Two large art shows have opened in New York over the last two months and both will continue into the beginning of June. One is the well-known Whitney Biennial 2012 [Biennial] and the other is a unique exhibition with the title, This Side of Paradise [Paradise]. Biennial, although smaller than many of its previous versions, features fifty artists. Paradise, which is on display in a once-grand palazzo on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, features thirty-two artists.
Both shows offer a diversity of media and modes of presentation, from more-or-less straight painting, sculpture and photography to broader-ranging displays of video presentations, site-specific installations, performance and sound.
That said, the differences between the two shows are telling. Paradise has a directness that will appeal to any and all visitors. All its work is accessible and comprehensible on some basic level. Although it has wall plaques on each artist that offer context and help explain specific aspects of the work, these plaques are hardly requisite for the appreciation of the actual artistic creations.
Biennial, as is often the case, is geared for an audience attuned to more conceptual issues of contemporary art, and even as some works provide immediate visual appeal, many others require that wall plaque as a primary and essential step to conveying their message. For one extreme example, as I was looking at the work of one of only two artists on display in a fourth-floor gallery, a very art-savvy couple, having read the wall plaque for the other artist, turned to the guard and inquired where they could find that art.
This incident, to me, is either a condemnation of the installation or of the art itself (and I would say, “both”). One might well ask why a major museum in one of its major shows would install art that is nearly invisible? Admittedly, this gallery required a certain level of darkness because the other art work in it was based on projected slides. Nevertheless, were it not for the wall plaque, very few visitors would even be aware of this art’s existence.
This little encounter caused me to smile and recall a statement by the great French Philosophe, Denis Diderot, who often wrote public letters as a way of reviewing the academic Salons in the mid-18th century. Because the most popular painter of his time was Boucher, whose facility for sensualizing and beautifying most anything with the stroke of a brush knew no bounds, Diderot asked for more, and so wrote: “First of all move me, surprise me, rend my heart; make me tremble, weep, shudder; outrage me; delight my eyes afterwards if you can.”
Two-hundred-fifty years later, our definition of art has expanded significantly; we accept the importance of conceptual art, which subordinates traditional material and aesthetic concerns to abstract concepts and ideas; and the production of the bulk of Biennial art is filtered through a conceptualist lens. And so, as I consider the Biennial and such works as that nearly-invisible one, I am tempted to reverse Diderot’s plea to the artist and say: “First delight my eyes, seduce me with your forms and colors; only then offer me the further delight of hidden meaning, surprising details, emotional release, or socio-political references.”
After all, we attend these exhibitions to look at art; and the more emphasis an artist places on a strong, visual statement, the more accessible the art, and the more we are drawn in and engaged by it. A strong visual statement should be the “hook,” the thing that lures us in for a closer examination.
And so, I offer you the following photographs that I have taken of the art from both of these important exhibitions and invite you to consider how each affects you.
First, however, I need to provide some background for the physical venue of the latter show, the Andrew Freedman Home.
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Bronx, New York, Andrew Freedman Home, Entry Gate; 1125 Grand Concourse. Opened 1924. Designed by Joseph H. Friedlander and Harry Allan Jacobs |
Freedman was an early owner of the New York Giants and also the director of the IRT subway line–the Lexington Avenue line that connects Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx (with an elevated section that also served Queens). The Freedman Home was built in 1924 on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx as a retirement home for those of means who had lost their fortunes (as he once almost did). Each resident lived here, rent free, including free servants, until trust money ran low in the 1960s. After two decades of struggle, it changed ownership, the last of its original residents were moved out, and it became a more traditional residence for the poor for a decade. Today it merely houses a Head Start day care center in its basement.
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Bronx, Andrew Freedman Home, Main Façade; 1125 Grand Concourse |
With the agreement of the building’s new owners, the New York-based arts organization, No Longer Empty, has organized this exhibition and is attempting to breathe new life into this once-grand structure and re-energize the Bronx community of which it is a part. The selected artists also were given the opportunity to salvage papers, furniture, memorabilia and other items of “trash” that could still be found in the abandoned personal living units of the building’s upper floors; and so, many of these found objects have been given new life in several of the art installations of Paradise.
Each of the photographs below is identified by venue and artist. I will attempt to make some functional connection between, or among, selected artworks from each of the shows. Naturally, I am not presenting all the works in either show. Nevertheless, I will offer seven such connections, and then, as time allows, I will conclude with a handful of unconnected images, all worthy of our attention.
Art as Archaeology/Anthropology
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Whitney Biennial, Joanna Malinowska, From the Canyons to the Stars, 2012 |
From the Canyons to the Stars creates a composition from styrofoam and plaster replicas of walrus and mammoth tusks, native to the Arctic region. The composition imitates that of Marcel Duchamp’s Bottle Rack [1914], an industrial item for drying bottles that he termed a “readymade,” in that he simply selected the object and elevated it to the status of art. This readymade (see below) soon became a recognized totem within the art world–a transformation of a manufactured item into art.
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Duchamp, Bottle Rack, 1914 |
Malinowska’s tusks, consciously arranged as if some Inuit totem–maybe even invested with unknown numinous powers–imply an archaeological connection. Both her work and Duchamp’s operate on the level of transformation of the material itself into a form that carries greater meaning.
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This Side of Paradise, Linda Cunningham, Paradise Lost/Regained? Utopia to Survival |
Linda Cunningham’s large installation, Paradise Lost/Regained? Utopia to Survival combines canvas, distressed sheetrock, salvaged windows, photo laser transfers and collaged remnants taken from the early residents of the Andrew Freedman Home to create a ten-foot high, book-like set of pages. In fact, its wings (or “pages”), fabricated of old window frame and sheetrock, draw us inside its various sections; these sections act as chapters of this twenty-foot long “book” and should be read from left to right in order to grasp the chronology of the experience of the Freedman Home residents.
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This Side of Paradise, Linda Cunningham, Paradise Lost/Regained? Utopia to Survival, detail |
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This Side of Paradise, Linda Cunningham, Paradise Lost/Regained? Utopia to Survival, detail |
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This Side of Paradise, Linda Cunningham, Paradise Lost/Regained? Utopia to Survival, detail |
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Whitney Biennial, Kate Levant, Eyenter Integra Intra Impression |
Kate Levant’s Whitney piece is a sculptural installation consisting of wall insulation, building cardboard, and roofing material, all hung from the ceiling with salvaged electrical wiring. Levant rescued this material from a burned down house in inner-city Detroit. She refers to this material as “wrecked, still trying to contend,” and asks us to consider this a sculpture “that suggests the eternal oscillation between life and death.”
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Georges Braque, Guitar [1913] |
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Kasimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition:airplane flying [1915] |
Off the Wall
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This Side of Paradise, Scherezade Garcia, The Formerly Rich, detail: Letter |
And so, honoring this phrase, Garcia takes much of her work off the wall and places it on the ceiling.
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This Side of Paradise, Scherezade Garcia, The Formerly Rich |
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Whitney Biennial, Michael E. Smith, Untitled |
The wall plaque does little to enlighten one about this work, in that it consists of the vagueries (forgive my word play) of “art-speak.” Here is part of what it tells us: Smith “allows the nature of his materials to drive the creation of his art, inviting the finished works to determine their own dynamics and placement in the exhibition space.” Should we, then, blame the works for their placement that makes them so difficult for viewers to locate? And, is there something in the nature of a metal frying pan that yearns to be dropped into the leg of a pair of sweat pants? If this isn’t bad enough, the overarching analysis offered up in this wall plaque is pure art-speak gobbledygook, as it claims that these four objects “seem to have emerged from the charred landscape of a postapocalyptic, science fiction dystopia.” Wow! Wells, Zamyatin, Capek, Bradbury: eat your hearts out! But something always survives an apocalypse besides frying pans and plasticized Hawaiian shirts. Surely, either the rats or the cockroaches would at least have made quick work of the oatmeal covering that ball on the ground!
How did I paraphrase Diderot? “First delight my eyes, seduce me with your forms and colors…”
Activated by Air
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This Side of Paradise, Cheryl Pope, Then and There |
The second room also uses gold paint on one wall to write words that may invoke musical syllables: “titati,” “titato,” and also the Italian word for flower, “fiore.”
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This Side of Paradise, Cheryl Pope, Then and There |
On the opening night of the show, and beginning in this room, a student of improvisational music from the New England Conservatory, Lautaro Mantilla, led a choir of non-music-trained, local Bronx residents in what has been described as a moving collective choral performance. Thus, not only are the ceilings of these rooms activated by the movement of air; so, too, as air passes over vocal cords, these rooms were activated by “the collective meetings of song and movement,” as their wall plaque stated. I wish I had not missed this event.
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Whitney Biennial, Sam Lewitt, Fluid Employment |
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Whitney Biennial, Sam Lewitt, Fluid Employment, detail |
Fabrication as a Tour De Force
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This Side of Paradise, Alejandra Prieto, To Handle |
Three works, two in Paradise and one in Biennial, can be appreciated simply in terms of the virtuosity of their making. Chilean artist Alejandra Prieto’s To Handle look identical to a pair of elegant, black leather gloves. However, they are made out of coal. Moreover, they are not cast from some mixture of powdered or crushed coal and a binder. They are carved out of blocks of coal. Further interpretation is provided by her wall plaque: “The…exploitive conditions involved in coal extraction might be linked in these ‘gloves’ to the sweat-shop labor of garment production, both forms of ‘work’ intended for a consumer whose concern is only comfort and luxury.” This unassuming display is a great piece of sculptural trompe-l’oeil.
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Whitney Biennial, Elaine Reichek, Paint Me A Cavernous Waste Shore, detail |
Elaine Reichek’s Paint Me A Cavernous Waste Shore, is an enormous tapestry. It is a direct copy of Titian’s famous painting for Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara which is now in London’s National Gallery of Art. Her title comes from the first stanzas of TS Eliot’s poem, Sweeney Erect (“Paint me a cavernous waste shore / Cast in the unstilled Cyclades….”). Were it not for the Eliot poem woven in at the bottom of this tapestry, one may well have assumed that a Gobelin tapestry had mistakenly found its way into the museum. Who does such complicated tapestries today, especially at this scale? It is most certainly a tour de force. Reichek, although originally a student of painting, says that she prefers embroidery and tapestry, “media traditionally associated with women.”
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This Side of Paradise, Federico Uribe, Persian Carpet |
Art Defining Space
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This Side of Paradise, THE POINT, Village of Murals |
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Whitney Biennial, Kai Althoff, Untitled |
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Whitney Biennial, Kai Althoff, Untitled, later arrangement |
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This Side of Paradise, Sylvia Plachy, A Sitting Room: Remembering a Week in January, 1980 |
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This Side of Paradise, Sylvia Plachy, A Sitting Room: Remembering a Week in January, 1980 |
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This Side of Paradise, Sylvia Plachy, A Sitting Room: Remembering a Week in January, 1980, detail |
Video/Film
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This Side of Paradise, Bronx Documentary Center, Tim Hetherington, Diary |
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This Side of Paradise, Bronx Documentary Center, Tim Hetherington, Diary |
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Whitney Biennial, Werner Herzog, Hearsay of the Soul |
What was the difference? In Diary, Hetherington looks into himself and his life and exposes what we might deem are fragments of his soul. It is visceral and rational. In Hearsay of the Soul, Herzog looks beyond himself to find an artist and some music that inspire him and possibly have some affinity with his own work. But this is more subjective, and one needs some blind faith to understand why Segers is here at all. Maybe Herzog realized that this installation might have a problem, because here is his comment on it: “If Segers’ images and my films do not speak to each other, but for a brief moment, I hope they might dance with each other.”
Visual Delights
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This Side of Paradise, Adam Parker Smith, I Lost All My Money in the Great Depression and All I Got Was This Room |
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Whitney Biennial, Nick Mauss, Concern, Crush, Desire |
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Whitney Biennial, Nick Mauss, Concern, Crush, Desire, detail |
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This Side of Paradise, DAZE, Furthur |
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This Side of Paradise, HOW and NOSM, Reflections |
Here I end my rather arbitrary attempt to make comparative connections between the two shows; I also won’t make any broad judgements between them. That I’ll gladly leave to you. But I will present several more works from each venue that I consider worthy of examination. Let’s begin with the Whitney Biennial.
Other Art from the Biennial
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Whitney Biennial, John Kelsey, Depesrsion, Impoetnce |
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Whitney Biennial, Dawn Kasper, This Could Be Something If I Let It |
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Whitney Biennial, Nicole Eisenman, Untitled |
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Whitney Biennial, Jutta Koether, The Seasons III and II |
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Whitney Biennial, Tom Thayer, Leonidov’s Steps, The Whelming, et. al. |
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Whitney Biennial, Luther Price, Handmade Slides |
This is what I was watching–the other piece in the room–when that “art-savvy” couple couldn’t find the work of Michael Smith. Luther Price is best known as an experimental filmmaker, but in this room he uses slides that have been buried, scraped, overmarked or otherwise distressed. Many of this series juxtapose images of Christ or Mary with scientific slides of insects, in particular the fly. One can invent compelling and disturbing personal iconographies from this series.
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Whitney Biennial, Lutz Bacher, Pipe Organ |
Other Art from This Side of Paradise
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This Side of Paradise, Lisa Kahane, South Bronx Portrait Studio |
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This Side of Paradise, Martine Fougeron, Trades/Oficios/Métiers |
Photographer Martine Fougeron has exhibited a selection of her project, Trades/Oficios/Métiers in the South Bronx, in which she focuses on the industries of Hunts Point and Port Morris and reveals the dignity of work and “forgotten trades.” Fishmongering, baking, printing, steel production, recycling, its all there as she captures the pride of her subjects, and then mounts each photograph on an industrial baking tray. Her work is particularly vital, not only for the neighborhoods of the Bronx, but also for our country in these times when one of our political parties has been denigrating work and destroying unions. William Morris would be proud of Martine’s noble purpose. So should we all.
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This Side of Paradise, Abigail Larkoz, Strangers May Care More for Your Sentimental Debris |
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This Side of Paradise, Mel Chin, Messages to the President–Straight Off the Streets |
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This Side of Paradise, Nicky Enright, The Ravages |
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This Side of Paradise, John Ahearn, Headstart AM & PM |
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This Side of Paradise, Cheryl Pope, Shove |
Cheryl Pope, who also decorated the two rooms with gold leaf, “shoved” anniversary plates through a sixteen-foot, free-standing wall. The distant, straight-on view resembles an elegant abstraction of birds in flight. Close-up, the “‘take that’ gesture…serves to assault the nostalgia of memory and the token ‘kitsch’ commercial product that passes for meaningful connection.”
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This Side of Paradise, Gian Maria Tosatti, Spazio #05 |
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This Side of Paradise, Justen Ladda, Like Money Like Water |
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This Side of Paradise, Cope2, Painting the wall on opening night |
Interesting essay, Tyko. Thanks for helping me see something so far away. I especially liked the works by Cheryl Pope. It's also great to see Linda making such an interesting and beautiful intallation.
Thanks Tyko, have not had the time yet to see any of these ( seeing the Whitney has not always been a must lately) but your reporting reminded me it would be worthwhile.