Press Release
We Can Do It
Group Exhibition
January – May 20th, 2005
One of the most dramatic shifts within the ‘art system’
during the post-war era is arguably the breaking up of genres.
Since the emergence of visual aesthetics during the classical
period – whether formally based, as by Aristotle, or
founded on materials, as in Pliny’s Naturalis Historia
– the genre system has been as set in stone as the very
entry to the Acropolis in Athens suggests: A pinakotheke to
the left, and a glyptotheke to the right.
During the evolution of the visual arts – and a corresponding
critique – every question on what art is (or should
be), every bitter feud between ancients and moderns, as well
as the emergence of a multitude of different and mutually
contradictory ‘-isms’, have taken place against
the backdrop that genres have a substantial reality in and
by themselves. Not even the theories of Marcel Duchamp, the
revolutionary practices of Italian and Russian futurists,
or vanguard experiments with new artistic techniques, such
as collages, could do but very little to challenge a grid
that so comprehensively organized what could be said and done
in the field of art. And the consequences went further than
that: The laws of genre influenced the curricula of the art
academies, the architecture of museums and exhibition halls,
and the very way money changed hands on the art market.
All that started to come crumbling down a couple of years
after the Second World War, and coincided, in a more than
symbolic way, with the manifestation of the U.S. (or rather
New York) as the new epicenter of aesthetic development. A
few key elements in this sea change deserve to be noted. There
is the emergence of the Fluxus movement, of happenings and
Aktionen, where art is viewed as a social activity –
a performance, limited in space and time, and fundamentally
impossible to reproduce. The focus upon art as an ‘irreproducible’
experience could also be found in the views of more ‘traditional’
artists such as Robert Morris. In his “Notes on Sculpture”
(1966) he launched a convincing standpoint that the work is
nothing in and by itself – it appears as the result
of the presence of the viewer in an absolute hic et nunc,
thereby limiting the role of a specific genre as normative
for the experience of the artwork. And in Minimalism we find
an aesthetic where – in Donald Judd’s words –
the ‘specificity of the object,’ regardless of
being a painting, a sculpture, or something completely different,
constitutes its quality of being a work of art. Other events
were soon to follow.
If the artwork consists in its specific insistence in a field
of experience, then there is no need to be fuzzy with traditional
materials. Many artists started to work with pre-fabricated
industrial materials, just as Dan Flavin, for instance, and
his emblematic light tubes. This tendency gave rise to an
erosion of the importance of ‘craftsmanship’ –
the umbilical cord binding art to genre – which was
only further emphasized by phenomena such as Pop art, where
objects and imagery from a lowbrow popular culture could be
re-cast in a completely new context. The very epitome of this
‘trans-generic’ shift within the visual arts was
perhaps the appearance of installations: the anti-genre par
excellence. The installation can amorphously incorporate an
unlimited variation of material; it lends itself in a protean
fashion to whatever aim the artist may have.
We are today living in a world where the genre-system has
lost its normative grip over aesthetics. But that does not
necessarily mean that genres have disappeared altogether.
During the sixties some critics, such as Clement Greenberg
and Michael Fried, feared that the challenge of the laws of
genre would ultimately lead to the disappearance of art as
such. That has not been the case. Art is still there, and
genres still have their meaning – but now as an aesthetic
tool or a practice on par with all the others. What is demanded
today from artists working in the fields of sculpture, painting,
drawing, etc. is a sensibility unbeknown to earlier generations
of colleagues. It is a sensibility that must be aware of recent
developments in order to generate meaningful works of art.
Works that can be technically brilliant without collapsing
into academicism, confer an idea without yielding to an oblique
imagery or cheap bombasms, and last, but not least, partake
in a contemporary aesthetic dialogue, without becoming trapped
in an ideological cul-de-sac.
This is what the eight artists present at the show have in
common. There is no other external factor that binds them
together. They all represent different nationalities, genders,
generations and practices. What they do share is a contemporary
approach to genres: Intelligent, innovating, and thought provoking.
With different attitudes vis-à-vis concepts, materials
and techniques they show us which aesthetic strategies, relative
to genres, are possible to uphold in today’s complex
and ever-changing visual landscape.
We can take the German artist Stephan Balkenhol as an example.
His Untitled suggests a relation to a Northern European tradition
of woodcarving that goes back to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
But at the same time his works are devoid of any reference
to a classical ideal of beauty or those heroic poses that
are so well known to us from the history of monumental sculpture.
Balkenhol’s aim is rather to find a position of ‘extreme
neutrality’ – emphasized by the everyday qualities
and deadpan expression of his figures. His works could perhaps
be seen as ‘odes to the common man,’ where unremarkable
and nondescript individuals are placed on the same pedestals
we normally reserve for kings and warriors, if not for the
fact that every form of symbolic or allegorical reading has
been thoroughly exorcised from his art.
In Balkenhol’s sculptures we see the workings of chisels
and hammers. The method of sculpting figures, leaving the
untreated wood as a sort of base, makes his art forever bound
to its material context. It is a way to be honest towards
the viewer: By revealing the tools and processes by which
a work of art is made, he succeeds in liberating a genre from
an all too charged tradition, and gives it a new and absolutely
original direction.
In the field of painting, the Californian artist Kristin Calabrese
represents yet another strategy. She works in a large, overwhelming
format and with a distinct imagery, where political, as well
as emotionally charged themes seem to work together without
generating contradictions. In her monumental canvas, The Price
of Oil (2004), we see young men and women, piling up as if
they were framing the big void visible in the middle. But
what do we actually see here? Is this a throwback into a political
art from the sixties? Do the human bodies, stacked like objects
on a shelf, represent the co modification of men and women
within an oil dependent capitalist society? If this was the
only thing this work had to confer it could certainly be described
as a nostalgic echo. But with wit and playfulness Calabrese
points to another, more constructive reading of her work:
The status of formalism within the history of painting.
Calabrese uses a dual strategy in order to address this question.
Here we see abstraction mediated through illusionistically
painted objects, executed in a way that both deny and confirm
the flatness of the picture plane. Calabrese formalizes concrete
imagery fetched from mundane, everyday life in an abstract
fashion, in order to make a comment on painting as such. The
price of oil does not necessarily refer to global capitalism,
but rather to the costs of upholding a genre so often declared
dead, but still very much alive and kicking.
The German artist Torben Giehler belongs to a new generation
of artists that fuse different techniques, such as digital
media and traditional painting. His works often start as freehand
drawings in color that are digitally photographed and downloaded
into a computer. Using Photoshop software, he breaks down
the images and reassembles them again into models for acrylic
paintings, often executed in a large format.
We are surrounded by digital imagery. We see it in movies
and video games. Armies, corporations and scientists are using
it, and ordinary citizens rely on it at home and at work.
Information technology has also made us more aware of how
images are generated and of the possibility to alter a visual
object. In today’s world, no one would ever dream of
saying that a camera never lies. But this visual explosion
has up until now had rather meager effects when it comes to
visual arts. Computer generated imagery has been blocked by
an urge to imitate ‘reality’. Fantastic constructions
of imagined pasts or futures, leads to an obsessive focus
on realism and faithfully reproduced objects. In this perspective
Giehler’s abstract landscapes are a proof that digital
media finally has matured. Giehler’s exuberant colors
and expansive quasi-geometric forms project an environment
that is truly virtual. The viewer will identify certain parameters
such as mathematical composition principles, and a rhythmic
– almost architectural – proportionality of lines
and surfaces that is further emphasized by the dynamic use
of color. In his works he succeeds in generating a world that
intertwines and transcends physical nature, technology, as
well as our own innermost psychological mindscapes.
The British sculptor Antony Gormley has worked with the human
body as his artistic point of departure for many years. The
emphasis has often been on the intricate relation between
the existential experience of having a body, on one hand;
and the phenomenological experience of a body occupying a
certain physical space, on the other. In spite of the prominent
role played by the human body within the history of art, it
is rather the philosophical implications that are featured
in his sculptures. True to this aim, his main object has always
been his own body. Many of his earlier works are characterized
by representations of fundamental physical properties; such
as the extension and location of a body in space. Since certain
primordial categories, such as up and down, front and back,
etc, are necessary for our experience of spatial qualities,
he often places his works in unexpected positions, such as
hanging from the ceiling or mounted on the wall, as if defying
the forces of nature, as well as our mental capacity to understand.
In recent years Gormley has somewhat broadened his aesthetic
scope. Many of his latest works do not focus on the phenomenological,
as much as the perceptual aspects of the body. The question
is not how a body ‘takes place’ in an outer physical
space, but rather in the inner space of the viewer. His Sublimate
II (2004) is instructive in that regard. The body has been
broken up, deconstructed into a system of rectilinear solid
steel blocks in various sizes. What we see is a representation
of a representation where the viewer has to recompose the
shape in his own mind in order to make it appear as an image.
There are obvious parallels to how a computer breaks down
an image into pixels, or even to Gestaltenpsychologie, but
Gormley’s sculptures have wider implications than so:
His works do not only perform an analysis of the gaze of the
beholder; they also reveal what qualities are demanded from
an object in order to appear as a work of art.
The American artist Peter Halley has for many years painted
abstract works that can be seen as inspired by the angular
and strict geometry of Benthamian prison cells or modern day
computer chips. His paintings have a direct and striking visual
impact on the viewer through their scale, color and relentless
consistency. Even if it is tempting to place Halley in a tradition
represented by Mondrian and Newman, one must keep in mind
that his works are not simply ‘abstractions,’
since geometry in itself is seen as a metaphor for society.
Cell units, linked by linear trajectories, represent the rhythm
of contemporary social existence and the workings of the capitalist
economy – constantly swinging between isolation and
hyper-connectivity; urban alienation and high-octane activity.
His two works, Collacation (2004) and Six Prisons in Color
(2004) are in this respect vintage Halley, where simple diagrammatic
structures can be seen as a way to dramatize a political and
social arena dominated by media, technology and consumer culture.
Both Minimalism and Pop art has served as important and clearly
visible sources of inspiration in Halley’s work, but
he has nothing of the formers dogmatic tendencies or the latter’s
weakness of over-emphasizing the iconography of contemporary
culture. Halley works in a non-programmatic and often intuitive
way that injects his art with vitality and a surprising emotional
streak.
The American artist Tony Matelli creates hand painted hyperrealist
sculptures from silicone, resins and human hair that often
are as hilariously funny as they are deeply worrying. To enter
an exhibition by Matelli is to enter a world where the codes
that regulate our normal social behavior have been suspended,
and where new and unknown rules have been brought into play.
His works appear as if they where fetched from a dream, where
desires, fears and unrelated appearances are colluded in a
sometimes horrifying, sometimes liberating sense of incomprehensibility.
“Ideal Woman (1998-1999) embodies an ambitious risk-socially,
emotionally, intellectually and aesthetically. Reclaiming
a cartoon half-remembered from an old Hustler, which crudely
sketched the “perfect woman” as self-serve sex
machine, the piece revels in comedic grotesquery. The ideal
imagined by this particular macho reduction, rendered uncomfortably
“real” in three dimensions, is 4-foot tall and
flat-headed. Naked but for black panties, she stands on a
square of cheap carpet amid empty beer bottles and cigarette
butts. Her toothless smile curves serenely toward meaningfully
oversized ears.
Cast in silicone rubber, the figure’s freckled skin
has a touchable fleshiness. Its opalescent green eyes, framed
by fine lashes and brows, shine with life-like appeal. The
piece is enlivened by rasping contradiction: delicate craftsmanship
(and the kind of attention to detail one could only describe
as loving), jars against the crude affront of the image it
realizes. A subtle contrapposto, at odds with the awkward
distortion of lumpen proportions, resonates directly against
classical idealizations of the nude female form. Yet, beckoning
warmly, arms outstretched in a gesture that subtly invokes
religious iconography, the figure is imbued with grace. Disturbing
and inscrutable, simultaneously compelling and repellent,
it is profoundly eerie to be around” (Fischman)
In Fuck’d (2004) we meet a chimpanzee in distress. A
dismembered monkey is seen stumbling across the gallery floor,
pierced by a multitude of tools and weapons fetched from every
epoch of history. The apparent allusion goes to Kubrick’s
film 2001 – A Space Odyssey (1969), where a pre-historic
monkey discovers the first tool by using a bone from a dead
animal as a weapon, and by taking control over his troop he
unconsciously invents civilization. In Fuck’d civilization
has turned against its own inventor. In Matelli’s personal
and subjective universe there is always room for unintended
consequences, but also for a generous understanding of the
bewildering condition of being human. He once said about his
figures: “They are bewildered because I am bewildered.
I feel this is a contemporary state of being.”
Vik Muniz began as a sculptor in his native São Paolo,
Brazil, but became gradually interested in the photography.
A central feature in his works is an interest in art history,
which surfaces throughout his production. Muniz has also become
famous for a certain kind of ‘material promiscuity.’
As a preparation for his photographs he creates sculptures
or paintings in materials as diverse as chocolate, sugar,
dirt, dust, or cotton. These ‘low-tech illusions,’
as he calls them, are then photographed and often destroyed
afterwards. His method of composition is apparent in Don Quixote
in His Study, After William Lake Price (2004), based on one
of the illustrations to the English edition of Cervantes’
literary masterpiece. When closer scrutinized the photograph
reveals its constituent parts of heterogeneous objects. Here
Muniz excels in what has become something of his trademark:
A capacity to distort, as well as sharpen the viewer’s
perception of an image.
Muniz belongs to a generation of artists who have pushed the
conceptual tradition a step further. The visual icons of today
do not exclusively belong to religion or art, but may originate
in a context of commercial or political marketing as well
– as is obvious in Muniz’s Rosie, the Riveter
(2004), based on the famous U.S. propaganda poster from the
Second World War (whose aim was to urge women to take up position
in heavy industry). With his combination of humor and critical
approach, iconolatry and iconoclasm, Muniz challenges aesthetic
convention, good taste, and highbrow culture; as in his two
‘still lives,’ Nasurtiums, After Fantin Latour
(2004) and Water Lilies, After Monet (2004), where he proves
that artworks are as much elements in a cultural code of communication,
as an object for aesthetic contemplation.
One of the Tony Oursler’s aims has been to penetrate
the impact of contemporary television culture upon the modern
day psyche. In many of his video works he present us with
characters that seem to be forever trapped in a semi-parasitic/semi-symbiotic
relationship with technology, and whose last line of defense,
in order to retain at least one bit of authentic subjectivity,
appears to be a retreat into a psychotic state of mind. Oursler
has a large and varied production, where the depth of his
conception is thoroughly matched by technical brilliance.
His works cover a wide range of expressions, from intimate
video sculptures, to expansive site-specific installations.
His works expresses a ‘trans-generic’ modus operandi,
where sculpture, video, as well as performative elements blend
into one another.
In a work such as Star (2003) we find surprising attributes
of classical sculpture, although realized in a truly innovative
fashion. During the last hundred years, sculpture has gradually
drifted away from its monumental origin. Overt allegorical
and narrative elements have disappeared together with the
plinth. A war memorial today would hardly display heraldic
emblems and heroic warriors cast in bronze, it would rather
use as un-symbolical means of expression as possible, perhaps
fetched from Minimalism. Oursler breaks free from this modern-day
‘muteness’ by challenging aesthetic conventions
and stylistic dicta. Through the use of technology, such as
video projections on volumes, he reinvents plasticity and
re-conquers the function of narrative on behalf of sculpture;
and by injecting an element of performance he admits the genre
to be evermore itself and fulfill its inherent potentialities.
-Erik van der Heeg
Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Inc.
Iljinka Street 3/8 bld. 5
Moscow, Russia 109012
Tel: (+7 095) 101-21-02 Fax: (+7 095) 101-21-04
e-mail: info@tatintsian.com
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