Information and image, the homeless in London: Bryan Adams at Atlas Gallery, London

Unlike major cities in the USA, the city of London made a concerted effort to assist its homeless population during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. For folks who were sleeping on the streets, the city government rented hotel rooms and provided food for the lockdown. “Everyone In” brought in 6 times the usual number of homeless and some of these folks were moved to permanent housing. In New York City, the state government did little to nothing for the homeless and passed a law to keep them from riding the subway all night. Chicago did nothing and the homeless flooded the subway system after midnight, providing an unsafe environment for themselves and the hapless travelers going to one of America’s busiest airports for redeye flights. Thus, it is estimated that a homeless person during the pandemic in the USA was two to three times more likely to die of Covid-19 than people in the general population.

Although Great Britain showed much more concern and compassion than the USA, Bryan Adams and Atlas Gallery of London still seemed to feel it was a good time to remind folks of the problems facing the homeless during these harsh times and to ask whether enough is being done. Indeed, there was a significant surge in the numbers of rough sleepers in the last part of 2020 and first part of 2021, about half of them on the streets for the first time. It is feared that once Covid-19 is finally eliminated, support mechanisms will be removed and homelessness will become even worse in the city. What is to be done for the homeless after the pandemic? Will they simply go back to sleeping in the streets? During this period of time when compassion has been cultivated to save the lives of our most marginalized and vulnerable, will we just go back to an unacceptable normality with the homeless? Did we just experience a temporary compassion to fit the needs of the pandemic and soon we will be back to what was?

Adams’ photos are stark and uncompromising as the subjects often face the camera naked (to ostensibly divorce them from the visual trappings of their social status, location and time period). Engaging the photos becomes a combination, therefore, of pre-established information and raw image. So we come to each photo knowing that we will see a homeless person and this necessarily alters how we engage the image even without visual trappings. Perhaps this is the perfect process to push us to examine the prejudices or preconceived ideas that we bring to these folks. The photos might confirm what we already feel or disabuse us of misconceptions. But we have to ask: What do these photos do to us in relation to what we already know, believe or feel?

So Adams is not proselytizing or arguing so much as he is asking us to become aware of our own emotional responses and how they are triggered. He might be asking what is necessary to change our pre-established conceptions. Can such a raw image do it, or does the image become corrupted based on what we believe? What kind of cognitive baggage do we carry around with us ready to impute on others who have not been as fortunate as us? How does the information we possess affect what these photos can do to us? Can we begin to see in these images what puts people off about the homeless? Can we recognize what alienates us from these folks who stand unassumingly in front of us? What stops us from real moral and social action concerning this group of “outsiders”? How much emotion should we feel staring at these images – is it emotion they solicit? Are these photos soliciting anything from us? What makes us feel or stops us from feeling a sense of responsibility while looking at these photos?

Indeed, these are photos of homeless folks who have taken action to improve their circumstances by selling copies of The Big Issue. The Big Issue is a periodical that can be sold by the homeless to earn income. The seller pays a small amount for each issue, but sells the issue at twice that fee. Thus, this is a venture completely centered in a business operation and not a process of begging. This enterprise was begun in 1991 and spawned successful copycats around the world. A little bio is available concerning each of the sellers depicted and the bios mirror the prevalent causes of homelessness. There are, in fact, three big reasons for homelessness – drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness and just plain bad financial luck. Sometimes there are combinations of these three factors or one factor leads to another factor which becomes a negative feedback loop. So the information we bring to each photo also can have an optimistic element as we know these are folks who have suffered, could have given up, but are taking action. This is, perhaps, why we see smiles or glimpses of smiles on some of the subjects.

To me this show is all about the information we get and bring to the visual image, the limits of the image itself, how we feel compelled to supplement images instead of absorbing them and whether a lot of this is trustworthy. We can either do a conscientious job by learning as much as we can about those in need and avoiding petty cynicism, or we can do an irresponsible job by clinging to misconceptions and buying into hate. The show seems to be about the need to continually search for the truth about those who have been harmed and neglected by our society. The photos demonstrate that folks in dire need exist and if we truly care about them beyond the pandemic, we will learn what it takes to fully tackle homelessness as the long-persisting social evil it has been and always will be. 

Christian Faur - Sum of Parts - Kim Foster Gallery

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Christian Faur seems to be seeking a type of language which reveals its limits as it imparts, through its limits, even greater meaning or intensity to what it expresses. Frank Lloyd Wright said that every material possesses its own message and Faur seems to seek materials that have, despite or because of severe restrictive limits, a potential for expressing more than an ordinary expressive tool like math, logic or a sound/text-based language. The unsayable is best unsaid through a flawed or highly restrictive language which points to the unsayable through its very material limitations. The language we often use is a very real thing, like something material, and other things can be used in unconventional ways to possess and convey what language cannot convey easily or at all. This is, to me, the core meaning of Faur’s amazing show at the Kim Foster Gallery in Chelsea.

Faur also seems to ask what it is about sound and/or text that allows it to hide itself so effectively and point you toward something else, some meaning which seems to be a part of, and not a construction based on, some phenomenon. Meaning exists independently of an object or process, yet the medium of spoken/written language camouflages itself so well that it becomes virtually invisible and creates a surrogate world of meanings within our minds often confused with the real world. Faur seems to imply in his show that the most expressive material possesses something that tricks you into accepting meaning but also advertises its trickster nature. He seems to imply that a language which camouflages itself so you do not notice it when you use it, does not really get to the pith of things. A ‘flawed’ or burdensome, noticeably restrictive language opens meanings to even deeper penetration than a language which remains relatively invisible.  

To me, Faur also explores the mystery of how meaning is constructed – how deeply can we perceive the intersection of the world and our minds that produces insights and conclusions? How did sounds and later scribbles (there are about 800 differing sounds in all the world’s languages) become the material that captures and expresses these insights and conclusions?

So, Faur is shooting to make the invisible visible and, in science, this is often done through mathematics. Math provides identity, elicits relationships, charts growth and decline, predicts motion relative to other objects, but what if you want to understand the real essence of a tree or an ecosystem or injustice or the weird beauty of the life of a Mud Dauber (a wasp which constructs mud structures in which to deposit spiders it has placed in suspended animation as food for baby Daubers once they hatch) or the full moon or the constellation Orion or why you respond to evil the way you do or a zillion other things? Math and the scientific method fall way short – simple description falls short. There is something more called meaning and it is bigger than description. To me Faur is saying, “If you want this bigger stuff, you have to jerry rig new communication tools. Poetry, surrealism, symbolism, zen koans, Gauguin’s use of color etc.”

So we might see one of Faur’s pieces from a distance and shrug saying, “Oh, these are sunflowers.” But then as we approach we realize, “Oh, wow, these are a load of differently colored crayons perfectly ordered as pixels.” Are they sunflowers or are they crayons? This whole process of recognizing crayons underlying sunflowers approximates the realization that everything we see is, in reality, wavelengths of light. Just as we really see the tips of crayons making up the sunflowers, we really see photons making up sunflowers in reality. My immediate response to and experience of sunflowers can be affected by this knowledge and heighted by the realization of how complex the process of perception is. It is not a knowledge of sunflowers that heightens this experience of sunflowers but an awareness of the complex processes of light and the human eye and mind and how this may have evolved that adds to the wonder of this experience of sunflowers. The crayons reveal the sunflowers but declare themselves to be tricksters in the process, the childlike joy possessed in the crayon itself becomes manifest in the process of visual revelation and so the material becomes the message.

Seeing crayons as sunflowers, therefore, approximates an insight we could possibly have, but never really seem to have, which would constantly reveal to us that whatever we see is never what we call it since it is light of differing types of wavelengths and not objects themselves. But this insight never really registers with us, we have to remind ourselves, because light, like language, camouflages itself as a messenger and makes us believe we are seeing ‘things’. Why do we never realize we are seeing light? How does light deceive us so easily? Even when we tell ourselves we are seeing light, this usually has no impact or meaning. So Faur is approximating an insight we feel we should be able to get but never really do. The way we experience the world is based on a huge deception that Faur quixotically and playfully attempts to fix with crayons.

In another piece, Faur takes zillions of little strips of text from the Quran, ‘Old’ Testament and ‘New’ Testament and uses them to construct an image of one of those buildings we have all seen in documentaries of the nuclear explosions in the desert near Las Vegas. We see a building as it stands just before it is to be obliterated by a nuclear blast. We can also see that some of the tips of the strips of text are gilded and under the image is a golden heart, apparently representing the idol of the Golden Calf. To me, we see religious text as a messenger that has not advertised its trickster nature enough so that, unfortunately, most folks wind up taking it 100% literally. A message meant to point to peaceful, individual, humane development thus becomes a battle cry to reduce other cultures, peoples and religions to smithereens.

We also see an American flag comprised of dollar bills sewn together. Yes, we have a democratic government because this is the best system to generate wealth for some. Faur also uses his crayons as pixels to represent an old photo by Dorothea Lange. When Lange was working, color photos were too expensive to make. Crayons now become the ‘arte povera’ way, perhaps, to add color to this documentary material.

Faur also experiments by laying crayons flat on a birch plywood backing and melting them together using a blowtorch. The shape of the crayons causes the appearance of brush strokes while the melting of the crayons together creates a semi-abstract piece which Faur pointed out to me he cannot control perfectly and which often yields unpredictably amazing results. Faur depicts the famous photo of Wittgenstein and a photo of a woman Faur thought to be a typical working-class woman of Wittgenstein’s time, but which now turns out to be Virginia Woolf’s mother. Wittgenstein’s famous phrase is also encoded in another piece, using colors for sounds: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Faur possibly asks what cultural elements must be inherited or learned, and by whom from whom, to ‘decode’ such encrypted insights. 

Finally, you cannot miss the umbrella made of real human hair, which seems partly inspired by Meret Oppenheim’s ‘Fur Breakfast’ at MoMA. These days human hair has become a valued and expensive commodity. A temple in India, for instance, where pilgrims have their hair shaved as a sign of humility, makes millions a year from that largesse. What better way to demonstrate your social standing through conspicuous consumption than to use the hair of poor women from developing countries to provide you with protection from a storm? 

This show ended in September 2017. Re-posted from wsimag.com

https://wsimag.com/art/30433-sum-of-parts

Cycladic Figures from the Metropolitan Museum

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Nobody really knows what function these figures used to serve for their Cyclades' creators. During this period of human history, in this part of the world, 'art' always served some practical, magical purpose. 

All archaeologists can tell us is that these figures were almost always female, they were painted and they were placed in graves. The Cyclades is a group of small islands in the Aegean Sea that seemed to form a circle around the island of Delos - the putative birthplace of Apollo. These figures date from a culture that existed from about 3000 to 1000 BCE.

Beyond whatever purpose their original creators had for these figures, they have always appealed to me as amazingly meaningful works of art. 

The posture of the figures, the way their heads tilt upward and backward - to me, I have always interpreted this as representing a type of ecstacy or inner transformation: the point at which reflection and insight finally kick in to change one and help one rise to a higher level of being...from the mundane and predictable to a level of joy, liberation, tolerance, mercy, understanding and fraternity. 

The folded arms represent repose, a posture of looking inward. The head tilts upward, involuntarily, reflecting a change from inside that will reflect in the person's outward behavior from this point onward.

The figures used to have eyes and mouths painted on to them, now the lack of eyes and mouth helps to create the impression that the figures are looking inward.

Above is an early example of this type of figure. The elongated neck probably represented some type of magical purpose or it might have reflected a beauty trend of that culture and time.

This is my favorite figurine, reflecting, for me, the anxiety involved in questioning the extent of inner development, wondering whether the ex post can become the ex ante and then experiencing the type of inner change one suspected might exist.  

For some lost reason, the harp player is male. Indeed, the 'active' figures all seem to be male in this culture.

A rare male figure with head tilted and eyes and hair carved into the sculpture. I am a bit confused because the notes from the Met point out that the top part of his body has female breasts, yet a male sexual organ is also carved into this figure. It could be that this figure was meant to have both male and female characteristics.

Tony Matelli - Garden - at Marlborough in Chelsea

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In world mythology the trickster figure is usually really good at giving horrible advice. The irony is that the trickster is usually not trying to sow discord or wreak havoc in people’s lives, he is sincere but misguided. So the trickster has gotten a bad rap – he’s not a ‘trickster’- he is not malicious, he’s just very sure of himself but wrong.  I’m convinced that the serpent in the Garden of Eden story is such a trickster figure and everything he promised to Adam and Eve was something he really believed in. He thought he was doing them a favor by passing on the knowledge of good and evil and really expected his counsel to lead to amazing results. The serpent can represent our own inner capacity to falsely assume impossible results or to, basically, use our intelligence to cheat and cut corners in our spiritual or humane development instead of doing the right thing.

In his show Garden at Marlborough Chelsea, Tony Matelli presents two upside-down, naked human figures in painted cast silicone. Given that the show is called Garden and the story of the Garden is that of the fall of humanity due to a lack of discernment in judging between what’s good and bad spiritual advice, I’m assuming these figures represent the effects of listening to the serpent, namely the loss of grace in exchange for greater self-consciousness. These two folks have been rendered incapable of effective action and find themselves in an absurd condition searching for a solution to right themselves. We see, as Heinrich von Kleist put it in his brilliant essay “On the Marionette Theater”, “…the disorder that self-consciousness imposes on the natural grace of the human being.”  Kleist’s prediction: “As we look in a concave mirror, the image vanishes into infinity and appears again close before us. Just in this way, after self-consciousness has, so to speak, passed through infinity, the quality of grace will reappear.”  Between these two figures Matelli has a levitating green day-glo rope sculpture of silicone that seems to represent the serpent. It’s as if the rope doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to either given the initial choice we made and the life of toil and conflict which followed.

Matelli also has various types of garden religious statuary or statues from the classical era subjected to a sandblaster, each statue serving as a stand to hold various types of cast bronze renditions of food – there’s shrimp on the Virgin Mary for instance. I think I saw a Buddha with oranges. What does this mean? This statuary promises greater meaning than the vision of the world Schopenhauer, for instance, provided, where we are stripped down to the basics of pure biological survival and everything else is supposedly illusory. So we can say there is a contrast between the statues and the food – one is relatively permanent and makes a promise of meaning (like the serpent?) while the other is absolutely essential to the natural survival of our beings and may cast the relevance of the statues in doubt. Or perhaps the food represents a type of naturally spiritual (I hope that’s not an oxymoron) sustenance like that promised from the Tree of Life, while the statues are the dead, stone echoes of that which was originally offered to us by God in the garden. The statues, perhaps, represent our clearer perception of the serpent’s bad advice once the quality of grace reappears.     

Tony Matelli

Garden

May 16 – June 20, 2015

Marlborough Chelsea

545 W. 25^th Street

New York, NY 10001

Robert C. Jackson at Gallery Henoch (Witty Super-Realism)

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Gallery Henoch is one of the premier galleries, if not THE premier gallery, in New York City, for super-realism. It has another one of its amazing group shows up these days until June 20^th and it should not be missed. Some folks have a misconception about super-realism and believe that super-realist artists are only interested in capturing something they perceive in the world on canvas. Henoch continually disabuses this misconception and in its current show we can see how flexible and diverse the technique of super-realism can be. Robert C. Jackson’s piece was especially spectacular to me for its creativity and wit.

In fact, I wanted to highlight the piece above by Jackson because after looking at the painting for a while and chatting about it with a friend, we finally felt we had discovered ‘the hidden meaning’ of the painting and we were impressed by the cleverness and execution of Jackson. He actually seems to be conveying a traditional theme found throughout the history of art in a brilliantly light-hearted and humorous manner.

So we see that Jackson has painted stacks of burgers, pancakes, doughnuts, cakes, oreo cookies etc. When my acquaintance (sarcastically?) asked me whether I felt each oreo cookie in the painting had a specific meaning, I had an ‘a-ha’ moment. Au contraire mon frere – each consumable item probably does not have its own meaning but collectively Jackson seems to be portraying objects that provoke desire. I think one aspect of the piece is to invite the viewer to examine what exactly ‘desire’ is comprised of. And if we introspect a little it seems that desire is comprised of a somewhat intense feeling of inner pain that grows more intense the longer we want something. When we want something, we are goaded through the pain we call desire to an aggressive act purely designed to stop us from suffering and, secondly, to derive whatever pleasure the actual acquisition of the object of desire provides.

So what about the apple on top of all the objects of desire? Why are there two bite marks? Why was the apple left after just two bites? Well, it took us a couple minutes to get this one, but our guess was that this is the apple from the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve bit into it. So Jackson seems to be hilariously portraying (or parodying) the fall of humanity in this piece. There is no snake in the painting because, perhaps, in the story of the fall the snake represents a type of desire for unnecessary things that goads us into aggressive action that becomes harmful to ourselves and the planet.  Good interpretation? Bad interpretation? So all the goodies portrayed – the burgers, pancakes etc. – can either represent the garden or the goodies promised by the snake. I tend to think they represent the goodies promised by the snake – an overabundance of goodies if you just cave into your desire and indulge.

Also, Jackson likes to use oreos a lot in his work. Is this a reference to the famous psychological experiment where small children were challenged not to eat an oreo cookie for 15 minutes under the promise that they would receive more oreos later if they could show restraint?

My interpretations might be dead wrong and Jackson might be reading this right now saying, “What kind of stupid take on my art is this!?” That’s OK, I’m a risk-taker. We’re also including some other images of Jackson’s work so you can see whether there are some common themes in his work. I especially like the T-Rex toy poised to gobble up the oreos. In one piece by Jackson from the past he had a toy dinosaur with a gummy bear in its mouth. It’s as if Jackson is saying that this huge aspect of our lives – desire – even subconsciously underlies children’s games but it is largely ignored and rarely investigated.  

Group Show

Gallery Henoch

555 W. 25^th Street

New York, NY 10001

Christian Faur at Kim Foster Gallery

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As the cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner pointed out, before children can visually represent anything, they scribble. Scribbling with crayons is a form of process or action art in which the child does not even attempt to represent anything, yet the child seems to derive immense pleasure from this expressive act. With a pack of crayons the child chooses from among differing colors, discovering preferences, learning the emotional effects of the differing colors and also learning that his/her expressive actions can result in a type of beauty to be shared with others.

Christian Faur uses crayons as his medium of expression in his current work at Kim Foster Gallery (part of a group show called Heavy Lite). In fact, I’ve been waiting a couple years to see a good representation of Faur’s work again – he’s always been one of my favorite artists represented in Chelsea. Gallery hoppers at the Kim Foster Gallery are generally dazzled by the creativity and innovation in his work, even though what he does may sound pretty simple: basically, Faur takes photographic images and replaces the pixels with crayons.

So, what does this mean?

Unlike a pixel a crayon holds tons of potential expressive energy.  Each crayon is like a little chunk of U-238 (uranium) waiting to be converted from matter to energy. I am pretty sure that if you stuck a three year old kid in front of one of Faur’s works, the kid would start drooling (representing our inherent NEED to express when the opportunity to express is present). Standing in front of one of Faur’s works gives you this feeling of raw potential expressive energy that is pent up in each image. Each image could be deconstructed (and I’m not referencing Derrida here) into miles of wonderfully chaotic scribbles.  

Physically moving around these sculptural works also highlights the pent up expressive energy laden in each piece. As you move around your ability to see the images changes. Get close enough or view a piece from an angle and you no longer see the image, but, instead, the tips of the various crayons. If we use the Boltzmann-Plank definition of entropy, and view entropy as a means to assess disorder, Faur’s work represents a type of ektropy (the opposite concept of entropy) – or amazing, flabbergasting, almost Prussian, almost angelic order. Each piece seems eternal in its anti-entropic order, yet we are also hit with the realization that this could be converted at any time into frivolously joyful childlike expression. Maybe the big message here is that all art is a type of conversion of matter into energy, with the artist as the intermediary.
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A better perspective to see how Faur uses crayons...

Simon Brown - The Weight of Knowledge - at Benrubi Gallery

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The Benrubi Gallery is in the historic Fuller Building on 57^th street, along with a sizeable number of other galleries, so this one destination could keep you busy for some time on a gallery-hopping afternoon (in the elevators you see a listing of the various galleries and which floors they are on).  Indeed, the Fuller Building itself is worth experiencing. This building was designed in an Art Deco style and opened in 1929. In fact, the building was created specifically to hold art galleries at a time when 57^th street was, perhaps, the place to go to see art in New York. A number of historically famous galleries have been housed in the Fuller Building through the years and the current galleries do a yeoman’s job of continuing the tradition of the building.

Benrubi currently has a show of photos by Simon Brown which any bibliophile will enjoy viewing.  The show is called The Weight of Knowledge and consists of photos of, primarily, groupings of books.  But, many of the books seem quite old and are literally bundled up in small stacks and often stacks are piled on stacks.

This is actually what caught my eye, because this binding and stacking lends itself to a number of interpretations. We could come up with a prosaic, literal interpretation and say that these are just useless, damaged old books that need to be abandoned because the knowledge contained has become obsolete – and, therefore, we could draw a blasé interpretation about the continual expansion and refinement of knowledge. But on a deeper level, I’d like to think that the content of these bundled books has now been made deliberately inaccessible, as if someone has realized a limitation to what can be conveyed or grasped through the written word. The person who has bundled up these books is now dissatisfied with the written word, and is seeking for something more. To me the person who wrapped the thin rope around the books loves the inner engagement of ‘the word’ but also realizes that language is not a sufficient tool for complete self-awareness and humane development.  

Perhaps this book bundler is like the hero of Canetti’s Auto da Fe – the rabid and obsessive lover of books who, ultimately, burns himself to death among his priceless library (Canetti is such a good writer, please check him out!). Even Ecclesiastes warns that “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”

So to me the binding of the books with rope is a deliberate process by a person who realizes that you can only get so much from the written word before you have to dive deeper into yourself and plunge more forcefully into the world to really determine what you’re made of and how you respond to others and how you might be able to better, and more humanly, respond to others and change stuff that’s wrong.  But the interesting thing is that behind many of the bundles of books it seems as if Brown has photographed an artist’s easel. So how does this add to the interpretation?  Perhaps the easel and the medium of painting or visual arts represents the ability of the person who has closed his books to now create based on his/her own insights derived from direct experience.  But, then again, this is my interpretation and what I love about pieces like these is that a zillion different interpretations can be engendered.

Brown also has one painting in which he piles the books in such a way that as the books get higher, they get smaller, thus creating a type of pyramid of books.  So it’s as if the textual content of the books literally disappears into thin air the way a Pharoah’s soul was supposed to be able to ascend through the pyramidal structure into the next world. Brown also has fantastic photos of collections of books in an empty room and in a sumptuous library along with one photo of scrolls and portraits. So the show might not just be implying that the word is insufficient, it also highlights the value and love we feel for books and the process of discovery we relish from them. These types of photos are the best advertisements against e-books possible.  One of my favorite photos is of a book collection that was saved from a fire – one can only imagine the glee felt by the bibliophiles who preserved those books.

This show is only up until December 20^th, so I would encourage you to drop by the see the Fuller Building, see this great show and to pop into some of the other galleries before then.  The galleries in this building should definitely be on every gallery hopper’s to see list every month.