iles said she hadn’t seen 50 percent of the art until it walked through the door-it’s new work made by artists invited to participate in the show.

Visually and aurally the show is noisy, and some of the quieter work doesn’t get a fair shake. That’s my only complaint. Here are a few high points:

Francesco Vezzoli’s Caligula with Helen Mirren, here, vamping it up.

>> Francesco Vezzoli‘s faux film trailer for a remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula is the soft, cheesy center of the show. A star-studded cast (Helen Mirren, Benicio Del Toro, Karen Black, Courtney Love) vamp it up full blast in Donatella Versace-designed togas, and it works splendidly as a tittilating satire of life in post-9/11 America.

Nari Ward’s Glory. In the background is a collage by Mark Bradford, also outstanding.

>> Nari Ward’s “Glory,” a lit-up faux tanning bed/coffin, will imprint you with the pattern of stars and stripes, and is an amazing antiwar/ antipop culture statement.

Urs Fischer’s holes in the Whitney walls

>> Urs Fischer cut mammoth circular holes in the fourth-floor walls, creating an atmosphere that’s both bombed-out Iraq and fashionable art world.

Liz Larner’s pile of handlebars “RWB’s”

>> Liz Larner‘s monumental pile of bicycle handlebars festooned in red, white and blue evokes the end of childhood innocence, and childhood victims everywhere.

Strauss, in her Whitney chapel of love. (Sorry for the glare and fuzz.) This was taken at the press preview.

>> I’ll end with Zoe Strauss, whose art, in a show full of posturing, has no pretense except to be the best representation of the person and the best telling of the story. And that’s unbelievably refreshing.

Groping its way through pop culture, much of the art in Biennial 2006 claims the high ground by framing the discussion of war, commerce, poverty, politics and bigotry as something more than a two-second soundbite. It’s a show worth your time.

“Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night”
Through May 28. Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave., New York. 800.WHITNEY.