You see I am here after all

So often in modern and contemporary art, there is a propensity for the use of repetition and redundancy by the artists within their works, and You see I am here after all, by Zoe Leonard is no exception. Often the hand of the artist or their assistants’ is involved in the production of the redundant work on display but, with You see I am here after all, Leonard has managed to avoid the process of creating superfluity to illustrate; the 3,852 postcards that comprise You see I am here after all exist autonomously and have been gathered to form a work that capitalizes on the revealing characteristics of this souvenir.

What Leonard is able to get across to the viewer through her process of collecting in lieu of creating, is that this redundant production phenomenon actually exists in our culture. Niagra Falls, the popular tourist attraction, is exposed as a subject that can be skewed by the craftsman creating the imagery for the cards, and through the use of propagative media, the overtly altered scene can then be disseminated. The tourism icon has been captured from various vantage points, and Leonard has grouped like perspectives together in a typological fashion to underscore the general homogenous nature of the postcards while also allowing the viewer to notice the subtle differences in the technology implemented in the printing of the scene and its state at the time of capture.

It would have been suitable for the artist to divulge the full rationale for the arrangement of the postcards as part of the exhibit. The nature of this work is so conceptual; to augment the presentation of the postcards is an idea that would strengthen the validity of Leonard’s work. The viewer can certainly ascertain the reasoning behind the manner in which the postcards are displayed but a formal offering of the manifestation, in its entirety, as the concept and its execution is something that the viewer most often benefits from. The inclusion of the “blueprint” of the concept is, for example, something that artist Sol LeWitt understood well. It permits his work to be created by his assistants, and supports the sentiment that conceptual art lives forever as a thought.

The title, You see I am here after all, for this exhibit speaks in particular to the commercial nostalgic qualities of postcards, and also to the thrust of conceptual art: not unlike the memory of visiting a tourist attraction, art exists in our minds forever and always. Conceptual art is abound at Dia: Beacon, and for nearly a year You see I am here after all, stands as an intriguing addition to the conceptual art on view.

This exhibit may very well be exhausting to some patrons. It isn’t an entirely fresh motif, and it isn’t illuminating too much that hasn’t already been demystified. You see I am here after all is sharp in the respect that it’s an exhibit of a single work of art fabricated by a single artist. Although it’s reminiscent of so much preceding it, with a familiar subject and its faintly unique employment of ready-mades, Leonard’s fabrication is capable of resonating with even the aforementioned jaded patrons.

Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective

Art patrons that wish to view an exhibit that is truly fun, should seek Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA. Knowledge of LeWitt’s statements about art are helpful when making efforts to fully appreciate the wall drawings as the magnificent works of art that they are, but it isn’t entirely necessary to have this working knowledge to simply enjoy the drawings. Similarly, familiarity with the artist’s sculptural works, although not on display, also serves to heighten the viewer’s involvement and enjoyment of all that is exhibited here. The retrospective is truly comprehensive, with LeWitt’s work residing on the three floors of MASS MoCA’s building #7.

The first floor contains the groundwork for the wall drawings, revealing the root of the general expressions found throughout the retrospective. So much is established on this floor and as patrons will later realize, much like many of the works themselves, the building almost becomes a sort of “gradation” in respect to the variance of his work found amongst the three floors.

On the second floor, LeWitt’s mid-career wall drawings live excitedly on the walls in building #7’s vast area. This floor is the very suitable main entrance point of the retrospective; the intermediate wall drawings greet viewers and permit them to ascend to a latter point in the artist’s career, or descend to a grouping of earlier-period LeWitt conceptions.

The third flood delivers the “coup de grâce” of the exhibits magnificence. The colors of the large-scale drawings have become increasingly more radiant, and the magnitude of LeWitt’s drawings, if not previously realized, is clear after viewing the three floors in their entirety. Contributing to the expansiveness of the work are the media implemented by LeWitt to give rise to his conceptual art. The execution of most of the drawings have been achieved with conventional media of contemporary artists such as acrylic paint, leaving moderate amounts of texture to be found, while works such as Wall Drawing 38 are created with small rolls of tissue paper inserted into pegboard, resulting in a more significant depth. LeWitt seems to allude to a recurrence of what preceded, with graphite scribble drawings having been conceived late in the artist’s career, as indicated by their presence on this final floor.

Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective will remain in the renovated building for a staggering 25-year period. The accompanying brochure is informative regarding the project, its history, and the artist, along with his abstract notions. The oeuvre becomes most intriguing with LeWitt’s statement found in the gallery guide: “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.” With this assertion it is fascinating to consider how, in spirit of this proclamation, the artist’s detailed instructions and diagrams have become the wall drawings present.

ARiThmetic

However difficult to fathom or except, Mathematics is in our soil and in our soul. The Fibonacci sequence appears repeatedly in nature indicating that human beings haven’t created Mathematics; it pre-dates our existence. Through the encompassing quality of Art, ARiThmetic underscores the realization that Mathematics is absolutely ubiquitous. While the two disciplines fail to completely circumscribe each other, their relationship and its dynamics are revealed with the artwork of Benigna Chilla, William Bergman, Maria Hall, and Nat Friedman.

Benigna Chilla, with her prints, has created works that dazzle the viewer with their precisely layered lines. Each of the prints is a little different than the next, and they’re hung contiguously in a space of their own within an exhibit that is otherwise a mélange. This allows for the prints to be viewed collectively, and they become a study in variations of a dendritic nature. Viewers familiar with the work of artist Sol LeWitt will find recognizable artistic and stylistic vocabulary within Chilla’s prints.

The most thought-provoking oeuvre in ARiThmetic, if not also the most visually arresting, is the work of William Bergman. The subjects of Bergman’s sculpture appear neither entirely natural nor purely manufactured: the contours of the plaster sculpture amid biomorphic and geometric. Form becomes the content of Bergman’s creations, as the emphasis on the marriage of Mathematics and Art emerges, and the intrinsic manner by which structure and formula grant life is realized.

Stainless steel offerings from sculptor Maria Hall are found throughout the exhibit. These geometric sculptures, at maquette proportions, are reminiscent of larger works created by artists Tony Smith and Antoni Milkowski. Hall’s sculptures somehow appear as if they have been removed from their original contexts, disseminated amidst ARiThmetic, and now serve to merely reinforce the notion that Mathematics can facilitate the creation of art.

The presence of earthly materials, further emphasizing the relationships between Art, nature, and Mathematics, are found within sculpture created by Nat Friedman. Modest subtractive stone works accompany prints of a similar guise. An unidentifiable mathematical principle is felt rather than seen with Friedman’s irregularities and curvilinear reductions. Fragmentary pieces of stone are manipulated, by the artist, to form architecture-esque three-dimensional representations of the artist’s two-dimensional prints.

Art and Mathematics are commonly thought of as incongruous. ARiThmetic successfully illustrates the union of these two disciplines with artwork that creatively implements stringent physical processes. The hand of the artist has deliberately been removed in some instances favoring the tools, such as computers, existing as a result of our collective mathematical competence and aptitude. Some may find this particular coalescence of the incongruous disheartening; the deepest visceral manifestations having been displaced by that which may alternatively reside deep in the minds of these artists contributing to ARiThmetic.

Legacies of Abstraction

The exhibit Legacies of Abstraction, held at the Esther Massry Gallery at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, is aptly named. Immediately upon entering the modest exhibition space it is easy to identify the Op Art of Richard Anuszkiewicz as having potentially influenced the work of the contemporary artist Warren Isensee. Geometry and symmetry are, in fact, the prevailing qualities of Isensee’s abstractions and it is for this reason that, of the three artists represented in the exhibit, Isensee’s work appears the most formulaic and sterile despite his brilliant use of color. With his expansive palette viewers find that Isensee, even here, implements formula to create a mesmeric arrangement of colors. His work is heavily stylized, teetering on what we may expect to find in the realm of contemporary design.

Theresa Chong’s drawings on rice paper are largely uniform. They’re consistent in regard to their dimensions, and contain a standard scheme of dots and lines forming fields of abstraction resembling constellations. Chong uses the nature of the line, and the proximity and quantity of the dots, to render the air of each of her drawings. Some of the works contain a highly populated scheme of lines and dots, while others give way to the visual solidity of the rice paper. The compositions appear as a reaction of a populous to stimuli. Notwithstanding the varying density of the compositions created by Chong, strong continuity is preserved throughout this body of work. The pronounced uniformity among each of the artist’s drawings collectively forms a literal constellation created by their communal similitude displayed on the gallery walls. Here again, with the work of Chong, contemporary design springs into the viewers mind.

Katia Santibañez’ drawings and paintings read like cyclic growth charts. Structured meticulously, her works appear as cellular and organic “quilts”. They could be likened to stills of the psychedelic visual supplementation that you often find with computer audio players. The primary difference, of course, is that these images aren’t computer-generated, they’re Santibañez-generated, and may have been created in close concurrence with psyche of the artist. In suit with the other artists’ work contained in Legacies of Abstraction, the abstract work by Santibañez seem to have been fashioned with symmetry and strict methodology.

The feeling that the viewer is left with, after experiencing the exhibit, is that this has been done before. The names on the placards and didactics have changed, the works have become a little more fit and polished but what we are viewing, after all, are legacies. These legacies, handed down from earlier abstractionists, have potentially arrived just a little closer to the pinnacle of their promise in the work of Isensee, Chong, and Santibañez. The exhibit, particularly for anyone who is able to recognize these legacies, is worthwhile. The artists have displayed their formal technical prowess while maintaining some semblance of selfhood in the creation of their art and, with their work, form a cohesive collection of contemporary abstraction, which seems suitable for the newly erected Esther Massry Gallery. Despite their slight aura of design, these works are fitting examples of contemporary art.

Oatman/Lail NewsHour

The current exhibit at The Teaching Gallery in Troy, NY contains work from two artists who have concerned themselves with the power associated with visual information. Thomas Lail, an instructor at Hudson Valley Community College, the home of the Teaching Gallery, together with Michael Oatman, have created mind-numbing collages that inform.

The Oatman-Lail NewsHour contains only the work of the two artists and is presented as one amalgamated exhibition throughout the bi-level gallery. Lail’s approach to collages varies from Oatman’s approach to collage construction a great deal. Lail provides, for the viewer, very little comprehendible visual information in his collages comprised of cut photographs and photocopies. With the title of the exhibit hinting toward the informative quality of art, what Lail seems to be telling us is that something is wrong with the manner in which we receive our information. The fault is potentially our own, pointing to deficient sensory perception, or an inability to comprehend what it is that are perceiving, or perhaps Lail is telling us that we are far to apathetic to our approach of information. Notwithstanding this arguably accurate observation of our behavior, there are enumerable sources of information, each with it’s own relevance, bombarding us all at once throughout the course of our day. Lail’s work seems to speak to this overwhelming feed of information with his collages containing so much information, piled onto the supporting backing, that it ultimately becomes a stimulating yet indecipherable noise.

Supporting this sentiment is the audio and video installment on the first floor of the gallery. Behind a curtain is a large television broadcasting sonic expression throughout the exhibition space. If viewers are patient enough, there’s an accompanying video to the ambient shrill that supports the visual feast throughout the gallery.

Michael Oatman’s collages are beautiful. His works are so seamlessly crafted that until you’re informed that they are collages, you would assume that they’re magnificently detailed paintings. Cleverly titled works like Pornithology and Zoogiest, give viewers a sense of Oatman’s dark sense of humor and artistic wit. Oatman is creating collages that are scientific, political, and ornamental. The collages, much like his collaborator’s work, reveal our current sensibilities. Oatman would like the viewer to consider those sensibilities as a nation at war, having created works containing arms-obsessed birds clinging to tree branches in utopian landscapes. Oatman is cognizant of the destructive capacity of humans and presents this capacity with ludicrous imagery of creatures, which have been here far longer than humans, participating in activities that we feel compelled to carry out in the name of nationalism.

The esthetics of Oatman’s collages are largely homogenized through the use of elements gathered from publications printed between the 1940s and the 1970s. This gives the collages their pedagogical feel, suitable for The Teaching Gallery, containing images that would otherwise only likely be viewed as reference materials.

This exhibit is beyond impressive, and the accompanying brochure for The Oatman-Lail NewsHour is thoughtfully crafted and seems to have had a generous allocation of resources appropriated for its creation. The Oatman-Lail NewsHour will be exhibited through April 4, 2009 at The Teaching Gallery within Hudson Valley Community College.

Slumdog Millionaire

The title Slumdog Millionaire is beyond conflicting; the two words are incongruous. As true as this is, the story of Jamal, played by both Dev Patel, and younger Ayush Mahesh Khedekar, is really two stories; one begetting the other. The story of the “slumdog” is revealed through Jamal’s recollections while a contestant on a televised trivia game show. Each question invites the viewer to witness more of the main character’s grim life, simultaneously revealing how it is that he is privy to such trivial knowledge.

Once Jamal’s relationships with his brother Salim, and female friend Latika have dissolved completely, through no fault of his own, and he continues to approach success in his pursuit of the game show grand prize of 20 million rupees, the film asks the viewer to consider the value of monetary accolade when measured against the value of companionship. Jamal spends the better part of the film in pursuit of the girl he was once deeply fond of and it’s the hope for reunion, not fame or fortune, that is the prevailing motive prompting him to make efforts to get on the show.

There are several moments in the movie that point to the wisdom and character of the underprivileged Jamal. Perhaps most memorable is his unwillingness to cheat on the game show, despite the efforts of the host to lead him astray. Equally memorable is his respect for women, even as a young boy, when he honors the space of the adolescent Latika as she bathes and clothes herself. Jamal is ultimately reunited with Latika whilst playing the role of quiz kid, winning the rupees, and the film becomes a story of good things happening to good people lest we forget the manner by which Jamal has acquired the knowledge and wisdom, and the horrific life that Latika has endured, which are perhaps requisite, for the purest joy of triumph to be realized.

Uninhabitable: the rationale

This blog, like every other blog, has a name. This one is titled Uninhabitable. It came as a surprise to find that this was still an available URL. I feel that so much of our ambition as propagative mammals is truly short sighted. Furthermore, our appreciation for one another has arguably been displaced by consumerism and the maddening work ethic requisite for the fullest association with this behavior. It seems that much of this pronounced carelessness is rendering increasing amounts of our environment literally uninhabitable. What may be worse is the toll that this aforementioned displacement takes on our mental health. What is the real quality of ones life when it approaches being utterly vapid?

Check, check

I’m crafting things out of thin air which, as an impoverished material, implies so much.