Performances Under Working Conditions- Walead Besthty

Walead Beshty’s Performances Under Working Conditions documents traces and examines the interactions between humans and mundane objects. Having a concept of “procedure” as an artistic theme and experimenting with it in art have always been my interest, and so did why Beshty’s pieces caught my eyes.

This series use the preexisting design of gallery tables and desktops recreated in copper duplicates to “explore the ways in which objects accrue and produce meanings through their placement and circulation in the world” by allowing gallery staffs to resume their normal everyday work activities on them throughout the summer.  

It is apparent that the copper preserved the staff’s coffee rings, rested palms and elbows, scratches and even what appear to be bare foot prints, all originating from the nexus of the staffs’ day-to-day activities at the desk. These traces eventually “oxidized to mercurial stain” and recorded their movements and time. As such, Beshty offers evidence of the everyday actions performed by the staff—at least those that came into contact with one of the surfaces—which typically remain disconnected from the works hanging on the gallery walls.

However, whether or not this information is interesting in any way is debatable. It is interesting how within this procedure, he highlights- or even embellishes- the mundane into grand ways through the use of highly vibrant copper materials. Yet, what does it mean by recording the traces and time of our daily-procedur in an artificial way, and then discharge them from its original context to hang them on a gallery wall as if they were canvases?

For me, the copper pieces show us alluring marks of “discourse, transaction and negotiation” that become meaningless when taken out of the context of their original environments.  Whether or not this dislocation/ loss of meaning was Beshty’s intention, at least for me, this was where the installation fails: the over-crowded arrangement of these copper desks suffocates the sensual and informative value of both the individual pieces and the series as a whole. Nor did the installation give the impression of ironically referencing the original utilitarian environment. 

Though first drawn into these works with interests, it left me with many critical questions. Yet, all I could say for now is that it was indeed "The Performances Under Working Conditions."

Tomma Abts: Queen of Subtlety

To start off, I am not the biggest fan of abstraction. I'm a figurative artist so the work I'm most attracted to usually involves the human body. However, after further reflection, Tomma Abts' work has always occupied an amusing place within my family tree of artistic influences (amusing because of the comical juxtaposition between her work and the grisly, psychologically dense portraits by my father Lucian Freud).

Abts' work is fascinating, hypnotic. She possesses an ability to create a two dimensional plane that is simultaneously three dimensional. Her surfaces are painted with extreme precision; every stroke is blended as if it was an entity in itself.

Her arduous (obsessive?) technique works for her style. I've read before that from initial planning to completion, one 15" x 19" painting can take her years. This level of care and detail when applied to abstraction is so refreshing to me, especially considering art such as this:

(Fredrik Vaerslev @ Andrew Kreps Gallery. I'm sorry but I think the entire class was out the door after less than a minute)

I found most of Tomma's finished paintings at David Zwirner to be fantastic. All praise for her work aside, I couldn't help but feel a sense of de ja vu. Nothing about her "New Works" felt new to me. If you asked me to compare a painting from this exhibition with a painting from her 2006 series that garnered a Turner Prize, I wouldn't note a huge difference. Abts has found a model of painting that works for her and likes to safely stay in her own shadow, even maintaining the same canvas size.

This turns me off. I love seeing artists evolve, transform, maybe even deconstruct their own style.

I kind of wish I saw the performance at Gladstone Gallery

Whatever I write here cannot be a fair critique on Allora and Calzadilla’s Fault Lines at Gladstone Gallery, for we did not see all the elements with which the artist wanted to fill the space. However, Gladstone released a statement proudly presenting the overall objective below:

“Fault Lines will explore the overlapping mechanics of polyphonic vocal texturing, geological and sculptural displacements, and adversarial rhetorical language in a new performance-based work, featuring an original composition by Guarionex Morales-Matos.”

Playing on the title Fault Lines, Allora and Calzadilla features performances where old-fashioned insults are sung by two boy trebles in a “verbal duel.” As Gladstone says, apparently the (beautiful) “voice escapes the letter, allowing the musical texture to take precedent over the word’s intelligibility.” But I felt more compelled to write about this because I read a Jerry Saltz article on Vulture slamming the show:

“Fault Lines consists of ten large stone 'sculptures,' all arranged tastefully about the spacious gallery," he writes. "In actuality, they’re just unnecessarily heavy steps quarried, polished, moved to, and installed in the gallery at who knows what expense.”

I don’t know much about the work Saltz sees the married-artist duo having plagiarized, but it took me five minutes to go around the gallery and see “geological and sculptural displacements,” and I left feeling not much. The ten stone sculptures were two-level choral risers that seem to have been informed by some minimalist aesthetic tips. The surfaces of the two steps made of “pretty marbled stones” were at times clean cut like glass, some corners left ragged. The careful walkthrough of the gallery left me feeling quite silly, after seeing pictures of little boys walking, climbing, singing on them. I probably wouldn't (and shouldn’t) have gone on the risers anyway, but that barricade—the one that beeps “don’t touch, it’s art”—rings as practical solutions to damage but also a psychological elevation of value.

Would these sculptures stand alone as art worthy of being in a gallery space without the performance component? I’m not really sure, but as much as they were pretty objects that could definitely serve other functions, such as a platform to showcase one’s family picture frames in a two-story penthouse in West Village. How does one sell the object alongside performance art? Will Gladstone sell these risers? Is the cost of the performance simply embedded in the material cost + alpha? Jerry Saltz’s critique serves as a cathartic release, a working bullshit detector in the art world:

“Fault Lines is simply the kind of atria art that goes down easy, making unsuspecting crowds think they’re in the presence of deep thought. A performance with a celebrity sleeping in a box, an artist staring at audience members, and the like. All this work does is momentarily entertain. It is utterly unoriginal, devoid of personal thought, bathed in bathos, subtly sensationalistic, and very windbaggy.”

I had more fun reading his review than being in that space. Maybe it would have been better with the performers, but I absolutely appreciate his mere deflation of objects that occupy spaces with an aura of significance, entitlement and pseudo-intellectualism.

Find Saltz’s article here: Allora and Calzadilla’s Fault Lines Borders on Plagiarism

http://www.vulture.com/2014/09/art-review-fault-lines-borders-on-plagiarism.html

Marcel Dzama's Une Danse des Bouffons

Marcel Dzama’s Une Danse des Bouffons was perhaps the most immediately impactful gallery exhibition our Eye and the Idea class visited during our time in Chelsea. Rather than uniting his work through medium or technique, Dzama’s mixed media work in this show used a focus on color to create demanding rooms, one warm and one cool. The configuration of the red and blue galleries, which mirrored each other for the most part, but with minor changes, very effective carried across the dichotomy. More than the immediate impact that such heavy use of one color has, the works seemed more dynamic because they were arranged in environments.

A bit of the environment created by Dzama's use of color

Among all the galleries we visited, this seemed like one of the more complete attempts to use space in a meaningful way. Fredrik Værslev’s a Shore Thing series, mirrored the simple gallery space it was placed in with bleeding lines of paint and canvases as rough as the floor. Dzama’s work did not have his direct relationship with the architecture, but instead created cohesive rooms. According to the Press Release on Dzama’s work, the red and blue theme is inspired by the Nigerian God Edshu, “recognizable by his hat that was colored red on one side and blue on the other”(Press Release Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner Gallery).  The spaces, and in particular the red space, appeared as full rooms, a sense amplified by Dzama’s tendency to create collages and textured 3 dimensional work. In filling the spaces with texture and narratives, but limiting the colors used, Dzama created what I viewed as a very satisfying set of experiences. The use of color unites Dzama’s concepts with the execution, and mitigates the feeling of chaos that can arise in mixed media work without a uniting characteristic. The monochromatic nature of the rooms also heightens the surreal feeling of each space, adding a sense of order that can be satisfying but also disquieting in conjunction with so many disparate elements.

Fredrik Værslev's A Shore Thing mirrors the space it is placed in, or vice versa

Unfortunately, the center room between the two almost identical set ups was never clearly explained, and felt as if it belonged to a different concept or show. The slightly obsolete televisions stacked on top of one another, all playing videos of some alien choreography performed by people in polka-dotted spandex, felt very much like a parody of “art.” This parody could have been self- aware, but its unity with the video work in the other rooms gives the impression that Dzama’s use of these stacked televisions was meant without irony. There is no discernible spin on what at this point reads to me as a trope that has appeared in everything from television to music videos. On the other hand, this relatively neutral room did serve as an effective transition between the red and blue rooms, and mirrored the focus on chess through both the black and white costumes and the square arrangement of the televisions.

The stacked televisions serve as a transition, but also a cliche.

            The longer video work on display in this gallery did effectively mimic an early silent film style, and helped create different atmospheres for the red and blue rooms thanks to the difference in lead stress between the two rooms. This type of repetition with slight variation was visible all over Dzama’s rooms, and helped convey to me the surreal nature of his pieces, by subverting expectations. I also enjoyed seeing the costumes in each room. This detail provided some insight into the making of the work. The fact that these large, grotesque costumes stood as sentries behind each door, while clearly intended to startle the viewer, also served the deeper purpose of creating an uneasiness that carried over into the videos.

            Primarily, I found Dzama’s work engaging. Where other work we saw appealed to me more aesthetically, Dzama’s work demanded participation and reactions from the viewer.  His video narrative, large cast of characters on the walls and in dioramas, and interaction with artists of the past created an environment that required attention in a more complete way.

-Izzy Kapur

Chelsea Gallery Prompt

I don't want to be that person that goes off on a potentially unrelated tangent, but I'm going to do it anyway-- try to see it as me thinking outside the box.

The only art exhibitions that I'd ever visited were at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the LeRoy Neiman Gallery at Columbia which is pretty pathetic considering I'm a visual arts major, but in my defense, having everything just a click away makes it easy to forget to go out and see the art in person and up close. Regardless, this past Thursday was my first time going on a gallery tour in Chelsea (and in general for that matter). 

We began our gallery walk at the Petzel Gallery. The first piece that I noticed was a sculpture by Walead Beshty titled Performances Under Working Conditions.

Walead Beshty

Performances Under Working Conditions

Installation view 20

2014

The press release states that Beshty "continues to explore the ways in which objects accrue and produce meaning through their placement and circulation in the world" (Petzel). Originally, these "Copper Surrogates" were tables and desks that gallery staff utilized in their normal everyday work activities. The marks on the polished copper table tops are indexes of the gallery staff's presence through traces of oil from their arms, hands and fingers or rings of condensation from beverages once consumed.

Walead Beshty

Detail from Reception 2

2014

polished copper table top and powder-coated steel

31 x 81.875 x 1.5 inches

Now, straying from the exhibit itself but hopefully still staying somewhat relevant, there were three free, white gallery benches near "541 W 22nd St" (according to what I scribbled down on one of the press releases)--three very simple white benches with a sign made out of notebook paper that labeled them as "FREE" were out on the sidewalk. Being not only artists, but college students as well, a few of my classmates along with myself thought to remove the sign and place them up against a gallery wall so that they would blend in with the scene and not be taken by other wandering artists looking to furnish their studios.

When I returned to the location to retrieve one of the benches, there were people sitting on them. They talked to each other, checked their cell phones-- someone even forgot a scarf on one of the benches. I felt as if I had just set up an impromptu, site-specific performance piece. The perceived status of the benches shifted from a discarded object to public seating just by a slight shift in presentation.

The same happened to these readymade copper table tops, but in this case, they went from an everyday commodity to a piece of art as a result of the artist's authority and their presentation in a gallery. Maybe if I was famous those benches would have turned into a work of art...

Courtland Thomas – Chelsea Gallery Walk Thru (9/18)

Can we talk about the huge vagina at the David Zwirner’s gallery?

Marcel Dzama’s Une Danse des Bouffons (A Jester’s Dance) left me stunned, shocked, and strangely subjective. The artist’s “Dadaist love story” stole my attention from what I had originally aspired to write about (Dzama’s Death Disco Dance, the television sets broadcasting a dance series in the middle of Guadalajara, Mexico on repeat).

After walking into Dzama’s installation, I was instantaneously transported into the modern recreation of Étant donnés’s romantic affair. Inside, mattresses with pillows invite guests to relax their bodies (and mind), in order to focus entirely on the film. The seats, built on foam material, aren’t exactly proper seating… however, I feel they somehow emphasize the architectural artistry within the film – sharp angles in the form of knives, a cutting-edge plot. The foam square compress when I sit down, making me fear sinkage, but also allow me to sink into the love story on-screen.

Within minutes into the film, I began to wonder what exactly constituted this as art. Une Danse was not far off from any of the videos my Computer Science friend makes – seemingly other-worldly, foreign, and not entirely straightforward about its purpose or mission (there’s a wonderment of… ‘what… IS this?’ throughout the entire film that keeps the viewers captivated). The main distinction between the films produced by Dzama and my Comp Sci friend were production levels; my friend doesn’t have access to Kim Kordan and Hannelore Knuts. Or weird papier-mâché vaginas.

In raising the question “what is art?,” Dzama’s installation can be considered an institutional critique. But is that an effect of contemporary art? The expansion of art types and mediums in the twenty-first century, due in part to the Information Revolution powered by microprocessors, has invited an open critique of what is included in contemporary art. Because definitions are relative to what the entities they define are not, perhaps a bigger question is to ask is... what is not art.  

NAME CHANGE

Our amazing seminar recently changed its name to "Seminar in Contemporary Artistic Practice"... but we're the same class, looking, reading, traveling, talking and practicing...