Natalie Frank: The Brothers Grimm at The Drawing Center- edited

The genre of fairytales has been explored by artists but working on the uncensored versions written by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (Brothers Grimm) has not been done as extensively as Natalie Frank’s show. Like the tales themselves, Frank’s work also has a gruesome quality to it in terms of the realistic rendering of characters and its uncensored content. The unrefined quality of the tales, along with their violent and sexual nature is kept alive in the drawings with the gestural use of dry pastels and gouache (in grotesque fleshy tones in some cases), giving the work its visceral characteristic.

The work incorporates themes such as mythology and fantasy when it comes to depictions of characters which appear to be hybrids of humans and beasts. Stylistically, the drawings touch upon surrealism and abstraction as characters merge and melt into other characters. Compositionally, the drawings maintain a book- illustrative quality, at times shown with thick borders around the central image. There is a child-like rawness to the drawings, but the work itself may not be suitable for children to view, marking another similarity with the original Grimm tales which were not intended for a younger audience.

There is, however, a comic element and a sense of absurdness alongside the horror and cruelty on display. The psychological tension of the subject of sexuality combined with violence, underlying the drawings, may make one feel uncomfortable into accepting its significance to humanity. In this case, the moral of the story may be that the subject of fairytales, censored or uncensored, may never grow too old to be explored further as primal human desires remain the same through the ages.

Portraits from the École des Beaux-Arts Paris (revised)

The Drawing Center celebrates the intimate and often revealing aspects of portraiture through four hundred years of portrait drawings in their current exhibition, “Portraits from the École des Beaux-Arts Paris.” The range of mediums and styles of portraits featured in this exhibition all work together to showcase the long history and meaning behind portraiture. It has lived as a platform of prestige as well as a means to reflect on identity. Portraiture carries a heavy history of varied formal qualities and ways of representing subjects and the exhibition's diverse display of works enabled viewers to fully experience the long history behind it and contextualize its place in society today. The traditional drawn portraiture showcased in the exhibition is no longer a common means of capturing one’s appearance. Portraits, once drawn or painted, now live as photographically derived profile pictures on social media and digital photography.

Walking through the exhibition, viewers are able to see the history of portraiture from early baroque to contemporary, allowing them to witness the shifting perceptions between artist and model, and artist and themselves. Intimacy between the artist and their work is showcased to the audience through the thorough detail of realistic rendering of emotions. Every slight detail of emotion shown in each piece on display, whether it is a small smirk or an intimate gaze, builds an overarching sense of calm and closeness. Even the rough brushwork and neon coloring in Claire Tabouret's "Les Débutantes.1" made of acrylic and vinyl paint on paper has a sense of a emotional connection. The debutantes looks at the viewer with a slight pout, staring straight on, full of angst. Her stare makes the viewer feel connected, allowing them to feel her emotion of oncoming adulthood.

“Portraits from the École des Beaux-Arts Paris” creates a provoking narrative of the quiet intimacy between artist and model through portrait's history, as well as invites viewers to experience these moments of closeness. This diverse exhibition of portraits allow viewers to appreciate these moments that are lost within the fast paced world today. When a click of a button captures a moment, does it hold as much as the painted gesture and markings of a drawing from a live model? This question has persisted through history since the invention of photography, and the Drawing Center’s new exhibition works as a reminder of the unique experience of viewing a drawn portrait.

It's a Björk World After All, "Songlines" at MoMA (Revised)

An internationally renowned musician and artist who has won many awards, Björk is known for creating immersive, curious, and quirky music accompanying videos. One of the elements of the multi-floor MoMA exhibition is "Songlines," a 40 minute long immersive audio tour through most of her albums, featuring costumes, notebooks filled with lyrics, and random ephemera. The Björk retrospective has been unanimously panned by critics, which can cause viewers to go into the show expecting the worst. After the anticipatory hype of queuing, the museum staff provide exhibition goers audio guides. At the beginning of the audio tour a narrator implores the viewer to experience the exhibition fully, ensuring they spend sufficient time in each area. However, most visitors did not. If MoMA truly wanted everyone to spend the full 40 minutes, they should have put them on a timed tram ride.

Lacking any other contextualisation, biographical or historical introduction, the exhibition presupposes prior knowledge of the prolific musician. Unfortunately this renders the experience inaccessible and devoid of meaning to an uninitiated viewer. Those unfamiliar with Björk might consider the experience as hero worship. The knockoff Madame Tussaud mannequins did not help either. As a fan of Björk's music, I revelled each time a segment of a familiar song played, but found the audio guide's story narration to be annoying like an AM radio station I couldn't turn off. I was grateful to see her costumes in person, but all the exhibition ignited in me was the desire to listen to her music while going through the exhibition.

Although Björk has performed at MoMA and previously collaborated in museum educational events for children, a traditional career retrospective for a musician always feels like an odd marriage. Several museums have managed to make successful retrospectives of musicians' careers. Effective examples include the "David Bowie is" at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Johnny Cash Museum in Nashville. To make a career retrospective of a musician engaging and enjoyable I find it necessary to include more biographical background information, ephemera from various archives, and access to the music itself. Unfortunately MoMA decided to go in a less traditional direction that was not as compelling to a wide audience.

- J.E. Molly Seegers

Much to be Desired: Triennial exhibition, "Surround Audience."

Steegmann Mangrané's "Phantom"

                                                             Jerry Saltz experiencing "Phantom" 

Heavy on the technology and Internet-themed works, Surround Audience presents the work of 51 early-career artists including Steegmann Mangrané's and his piece, "Phantom". "Phantom" uses the technology of the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality gaming gear. "Oculus was looking for an opportunity to unveil its technology in a public way," Steegmann Mangrané stated, and everyone there seemed to really enjoy the experience. Standing in line, you patiently wait you turn, while hearing each person go and gasp at what they see. 
For me, I am no stranger to either the technological wonders of video games, nor the oculus. I have experienced many games using the new technology and was overly excited to see what a visual artist would do with something like that. When you put on the head gear you are transported to a digital forest, he chose an endangered forest in Brazil. For those who haven't experienced it, its basically a digital world you can walk around in. Although everyone around me was thrilled and inspired by the experience, I was disappointed. I was so disappointed that I actually became mad. For me the experience was amateur hour in comparison to what game developers have done with the technology. 
Artnet news claimed that "It's so cool," was proclaimed by almost every "rifter". But for me, Mangrané didn't make art, he made a demo, and not a very good demo. My point of view is that he used the hype of the technology to hide just how mediocre his piece actually was. As a gamer, I have been exposed to not only the impressive and deep worlds created by game developer but also their simple yet brilliant demos. If the Oculus Rift company had wanted to have a public viewing of their new technology and exposed it to non-gamers maybe they should have stayed with a game developer who understands it because Steegmann Mangrané didn't even touch on the possibilities of the technology. 

Bjork "Black Lake"

“Black Lake” is a video work by Bjork from the album “Vulnicura”. This video describes disappointment about Bjork’s broken marriage and expressing her pain. The music represents the downside of her life. It sounds sad but strong. The lyrics spell out her strong desire and hope for a better life with the emotional music background.  The best music video is not about telling or writing a story, but instead you can feel it's experiment when you see it; in this case, Bjork successfully inspired the audience her pain with the strong emotional dance which accompany by the color changing scenes and the dynamic background music.

As a photographer, from my point of view, every single scene is seen as a picture. Color, costume, and music are the main elements in the video that represent different feelings of Bjork. At one point in the lively video, there was a bright electric blue stream merge into the darkness. The electric blue stream comes out from the rocks emerge on the scene; it catches my eyes. It is an identity for hope in Bjork life.

At the second half of the video, the background changes. Even though the daylight and grassland were still in a cold color, it looks more hopeful with the bright sky background.  The camera's distance from Bjork is fixed, but her behavior changes. Her dress changes to silk fabric, light and graceful. She is standing in the middle of the green flatland, smiling and singing the song. And the lyrics were “ I am a glowing shining rocket. Returning home. As I enter the atmosphere. I burn off layer by layer.” Bjork steps out of the shadow with sparkling body and the light grows brighter, and the scene becomes a representation of her happier future. 

Additionally, her gesture is also an important element in Bjork’s video which reflects the feeling of her lyrics. She always performs in the middle of each shot. She is in a substantial position of the shot which expresses her egoistic and feminist personality. In this video, she falls to her knees into the loam of a cave floor and her skin as pale as death. It is a beautiful picture and she seems lonely and helpless. She sings, “My heart is enormous lake, black with potion. I am blind, drowning in this ocean. My soul torn apart, my spirit is broken”. When I heard that phase, I felt sorrow and pain, and it sounded like mad than self-pity. The ending scene is her first time walking away from the camera. Her body becomes smaller. Bjork is walking away from the pain and seems peacefully quiet.

On Kawara - Silence at Guggenheim Museum

On Kawara - Silence at Guggenheim Museum

Annually, the Guggenheim museum presents a huge solo exhibition using most of the entire gallery space. It seems more special than any other years because it is the first full retrospective exhibition of the artist, On Kawara, who died in the last July. As a big fan of Kawara, it is good chance to remember him and admire his life and works in just one space. Since it is a retrospective exhibition, there are huge amount of works from every category of his conceptual projects which were done in daily based during his life. 

*the copyright of this image is the Guggenheim Museum

Especially, I was very impressed by the amount of the date paintings (the Today series) in chronological order, in different size and color. They usually are displayed just paintings only before but in this time they are all organized with the boxes which are the cover of the each paintings for their storage and which are also has the newspapers of that dates inside of the boxes. Also I found out in my second visit that they show this series of paintings from its start which is January 4, 1966 and the end which is January 12, 2013. The show was a good time to know a great conceptual artist who worked every single days in his own rules and Kawara did not give talks much about his works but you can found the power and depth in that silence.

On Kawara – Silence : Revision

Guggenheim presents On Kawara – Silence, Kawara’s first retrospective includes date paintings (the Today series), postcards (the I Got Up series), telegrams (the I Am Still Alive series), maps (the I Went series), lists of names (the I Met series), newspaper cuttings (the I Read series), the inventories of paintings (Journals), calendars (One Hundred Years and One Million Years), as well as his drawings. I wonder how Kawara’s long artistic journey under his immaterial and abstract concept –time- can be revealed and filled with the rotunda. However, my whole impression of this show is “bathos”, which is a little vain, and structurally matching with the coiled rotunda.

            

The exhibition started to fill with the wall by his early drawings, which were unfamiliar, fresh, and very interesting for me because I could see not only his diverse ideas for installation art but also his nature. Through Kawara’s series of work, viewers are inspired to imagine his everyday practices, his social connections including famous figures in the Art world, and other historical places and times where he passed. However, the way of arrangement his oeuvre repeated continuously so, I think, the concentrating energy of exhibition was loosen at the end to display the greatest One Million Years, which is on the biggest canvas work in this show. Although Kawara’s work has profound ideas and experiments about the transition of time and space, the Guggenheim didn’t transmit the meaning of his work enough and left viewers exhausted at the end.    

In the Studio: Photographs at the Gagosian Gallery / REVISION

Ah, the artist’s studio! One should question if the artist transforms the studio, or the studio transforms the artist. This was certainly no different in the presentation by the curator, Peter Galassi, which left the viewers to wonder and contemplate.

Thematically assembled in two floors with 150 collected works by artists even the most casual fan would’ve heard of, the exhibition is an experience like none other. We are given the opportunity to take a peek at the masters at work. From Richard Avedon’s take on Dior, to Robert Mapplethorpe’s ever-suggestive self-portraits, to Jeff Wall’s striking Picture for Women, there is much here to appreciate. Many works are familiar, yet there are surprises lurking each angle of the wall. But what does this mean? What correlation could possibly exist between Cindy Sherman and Lee Friedlander? One thing is certain: the artists did not agree on the physicality of the studio as a location. As we acknowledge this as if we are figuring out a puzzle, Galassi leads us to believe that the theme of artist’s studio, for the medium of photography, is more than just a space to position the camera; the studio is a subject matter of its own. It questions photography as a medium, and how it sustains itself as part of its environment. Whether it is the disruption of perception in Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women, or the portrayal of visually documenting performing sculpture in Charles Ray’s Plant Piece I-II, it leaves the viewer with the question in mind. Is the studio entirely artificial or a distortion of reality?

Paul Chan’s Nonprojections for New Lovers at the Guggenheim Museum/Revision

The Guggenheim Museum’s current retrospectives of artists On Kawara and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian entice the audience to explore and reflect upon these artists’ work. Paul Chan’s exhibit Nonprojections for New Lovers, however, leaves the viewer yearning for a manner in which to engage with the installation.

Photo Courtesy of David Heald, Guggenheim Museum

Curator Katherine Brinson states that the newly crowned recipient of the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize has made a “visionary contribution to the field of contemporary art.” Chan’s multifaceted installation features his pursuit of essential elements such as a light and absence. A case holds books of erotica with titles such as How to Train Your Virgin, produced by Chan’s publishing company Badlands Unlimited. Across the space, a meditation on movement and shadow presents itself as four white nylon tubes that wriggle and dance in response to wall-mounted fans. Cement-filled shoes rest on the floor, strung together by electrical cords connected to projectors that project nothing. Adamant about separating political activism from his artistic practice, Chan’s presentation feels inconclusive. Devoid of images, the installation emphasizes Chan’s response to image-driven consumer culture. 

Photo Courtesy of David Heald, Guggenheim Museum

Nevertheless, Chan receives attention from the very commercial industry he challenges. Exhibition reviews appear in publications such as W Magazine and The Collector Tribune, illustrating the prestige of the Hugo Boss Prize. Photographs of Chan’s imageless pieces now packaged for consumption raise doubts about the sincerity of his intent.

Photo Courtesy of David Heald, Guggenheim Museum