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The Ministry of Artistic Affairs hosted its first event of the season last Wednesday evening at the capacious Neubacher Shor Contemporary. Currently on view in the main gallery is new work by the collaborative duo Tibi Tibi Neuspiel and Geoffrey Pugen, made in the aftermath of their gripping Nuit Blanche performance, The Tie-Break. Conceived as a reenactment of what ESPN once called “the most riveting episode in the sport’s history”, Neuspiel and Pugen set out not only to memorize and execute the legendary fourth set tie-break from the 1980 Wimbledon Finals between Björn Borg and John McEnroe, but to do it over and over again, all night long. As anyone who was there that frigid evening last October can attest, their composure and sheer endurance in the face of blistering winds and a few too many drunken hecklers further electrified the atmosphere of tension and suspense, despite the audience’s assumed knowledge of the match’s outcome.
Category: reviews
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“The Tie-Break” pt 2: Tibi Tibi Neuspiel + Geoffrey Pugen at Neubacher Shor Contemporary
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IMHO: Are not Hirst’s spots merely Rorschach inkblots made by robots?
Perhaps it’s who we follow, but our news feed over much of the past week seems to have been Occupied by all things Damien. (Okay there were some bits on SOPA and the Bushwick gallery scene in there as well, but you get the point.) Aside from the sheer bonanza of articles employing spot-related puns in their titles, Gagosian’s worldwide exhibition of Hirst’s paintings has yielded such a polarized response from artists and critics that each new review seems to be a reaction not only to the paintings themselves, but also to the many reviews that have come before. It has made for some unexpectedly fascinating psychological reading, despite our best efforts at studiously avoiding the whole throwdown.
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Art and Drinks and Bettina Hoffmann
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Recently we enjoyed the art and drinks at Art and Drinks, the experimental venue on Dundas West featuring non-narrative video art in a lounge-like setting. Conceived as a hybrid pop-up space by artist John Oswald, Art and Drinks sets itself apart from the usual gallery/café scene by carefully foregrounding the exhibition and visual experience of the art over the comparatively unaesthetic business of eating and drinking. Presented salon style on all four walls (including the plate-glass window fronting on Dundas), video works by a changing roster of artists are displayed in a variety of projected and screen-based formats and sizes. Ambient music serves to modulate the sounds of conversation without detracting from the visual experience, while headphones hanging on the walls invite the viewer into further engagement with individual works. One might expect visual cacophany from such an arrangement, but the effect is surprisingly harmonious and coherent, a testament to the curatorial choices Oswald has made with regard to artworks and placement. -
Please touch the art: Derek Sullivan at The Power Plant and Jane LowBeer at Loop Gallery
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Over the past few weeks we’ve been thinking especially hard about art. So hard, in fact, that recent encounters with art that foregrounds the physical experience have been a hugely welcome relief from all that heady cogitation.The first such encounter got us out of our chairs and walking up stairs as part of Derek Sullivan’s recent Power Plant show, Albatross Omnibus. Comprising three industrial-sized stepladders and 52 print-on-demand artist books suspended from the ceiling, Albatross Omnibus conceptually echoes Yoko Ono’s well-known 1966 installation, Ceiling Painting (YES Painting), whereby viewer initiative and participation is required to experience and complete the performance of the exhibition. However while Albatross has similarly playful, meditative, and uplifting moments, Sullivan’s books collectively embody a much more idiosyncratic and energetic profusion of words, images and ideas rather than a singular (albeit profound) experience. This is not to say that Sullivan’s work is superficial; in fact the many humourous concrete texts and visual koans which make up the body of Albatross belie a deeper love and engagement with the history of reading, print, and the book itself. Steering a ladder through space, ascending the steps, and stretching up to page through each slim volume in turn, one enacts a physical experience of the pre-digital library, wherein books occupy positions, not always easy to reach, in a specific place and time. At a moment when books are rapidly beginning to disappear into the cloud, we are reminded not only of the sheer pleasure of touching and turning a page, but also of the importance of preserving and protecting the printed format as one of the still-unsurpassed achievements of human social, political and cultural expression.
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Actual size: the sculptural drawings of Jannick Deslauriers and Joan Linder
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Jannick Deslauriers’ recent exhibition at Show & Tell Gallery is a study in contrasts. Utilizing the lightest of materials–crinoline, tulle, lace, and organza, she constructs life-sized sculptures of physically and/or politically weighty objects such as a pair of hand grenades, a sewing machine, a typewriter, a tank. Suspended from above, the objects exert a spectral presence on the space, appearing as literal materializations of creative or destructive human impulses. Seen through this lens, an unassuming brick, rendered in terracotta-coloured crinoline and black thread, becomes a symbol of both our collective capacity to build society, and–when taken in hand and thrown through the scapegoat-of-the-moment’s window–to destroy it in turn. -
Art by number: Ken Nicol (and Mel Bochner, and Mary Temple, and Roman Opalka)
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On the tweeted advice of Leah Sandals, we stopped by MKG127 gallery for the last day of Ken Nicol’s show. Aside from an irrational desire for Cy Twombly books and a penchant for Bic four-colour pens, we personally share with Nicol a complete and not unwelcome inability to multitask. Perhaps this explains our delight in his show, titled Hundreds of Things, Volume 1, for which he executes extremely well-crafted permutations of the number 100 in a wide range of seemingly mundane, normally discarded materials. From his gallery’s website: -
Fred Tomaselli at the 2011 Editions/Artists’ Book Fair
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Over a packed four days in New York doing research for a future show, we managed to briefly stop by the Editions/Artists’ Book Fair taking place in Chelsea this past weekend. Occupying two floors of the former Dia building on West 22nd, the fair was intimate, friendly, and filled with surprises, not least of which were the many strong showings by non-New York exhibitors such as Clay Street Press (Cincinnati), Western Editions (Chicago), and High Point Center for Printmaking (Minneapolis). We’ll profile each of these organizations separately in a series of future posts, as well as New York-based standouts Specific Object and Forth Estate. -
Susan Hiller at Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art
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Presented as a wall-sized video projection, Susan Hiller’s The Last Silent Movie is a beautifully simple and deeply moving testimony to the ongoing obliteration of linguistic and cultural diversity in the wake of accelerating industrialization and globalization. Featuring simple white text on a black field accompanying words and phrases being uttered by the last speakers of twenty-five endangered or extinct languages, the video surprises and delights with the remarkable and unfamiliar sounds of languages such as Manx, Jerrais, Livonian, Potowatomi, Yao Kimmien, and Ubykh. -
The Power Plant Refresh inaugural exhibitions, review pt 2: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
continued from The Power Plant Refresh inaugural exhibitions, review pt 1: Thomas Hirschhorn
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Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s video projection and installation, Phantom Truck + Always After, occupy the second main floor space at The Power Plant. Diametrically opposed to the overwhelming visual stimulation of Das Auge (see previous post linked below), Manglano-Ovalle’s work is no less political and confrontational. Through understated, enigmatic sound, video, and installation work, Manglano-Ovalle explores the metaphorical potential of the concept of “climate” as it relates to both meteorological and socio-cultural and political events that characterize our time. For the relaunch, The Power Plant has chosen two key works from Manglano-Ovalle’s oeuvre which focus on the aftermath of destruction. Always After (The Glass House) is a wall-sized projection documenting the sweeping up of shattered glass after Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall, former home to the architecture school at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, was ceremoniously destroyed to make way for renovation in 2005. Extreme close-ups of cracked, crystalline forms being slowly pushed and mounded by the broom are a meditation on the necessity and ritual of restoring order after a destructive event. An atmospheric soundtrack comprising dischordant notes and rumbling sounds interspersed with long intervals of near-silence gives the projection an unsettling, threatening tone, as if a storm has just passed or is brewing. The obliteration of the work of a modernist icon represents a critical shift with resultant underlying instability in the socio-cultural climate of our time.