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

{{{click on images to enlarge them}}}

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.

Queens Museum show of emerging artists--- 2015 --- Part 1

{{{Click on images to enlarge - The Queens Museum is located near the Unisphere and can be reached after a nice little jaunt through Flushing Meadows/Corona Park}}}

At the Queens Museum there is a show revealing how the use of media as part of the message can become a significant or integral factor in the interpretation of artistic pieces. In this show the medium itself comes to the forefront and adds an extra dimension to the interpretive process.

{{{the lighting for this show by the Queens Museum was less than desired}}}

Sun Young Kang creates what is often called ‘book art’. So, for instance, she takes a Britannica Book of the Year for 1952 which apparently was badly damaged and partly gutted, includes a simple Korean text in lieu of hundreds of pages and connects some of the shredded pages to little glass vials. I’m assuming the choice of a 1952 Book of the Year has to be significant for a Korean artist. This was a horrific year in the Korean War. Basically this was the year when both sides dug in, a la World War I, and an unresolved and perhaps unresolvable situation emerged on that peninsula. From 1952 onward, Koreans were forced to abandon all hope for unification and South Korea went into a long, agonizing survival mode, run by often brutal dictators.

Before I knew what Kang intended I thought she had deliberately gutted the book and it represented to me what we readers do when we read  – we significantly alter our books: they contain more or even different things from what the author intended after we have read them; we change our books through our individually engaged readings of them. Vials often hold medicinal products and to me could hold out hope for a resolution of the division plaguing her country or the vials could represent hope for healing or the need for an external agent to calm and soothe the suffering one feels learning about Korea’s tragic history.  I’d like to think that the vials contain the by-products of the process involved in a reader engaging a text – a sort of elixir developed by really getting into a book. We are not just absorbing info when we read, we are analyzing, disputing, aspiring, altering our perceptions and beliefs and affecting change to our motives and emotional responses. To me the vials contain that stuff.

As Kang explained however, “The remnant of the book from 1952 reminded me of what happened in my own country (and even in the USA)…The book obviously was not readable and missing its story. This spine piece was for me the ‘presence of absence’... Also observing the bottles with mysterious stuff made me think that they contained the lost story. What I did was make this book object with found objects and recreated the missing stories and regained them just as memories do in life after our losses.” 

Kang also shows nifty little hand-made books into which she has burned holes in the pages using incense sticks. Of course, incense is used among some Buddhists to help their prayers rise into the sky to reach the gods. Burning little holes into the paper can represent, therefore, moments of connection with the god-like or the spiritual. These burned holes become inexpressible markers of insights and spiritual union.

{{{really sorry about the bad lighting}}}

Arlene Rush is interested in using casts of her own head and facial features to examine and experiment with the concept of ‘sameness’. The 2 pieces are actually samples of some of Rush’s earlier work. In these pieces she strives for a type of androgynous look and feel which is non-specific in regard to gender and ethnicity.  Rush seems to wish to thwart the viewer’s interest or proclivity in seeking out and finding specific facial features that might reinforce a person’s preconceived prejudices about various types of people. She wants her casts to be metaphors for a basic type of humanity which is shared by all. She thus makes the viewer more aware of a common process by inhibiting the process and creating a strong desire for it. She questions the efficacy and ethics of our continual attempts to, basically, endlessly profile each other.

{{{closer view of a head by A. Rush with a work by Will Kurtz in the background}}}

It’s a thought-provoking concept to try to wipe out your own gender and race/ethnicity but is there really a ‘universal’ or prototypical and non-ethnic look?  It might be more likely that we get the ‘blond-haired, blue-eyed’ Jesus phenomenon – the most dominant culture group sets the standard for what’s supposedly objective or non-ethnic. I’m not sure there is such a thing as a non-ethnic person and this might also be a point that Rush is making. In email she explained she was shooting for a “universal self” exploring “…an ontological question.  The perception of reality and the notion that we ultimately are all the same: wanting to be happy and not to suffer.”

To me, if it’s impossible to wipe out visual character traits, we simply have to be aware of how we search for them and how pernicious this process can be.  Rush is also interested in the concept of the ‘unique’ self and questions the extent to which any of us who are socialized into whichever society can truly be unique. To what extent can we break away from the herd we were born into? Spinoza once wrote that people believed they were exercising free will merely because they were conscious of their actions. Perhaps we believe ourselves to be individuals merely because we are aware of our existences.

Will Kurtz makes life-sized figures of humans and animals – often marginalized folks with their pet dogs – out of newspapers, with an internal wood and wire structure.  In his artist statement he writes that he wants to reveal both the ‘resilience and vulnerability’ of these folks to create empathy with them. He likes adding the element of the marginalized person’s dog or dogs because of the ‘innocence’ the animals bring to the situation.  The innocence and raw energy of the dogs is, in fact, often a stark contrast to the hopelessness and learned helplessness of the human companion. The dogs could also, I’m guessing, serve as symbolic proxy figures for the people depicted – they might represent the inherent value and dignity of the person, the pure, guileless core of the person which makes the person worthy of our concern.

Newspapers, like the folks depicted, also have the function of soliciting empathy from us – often we read of suffering around the world that we feel helpless to address on an individual basis. The use of newspapers could also reveal the aging process. The date of the stories depicted does not change just as our birthdays do not. Finally the people Kurtz shows are usually the people we see in transition – we see them on the street, in stores, hanging around. To many of us they are of as much value as old discarded newspaper. There’s something separating all of us from each other on very basic levels in our society, and Kurtz’s art seems to highlight that.