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

Genesis 2015 - Dan Hernandez - Kim Foster Gallery

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While Dan Hernandez was standing in front of the Leonardo Annunciation a few years ago at the Uffizi, he recognized similarities between the painting and the classic arcade game Street Fighter II. Leonardo has the Archangel Gabriel leaning in toward the Virgin with a stylized hand gesture indicating a greeting or blessing while the Virgin seems to be pulling back into a type of defensive posture. The placement of the two characters to the left and right of a vanishing point in aggressive and defensive postures is, in fact, mirrored by the placement of characters in Street Fighter II. Thus Hernandez began his Annunciation Fighter project, which has evolved into the Genesis series he has been showing at the Kim Foster Gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea district.

Although the current show in the series is called Genesis 2015, his work draws from many different systems and games - Genesis, as Hernandez explained to me, was chosen as a term because it “straddles the old and the new.” He seems to be interested in combining aspects of these games into early Renaissance masters like Giotto, Duccio and Pierro, but he is also interested in “…the sheer density of information in some of the work by Tintoretto, Bosch and Bruegel, illuminated manuscripts, Indian miniatures…the list goes on and on”.  

In some of his pieces you see various saints, angels and perhaps even God ‘Himself’ participating in virtual carnage against legions of adversaries.  Indeed the legions are often differentiated from each other by the giant iconic figures among them, goading and inspiring them to greater and greater glory, and sometimes zapping guys themselves with fearsome laser beams coming from eyes, hands or, potentially, wherever. Sometimes the spiritual warriors are marshalled behind inspiring iconic figures or just organized into potential battle legions waiting to suppress the infidel or maybe even members of one’s own religion who simply live across a border.

Hernandez informed me that he is not necessarily making a statement concerning any particular current political situation and that his pieces are more about the “toy box than the battle field.” He’s “playing at violence” as his children do and that this “runs deeper than current events.” Hernandez points to an early piece by Philip Guston of children play-fighting with garbage can lids as shields and small planks of wood as swords as a reference.

Yet, Hernandez’s work also can serve to satirize the use of religions of ‘peace’ being used as means to marshal armies (throughout history) and his work can also ask to what extent religion is a motivator in conflict or just a banner used to justify conflict being pursued under ulterior motives. There’s also the absurdity of individual cultures going to war just to, basically, destroy the other culture’s religious icons and bury their stories, even though the warring cultures may have icons and texts that, basically, espouse the same principles. Armies have fought to preserve icons and stories. Whose religious meme will, ultimately, survive all this carnage, since it doesn’t seem possible for differing religious memes to coexist?

Deeper to me, however, than Hernandez’s toy box analogy is the fact that his work can also potentially parody the concept of the individual spiritual ‘journey’.  We seem to enjoy thinking of our spiritual ‘quests’ in terms of violent allegories – there is something corrupting or evil inside of us, and this must be rooted out and obliterated. The goal of every religious quest seems to be the attainment of a higher level peace or equanimity, but to attain this equanimity we have to, paradoxically, fight against an adversary the way you zap guys in video games. Of course, once you establish your state of spiritual perfection, as Hernandez shows, you need an army to protect you and your methodology from the other guy’s spiritual perfection and methodology.

Pardon the Interruption, Please : Will Kurtz at Kim Foster Gallery

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The first Thursday after Labor Day, in the USA, is the traditional beginning of the art gallery season in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. One of the highlights of the Chelsea opening night on September 10^th was the sculptures of Will Kurtz at the Kim Foster Gallery, which engaged and dazzled the hordes of folks who came out for the night of art-viewing, people-watching and free wine. 

Kurtz makes life-sized figures of humans and animals out of New York City newspapers (often the New York Times) using an internal wood and wire structure. He usually chooses to depict the types of folks we see around us in public spaces as we are moving about the city and in the past he has often focused on marginalized people with their pet dogs. In his online artist statement he states that he wants to reveal both the ‘resilience and vulnerability’ of these folks to create a feeling of empathy in the viewer. He likes using a person’s dog in many of his works because of the ‘innocence’ the animals bring to the situation. The innocence and raw energy of the dogs is often in stark contrast to the beaten-up, obese, enervated, abject person nearby. Indeed, the dogs might even represent symbolic proxy figures for the people depicted, representing a pure, guileless core of the person which we should be able to better recognize in order to make this person more worthy of our concern and feelings of fellowship. 

On each figure we see little glimpses from the newspapers of stories, headlines or images. On the big butt of one woman we see the phrase, for instance, “…half the sky…”. Like the ever-present news, photos from the news, ads, headlines, we cannot escape the effects of these folks who seem to be permanent markers of our journeys through the city each day. Indeed, like the buildings and streets they occupy they seem to also be permanent fixtures that we have seen a zillion times, can anticipate constantly seeing and therefore tend to ignore or disregard. It’s as if we are subjected to an endless and unbreakable cycle of the same emotional responses from the news and these people through each day.

As we experience them, they are mixed into the advertisements and the news we almost unconsciously absorb just as readily as the news and ads are mixed into them in these sculptures and this reflects our relationship to these people. If one of them does catch our attention again long enough, it’s the same compassion, disgust, admiration, the same limited range of emotions engaged in us by the papers. Like lurid headlines, they can engender interest, sympathy and disgust all at once.  These folks are as ubiquitous as the news and run us through the same untiring pace of responses as the news. It’s as if Kurtz wants us to realize that there is so much more to be felt and understood in regard to these people than we have felt before or tend to feel. Likewise, there is so much that we are missing by merely reading the news and not taking steps to more deeply engage our personal worlds on deep and meaningful levels.

Newspapers are, of course, partially in the business of soliciting empathy from us and often we read about suffering around the world that we are helpless to address on an individual basis. Therefore, newspapers might be the perfect medium for the depiction of these folks. Newspapers help to convey an aging process to these pieces as well. The dates of the stories, ads and headlines do not change just as our birthdays do not change; the newspaper grows older in a discernible way just as we and these folks do. The folks in these sculptures represent a type of urban permanence and transience at the same time.

Interestingly, Kurtz also includes a couple New York City police officers among the folks we commonly see on the streets and this is of real, timely significance in New York City. There is constant chatter in the press as to how the homeless in New York are proliferating and destroying the ‘quality of life’ that more conservative mayors had allegedly created in the past. The police are now being used, according to what we can see in the papers, to break up little communities of homeless people so that they do not create such an eyesore to ‘the rest of us’. So we have police in this gallery, watching over the street folks.

Furthermore, the police, in New York City and the USA in general, have come under deep scrutiny. In New York City, about a year ago, a black man was needlessly and cruelly killed by police officers making an arrest – sparking massive protests.  Just a few days ago an African American, Harvard educated, ex-tennis star was attacked by a police officer for absolutely no good reason. People around the world are currently watching the video and wondering why this kind of thing keeps happening here.  So the presence of these officers in the show is just brilliant given the changing perceptions of the police in the USA and especially New York City. The NY police chief, himself, has said that he has not witnessed such an anti-police attitude since the early 1970s. So the police are standing vigil in this gallery – are they our protectors? Are they benign? Are they evil? Each viewer has to deal with his/her own feelings about seeing these cops in a gallery in light of all the recent news. Each person also has to ask him/herself what can be done about the apparent abuses that seem to happen regularly in this city in regard to the police. New York City has more police officers than Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston combined – they are everywhere in this city, including, now, an art gallery. 

To many of us the people depicted in this show are of as much value as old, discarded newspaper. Kurtz helps to show that there is something separating all of us from each other on very basic levels in our society – it’s up to each of us to ask why and how and to try to break down any barriers on a personal basis. The show runs until October 10^th 2015 at Kim Foster Gallery at 529 W. 20^th Street in New York City’s Chelsea district.

Wasted by Deborah G. Nehmad at Kim Foster Gallery (A Show about Gun Violence in America)

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Deborah G. Nehmad uses paper as a type of surrogate material for human skin, and, therefore, by extension, for the human body.   On her website Nehmad writes: “…the processes I employ – I repetitively burn, etch, scrape, score, stamp, puncture, type, apply pressure, write and draw – and materials I incorporate – heat, paper, gut, glass, ink, thread, soot and metal – offer a visual vocabulary that seems to parallel the way pain marks a body.”

In her current work Nehmad uses her method to step back and look more broadly at gun violence in America, trying to create a graphic representation that might affect the viewer more viscerally than graphs or statistics. Using handmade Nepalese paper Nehmad burns holes and makes stitches to represent individuals killed through the use of guns. Nehmad represents deaths by homicide, suicide as well as deaths caused by the police. The deaths of children due to gun violence (through homicide and suicide) are also graphically represented to differentiate them from other types of gun-related killings. 

For the central image or background of her graphic representations of the numerical effects of gun violence, Nehmad uses giant circles. The irony is intended – the circles can, obviously, represent gun range targets.  Yet, circles can also represent a type of unity. The blotches caused by the burning and stitching marring these circles can represent the type of harm being done to our communities.  We live in a culture where our education does not extend to teaching each other how to handle our rage or how to address factors more humanely that might otherwise cause us to fly into a rage. Our popular culture, in fact, encourages rage. The consumerist nature of our society also allows us to purchase the means by which we can more easily act out our rage. The pieces suggest that the whole emphasis of our society involves ignoring or denying a type of humane personal development that can resolve conflict and, instead, embraces violence as the best solution to all of our problems. We see this in individual social interactions as well as the overarching ‘ideology’ of American foreign policy.

The show points to a problem right at the heart of contemporary American society. It’s easier to attack and lash out than it is to view the other as a fellow human being worthy of respect and compassion. We teach malice and not compassion or understanding. In fact, it’s more profitable when folks attack and lash out so these unnecessary deaths depicted in these pieces will undoubtedly continue for the foreseeable future. In this show guns become symbols of the absolute refusal to believe that it is possible to live like decent and compassionate human beings. The images show the effects of this refusal to even attempt to establish a humane ideology as the basis of our culture.

Deborah G. Nehmad

Wasted

April 9 – May 9, 2015

Kim Foster Gallery

529 W. 20^th Street, groundfloor

New York, NY 10011

www.kimfostergallery.com

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...

Nautical Sculpture by David McQueen at Kim Foster Gallery, Chelsea

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Why did New York City become one of the centers of the world banking system?  It started with shipping. Before Wall Street there was South Street, and this is where the ‘rise’ of New York City began. New York Harbor is, actually, the deepest harbor in the western hemisphere and it was easier to bring in huge cargos to South Street than it was to bring them to the other places along the coast.  Indeed, you could bring the biggest ships in the world right up to land at NY Harbor (this was a huge advantage over other coastal cities).

Guys like John Jacob Astor (America’s first millionaire) used the harbor so effectively that they made a financial killing through world shipping trade.  Soon these shipping magnates began developing banks where they could loan out their huge surplus earnings and then realized it was far easier to make money through banking than shipping. Astor built one of the first banks on Wall Street and other erstwhile traders soon followed. So shipping lead to banking and banking took root and took off as New York bankers began loaning to the world. Despite the huge harbor, the shipping scene became moribund. One lifestyle was lost and another was begun.

So you can think of New York City as being pre and post Wall Street.  Indeed, before the banks on Wall Street there was a leisurely pace in lower Manhattan and the area was filled with small houses and rustic looking neighborhoods.  The cemetery and grounds at Trinity Church sprawled through the neighborhood (Trinity was forced, over the years, to relinquish the land to businesses) and Trinity remains, to me, the chief symbol of New York as it was before it became a banking center.

Yet, as David McQueen reveals in his amazing show at Kim Foster Gallery, there are still 40 light houses to be found in New York Harbor.  This attests to the importance of shipping in NY history and also is a testament to the fact that even though we have adapted to a city of bankers, the ocean still remains as a possible source of discovery and challenge.  The light houses harken back to a pre-corporate world where ingenuity and physical challenges existed side by side.  These light houses, I am assuming, are no longer being used, but stand as a reminder of how New York City ‘evolved’ and how shipping and not capital once dominated the lives of New Yorkers. With the loss of shipping we lost a type of work-ethic, sense of adventure, desire for discovery and daring and a sense of romance that the few ships remaining, which you can see as relics at South Street Seaport, do not adequately convey.  

Interestingly, however, because the light houses have lost their practical functions, McQueen experiments with them, and other nautical objects, in more fanciful and imaginative ways, often imputing fantastical purposes and functions to them.  Indeed, it’s almost as if he has created his own allegory involving the loss and search for love through the objects in this show. For instance, two light houses stand facing each other and we are challenged to view them as if they are disgruntled and puzzled lovers at the moment just before a formal breakup. A sextant and graph and other do-dads used for navigating are used to measure the increasing amount of time one might like to spend savoring meaningful aspects of a relationship. The astrolabe becomes a device used to find one’s love again while engaged in a pursuit of self-discovery. A station pointer meant to triangulate a fixed position based on three observable points is to be used to discern emotional and inner states. An object similar to a telescope is present with 31 markers which help a person document levels of desire over the course of a month.

In one room McQueen also has an installation display of 7 rotating lights which are positioned based on his research of where the 7 lighthouses represented by these pieces functioned in relation to each other. This installation is titled “Searching Still” and could represent the ever-present and somewhat desperate search for emotional engagement with another or others. There is also a separate piece, in the room with the installation, of a lighthouse beaming its light out onto a painting of the sea.  One just sees violent, tossing waves illuminated.  

One of my favorite pieces is “Breaching Pod” which shows the hull of ships emerging from a flat piece of wood.  This is almost like a fairy tale image of a piece of wood protesting against its flat and mundane appearance and trying, instead, to morph into something more romantic.  Basically this is a floor that wants to be a ship. “Balikbayan Boat” seems to be based on McQueen’s Filipino heritage and represents a type of cargo ship that never used any type of mechanism to tie down the cargo. The skill of the sailors themselves kept the cargo within the ship as it moved across the sea and the function of the journey – to bring home gifts to family and friends – provided the extra focus and effort needed to complete a perilous task.  The boat deliberately looks overburdened and as McQueen mentions in his notes for the show the boat is “extended beyond any notion of practicality”. 

David McQueen graduated with an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University - the premier grad program for sculpture in the USA - and is clearly a rising star in the field of sculpture.  His pieces are whimsical, imaginative, fanciful and often interactive.  Coming from a family of jewelers, he also shows he learned that craft well as we see intricately detailed work in regard to the metals he uses in his sculptures.  He combines the skills of a perfectionist with a need to engage the viewer thoughtfully and meaningfully through his highly creative work. 

This is me, Daniel Gauss...

Fuzzy Geometry at Kim Foster Gallery by Sydney Blum

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As a possible descendant of Carl Friedrich Gauss (the Prince of Mathematicians, the inventor of non-Euclidean geometry and the creator of a 17-sided polygon - this was once big news in the field of geometry), I was compelled to see the show of work by Sydney Blum, at Kim Foster Gallery, called ‘Fuzzy Geometry.’

Fuzzy Geometry is actually a serious subject in the field of mathematics with philosophical and ‘theory of knowledge’ implications.  All I inherited from C.F. Gauss, however, was his big nose so I don’t claim to be an expert on geometry.  From what I can tell, I’m guessing Fuzzy Geometry is kind of like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, but applied to bigger stuff than subatomic particles. I think Heisenberg said that in the process of trying to pin down the location of various particles, we change the scene so that an exact location of anything subatomic can never be precisely known.  We can have kind of a ‘fuzzy’ awareness, however.  But a fuzzy awareness seems to work – it’s good enough to do the trick.

It’s the same thing basically in Fuzzy Geometry. Essentially there is a difference between theoretical space and real space and our capacities to measure and create in these two realms. Imprecision is an aspect of any type of real measurement and it is ignored in the field of pure mathematics but it cannot be ignored if you are building airplanes. Frankly, I don’t know exactly what Fuzzy Geometry is, but the concept can still be meaningful to me in artistic terms. I think we can go with the definition that pure location and measurement is a myth in the real world and that we are always working with a type of fuzziness when we measure stuff and the relations between stuff. We want absolute precision and certainty, but we need to throw in the towel and accept the fact that we have to live with a certain amount of ambiguity: but that’s OK.

So the artist basically works and plays with the concept of ‘fuzzy’ or ‘fuzziness’.  In the past she literally used human or animal hair in her pieces.  After a while she had ethical qualms about doing this and deliberately switched to synthetic hair to connect the dots in the coordinate systems she uses in her pieces.  I think how Blum uses hair is, in fact, a key to interpreting the pieces because hair possesses a number of symbolic qualities.  Hair can represent potency – remember Samson?  Hair is also sexy - it no longer serves any real survival value for us – it’s there purely for Darwinian ‘sexual selection.’  It’s also a component of the ‘animal’ or ‘natural’ self we often attempt to deny. 

In her pieces, as I interpret them, Blum seems to be subjecting hair to a type of procrustean process.  (Quick ancient Greek mythology refresher here: Procrustes had two beds: one long and one short. If a traveler stopping by his home in the wilderness was tall, he’d be given the short bed and vice versa. At night the tall person’s limbs that overhung the bed would be chopped off by Procrustes or a short person would be stretched to death to fit the longer bed.) The hair seems to be coiled and stretched, unnaturally, between the points. It is then tied in place by wires.  The hair could be long and flowing and gently curling, but it becomes rope-like and looks to be stretched to the point of bifurcation.  The implication (to me) seems to be that intellectual systems are supposed to exist  for us, they are supposed to aid us in our development in a smooth and easy process; we should not have to try to fit into such systems or become slaves to them.  So the Fuzzy Geometry pieces, potentially, represent a kind of conflict between a natural and theoretical development – intellectual systems often expect nature to conform to the structure of thought and not vice versa. The system does not form around the hair, the hair is stretched within the system.  There might be a more natural process of perception and assessment than the purely abstract and mathematical approach. Indeed, a purely abstract approach might always be quite limiting or even destructive to a type of natural development.

Of course there can be a zillion interpretations and another could be that these geometrical shapes are kind of like Meret Oppenheim’s furry cup and saucer at MoMA. Just as the cup and saucer have absurdly transformed into something hairy, maybe the geometrical shapes, or what they represent, possess an inherent quality to morph into something more organic and lively once the need for precision and exactitude is abandoned.

Kim Foster Gallery - located at 529 W. 20th...  info@kimfostergallery.com

C.F. Gauss:

Me:

I would argue there is an uncanny resemblance between our noses.  Does this prove descent? Hmmmm.....our noses are so similar!  Actually, I have no idea whether I'm related to the great guy or not. I never really cared enough to fully check.

Genesis by Daniel Hernandez at Kim Foster Gallery

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Εν Τούτῳ Νίκα - In this sign you will conquer!

These were, allegedly, the Greek words Constantine saw in the sky, which led to his conversion to Christianity before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (313 ACE).  According to the legend, his troops entered the battle under the banner of Christianity and bearing the sign of the chi-rho (a two-letter symbol for the concept of ‘Christ’) on their shields.  This would, therefore, mark the first time an army was led into battle under the Christian banner.  Ostensibly, in Daniel Hernandez’s latest show at Kim Foster (as he explained it to me), he parodies this use of Christianity (throughout history) as a rallying cry to battle and a banner under which to fight.

Yet, I think there’s much more to his pieces. His work also parodies the religious quest itself – which often pits the ‘quester’ against the ‘adversary’ using military metaphors.  His work also questions what the social functions of a major organized religion are and can become and how it might become possible for entire cultures, who share the same basic values, to go after each other with the sole purpose of destroying each other’s religion.  In his pieces we see Christianity as a cultural marker that motivates confrontational and destructive action at the same time that we see the individual spiritual quest represented purely in aggressive and militaristic terms.

Modern scholars are, by the way, beginning to believe the story of Constantine’s conversion to be a hoax, in that the Arch of Constantine in Rome only bears Mithraic and ‘pagan’ religious references in regard to Constantine’s victory.  If Christianity was such a factor in his victory, why the heck aren’t there any crosses or chi-rhos on the Victory Arch?  It seems more likely that various social pressures later compelled Constantine to embrace Christianity, and like in most corrupt bureaucracies, the Roman authorities merely concocted a dramatic cover story and backdated stuff.  The Templars, believe it or not, also adopted the saying “In this sign you will conquer!” when they were battling the Muslims in Jerusalem and surrounding environs.  So folks definitely used the banner of Christendom to charge into battle – sometimes against the heathen and sometimes against fellow believers, whether Constantine was the first or not. But the Constantine story, hoax that it seems to be, clearly set the stage for the type of future Christian-inspired battle carnage Hernandez pokes fun at.

You definitely see this happening in Hernandez’ pieces.  You’ve got the religious icons and the little figures fighting under them.  The clear implication seems to be that within the overall rubric of the central religious icon, the battle rages – for the icon and under the icon’s protection.  Edward Gibbon, of course, claimed that Christianity destroyed the Roman Empire because Christians were egalitarian pacifists.  Au contraire Ed, you only studied one aspect of this religion.  Recent research suggests that Christians made up sizable portions of Constantine’s army, were dang good fightin’ men, and may have, ultimately, been THE pressure to force an adoption of their religion on the state. 

It’s true there is an egalitarian ethic in the Gospels, but who, other than Quakers, ever took that seriously, I mean, really seriously?  Christianity became the ideal religion for the Roman Empire because it allowed a social transformation that gave a moribund system one last chance at survival.  Christianity and not paganism became the perfect ‘city’ religion because of the social values it promoted – fairness, toleration, mercy tempering justice – these were the principles this religion gave the Roman Empire (not hippy free love).  Equality never meant social equality, it meant equality in the eyes of God.  So actively participating in the operations of a stratified society – including military service – was never anti-Christian, especially after Augustine’s “justifiable war” theory.  History shows Christian guys became pretty fearsome warriors a la Chuck Martel, Karl der Gross, Dick the Lionhearted, Audie Murphy et al.    

But as Kim Foster pointed out in her notes to the show, the show is called “Genesis” for a couple reasons – one of which is that the painter hearkens back to the days when the Sega Genesis hit the market and helped revolutionize computer games.  I was never into this stuff, but based on some research it looks as if the Sega Genesis made battles look more realistic and made enemies tougher to kill. 

So what I think is hilarious about the paintings is that Hernandez establishes a direct parallel between the video game soldiers destroying their enemies and the belief that attaining to Christian perfection is a type of spiritual battle in which you confront and destroy an (inner) enemy. Paul started all this military metaphor stuff in the Bible.  Gird your loins and all that!  Although Christianity is the religion of peace (aren’t they all!?), even the guys who wrote the “New” Testament liked to envision spiritual ‘combat’ with the ‘enemy’ in military terms.  This stuff is all over Paul’s letters to all the guys he wrote to.  It’s a fight or a struggle and we’re trying to gain spiritual victory the way some little kid was vaporizing monsters on his Sega Genesis.  Our metaphor for spiritual development and elevation to a higher level of being is, basically, a metaphor of conquest and destruction and essentially the same thing as some pimply-faced kid zapping aliens on a computer screen.