The Lie of the Purely Figurative or Gestural: Erin Smith at Amy Li

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In many of the pieces of the work of Erin Smith, there seems to be a conflict between the gestural and the representational which helps bring the relationship between perception, judgment and emotional response into greater focus.  It is as if this relationship, in fact, gets in the way of pure representation, pure abstraction and/or pure process art. In fact, one flaw inherent in the type of abstraction which purports to reveal inner states of being might be that the inner states depicted are always divorced from the surrounding context generating the experience. Can we look inside ourselves and just perceive emotion? Can we look at inner states alone, divorced from everything else? Doesn’t the process of introspection involve experiencing a muddled confluence of images, dialogues, fears, desires etc.? Pure, representational visual imagery and pure abstraction both seem to become lies to Smith.

Just as it might be wrong to say there is a reality separate from the mind, it might be just as wrong to assert that there is a mind separate from the outside world. In the work of Smith we seem to see an attempt to find a point where the unity of inner and outer reality blend in the process of expression. It’s as if Smith is saying we can’t look at the inner world without reference to the outer world and vice versa. The process of introspection is multivariate and complex and, furthermore, not all of it has to be caught in the process of introspection for introspection to yield meaningful results. Smith seems to hint at what we should look for when we look inside and outside at the same time.

So an artist might choose an image because it is laden with some type of meaning, but in the process of depicting an image, Smith seems to assert that the artist must allow inner responses to the image to come to the fore and vitiate the clarity of the image.  So in the current show we have an image of some military character with a wry smile on his face. Perhaps it’s the wry smile in conjunction with the military uniform that was meant to be expressed to those who would also ‘get’ what this means on a literal or allegorical level. Yet the artist cannot refrain from confessing her own inner state in the process of sharing the image. This smile and uniform seemingly initiates raw emotion in the artist which also makes it to the canvas. The image elicits the responses, yet, one is also capable of assessing the legitimacy of one’s emotional responses, and this process also seems present in the tumult of the paint on the canvas.

Some of Smith’s work is more representational or abstract than others. In one piece salient aspects of the human figure are almost totally eliminated through harsh brush strokes of thick paint. Just a hint of the initiating factor for this emotional display is present as emotion and grappling with emotion fill the canvas and obscure the image. It’s as if Smith is saying that perfect photo-realistic clarity would equal total emotional equanimity and she seems to be asking whether this state might ever be attainable in our relationships to others and events in the world.

Amy Li does a yeoman’s job of bringing thought-provoking and meaningful art to her gallery on Mott Street regularly. She seems interested in finding real artists, engaged with real issues and creating real art. Recently I read an interview with a gallery owner who categorized artists as “emerging”, “mid-career” or “blue-chip”. At no point did he talk about authenticity of expression or the desire to really engage others on a meaningful or transformative level. He didn’t talk about artists as seekers trying to get their new findings out there to the benefit of other seekers and doers. To this owner, and maybe to many artists, the expected progression of an artist has to be expressed in terms of whether or not the artist is moving toward greater and greater economic success. The more upper-middle class you become through your art, the more ‘blue-chip’ you become.  Attaining an upper middle class life style becomes the be-all and end-all of the artistic endeavor. By this time, the artist is, however, basically just forging his/her earlier work for a market that knows what to expect and rewards one for meeting such (low) expectations.

As well as finding amazing artists who are really involved in the significant processes of creation, Li bucks this financial orientation and trend by trying to keep the art at her gallery affordable and by working with buyers who want art for all the right reasons. I’m not a PR rep or a salesman, but if you have some extra dough and want to support genuine artists and  galleries, and want to own something thought-provoking to share with companions, visiting Amy Li Projects or other galleries of this type would be well worth your while. ‘Invest’ in pharmaceuticals, ‘support’ art. The show by Smith is going to be extended a few more days and you can see it at 166 Mott Street and you can reach Amy LI through her website at www.amy-li.com 

Discarded Insulation Material on 25th Street in Chelsea – An Amazing Work of Public, Ready-Made Art

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In Walden Thoreau recognized the central importance of “heat” as one of the necessities of human life: “…for while food may be regarded as the fuel which keeps up the fire within us…shelter and clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and absorbed. The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us.”

I saw some amazing discarded insulation material on 25^th street while at the openings tonight (6/25), and it was the best ‘ready-made’ art of the evening. I took 4 quick snapshots with my smart phone.

So what is the symbolism or significance of discarded insulation material?  Well, first of all, just look at this beautiful stuff! It looks like a mixture of thick, wild animal fur and synthetic NASA-like material to cover a planetary rover from excessive solar radiation. It potentially embodies the attempt involved in recognizing a natural survival mechanism or function that evolved over zillions of years and deliberately reinventing it better than ever. This capacity to recognize what was usefully but blindly created by nature, in order to harness it more effectively toward our own (greedy and self-serving) ends is one aspect that separates us from animals, and forces us to live greatly alienated from nature.

Or, you can look at the faux animal fur (I wonder what kind of synthetic material that is?) and the silver coating and threads as being in conflict with each other. When a mosquito sticks its needle into our skin, it injects a substance to stop our blood from clotting (so it can drink our blood more easily – damn the freaking pest!). But that anti-coagulant is immediately attacked by histamine within the body – producing puss and an itchy little lump.  So this insulation material looks like a beautiful type of symbolic puss to me – animal fur and silver space stuff duking it out.

Also, there’s symbolism in the fact that the insulation material is being discarded. Although Thoreau points out the necessity of heat, we can think of this type of material as a First World luxury. It’s as if someone is saying, like Thoreau, “OK, I don’t need all this extra crap in my life. I’m going to try to get closer and closer to the natural world, where no silver space stuff has to be mixed in with fake animal fur to keep people warm.” Or did you ever see the old film “My Dinner with Andre”? Andre deliberately refuses to use a blanket because he wants to feel the cold – this brings him closer, he feels, to those who might not have the resources to warm themselves adequately, and adds another dimension to his life through his refusal to take means to add extra comfort to his being.

This stuff could also be part of the allegory which is Chelsea. I don’t know which gallery or building was being gutted so that this insulation material was discarded. But perhaps we can think of this stuff as what the heart and soul of Chelsea, or, yes, the guts and viscera of Chelsea, used to look like before the Highline Park came along to help raise rent prices and property tax prices, thus pushing many of the galleries out.

Artists of the WPA at Bill Hodges Gallery

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At the height of the economic depression following the 1929 stock market crash, President Herbert Hoover gave a radio broadcast to uplift the spirits of America. He said that 25% of Americans were unemployed. People were hungry, some starving. Farmers were losing their farms to banks, people were living in dire poverty and as President of the USA, he could help…but he wasn’t going to. If he put food in the mouth of a starving person that person would become dependent on government handouts and Hoover would not allow the beautiful system of rugged American individuals taking care of themselves to go down the drain just because a few million people might die in the streets.

His message wasn’t very convincing nor uplifting and FDR became the next president. It’s debatable as to whether the New Deal pulled Americans out of the Depression, but it certainly stopped Americans from dying in the streets.  One of the more inspired initiatives of the Roosevelt administration during this period of time was the Works Progress Administration. One of the wonderful aspects of the WPA was that despite the undercurrent of racism and discrimination and lack of opportunities for African Americans in the USA at the time, many African American artists were given opportunities to create and make a living from their art through the WPA.

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Bill Hodges brings together a group show of mostly African American artists who created for the WTA. Indeed, it’s an all-star cast and reinforces my steady claim that this gallery is a jewel in the crown of the Chelsea art scene, in what I consider to be the best building to see art in Chelsea – 529 W. 20^th street.The show not only highlights the diversity of artists who benefitted from the WPA program, but it also helps to highlight the changes that each artist went through before, during and after the WPA  opportunity and how social change in America over the years either affected or didn’t affect the themes of individual artists and why. 

Will Barnet, for example, arrived in New York City during the Depression and was ‘radicalized’ by the experience. He began with a style and content based on social realism and later dabbled with various other approaches including “Indian Space” painting, a type of abstraction based on Native American art, using organic shapes and lacking any semblance of perspective. The painting here is titled Martha and Two Cats and displays a style far from his social realism days. The two cats could be, I am guessing, of the “Russian Blue” breed – a hyper intelligent type of cat which is very shy around strangers, or maybe of the “Chartreux” breed - an ancient breed from France perhaps brought to Europe from the Crusades. The cats become symbols of status and comfort through their exoticism and plumpness. If Barnet had painted something like this in the 30s, however, it might have been perceived as social satire or criticism of the leisured, privileged class. But in the mid-80s enough social safety and welfare programs had been created to the point that even the poor seemed to have nice stuff in America and an ideology of upward mobility had trickled down throughout all classes. An artist did not need to worry about portraying the wealthy in his work in a negative light. “Wealth,” in itself, was not necessarily to be condemned in that decade of Reaganomics as it might have been during the FDR years.

You may not know that Romare Bearden had a degree in education and worked for the City of New York as a social worker. In fact, many African American artists in the first chunk of the 20^th Century had jobs in helping professions out of necessity, since it was so difficult for their work to be sold. Bearden was committed to his community on many different levels and his daily engagement with the social life around him added immense depth to his work. Under the Waterfall is another of Bearden’s famous collage (montage) works. Many of Bearden’s collages present ‘archetypal’ human forms in his attempt to equate the African American experience to larger themes in world culture and mythology. In this piece we see a figure bent backwards through the force of the water pounding onto him/her. The body is not in flight, but in a position to absorb the experience in what one might interpret as a deliberate attempt to engage the adverse aspects of the world directly in hopes of a greater insight into how one may live in and change these aspects of the world. The fragmented background adds to the feeling of a piercing, excruciating experience with the body at the limit of endurance in an almost shamanic ritual of enduring pain to gain visions.

Elizabeth Catlett overtly used her art as a way to express her social awareness and to protest what she could clearly see to be wrong in her society. She not only protested through art but was arrested periodically for her participation in literal protests. Indeed, in 1946 the US government accorded her a type of honor, perhaps, by declaring her an ‘undesirable alien’ while she was in Mexico and she was prevented from entering her homeland for a decade.  Before that she had experienced various forms of discrimination such as an acceptance to a university followed by a revocation upon the discovery of her race and the inability to live in a campus dorm at another university for the same reason.  Despite the irrational hatred directed against her, however, her art always seems to be a positive statement. The piece Rebozo refers to a traditional Mexican garment worn by women of the working class or women from rural villages. The rebozo served various functions – for instance one could use it to carry objects or to carry a baby. Frida Kahlo painted herself in a rebozo to represent her solidarity with the working women of Mexico.  In this piece we see a woman in a rebozo who could be engaged in prayer or her folded tense hands can be a sign of concern – the implication to me is that she is offering a prayer for better conditions in general brought about through her own experience of pain.

In the work by Charles Sebree that we see here, we can see how African Americans were open to influences from Europe and how these influences were appropriated to reflect American themes. When I saw this Christ with Thorns, Rouault immediately came to mind, but this seems to be a softer rendering than Rouault was used to doing. Furthermore, this is a Jesus who does not betray the sometimes mawkish expressions of some of Rouault’s work as this Jesus does not suffer physical pain and is almost like an icon of a darker skinned Jesus. The implication could be that the African American experience in America has been, to a great extent, “messianic” and long-suffering. There is a hope implied that the suffering will be redemptive and that the African American community may be more capable of initiating positive change due to its horrific experiences and that greater humanity may someday envelope this country through a greater acceptance of the African American people and their insights. This a patient and serene Jesus who has faith that humanity will ultimately prevail.

Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Frederick D. Jones, Milton Avery, and Charles Alston are also included in this amazing show.     

Artists of the WPA

April 16 – June 6, 2015

Bill Hodges Gallery

529 W. 20^th Street, 2E

New York, NY 10011

www.billhodgesgallery.com

Bubble Wrap Art - Bradley Hart at Anna Zorina

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Bubble wrap owes its proliferation to the computer industry. Initially it was designed as a type of funky wallpaper (which nobody in the Eisenhower era wanted to buy) but, after lying dormant for a few years, it was realized (in 1959) that this would be the most effective protection for the transportation of computers - especially the IBM 1401 variable wordlength. As folks who work in galleries know, bubble wrap is the de rigueur accompaniment to art pieces when they are transported.

It was, in fact, the cavalier attitude toward bubble wrap at art galleries which triggered a type of moral or environmental awareness in artist Bradley Hart. He realized this material was so ubiquitous and commonplace that even folks in the field of art, who are supposed to be sensitive to environmental and social issues, were not thinking of the consequences of using and casually discarding this material into eternally stagnating inorganic landfills. Using bubble wrap as his means of expression became his response to this situation of wastefulness.

Hart uses bubble wrap kind of in the way a street artist might use a wall. Indeed, the Berlin Wall before its take-down by the people of Germany is even one of the images in the show, as, perhaps, a self-reflective gesture. But Hart’s refusal to allow something to go to waste and his desire to make use of the most useless type of cast-away thing requires that he engage in a super-laborious process of creation. He injects acrylic paint into each cell of the bubble wrap, cell by cell, methodically, in what might even be called a type of proletarian process art. I’m assuming Hart doesn’t pay some guy $10/hr to do the injecting – he himself goes through what most would find to be an incredibly tedious process to get his final result. He’s basically a ‘worker-artist’ or he’s like a Japanese full-body tattoo artist, engaging in a repetitive process of injecting ink over and over again into human flesh. Yet, he could also be considered to be in the tradition of the great tapestry makers of the Middle Ages, who worked with a negative image and who looped thread continually from the negative side to the front side of the tapestry and back again to get large narrative images from thousands of little stitches.

In the gallery notes pointillism is mentioned and he also seems to follow from this route. The whole point of pointillism was to apply unmixed colors in little dots so that the human eye would do the mixing if you stood at the right distance from the painting (three times the distance of the diagonal of the painting). By not mixing the colors on the canvas, you get greater brightness. Yet I’m not sure Hart is shooting for brightness in these pieces; I interpreted his work as, mostly, process art, as a way of taking something valueless and inconsequential and finding a hidden quality and potential in it that lay unexploited due to the extreme effort necessary to utilize it. Hart is, however, motivated by his environmental concerns and is willing, therefore, to take whatever time is necessary and he brings out an expressive potential in this material in a similar manner in which bubble wrap’s protective potential was inadvertently discovered. He reveals that within the bubble wrap itself was a hidden emergent quality for the transmission of meaning allowing this material to be saved from the landfill. Hart’s art is also a type of victory over an obstacle, the obstacle being the nature of the bubble wrap which allows the transmission of visual imagery but only through a laborious effort that ultimately requires the active collaboration of the human eye.

Hart doesn’t waste anything. In order to get each cell full of paint he has to over-inject into each cell. This causes paint to seep out the back of the bubble wrap. Hart then peels this layer off as a second painting. So you get the image of the object and then an abstract, dripping, flowing image derived from the image of the object at the same time, which calls the legitimacy or primacy of the visual image into question and points more toward the importance of the effect of imagery on our inner reality, as it interfaces with our experience, memory and emotional responses. Hart also seems to take excess acrylic paint from his floor, pallet, tools etc. and applies them to a canvas in what the gallery notes refer to as a ‘collage’ style. So at first Hart shoots for realism through a difficult means to convey realism but this process results in more and more expressionistic pieces which impugn the notion of a separation of objective and subjective reality and point, instead, to a unity of inner and outer experience.

Max Neumann at Bruce Silverstein Gallery

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Portrait painting owes its most meaningful possible impact to our ability to discern character traits and emotional states by studying the human face. Indeed, a great portrait painter can engage us to draw upon a wide array of previous experience, insights and even knowledge of our society, the world and history, to grasp the representation of his/her subject. The great portraitist invites us to construct our own narratives around the subject and often compels us to assess and pass judgment on the subject he/she paints.

For example, one of my favorite portraits at the Met, El Greco’s Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara, shows us a professional torturer (he was appointed Grand Inquisitor of Spain in 1599 and 250 – give or take a few – ‘heretics’ were burned to death during the three years he ‘served’ in this position). We can know so much about this cold-blooded and ambitious religious bureaucrat just through the surreptitious gaze to his left that El Greco gives him. There is no mercy in this calculating type of man, no milk of human kindness, but no ‘banality’ of evil either – he is resplendent in his church gowns and relishes his power and opulence.  In another room at the MET, Rembrandt’s self-portrait from 1660 evokes compassion as we perceive a deep sense of sorrow and resignation.  While we look at this painting we can experience a type of melancholic calm, searching ourselves to understand what Rembrandt felt toward the end of his life. Holbein’s painting of Sir Thomas Moore at the Frick is also one of my favorite portraits in New York and provides an engaging model for a morally uncompromising life in a city where the Mayor just called one of the worst political crooks in NY State history a “man of integrity.” Moore is portrayed as rock solid in his commitment to an ethical life and higher calling, but not devoid of warmth or kindness.

So what does it mean when a contemporary artist, in this case Max Neumann at Bruce Silverstein Gallery, abandons all this?  What effect do portraits have when they have been darkened, made to appear completely two-dimensional in appearance, and various facial features have been deliberately obscured through dark patches of paint?

To some extent, perhaps Neumann could be repudiating the history and purposes of portraiture. His art could be an attack on the limited extent to which engagement through portraiture might be a meaningful or transformative process for the viewer. Maybe he is even saying portraiture is wrong and self-deceptive. What do you hope to derive from your self-righteous insights about the political career of an Inquisitor painted by El Greco? How did understanding Rembrandt’s sense of failure and loss change you? So you admire Sir Thomas Moore while looking at a Holbein, OK, big deal, so what? Maybe Neumann asks the question: what exactly do we want from portraiture (or art in general), what do we expect to happen and why are we so satisfied with, perhaps, so little?  Are you engaging in one process, while viewing art, while neglecting another more important process? We could, therefore, possibly view Neumann’s work within a tradition of anti-art.  I tend to think, however, that it’s not anti-art but an attempt to make us more aware of an interpretative process we use often without questioning it.

The effect of seeing these large shadowy paintings comes from our sudden inability to engage in our habitual process of scanning a face, drawing upon our positive and negative experiences of others with similar facial characteristics and making quick intuitive conclusions and judgments. So looking at Neumann’s pieces we are frustrated and liberated at the same time. We are rendered helpless and even powerless to engage in a process we are used to and which provides not only gratification by also a certain amount of interpersonal survival value.  These subjects take on the aura of Cycladic figurines. They are not to be engaged by us and will not engage us because, perhaps, they are subjects who are diving deep into themselves. Indeed, we can even think of Neumann’s portraits as being a part of a type of religious tradition as these portraits become contemporary icons of the contemplative or spiritually transformative process. Perhaps they represent our concept of inner struggle and breakthrough as much as a serene-appearing Buddha sitting under a tree might have represented this in other times and cultures. This is still our concept of inner change – it comes in seclusion, involving a closing off of the senses and a process of deep reflection.  We don’t feel that we change through transformative experience, but through a self-generated inner process of rigorous self-examination.

Strangely, these portraits break down the barrier between outer and inner world and point us back at ourselves. They say: "Don’t perceive me, don’t analyze me, stop interpreting - dive into yourself as I am diving into myself."

El Greco:

 Rembrandt:

Holbein:

John Messinger at UNIX Gallery

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When the English and German Romantic painters created pieces, they began with an aspect of nature which seemed to evoke something meaningful but ineffable, and they then created a super-enriched version of that aspect of nature on paper or canvas. The viewer then engaged the super-enriched nature, which was divorced from nature through artistic creation, and then was able to go back into nature and engage other aspects more deeply or fully due to the exposure to the artwork. The Romantics realized that gazing intently at ruins, rock formations, gnarled and twisted trees in old cemeteries, the moon etc., could engender a euphoric and trance-like state approximating (or even accomplishing) a type of communion with the world. It seemed to be their goal to spread this experience.

Lyle Rexer, the curator of the John Messinger show at UNIX, references the Romantics a couple times in his notes to the show by way of contrast. While discussing Messinger’s new pieces, he even conceives of Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ as gazing instead at a giant video screen enhanced by Dolby Surround-Sound.  So what is Messinger doing?  Using a Polaroid camera, he takes zillions of photos of a large computer monitor either as it is blank (but glowing a soft blue color) or after he has accessed various images, often of some natural phenomenon/a.  He then organizes these photos of a blank screen and images from the internet into patterns on a large grid, creating a large but soft, abstract design.

So what’s going on here? Well, since Rexer mentions the Romantics, let’s start there.  The important thing about the Romantics is that they were not interested in super-realism. Turner once said, “Indistinctness is my specialty.” Friedrich was said to have painted the ‘tragedy of landscape’ and suffered due to his desire to fully embrace, in his art, everything nature really made him feel. The Romantics were the middle-men of experience. They engaged nature, found something amazing about this engagement and tried to pass it on. 

Messinger does not start from nature as a source. Messinger, to quote Rexer, “…sits in front of a computer screen, prepared to merge with the images gathering there, but separated from them by the camera he holds, a Polaroid, which he snaps compulsively, generating a mounting pile of paper and chemical images, a ‘real’ alternative to the virtual world that threatens to engulf him.” The photo removes the image again from the electronic gadget and brings the image back into the world as a three-dimensional object. The internet was supposed to be the information superhighway, but the information and image sewer, which the internet has become, is now scoured for anything meaningful among all the dross, and this is photographed as a way to save the image from being lost among what the internet has become. Messinger is not the intermediary the Romantics were, he is the ‘curator’ combing for that which can engage and enrich.  

A grid can be used by an artist to develop perspective. Or a grid can be used to demonstrate movement or action. Muybridge, also mentioned in the notes, used a grid of photos to show how individuals moved through space. Here the grid is serving another function.  It provides the opportunity for the creation of an over-all geometrically abstract image comprised of the absence and presence of engaging imagery.  The blue screen, not meant to ‘represent’ anything, nevertheless, when photographed and brought into the world on its own, becomes as pacifying, if not more so, than the image of the sea, waves, soaring birds or clouds.  So what type of experience is Messinger shooting for?  You can scrutinize each of these large pieces and see the individual aspects of nature being photographed, in contrast to the blank images, or you can step back and be affected by the overall structure developed by contrasting types of images.  In either case, the artist awakens the sense that there is some type of extraordinary, indefinable immanence to be experienced here. What the Romantics tried to do by highlighting certain aspects of nature, Messinger tries to do, perhaps, through repetition and contrast. He begins his process completely divorced from the natural world and works back to find and present an immanence as engaging as that presented through a direct encounter with nature. 

Horses by Deborah Butterfield at Danese / Corey Gallery

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One of the highlights of the Chelsea opening night last week was Deborah Butterfield’s striking sculptures of horses, apparently made out of drift wood or ‘found’ wood. This was the type of show where people entered the gallery and immediately said, “Wow, this is amazing. How did she do that?”  That’s important, of course.  The artist has to arrest the viewer visually, first, before the person will stop and begin to engage a piece.  If your pieces look boring, people won’t stop and look. Butterfield’s work is so ‘wowing’ on just a purely visual level, that virtually everyone who saw the show stopped and thought about what she was doing and discussed the work with the folks they were with.

The fact that the horses seemed to be made out of drift wood or wood that had fallen from trees was fascinating to most viewers.  Actually Butterfield does use this wood initially to create the sculpture, but since wood decays so easily, she casts the sculpture from the wood and then burns the wood away with molten bronze, creating a permanent sculpture. But it looks like the real thing. I didn’t realize the sculptures were bronze until I went back a second time.

Now, I have to confess, even though I’m a city guy, I’m a sucker for horses and love all things horses. To me, the horse is a symbol of transition.  By transition, I mean transition within our inner reality as well as transition in our external reality.  Traditionally, symbolically, the horse represents what gets you from one (rotten) place to another (better) place.  It takes you from a place of turmoil and conflict to your own hearth.  It leads you into and out of battle; it helps you escape, engage in some adventure or go home.

The horse has, in fact, been one of the most important symbols or images in the history of Western art.  St. George kills that dragon while riding horseback and who doesn’t love Rembrandt’s emaciated horse at the Frick, selflessly carrying that Polish soldier toward his quest? We see a look of dogged resolve on the head of the horse, despite the emaciated state of its body.  It's as if the inner strength or inner qualities of the horse, and not just its outer strength, is what makes the horse such a potent symbol.  The resolve or determination of the horse is contrasted with the calm sense of command and confidence of the rider. More than anything, Butterfield is able to capture and convey this same inner strength of the horse, through her work, using dead wood.

So the big question is, why did this artist make horses out of found pieces of wood?  We can say that the horse is a symbol of transition in Western art. We can also say that these horses are a type of symbol of ‘freedom’ or inner strength, especially since they seem to be wild horses.  What I liked was the fact that Butterfield uses discarded, dead wood to convey the strength and life of these animals.  Wood, although ‘dead’, possesses potential combustible energy.  So the horse represents movement and freedom while wood can represent latent, potential energy – so the artist is combining the two most salient elements of horses and wood to convey movement, transition, freedom, and the captured potential for energy possessed in each piece. We get a sense of a composite creation that incorporates the concept of transition and the potential explosion of energy at the same time.

When you look at these pieces, it’s uncanny that the artist was able to take random pieces of branches and fit them so perfectly into the form of a horse. It’s almost as if this was meant to be and that these discarded and fallen branches should be shaped into horses.

So I’d encourage you to drop by Danese/Corey and just experience these horses.  These sculptures have a presence that affects you immediately and that will stimulate and engage you on many different levels.

6 Korean artists at a group show at Elga Wimmer-Hyun Contemporary

Inside and Out is a group show curated by Suechung Koh at Elga Wimmer Hyun Contemporary. The connecting thread through the show seems to involve the experience of new, immigrant, upwardly mobile New York City dwellers and how their new city provides novelty, excitement, and challenges for growth while also providing experiences of immense anxiety, concern and even defeat.

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For this show, Kyunghan Kim has created large pieces which consist of vertical, parallel stitches and groups of stitches, of various lengths. The stitches actually correspond to words and word patterns in specific New York Times articles.  The work was born of Kim’s frustration, after arriving in the USA, of not having a sufficient command of English.  He saw lots of interesting looking folks reading the NY Times and wanted to do it, himself, knowing that there was meaningful and engaging content to be absorbed and he realized that reading the Times was a symbol of enculturation into a certain type of American social class. Unfortunately, like many folks who come to New York looking for a better life, he was initially locked out from this experience due to a lack of English fluency. Indeed, for many ambitious immigrants, being able to read the Times is a measure of full integration and success.

So his pieces can have various interpretations. He shows that, more than anything, integration into a society involves interpreting, embracing and embodying symbols. So, the piece could even be a type of protest – Kim could be saying, “Let these strange symbols of the American dominant culture remain locked. I can live without them.  They are like stitches - too binding and limiting anyway.” The artist could also be making a statement about the nature of language itself.  The stitches are empty proxies for words, sentences and paragraphs. Their emptiness forces us to think about what, exactly, language really is. What can and can’t language accomplish? What is it that gives these alphabetic symbols such engaging potency, and just how potent or limited are these symbols?  What power do these 26 letters have that stitches do not have? Language, moreover, also is a stich-like process…it penetrates and fixes/stabilizes…it kills direct experience to convey this experience in a different form. Language is born from but then divorced from reality but creates a new reality which then influences experience and reality through a bizarre and continuous feedback loop.

Hongseok Kang presents aquarium fish which have died. In Koh’s program notes she states that the fish, to the artist, are like city dwellers dismissed from a company, abandoned by others, lost, forgotten, marginalized. In a large city we become accustomed to viewing each other in such a way – we lose touch with our own humanity and lose feelings of sympathy or compassion for the actual human beings around us. Our sympathy becomes directed toward people on TV thousands of miles away while we have real, significant suffering outside our doors.  So in the piece you see here, we see the dead fish surrounded by a type of now useless medication.  The fish is against a two-toned background signifying an underlying reality of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’, perhaps signifying the endless competition we are subjected to in the city, or maybe even the concept of a type of spiritual development that might be possible once one is expelled from the rat race.

Jeonghee Park presents humorous depictions of animals which have transgressed into human spaces. Here we see a group of lions in someone’s posh apartment.  The trappings of our lives are supposed to pacify us – those comfy couches are meant to make us docile and well heeled.  The lions, to me, are our form of protest. Underlying the comfort and self-induced tranquility bought from high end furniture and interior decorators we still retain the capacity to demonstrate moral and socially transformative power.

Heesoo Kim lives in New York City and seems to be following in the Art Brut tradition of presenting child-like drawings/paintings.  Yet, unlike a lot of art brut work, Kim’s stuff is very engaging, bright and optimistic.  This work takes delight in New York City life where, to the newcomer (I am now a grizzled, disgruntled veteran), everything radiates excitement, novelty and passion.

Inbu Pyo’s work contains uncountable small pieces of paper packed together in small spaces.  Like the millions of people who live in a large metropolis the individual pieces of paper can be bent by the wind but not easily displaced.  To me the individual pieces of paper, being potentially moved in relation to the surrounding pieces, represents the communal emotional response often felt by city dwellers.  We are all packed next to each other, we are all connected via TV and the internet, and every world event or crisis has the type of ripple effect of the wind. We all bend and move together – we are temporarily forced to respond, and we often respond uniformly, but resume our normal posture soon thereafter.

If we think of this show as being about the individual in New York City, Inhee Yang’s work seems to represent the permanence and transition that epitomizes the city.  You have strong, stable forms combined with circular lines which seem to imply continual motion.  The constant, apparently eternal forms are the city, or society, we are in the faint lines that intersect or go silently around these sun-like orbs that would seem to represent the structures and institutions that we need to acknowledge for our own survival within a huge social group.