January 2009
Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) at MoMA Atrium
Pipilotti Rist hits the high-water mark for undiluted trippiness in “Pour Your Body Out”. Filling the massive MoMA Atrium to the brim with Technicolor video ooze, the work drifts in poetic free-association from image to liquid image. Providing a close-up Purple Haze perspective, the camera floats past a nude woman crawling through a lush meadow, a rain of tulip petals, dripping overripe fruit, slippery worms. The Atrium becomes a lava lamp, bubbling with turquoise, magenta, and other confectionary hues, like an oversaturated sugar solution. But all is not pastoral bliss; to harsh our mellow, an ugly pig gnaws an apple, and disembodied feet slip on muddy rubbish. Lovely red waves are revealed to be a massive menstrual tide. The audience reclines on a huge circular sofa, invited to soak up the pantheistic delights with unselfconscious hippie abandon. “Please feel as liberated as possible,” reads the wall text.
At times, “Pour” resembles a 1968 light show for, say, Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore. It explores the same visionary terrain of experimental films like Scott Bartlett’s “Serpent” (1970) or Pat O’Neill’s “7362” (1967), but these first-generation psychedelic works retain more complexity and power than Rist’s easy ooze.
"Pour" makes a splash with its sheer scale: it's art video as stadium spectacle. Such massive form demands equally massive content. But unfortunately, this time Rist has come up dry. "Pour" contains only a droplet of meaning, diluted to insignificance in bottomless spectacle, like a spit in the ocean.
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January 2009
Fred Sandback at David Zwirner Gallery
The sculptures of American minimalist Fred Sandback (1943 – 2003) are constructed with lengths of yarn, stretched between floor and ceiling, or spanning the length of a wall. These straight lines, running vertically and horizontally, appear to define volumes. At first glance, they read as enormous sheets of glass, or as mirrors reflecting the white cube of the gallery. On closer examination, they work in a variety of ways. The yarn traces imaginary surfaces, leaning an absent plane against a blank wall. Rectangles assembled in the center of the room boldly slice the space and produce highly optical effects, dependent on the viewer’s location. Intervals and proportions expand and contract. The eye collapses the sculpture’s three-dimensionality to flatness, or conversely, projects conventional two-dimensional perspective out into space. A collection of perpendicular planes can be seen as a tunnel of reflections bouncing between parallel mirrors.
The works in the exhibition date from the start of Sandback’s career in the 1960’s through to the 1990’s. It is evident that decades were spent refining a specific strategy. Sandback’s work is as monumental in scale as his contemporary Richard Serra’s, but is absolutely humble in its material. Yarn is homey, domestic, cheap. It has connotations of the feminine: yin to the macho yang of Serra’s steel. To achieve complexity via simple strategies seems to have been a special gift of the first generation of minimalists. By austerely tracing absences, Sandback’s work achieves a mysterious marriage of opposites: humility and monumentality.
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February 2009
Candida Höfer’s Philadelphia at Sonnabend Gallery
One of the functions of architecture is to visually represent the authority and power of the building’s owners. Candida Höfer (born Cologne, Germany, 1944) uses an exacting methodology to photograph the interior spaces of public institutions. She places a view camera in an enormous room of a museum, library, or church, and captures a hyperreal vista of orderly arrangements of ornate décor. Clean architectural lines recede to a vanishing point always in the exact center of the image, forming a perfect symmetry. Details in the carpeting, upholstery, molding, and tiles are crisply rendered from foreground to distant background. The spaces are always unpopulated.
To stand before these images is to be awed by both Höfer’s photographic technique and the grandeur of the space that is represented. These 6 by 8 foot images, viewed at close range, engulf the viewer's field of vision, offering the illusion of being inside the space itself. “Masonic Temple” (2007) portrays a spectacular entrance hallway, with filigree, pattern, and statuette on walls, floor, and ceiling receding to infinity. It’s impossible not to wonder about the specifics of the political, religious, and cultural authority that chose to express itself in this way.
Höfer studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher, and clearly shares the Becher’s conceptual clarity and unvarying methodology. But the Becher’s repetitive black and white images of industrial architecture, presented in modest sizes, have an austere rigor that suggests a critical distance towards their subject and towards the very act of image-making. Höfer’s colorful, baroque interiors are presented in sizes that engulf the viewer, overwhelming any criticality with square meters of rich panoramic perfection. Höfer allows us to interrogate these spaces. However, the sheer physical grandeur of the photographs leaves us no room to step outside. We see the way power and authority embodies itself, but do these works do more than merely celebrate that power? There is a risk that a photograph of decoration may become itself merely decorative.
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April 2009
Paul Glabicki: ACCOUNTING for… at Kim Foster Gallery
Symbols, when drained of their meaning, become decoration. In Paul Glabicki’s new drawing series, the very blankness of empty symbols becomes a useful line of inquiry.
The 28” x 23” drawings are done of the backs of pages removed from a Japanese accounting ledger from the 1930s. Using pencil, pen, and crayon in a variety of muted shades, Glabicki applies layers of new information over and around the calligraphy that bleeds through from the back. In thin careful lines, he inscribes streams of numbers, bits of architectural detail, map labels, postmarks, texts in Greek and Sanskrit, and symbols drawn from chemistry, geometry, and astrology. The result is a detailed plane of uniform density. The layers of small intricate marks are constructed with impressive care, implying an almost autistic focus to detail and a clarity of intent.
The marks do not run to the edge of the page, and thus do not imply a partial view of an infinite surface, as in the work of Sue Williams. They are uniformly controlled, unlike the freely expressive script of Cy Twombly.
These drawings are clearly the residue of process. But Glabicki does not rely on a rigid rule-based system, like Sol LeWitt. Small arrows connect diverse signs, but Glabicki does not rely on some private system of meaning or arcane research, as in Mark Lombardi’s attempts to make visible hidden connections.
Glabicki’s process is to select a variety of types of empty signs, and then to blend carefully measured amounts, like a chef or an alchemist. These blank works are not about the artist, nor about the referent of symbols, nor about decorative surfaces. The amassed empty symbols of ACCOUNTING for… suggest something like a view of knowledge itself, existing in an idealized detached state, before it becomes incarcerated in the mind; that is, meaning before it gets inside people and turns them into the overtly subjective baboons that we all are.