Luxury is a misery that loves company - Suzanne Heintz at Joanne Artman Gallery

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Almost all of the research on human ‘mate selection’ deals with those factors which ensure attraction by making one person feel good or pleasant about or to another person. You might, however, question the premise that our choice of a partner involves avoiding anything that might clash with our politics, lifestyle, personality, appearance and ethnicity. You might also question the over-arching assumption of this research, which seems to show that women tend to be primarily attracted to men based on their status while men tend to be primarily attracted to women based on their physical appearance. 

What the research fails to even investigate, however, are the social pressures involved in compelling many folks to partner up in the first place. Suzanne Heintz is a conceptual photographer who has regularly done work investigating and impugning social norms and, in her latest series of photos at JoAnne Artman’s Chelsea location, Heintz looks at the social pressures to cave into the expectations that others set for us in regard to marriage and starting a family.

Apparently in regard to constant badgering from her friends as to when she was going to get married, Heintz created her own ideal mannequin mate and child who co-star with her in numerous photos demonstrating to the world that Heintz is, indeed, married, with a child, and absolutely positively as happy as a woman can be now that she has bought into this well-trodden lifestyle. Her husband is the WASPily handsome Chauncey and the daughter is Mary Margaret (a name potentially a little too Catholic, but a woman has a right to take some risks, I suppose – interestingly, the name Chauncey is of Norman origin and became a male ‘given’ name in the US in honor of Charles Chauncey, an early president of Harvard).

So Heintz focuses on action taken not to derive any sense of meaningful gratification, but action taken to avoid ridicule and to place oneself beyond the reproach of others. You do something to avoid the stick and not get the carrot. Or, if there is joy, it is a joy from doing what has already been done and feeling pleasure that one can now say he/she did it. In this type of marriage and family the husband and child are there to serve a psychological function. They are, basically, actors recruited or molded to ensure that a person is not subjected to social scorn and attack. All three family members form one conforming unit to ensure a happy, family comfort which is not real comfort, but an avoidance of contempt that approximates and mocks true comfort and serenity. 

The partner in these photos is not defined by his amazing inner qualities, but by his ability to adapt on a visual level to an environment of affluent expectations. (And people wondered how an uneducated nobody from Germany could come to New York City a few years ago, call himself Clark Rockefeller, wear all the right clothes, use all the right idioms and marry into money while traversing the highest social circles.)

In fact, it’s not so much the marital status that is highlighted here in these photos as much as the overall upper-middle class lifestyle. It is as if a person would be insane to live unmarried and to do something that does not provide the lifestyle in the photos of travel, expensive housing, brand-name clothing etc. 

The rub, of course, is that nobody who chooses this type of life of luxury ever develops truly original or transformative ideas or lives life to its most profound level. It is basically a life exhibiting a type of cowardice toward life, where safety is the premium and those who show real courage and a sense of adventure are considered pariahs because they point to the cowardice behind affluence. ‘Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris’ (from Marlowe’s Faustus) is usually translated as “Misery loves company.” Actually it means something like, “Unhappy folks derive happiness from folks being just as unhappy”.  These photos might warrant a slight alteration of the translation to “Luxury is a misery that loves company.”

Freedom from Meaning - Sopheap Pich at Tyler Rollins Fine Art

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As Sopheap Pich explained to a group of art students from his alma mater (Massachusetts/Amherst) a couple years ago, the last thing on his mind is infusing his work with any sense of meaning. In lieu of conveying or expressing something, Pich creates with a sense of freedom, absorbed in a process he finds fulfilling, using materials from his native Cambodia he is attracted to. This approach, in fact, forces the viewer of Pich’s pieces to examine the legitimacy of his/her own expectations, in general, for an artist, as well as the artist’s work.

Pich was born in Cambodia in 1971, the year after Nixon and Kissinger’s ‘sideshow’ bombing and invasion of that country (during the Vietnam War), which lead to civil war and the ultimate triumph of the Khmer Rouge. After Vietnam defeated the horrifically cruel Khmer Rouge government in a two-week-long war in 1978/79, and occupied Cambodia, Pich’s family was able to make its way as refugees to the US and relocated in Amherst, Massachusetts. After receiving degrees from Massachusetts and the Art Institute of Chicago, Pich (who had always missed the country he had known as a child) chose to return to Cambodia in the early 2000s, almost immediately after another Cambodian civil war, and has maintained his studio there since that time.

Pich primarily uses rattan and bamboo in his sculpture. As a child he was taught how to make grid-patterned fish traps by his father out of bamboo and, like bamboo, rattan is easily accessible throughout the country and has been used in Cambodia for ages. He ultimately returned to using these materials, however, by chance. For a gallery show in the early 2000s, he had bought easily obtainable rattan to create the structure of a pair of lungs he was going to cover with empty cigarette wrappers he had collected for this purpose (he had been smoking heavily at this point in his life). When someone involved in the show saw, however, the bare rattan sculpture, he encouraged Pich to forego the easy social commentary involved in plastering it with the empty cigarette packs and to just go with the grid-patterned or structured rattan lungs – which made quite an impact on viewers of the show.

Before turning to art Pich had, in fact, been a pre-med major and liked the shapes of the non-expressive, ‘anonymous’ internal organs of the human body and began to continue in this direction with his sculpture. Indeed, the direction that Pich has been going with his art seems to be highly intuitive and based on what he likes and what feels good to him. He began working with different types of soils, for instance, because he liked the smell. He relishes spending hours at a time wrapping wire around bamboo and rattan to create his sculptures (which have evolved from organic, biomorphic forms to, essentially, flatter grids) – the process of work seems to be soothing and almost therapeutic to him. At a talk at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where his work was featured recently, he said the hours of work he pours into a piece allows an ‘…escape from the horrible nonsense around me’. 

 At Massachusetts he jokingly said: “I want to make work that I don’t have to explain.” He does not approach a work with a fixed meaning and, in fact, works to take meaning out of his art, yet he realizes that his pieces do communicate to others and that the work itself will often tell what it means. Pich states that, more than anything, he seeks freedom in the artistic process, allowing the work to sometimes lead him, trusting in the accidental and unexpected. He is not in total control but he is connected and often brought to another level of understanding.

 Knowing that the artist is not putting meaning into his work has an effect, of course, on how we approach his work. It makes us keenly aware of the interpretive process we continually bring with us to galleries and museums. We realize more precisely what we believe ‘meaning’ is or can be in a piece of art and we have to wonder whether this is sufficient or truly meaningful. It’s a new twist on what Duchamp and Cage were doing, I’m guessing, with ready-mades and chance-operations pieces. In both cases Duchamp and Cage were saying we can derive a ‘symbolic’ interpretation from almost anything and we seem to love doing this - put a snow shovel in an art gallery and it’s no longer a snow shovel, it’s now an analog or metaphor for something inside us. 

So Pich puts no meaning into pieces, he just surrenders to the process of creation, but we come in looking for a meaning. We then begin to sense the inherent limitations of art along with its benefits. To what extent is art merely a form of (relatively empty) cognition and to what extent does it or can it reach emotion, motivation, or become truly transformative? Before we begin to engage any of Pich’s pieces, we have to question the process of engagement itself, and this allows for a more transparent understanding of any meaning in the pieces along with the value of that meaning.

Pich readily admits that the material he uses is already infused with meaning – and at the Met he seemed to admit that given Cambodia’s tragic history many will, perforce, respond emotionally to his pieces based on the horrors they are of aware of in recent Cambodian history.  Another level of meaning involves the fact that we have a guy who went from using bamboo as a child to make ‘useful’ and effective fish traps, who then came to America and was introduced to modern and contemporary art, and who now uses, basically, the technique he learned from his father to make ‘useless’ (as Duchamp would define the ‘useless’ as a necessary part of an artistic piece) grids. This would seem to mirror, in microcosm, the move from the useful to useless that provides the essence of Western art, only Pich has removed meaning from this move.

If we look for conventional or personal meaning in the pieces at this show at Tyler Rollins Gallery, the big question would seem to be what a bamboo grid would represent (although there are pieces that are not grids and some of the grids are double and separated by burlap and encaustic etc.). To me a grid is an attempt at an objective point of reference through which one can track movement or compare movement. It is an artificial construction or tool to discern difference or change. It is also a restrictive structure constructed by following the same rule repetitively.  

So I enjoyed thinking of Pich’s grid-pieces at Rollins as analogs for my inner reality, that call to light my internal cognitive ‘constructions’ employed to track emotional responses to the world and others and to maybe chart potential new and more humane responses. By doubling the grids, and separating them by burlap from rice sacks, this could reference quantum type jumps in our inner perception (just musing now – your guess is as good as mine). Why bamboo grids? Perhaps this implies that the cognitive tricks and structures I might employ now have existed through the generations and derive, themselves, from nature, to aid us in our pursuit back to a more sustainable relationship with the natural world through introspection and commitment to an innate integrity.     

Masumi Sakagami, Renée Lerner and Judith Shah at Walter Wickiser Gallery

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Sumi ink is made of a type of compressed soot derived from burning plant seed oils, which is then mixed with bone glue. It is still made according to a 2,000 year old process and it comes in a stick which can be mixed with water in order to dilute and lighten the ink on paper. As the ink ages, it takes on a richer look.

In a lot of Western ‘process’ or ‘action’ art, the darker the lines are in a piece, the more we can assume that the artist was in a more than usual passionate or aggressive state while making the piece. Mark Tobey, for instance, in the 50s, literally flung Sumi ink at paper, creating splashes of blackness that convey a sense of conflict, confrontation and aggression. However, since an artist using Sumi is able to continually add water to dilute the ink’s darkness, we can’t necessarily assume a state of being just from looking at the lines he/she makes. Sumi, therefore, is probably better suited to ‘represent’ and not necessarily to ‘express’.

What I liked about Masumi Sakagami’s sumi pieces at Walter Wickiser Gallery was the way she, nevertheless, gets an expressive look and feel by overtly experimenting with how dark and how light she can get her lines. In SUN SUN II we literally see hollow lines to the right of the piece. Density and hollowness become binary extremes or parameters for the rest of the action going on in this work. It gives a type of pulsing effect to the piece, of controlled appearance and disappearance happening within an overarching inner process which is being visually depicted.

Taki looked a bit to me like Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International done in a calligraphic style. Indeed, the shape of the image seems to be like a right triangle with the hypotenuse made completely of hollow twisting and turning lines. In fact, by turning the image over in the booklet that comes with the show, I realized that if you treat this figure as a right triangle, and turn the image so that the hypotenuse runs from the lower left corner to the upper right corner of the page, you see the lines becoming more hollow as they approach the line of the hypotenuse. Or, if you just keep the image positioned as it is presented, you see a movement from density to lightness from left to right. The right triangle, in the esoteric tradition, represents the creation of new life or a new being – the adjacent line on which the right triangle lies is considered masculine, the opposite side (created through the 90 degree angle) becomes the feminine and the hypotenuse is the new being (after all, ‘c’ squared equals ‘a’ squared plus ‘b’ squared). Is Sakagami playing with the triangular form here deliberately?

There are also some amazing fabric collages by Renée Lerner in the show.  Call me a film buff but looking at these complex combinations of fabrics and colors made me think of the Katherine Hepburn character in the film version of Jean Giradoux’s play The Madwoman of Chaillot. I’m pretty sure the eccentric Countess Aurelia’s closet looked a bit like some of the wonderful pieces in Lerner’s portion of the show.

For me, and you can drop by and judge for yourself, these fabric collages were laden with political meaning. Looking at elegant and expensive types of fabric among wire mesh made me think that this is the type of fabric donned by those who can, through money and power, render themselves beyond reproach. Clothing attracts but it also can intimidate.  Clothing for the well-heeled is more of a delicate armor than anything else. Although the artist was influenced by abstract painters of the mid-20^th century, and previous press describes her work as ‘painting with fabric’, I don’t think clothing can be easily separated from the social or political. Seeing the differing types of posh fabrics draped so beautifully with wire mesh made me think of these pieces as a type of protective talisman, where the possessor might be able to absorb some of the power and protection such material often provides the wearer. If, however, you are not as political a creature as I am, you can also just give yourself over to the various emotional effects provoked by the creative blending of the fabrics, found objects and colors.

Judith Shah’s current work at Wickiser seems to derive from a deep trust in her own intuition when she creates non-objective pieces. In her artist’s statement she writes that she is currently taking cues from both the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field artists.  In her painting “Red Head” I like how she has delicate little tendrils both reaching upward and spreading downward at the same time. Like the Color Field artists she maintains the two-dimensional basis of the painting while conveying a deep sense of a process involving the establishing of roots with the reaching upward toward a connection to something higher. The giant blob of red becomes like an organic bridge between the animal and spiritual.  

Part File Score by Susan Philipsz at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea (about Hanns Eisler)

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As he was being forced to leave the USA, in 1948, the composer Hanns Eisler read this statement to the press:

“I leave this country not without bitterness and infuriation. I could well understand it when in 1933 the Hitler bandits put a price on my head and drove me out. They were the evil of the period; I was proud of being driven out. But I feel heartbroken over being driven out of this beautiful country in this ridiculous way…My trouble started when I was subpoenaed a witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. I listened to the talk and the questions of these men and I saw their faces. As an old anti-fascist it became plain to me that these men represent fascism in its most direct form.”

One of the current shows at Tanya Bonakdar involves the FBI investigation of Hanns Eisler which helped lead to his deportation during the Cold War. Eisler had studied under Arnold Schoenberg and was one of the first of Schoenberg’s students to also compose in the 12-tone method. Yet, his friendship with Bertolt Brecht and his own burgeoning social conscience drew him farther away from the purely aesthetic and into a more socially oriented art. Like Brecht he was compelled to leave his homeland with the rise of the Nazis and he ultimately settled in Hollywood where he did some work providing music for films. After World War II, with the rise in paranoia concerning Communist influence in American culture and politics, he became one of the first émigré artists formerly embraced by the USA to be shown the door.

Susan Philipsz has become renowned for her sound installations and has created a 12-channel installation of some of Eisler’s film music from the 20s and 40s for Tanya Bonakdar. She also includes a number of large scale prints in which she superimposes some of Eisler’s musical scores with pages from his FBI record. By superimposing the FBI file pages onto musical scores we get a hybrid document that seems to represent attempts at artistic creativity as well as a sinister and oppressive force to control and mold thought through intimidation.

The FBI represents the force of assimilation and enculturation writ large. It represents the ideological melting pot for artists who are expected to abandon previous interests and/or ideologies and buy into the dominant American culture lock, stock and barrel. Ironically, Eisler’s whole artistic career seemed to be dominated by attempts by the authorities to curb his political and artistic messages – first in Germany, then in the USA and even in East Germany, where (although he composed the national anthem for the GDR) he was criticized for being too much of an aesthete after he attempted to compose a piece based on the Faust legend. He seemed to simply be the type of uncompromising artist and socially committed artist who was never going to completely fit in anywhere.

The effect of the often deliberately discordant music - which is played with different notes coming from the 12 different speakers at different times (in sequence) – in conjunction with the absurd injustice of the prints, created, in me at least, a sense of sadness and quiet outrage. You want to laugh at how utterly stupid and ridiculous the FBI was, but are checked by the realization of the effect this ridiculous intrusion had on the life and career of, basically, a person of goodwill who wished to contribute to the ethical development of his adopted American culture. 

Some pieces by Hanns Eisler:

Eisler before the House Un-American Committee

Ursula von Rydingsvard at Galerie Lelong

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Ancient folks thought of the tree as a type of bridge between the earth and the sky. A tree’s roots dig down deep into the earth and anchor it there, drawing water and nutrients, while the trunk, branches and leaves soar into the air.  The tree is sustained by the photosynthesis in the leaves from the sun at the same time as it is sustained by the water and minerals from the earth. The inner core of the tree is, therefore, the synthesis of processes of the sun and earth in union with each other. So the tree represented a bridge between the earth and the spirit realm or even between our animal nature and our higher nature.  The cross (used well before the Christian era) could well have been a type of ideogram for a tree (the horizontal line represents the earth, the vertical line under the horizontal represents roots and above the horizontal the trunk and branches are depicted).

Ursula von Rydingsvard, at Galerie Lelong, uses the wood from cedar trees to create amazing abstract sculptures that seem to radiate the essence of the union between the processes of the sun and earth that is incorporated in wood. What’s so special about cedar? I’m not sure why, exactly, she uses cedar wood, but it is wood from an evergreen which seems to outlast other types of wood and which has built up resistance to insects and mold, thus secreting a wonderful, soothing smell due to the oils it has evolved for its own self-defense. It seems that the artist takes four by fours of cedar and a power saw to create contours at the ends of the four by fours, covers the contours in graphite to better bring out the inherent design within the wood, and then glues everything together to get the effect that she’s shooting for.

So she gets a kind of upward rising flame-like effect in the wood sculptures. That’s what I mean when I say she captures the union of sun and earth – this combination of solar and earthy energy sources is what creates the unique slow-burning “flame-like” vitality of trees.  Also, it’s as if by cutting into the cedar she is exposing the inner life of the wood, where all the significant growth and development processes occur. So her process involves creating structures that eschew the outer, protective layer of the wood and expose the most vulnerable part. The bark of the tree is merely protective in function and she exposes that part of the tree responsible for its capacity to ascend while sculpting this inner portion in a way that brings out the vitality and strength of the material. Her cedar structures are brick-like, yet creating a stone-like texture (especially with the graphite). So the odd but piercing effect the pieces have seems to be due to the fact that they look craggy and stone-like while being, of essence, a soft but durable type of wood.

So we get a sense of calm ascendancy in these pieces. The bricks of cedar are not used to construct something useful, the bricks are involved in the creation of another type of ascending organic structure that would seem to result naturally from the nature of cedar once it is freed, as it were, from the imposed structure of the tree.

The show is up until the 13^th of December and I would encourage you to drop by and experience these pieces directly.  For many years von Rydingsvard has been doing something unique with her cedar sculptures and the effect of the pieces needs to be experienced directly. The show also contains some work in bronze and some work on paper.

David Rathman at Morgan Lehman Gallery (The Twilight of Testosterone in the USA?)

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The big questions for me, looking at the recent show at Morgan Lehman Gallery, were: Is David Rathman making a social statement about the loss of working-class America and the effect this has had on America’s conception of masculinity, or is he making a more general statement about changing conceptions about ‘manhood’ in America (as we lose our working class)? Or, am I misreading symbols and is there some deeper allegory afoot?

A couple of these questions stem from my own experience in regard to the types of outdoor basketball hoops he presents in many of his paintings. I grew up in one of the few racially integrated neighborhoods in Chicago (back in the day), Chicago still being one of the most racially segregated cities in America. 

It was a neighborhood founded originally by German immigrants who had built Holstein Park - a large park that ultimately would contain two giant baseball diamonds and an area containing several basketball hoops on a large cement court.  

We working-class kids of various races and ethnicities used the park religiously and this helped me look beyond race and later allowed me to move more comfortably through different jobs and neighborhoods interacting with different types of folks freely and respectfully.

So imagine my shock coming back home a few years ago and seeing that the park looked the same, except that the basketball hoops had all been taken down.  There was just a cement court with nothing on it now. 

It seemed that now that the neighborhood had become gentrified, the young, affluent white folks had decided that the racial mixture of kids still lurking in the environs, who wanted to use the hoops, would be an eye-sore and potential threat to their well-being.  Word on the street (what street was left) was that the hoops were literally taken down to stop black kids from coming in to play basketball. 

The park seems now to be primarily used by Golden Retrievers and other yuppy dogs as a huge dog run, and I’ve seen some pathetically bad ‘soccer’ games there of all white kids with first names like Asher, Barnaby, Dashiell, Hayden etc.

So hoops mean something. Indeed, here’s an experiment you can try. Take a basketball and go to an outdoor court somewhere at 6am (when it’s totally empty) and somehow the sound of the dribbled ball will reach the finely tuned eardrums of every guy within a radius of 2 miles, will activate and boost testosterone levels, and you will have a multi-cultural pick-up game of 20 guys going within 30 minutes.   

Hoops are huge to the American male psyche and, frankly, an absence of hoops in a neighborhood represents both a type of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and a type of emasculation for that neighborhood.  It was the use of old, beaten up, messed up, twisted and corroded hoops that resonated with me in this show and drew me into it more deeply as if I were looking for one last pick-up game myself. Yet, along with the rusted out hoops we also see beaten up old cars that have been abandoned and which have also become corroded. 

Looking closely, these are cars, I’m guessing, from the 70s and 80s, when America still had a working class and cities were predominantly blue-collar places with hoops all over the place.

So part of me thinks this show of amazing watercolor paintings is homage to the last generation of blue-collar, working class American guys and the type of ethic and strength they brought to our society. These cars were used until they literally started falling apart – they were taken as far as they could go before being abandoned (and replaced by what?).   In these paintings the terminus of the life of these cars corresponds to the terminus of the outdoor basketball court. 

Yet there are other objects that factor into some of these paintings.  There’s the big old 1970s/80s Chevy (?) van. Above it is scribbled “I deserve a little more…” The owner of the van deserves a little more in life? The van deserves a little more time to operate? We all deserve a little more than material stuff?  

The driver deserves better mileage? Hmmmm. There are also the tributes to heavy metal rock music performances and in one watercolor we see rock guitars under posters showing a metal band, a basketball rebound and an artist standing before an easel. One of my favorite paintings is of a lone Converse All Star lying on the sidewalk outside of a couple garbage cans. So part of me thinks this might be a personal statement of how the passage to ‘manhood’ in America has changed. 

I mean, let’s be honest, the Converse All Stars that were worn by inner city kids back in the day are not the Converse All Stars that some folks are wearing today.  What All Stars represented in the 70s and 80s is not what they represent today.  It could be that the artist is pointing out that the male experience in the USA, and the development of the male, used to be dominated by working class values which are being replaced by, dare I say, more effete values?

The paintings could also be a type of allegory employing the morbidity of testosterone driven activities. Masculinity has often been used in symbolic or allegorical literature to represent a type of aggressive and wandering spirit that seeks fulfilment in the ‘eternal feminine.’ Yet, we see no or few traces of femininity in these paintings. So perhaps the paintings are just a magnified view of a type of male development which has been or is being rendered obsolete – for better or for worse.

Read my essays here: https://goodmenproject.com/author/daniel-gauss/

Lisa Breslow at Kathryn Markel Gallery

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Stopping by the 529 W. 20^th street building on a Saturday afternoon gallery-hopping spree (or whenever you drop into Chelsea) is de rigueur.  Virtually every gallery there has art worth seeing on a monthly basis.  This go-around Kathryn Markel is presenting a show that includes some engaging and provocative city-scape paintings by Lisa Breslow.

What I’ve noticed about a lot of city-scape paintings is that the artist often shoots for a contrast between the permanent and the transitional.  We often see structures that will seemingly last indefinitely with people flitting fugitively through them.  The structures will last far past the time we are all dead and the implication seems to be that we are the builders, users and servants of the structures all at the same time. 

We are psychologically molded by structures and their functions, which we created to serve our needs, in an interesting type of feedback loop.  City-scape artists will also often contrast stark buildings or structures against the sky to reveal the relative permanence of the structures within the changing framework of nature.

Breslow is doing something arrestingly novel compared to these aforementioned approaches. Even in her painting which shows cabs and trucks going down a city avenue, everything is of one ilk. Everything is of the same soft, patchy appearance: the sky, the buildings, the street, trees, vehicles. She seems to be repudiating the whole concept of permanence and transition for a more holistic vision or experience. 

Our sense of sight and our other senses play a con-game on us, and create the notion that the world is permanent and solid. As every good Buddhist and physicist, however, knows, the world is our illusion. To me Breslow paints the city as this type of illusion, where every visual element melts into other elements revealing to us that what seems permanent is fragile and volatile while inviting us to examine what might really constitute tangibility - namely our capacity to patch experience together, discern illusions and develop from our interaction with the illusions of the outside world. 

How, for instance, do these every day sensations allow for such amazing cognitive, emotional and moral development in us? How do illusions create the reality of inner experience and human development?

There is a relative or complete absence of the human figure in these works, which may, in fact, imply that Breslow wants to highlight or question which images or visual stimulation might be most meaningful to us.  One implication might be that an awareness of the illusory nature of aspects of the outer world may lead to a greater dependency on and engagement of others or other minds or, using Buddhist terminology again, everything that possesses ‘Buddha nature’ (including the natural environment).  Once we are no longer taken in by the illusion of sensuous reality, we can realize that human engagement and a submission to nature might offer the only real reality – then, perhaps, we can really begin to develop in a more humane direction and become even more sensitive to the outer world around us.

  

Domingo Zapata at C24 Gallery - A Bullfighter in New York

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C24 Gallery knows how to throw an opening! I was enticed to enter after seeing several ornate chaquetillas (the little jackets worn by bullfighters) and, as I was entering the gallery, a small but lively band kicked into the famous pasodoble from the zarzuela El Gato Montes (which is often played at bullfights).  It was an electric atmosphere even if only wine, and not blood, was pouring freely.

El Gato Montes (but this was not the band that was playing at the gallery - I found this on youtube).

In Domingo Zapata’s show at C24 he includes several chaquetillas which have been customized for the New York City experience – indeed, some seem to have been tagged with a type of graffiti. He has four graffiti-covered burladeros – which are the walls a bullfighter can hide behind during a fight – and a few paintings of a bullfighter going about his normal every day routine.

So why are bulls such potent symbols? Well, for one, their horns are very symbolic.  To ancient people the horns represented the waxing and waning crescent moons. If you look at the left and right horns of most bulls you see how one looks like the beginning of a new moon and the other looks like the crescent moon before the moon totally disappears for a while. So we could say that the bull embodies the type of blunt power of the moon (the sun is a creative force, the moon a type of reflective force).

These are also big, aggressive beasts. They are easily provoked and are completely irrational and even apparently malevolent in their attempts to harm once provoked. They seem to be a perfect symbol for a type of destructive, inner aggression that might thwart a type of humane development - an inner blind force that needs to be eliminated for greater 'spiritual' development to occur.  In Buddhism 'nirvana' literally means 'the extinguishing of a (inner) fire.'  So we see a type of ritualized extinguishing in bullfighting.

So on the one hand we can easily have ethical reservations about bullfighting, while on the other hand we can also appreciate the meaning of the activity. In Zapata’s show he seems to be pointing to the fact, however, that the bullfight approximates an experience that is cross-cultural or universal. I think it would be well worth it to go see Zapata’s vision of the New York City incarnation of the bullfighting experience at C24.   

   

Owusu-Ankomah at Skoto Gallery

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Skoto has been a treasure in Chelsea for many years – often featuring the engaging and thought-provoking work of contemporary African artists. Currently they have an amazing show by Owusu-Ankomah, an internationally exhibited artist originally from Ghana.

This artist’s paintings are covered in various symbols which seem to have been inspired by the ancient Adinkra symbols of the Asante people. Since seeing the show I’ve been reading a great deal about these symbols and, if you get a chance, and are also interested in semiotics, history and culture, you might enjoy looking into this as well. Each symbol seems to represent a concept or even an aphorism. These symbols are often printed on fabric for clothing in Ghana but some have even been used in advertising. My favorite symbol is ‘tamfro bebre’ which seems to mean: “Don’t worry, the enemy will stew in his own juice.” A symbol that looks like two crossed leg bones means: “God never dies and therefore I cannot die.” 

If you look closely, though, at his paintings, you see that there are very powerfully built male figures that are somewhat camouflaged among the signs.  At times the symbols on a figure’s body correspond to a couple background symbols but then conflict with others. Is the figure deliberately searching for a correspondence between the patterns on his body and the patterns behind him? Does he believe that finding the right place so that his body and background naturally blend will lead to something?  Has he memorized the symbols that cover him so completely that he is now locked through symbols and memories of symbols into a type of artificial process divorced from real experience and the opportunities real experience gives for self-transformation?

The implication might be that these guys believe there is a ‘correct’ sequence, pattern or order of symbols which already exists in a perfect arrangement and once one recreates or adapts to this sequence, the end of symbolism becomes possible and the beginning of a wholly new process can begin. So the theory seems to be: succumb to symbolism to overcome symbolism. This would seem to fit in with the artist’s concept of the ‘microcon’ – a belief that there is a ‘super-symbol’ or a symbol that represents a ‘confluence’ of symbols that would reveal the nature of symbolism so clearly that we would be freed from figurative bondage and wallow completely in the muddy waters of full experience.

Eva Hild at Nancy Margolis

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Biomorphic art first seemed to appear in the early 20^th century with folks like Miro, Arp and Tanguy. Basically this is art which is evocative of biological forms without really being meant to point to any particular biological organism or organisms.  

Biomorphic art is usually used to highlight the absurdity of our bodily needs in comparison to our belief systems which tell us that we are ‘higher’ than our biological functions. So biomorphism has often questioned the extent to which we are noble in reason, infinite in faculty, in action like an angel and in apprehension like a god. 

At her latest show at Nancy Margolis, Eva Hild adds her own little twists and creativity to this biomorphic tradition.

It’s always fun to look at biomorphic pieces and see how differing biological processes, forms or functions might be used. In the series of darker sculptures we see that these figures are clearly not photosynthetic flowering plants. They seem to be more fungal, yet, unlike a fungus, these organisms do not seem to be parasitically attached to anything. 

How do they get energy? We don’t know. They are sort of huge, free standing, auto-generating fungi-like things, defying the second law of thermodynamics. Despite their size, however, they seem as benign as giant walruses at the zoo. 

In each of these pieces the apex or culmination of the organism’s development is a round hole in an olive like thing through which, I’m assuming, spores or semen or some reproductive substance may be able to shoot out. The structures ultimately become penis-like conduits. Will this lead to asexual or sexual reproduction?

Although these are benign walrus-like creatures, their function is, essentially, something active and aggressive. The entire organism is geared solely toward the reproduction of the entire organism.  It is sort of a monument to Schopenhauer’s ‘will-to-reproduce’.  This is the active and aggressive reproducing itself.  

Arthur is ringing in my ears now: "The purpose of an emotional communion between man and woman is procreation, although those in love are oblivious to nature's deceitfulness, making the actual process seem more noble than it is.” Yet, penicillin comes from a fungus so who knows what properties this organism may have for ‘higher’ beings.

Hild’s white sculptures seem to celebrate the ‘passive’ or ‘receptive’ as opposed to the ‘active’ represented by the darker pieces. Her white pieces seem more bone or skeletal-like. In the ancient world it was recognized that bones do not seem to decay and can last, potentially, forever. So bones were often equated to the eternal.  

In Hild’s pieces we see hollow structures that almost seem meant to be connected through some type of piping to other systems. If they are meant to be skeletal then some type of tissue must have evolved around these structures and some type of viscera may have developed within.

So, essentially, both of these pieces owe their very forms or structures to ‘principles’ – one the principle of active or aggressive desire, the other, possibly, to passive acceptance or fulfilment of aggressive desire. 

Please read the amazingly thought-provoking articles of Daniel Gauss: https://goodmenproject.com/author/daniel-gauss/