Renovated MoMA (Artist's Choice: Amy Sillman)

On MoMA's top floor, the walls of one room are filled floor-to-ceiling with artwork (and though some smaller flat pieces are hung, most rest on a white platform raised just above the floor, leaning. They are more or less equalized as objects (not salon but studio style). "Shape” is what conducts Sillman's delightfully superficial curation (history and genre disregarded. Sillman imagines a transhistorical movement depending on neither biography nor oeuvre, just appearance). The selected work is freed: from placards, from history, from artists. The white platform suggests a stage on which actors sans roles perform a plotless play. I briefly believe this could be MoMA’s new identity, a locus for the free play of forms, lines, and their opaque ideas, for the condensation of art rather than hegemonic rhetoric. (Would MoMA let the artist die for the artwork to live?)
Elsewhere on the floor I move through the early section of the collection in its new "loosely chronological" arrangement. In one room is Edmondson (qualified by a placard bearing his mythic biography) and Traylor. In the next is Modigliani and Matisse. In another, a dozen Picassos envelope Ringgold’s Die and an especially wistful Bourgeois, whispering an apology. (Sorry, but no.)

Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s Golden Spiral

Inserted into a wall like a taxidermy diorama, Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s Golden Spiral at 601 Artspace gives us a chance to meditate on what it feels like to habitat Earth and the human desires that comes with it. The 18-minute video is a fictious infomercial, advertising a way to achieve immortality. The golden spiral is a magic tool that when rubbed on the face reverses aging. The video takes us through images of outer space, dinosaurs, ancient fossils, deep sea fish, interspersed with pictures of a woman successfully aging backwards, and mixed with footage of people in clean lab coats hard at work pouring liquids from one beaker into another. The tone of the video is one that generates suspicion with its highly aestheticized seductive imagery disseminating information in a pseudo-scientific manner. The space surrounding the video is littered with Golden Spirals sculptures, arranged in a pattern that radiates from the bright glow of the video. When viewing the objects on their own, they function as symbols of habitation, empty shells that were once homes to genetically modified hermit crabs. The installation is one that produces anxiety in its sterile science fiction, leaving us to reflect on our relationship with time, our fight against it, and the resulting despair.

The End of the World and After

The End of the World and After
"Braut" by Tiril Hasselknippe
Magenta Plains

As I walked into the gallery, I felt like I entered a post-apocalyptic world. Besides the mist and purple light, the space contains five concrete Doric pillars in descending order. The top of each pillar contains a basin filled with water, pebbles, sand, and coal. Downstairs, a steel sculpture models an imaginary city resides between the two columns of the basement under the tint orange light. The city model looks like a maze with tube-like parts that also gradient from the tallest at the outer edge to the lowest to the ground at the center. The gradient, as both seen within the work and in the gallery space, implies the infrastructure of modern society. The water on top of the pillars proposes potential sites for survival and existence. Hasselknippe’s work makes me think of the Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, with its meditations on culture, memory, and longing. In an interview, Hasselknippe explained that the infrastructure she built in her sculpture suggests hope for human survival. I found myself struggling to connect with this resolution because the descending structure of her sculpture still hints at a hierarchical system. Although the sculptures show a reversed direction of the hierarchy, low at the center and high at the peripheral, I wonder whether it simplifies the relationship between humans and the infrastructure. It makes me think of what would the world look like if we could think beyond rankings and relative status?

I Can Make You Feel Good

I Can Make You Feel Good is an installation piece of Tyler Mitchell. The display is sectioned to three, divided by walls, each provoking different emotions with similar subjects. The First section is video projections on a pentahedron of black teenagers enjoying a picnic under the glazing sun, with a voiceover of Tyler Mitchell talking about his first encounter with racism on a picnic when he was fourteen. This contradiction accentuates the gap between a black utopia and the life they’re actually living.

Then, we enter the second area with images of portraits of black people, with symbols of repression, to remind the barricades black people are fighting to tear down. The last section is another projection of black kids enjoying their time, what’s different this time is that it’s projected on the ceiling, and lighthearted music replaced the heavy voiceover. Visitors lie on beanbags, feeling as if they’re physically been through the fight, and can now finally rest in the not anymore utopian world, but a world of equality we can achieve. I Can Make You Feel Good is a visualization of Tyler Mitchell’s ideal Black Utopia, inspiring people to join in on effectuating it.

    

 

Gagosian and Richard Serra: On Environment

This fall, Richard Serra and Gagosian launched an ambitious trio of exhibitions throughout New York City — Forged Rounds, Triptychs and Diptychs, and Reverse Curve — each commandeered its own gallery space. Weighing upwards of 50 tons, these mountainous metal sculptures loom ominously in Gagosian’s galleries. Typically made for outdoor spaces, Gagosian’s decision to shelter these works of art within a gallery setting — white walls, hushed tones, no touching — is a decision to appropriate the function of these sculptures; to remove large, public works from accessible spaces and place them instead in areas where interaction is restricted. Visitors are not allowed to touch the works, but are rather asked to quietly observe. While the sheer size of Serra’s forged steel creations is groundbreaking in itself, there is not much else to understand about these sculptures except that they are large and heavy.  Within the gallery walls, these lumps of metal have no purpose and serve less as a work of art and more as a monument to humanity’s ability to waste resources at an alarming scale. 

As scientists make clear the terrifying effects climate change will have on our future, citizens from around the globe are taking charge in an attempt to slow humanity’s destruction of our environment. Countless works of art using both materials and themes related to the environment and climate change have been created over the past few years. Yet Serra, an established artist, chooses to continue his work with forged steel. The transformation of iron ore into steel is an intensive process that requires large amounts of energy — energy predominantly produced by coal. If these massive steel creations were applied to a specific purpose; shelter, protection from the elements, etc…, perhaps the sociological benefits might outweigh the environmental footprint left by these sculptures. Instead; however, Gagosian — not known for its kind and welcoming nature — and Serra chose to exhibit these works inside a highly restricted space of privilege.

Obsession and Excess Collide

Obsession and excess collide in a feast of color, texture, and light in Karen Kilimnik’s 12^thsolo exhibition at 303 Gallery.  The installation is set up in the Petersbuger style with groupings of small paintings hung closely together.  Sculptures of ready-made models set atop gallery pedestals stand in the center while video’s play on two walls.  The space is crowded with photo collages of picturesque country sides, paintings of Victorian manors in the impressionist style, birds, hounds and even pastel seashells.  The only action in the gallery is amid the dancers on a screen, performing The Awakening of Flora by Marius Petipa and the video The World at War, which collages black and white movies of WWII.  

Kilimnik’s mixed media pieces are situated directly in the center of a rich history of European art and culture.  At first glance the work might be read as frivolous or even romanticizing of a past packed with atrocities. Yet take a step back and the work suddenly becomes a criticism of the vacuity of what we value and the excess we hoard.   

Ready-made puzzles of historic landmarks stand in the center of the gallery floor, dramatic light reflecting off glitter and rhinestones applied with hot glue.  Once gallant ships carrying stolen treasures from around the globe are reduced to a plastic child’s toy adored with rhinestones and glitter.  These works point a to the impermanence of value and pointlessness of vanity.  The installation remains, titillating the senses and drawing us into the seductive world of wealth and power with the sounds, the lights, and the movement, but the obsession of a culture based on excess and wealth has left a void which feels far too familiar in our current culture.  

Tijuanatanjierchandelier- Jason Rhoades at David Zwirner

Debuting in New York, David Zwirner brings Tijuanatanjierchandelier, the exhibition by American artist Jason Rhoades to the city. Upon entering the room, visitors are inundated by bright, glowing, neon lights tangled and hanging by wires above blankets, hides, and small knick knacks. 

The exhibition comes across as not several works of art hanging in one room, rather a singular experience contained in one large room. True, a viewer can take works in a small bit at a time such as the neon phrases, frankensteined light fixtures, or small collections of objects, but where one work begins and another ends is nearly imperceptible. He sets the space up like a marketplace with rugs laid out on the floor topped with pots, ornaments, souvenirs, and the like; objects one could expect to find in both the titular cities of Tijuana and Tangier.  However, Rhoades changes the intent of the marketplace, originally meant to buy and sell handmade goods often unique to the culture, country or person, and hangs above them slang words for vagina. 

Rhoades plays with language, hanging neon translations and colloquial terms and euphemisms for vagina to provoke and discomfort the viewer. His use of neon with the slag invokes the feeling of an environment similar to a sex district rather than a typical marketplace, even with lamps, ornaments, foods, and other crafts lay on the floor as if being sold. With this exhibit he seems to evoke the sale of exotic "stench trench" as a marketable good on the same level of objectness as a craft one might buy as a souvenir.

Rhoades seems to embody with this exhibit the exotification of sex workers white male tourists project on to different cultures during travel. One can not only buy crafts and artwork, but sex workers as well. He takes away a level of humanness by reducing sex workers only to the slang terms for vagina, which are often not said with respect and reduces them to the same commodification as a souvenir.

European Romanticism or Subversive Cat Lady? You decide.

Karen Kilimnik’s solo exhibition first reads as an unironically giddy shrine to the romantic sublime of European culture. Small paintings and photographs are stacked salon-style on the walls. Idyllic images of English landscapes, herds of cows, and luxurious mansions are bedazzled with glitter and rhinestones. Video footage of a ballet and World War II troops play on screens. Rhinestones are crudely hot glued to miniature models of world-famous landmarks, such as the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, intensifying the sickening feeling you are in someone’s naively reverential, fantasy world. Thankfully, if you look long enough, you will find that world infiltrated by nuggets of irony, hiding in the clutter. 

The first hint of subversion is found in the titles, which are casually written in all lowercase. While most are innocuous, such as “the pretty sheep in the golden english afternoon sunlight,” others are a bit odd, such as “thank you, i’m rested, i’m ready for my dinner now.” The latter conveys the sentiments of a cat whose image has been pasted onto an image of a Renaissance-era bed worthy of royalty. Many similar collages with strange titles have been quietly slipped in among the paintings and photographs. All of them are silly, and most of them portray cats in slightly surreal situations. In “secret meeting of the generals - onward!” five cats sit on chairs in a lavishly-decorated room. This ridiculousness suddenly permeates everything in the room, revealing that the miniature Louvre is just a store-bought 3-D puzzle, the rhinestones are actually Swarovski crystals, those sweet little paintings are made quite casually, and many of the photographs are of humorous subjects, such as urinating sheep. While the work still feels optimistic, it reads less saccharine, more playful, and a bit more critical of the social divisions between high and low art.