Tropo Mfg

Fantastic Voyage: Corey Postiglione

2011-03-25T17:09:00.000-07:00

Fantastic voyage: COREY POSTIGLIONE

FROM multiverses down to strings, Corey Postiglione is a cartographer of cosmology. His flat compositions, having strayed from his youthful obsession with minimalism have retained much of its language, or more accurately, formed a dialect of its guidelines. While even the most strident adherent could not (truthfully) deny minimalism’s pictorial tension between line and shape, figure and ground, Mr. Postiglione, too young to have fully embraced the dogma, has gone off the reservation of the blocky and monochromatic and rejected the objectness of minimalism, opting instead for a more poetic, if sparse, mimesis of human vision, complete with its biological limitations and psychological deceits.

IN Lolita, Nabokov describes the wishful thinking of a short-eyes gazing furtively from his darkened window across to a neighbor’s home and the fragment of girlish flesh that appears to have escaped the defensive modesty of the drawn shade. Her thigh moving slowly titillates the viewer until it is revealed as the forearm of a man reading the newspaper. Perception once again hijacked by conception.

MR. Postiglione employs similar devices of shape in his works that often appear as a decorative lattice or a Celtic flourish but reveal themselves, upon closer inspection, as diagrams of pandemic spread or microscopic examinations of nascent pestilence. These are alternated with concentric ellipses that suggest galaxies and constellations, citing in one breath both our mortality and historical affect. This conceit, once revealed, colors his work with a distinct creepiness. Dark Passage, shown here, a lacy shadow play of nettles and nodules, brings to mind a nest of parasitic worms. His Swarm II, 2008, like an illuminated x-ray that shows a forebodingly altered anatomy, produces a distinct queasiness in the average viewer and has the power to send hypochondriacs perspiring from the gallery.

SUCH an appetite of the macabre is not to all tastes, especially when administered in the method of pattern and decoration with a soupçon of formalism, yet these works––drawings for the most part as they make use of a texture that seems natural as opposed to the contrivance of layered painting––are abstract enough to allow us to ignore their augurs. There is a tactile and optical satisfaction that returns them to the realm of abstraction divorced fully from emotion. They rely on elegant line and subtle coloration as bait to seduce the eye and draw the viewer close enough for the sucker punch. In this way the artist becomes what in literature is called an unreliable narrator. Mr. Postiglione visually offers one version then another account of his strategy, first it is form, then content, and yet again form as each work retreats to its original position.

LIKE the forearm of Humbert Humbert's neighbor it appears one thing but reveals itself as another. In Mr. Postiglione’s case we the viewer make the final transition, restoring the view to what we wish it was, the intellectual pleasure of a contemplation of beauty in it most elemental nature; rejecting the fearsome imitation and participation of the real.

Max King Cap

CALIBAN IN THE MIRROR

2011-02-22T12:03:00.000-08:00

CALIBAN IN THE MIRROR: TODD GRAY

And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.

Matthew 18:9 Christian Bible, New Testament (KJV)

It is a brand of exile, outwardly elective but mortally irresistible. Unlike Marie Antoinette in her Petit Hameau, performing, with a cast of costumed courtiers, a pantomime of rustic life while only steps away from the splendor of Versailles, Todd Gray—a native Californian who grew up in the surf—is a pantheist, drawn by a more irreducible magnetism. Though fully immersed in the manufactured culture we refer to as civilization Mr. Gray is enamored of the monastic moment, a contemplation of a world (and his place in it) unveneered by the vanities of garish invention; our protestations of mortality in the form of monuments that we daily erect to ourselves, and, when seeing the works of others, constantly reconstrcuct ever more elaborately. His three large wall collages (all untitled, all 2009) in this exhibition are documentations and inventions featuring himself and the nature toward which he is drawn. Part performance and utterly earnest, Mr. Gray enacts a variety of rituals that sample equally from disparate traditions while adding his own variation. His awareness of the documentation and the struggle to reject his own gaze creates an uneasy and delicate bond between the anthropologist and the subject. Naked and lathered, Mr. Gray concocts an offering of endurance, surrender, and effacement. Though these works are photographed in the landscapes of Ghana, his second home, they are the lush twins of his Californian childhood, making his exile less rejection than embrace, a view of himself in an alternate but wholly compatible mirror. He is both Prospero and Caliban, master and slave, sorcerer and satyr; and between both personae is the storm—playing the role of evolutionary fork in the road. His foam is not a minstrelsy but a froth of the sea—a baptism and rebirth, and clouds—an ascension. These works continue his examination of nature and our sometimes ebullient, often indifferent, attitude toward it. His California Mission: Horse (2006), seen at right, presents the impenetrable looking glass that no longer projects our image, making palpable the lament of Mr. Gray’s fellow traveler, William Wordsworth, “And I could wish my days to be bound each to each by natural piety.” Max King Cap

IN LOVE WITH NIGHT

2011-02-22T09:45:00.000-08:00

Edward Hyde, Esq.

Conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker (in pajamas and robe on Sunday mornings in our Pittsburgh basement rec room) my father’s creased eyes betrayed the nascent glisten of rapture. This was his private time. I wanted no more to see him cry than he wanted to be seen because in all things, other than his Sunday commune with the RCA stereophonic console, he was a hard man who equated sentiment with weakness.

We are, at least the greatest number of us, wallflowers at the “Emotional Expression Ball”. We’ve even veneered this infirmity as a virtue, an emotional poker face concealing our tender and vulnerable selves. Of course, there are those who are too effusive, too ready with their emotions. We regard them with suspicion. They frighten us with their rawness, much as do the mentally unstable who sometimes accost us in the street, unnerving us with their unfiltered sentiments. We’d prefer surrogates do our emoting, employing a variety of diversions to wrench our unwilling feelings from us—sports, melodrama, and horror.

This last area—horror, fear, the bogeyman—is the subject of the exhibition, In Love With Night, that has assembled a number of compelling American and international artists to explore darkness, romance, terror, and dreams through interpretations of our physical and psychological fascination with nighttime. Featuring objects, installations, video, and photography, the works draw on contemporary and historical imagery that interprets night in both its objective and symbolic conditions, for night has remained the unguarded frontier of our dominion over the earth, or at least our little part of it, the self. Apart from the very real fears of darkness such as the concealment of danger, the propensity for accidents, and the lonely vulnerability, the night represents the unknown and the unknowable—fears of unexpected transformations, things out of balance, and secrets made known.

Guided by a belief that adoption is rather like buying a pig in a poke, some parents will endure any medical procedure and bear any expense to have a child that shares their DNA. This, of course, is eugenics by another name and suggests a naïveté that assumes biological children are less likely to turn out rotten. The Aryan Brotherhood prison gang is full of sons raised by their biological parents and the stranger/foundling has a long history of suspicion mixed with celebration—Moses, President Gerald Ford, Kaspar Hauser—but Chicago artist Jill Thompson, herself an adoptee, has created artwork for A Dog and His Boy (Dark Horse Book of Monsters, et al) that captures the chief fears of youth; abandonment, displacement, and puberty. Ms. Thompson creates a series of images that tread that tortuous path between a childish yearning for freedom and its attendant fears. The boy, adopted by a pack of hounds, is not merely a stranger; he is also of an age when uncontrollable urges make strange demands upon the body, causing it to change rapidly. Alternating between tender and terrifying Ms. Thompson’s images show the boy as fragile, in his forlorn abandonment, and ferocious, when he transforms into a ravenous and uncontrollable werewolf. The wolf in sheep’s clothing, and many other fables and fairy tales, illustrate our ancient folk traditions and religious beliefs.

According to Hamlet, “…the devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape…” (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, II, ii, 434-435). Such a devil is revealed in the work of Dutch artist Erik van der Weijde, who photographs the ice-skating rinks and playing fields used as hunting grounds by Belgian fiend Marc Dutroux, who kidnapped, enslaved, and tortured six young girls. The photos of recreation centers frequented by the notorious serial killer have an evidentiary appearance and without the knowledge of their significance they could easily pass for the mundane civic documentation of a neighborhood clean-up plan. That quality is precisely what makes them so distressing, the locations are resolutely nondescript. An analog of this work might be Chloe Piene’s video work, Blackmouth (2006), that shows a muddied girl, attempting to stand, as if newly foaled, and falling again into the muck. The howling girl, perhaps twelve years old, seems ambivalent of her transformation. It is a slippery path she will now follow and these earlier stumblings, she appears to know, will seem nostalgic in comparison to the world of pain ahead.

III

Darkness has an unfair advantage. Whether it is merely the inability to see or the influence of those mysterious and proverbial unseen forces, darkness puts us off balance. Brian Azzarello’s 100 Bullets series for DC Comics’ adult imprint Vertigo tells the story of vengeance made possible. Rather than hopelessly lashing out at loved ones or strangers 100 Bullets offers a scenario, in each installment, for genuine revenge. Illustrated with stunning economy by Eduardo Risso, 100 Bullets shows us that we have a taste, but often not the stomach, for justice. This imbalance continues with the vertiginous work of Shana Lutker, who builds and documents familiar interiors that she has never visited, reconstructing the wayward architecture glimpsed only in the illogical fragments of her dreams. Yet our dreams are often more memorable than our waking life.

Some in light, some in darkness,

That's the kind of world we're in.

Those we see are in the daylight

Those in darkness don't get seen.

This quatrain of Mack the Knife from Brecht’s Three Penny Opera could easily be the theme song for the Department of Nocturnal Affairs (DNA), a Los Angeles-based collective who, as both a work of installation and performance art, document and publicize the night animals in this pseudo-paradise we call Southern California. Unshakably on the side of the animals, DNA is happiest when nature, annoyed by our arrogance, reminds us just who’s in charge by placing a coyote in a traffic intersection, a cougar on the hill above a schoolyard.

Forgers and con artists (and sociopaths) trade upon the desires and expectations of their victims. Blinded by their eagerness to clues of deceit, the victim realizes too late the depth of their credulity and the architecture of their avid belief comes tumbling down. The fake Vermeers of Han van Meegeren, the Hitler diaries, the seemingly endless supply of pantomime scions of famous families; all produce their illusion by enlisting us as their co-conspirator to keep ourselves in the dark. Osaka artist Michiko Yao reveals her unpleasant truth slowly and sweetly. Her Samsara Pleasure Principle II, (2008), is a video installation that recalls Dutch vanitas painting and would pass admirably as a reiteration of mortality, yet the conqueror worm in this instance is a toy and the dying flowers artificial. Implied is the power of ritual and artifice to manipulate at will and an admission of its intent to keep exploiting that authority. A similar authority is referenced and exploited in the work of Inga Dorosz. Untitled (2005-2007) allows us to gaze into the infinite blackness of space, as if passing through a belt of asteroids. Based upon a discussion by two Irishman on the limits of infinity, the San Francisco-based Dorosz has built a fragment of the universe through the sly photography of homely potatoes. The revelation of family secrets––we all have skeletons in the closet––tend to rewrite our personal histories, putting the lie to the good old days, as Ken Gonzales-Day’s works testify. His Into Eternity (2006) discloses the twisted and unforgettable branches of our family tree, with its strange and bitter fruit.

There is a reason we take copious photographs of weddings and birthdays but almost never of deathbeds and funerals. Good times are ephemeral and need explicit evidence to be evoked. What was once euphoric is eventually diffused into a brief smile of recollection, an ever-dimming echo. Sorrow and fear, however, have an ineffaceable staying power and need no catalyst to materialize. They return with undiminished power, even fortified with repeated visitations; the blood quickens, the emotions reel and the bizarre and complex function of our humanity is put on full display—we bristle with life. This is so intoxicating that without a genuine event we are obliged to prime the pump of our soul by proxy, inventing and indulging in counterfeits that produce that same addictive delirium—the weeping, the screaming, and the trembling of the hairbreadth escape.

Max King Cap

images top to bottom
Chloe Piene
Jill Thompson
Eduardo Russo
Ken Gonzalez-Day

BABEL: THE CHAOS OF MELANCHOLY

2010-10-05T13:50:00.000-07:00

Kyungmi Shin

The devotional experience of the Gothic cathedral is a masterstroke of stagecraft; the upward gaze darkening as it rises, airily tinted by the fading light from the clerestory; the stone columns, like great trees, of a diameter five men can barely encompass, the smoking censer, the glowing cassocks, the Ave Maria…all these are manipulations of the audience experience, all evocations of future memories.

The photographs and installations of Los Angeles artist Kyungmi Shin follow a similar strategy. From her elegant and wretched 2004 work WarCuts––that excises the images of military personnel from the print reportage (that itself is dying)—a lacework of newsprint that festively curtains from its perch upon wall, to her 2007 Rich/Yellow that gives us a color photograph, large and segmented, of a forested coastline vitiated with the hastily, hand-inscribed word “rich”, a cataloguer’s brief pause before moving on to the conquest of other costa ricas; her inventions have recreated, juggled, and restaged our essential relations to our cultural hallmarks.

The urge to remake our world is an effort, in essence, to remake ourselves, a drive as old as the fable of Adam and Eve willfully partaking of the fruit of knowledge. Becoming as gods themselves was the bill of goods sold them by the wily serpent and the urge has been with us ever since. Evincing this creation of an Eden of our own is New York’s Central Park and Boston’s Emerald Necklace, completely contrived imitations of the natural world. They are utopian fantasies, egalitarian parks designed to reassure the wealthy and uplift the poor; as the rise of cities was accused of the coarsening of society such faux paradises were considered the antidote. These parks, and other works of Frederick Law Olmstead, godfather of landscape architecture, are, however, unabashedly romantic views of paradise; an arcadia of the people that never quite lived up to its promise.

Ms. Shin makes no attempt to appeal to the image of our ideal selves. Her works are an unflinching view of the world as we have made it, chaotic, relentless, and hostile to reproof. Her Babel, a two-storey cataract of photographs, refuse, and recycling is provisional architecture of the kind we are drawn to create. Confirming the gated community and the favela as diametric twins upon the circular architectural continuum, just as today’s McMansion is the verso of an A.M.E. church housed in a former synagogue, Ms. Shin’s is a fourth dimensional architecture. Valued items are eventually discarded, refashioned, then finally become fashionable again as a green commodity. The photos included in this construction (among many other ingredients) place, without judgment, the luxury construction in Dubai alongside images of Ghanaian shantytowns, as equivalencies. Her tower is the cognate object of all human endeavor, a jerry-built bulwark against obscurity.

Of Will Rogers’s famous and naïve pronouncement, “A stranger’s just a friend I haven’t met”, Ms. Shin’s view is the opposite, the currently valuable as future junk (and all of us eager packrats), a view comparable to the falsity of freshly picked flowers–– already dead but unwilling to admit it.

Max King Cap

FUGITIVE CANDOR

2010-08-20T13:57:00.000-07:00

FUGITIVE CANDOR

It is Ahab’s phantom limb, that fully palpable but completely intangible pentimento of loss. It is why we love antiquing, respect our elders, and revere the crackled canvases of the old masters. A storefront, too, can display this intuition; its barren mannequins revealed as scarecrows alone in a darkened but embarrassingly public alcove. It is a territory full of poignant relics, with every direction magnetic. To navigate it we have the three artists in this exhibition, Matt Ohm, Tim Ripley, and Deborah Boardman.

We all have a homeland. For some it is an actual place with longitude and latitude, for others it exists as an amalgam of evocative smells and embroidered recollections. Some we long for, others are the milestones by which we measure our escape. Matthew Ohm, of Long Beach CA, toggles the two locations. With a freehand schematic on a plank of smooth poplar he has shown us in Wilton, Wisconsin, 2005, a vision of a forest clear-cut into glade. The stumps show their rings with the elegant economy of cartoon spirals as they diminish into a distance without horizon, without end. On further inspection we find the plank to be plywood, its fine surface merely a veneer, its image not wood inlay but mere oil paint. This is a concoction of appearances. If one is deceitful can the other be trusted? Is there even such a place as Wilton, Wisconsin? That he would just as soon hack a tree as hug one is demonstrated in Smudge, 2007, another process-oriented work that required him to cut down a bush and from it make charcoal, some of the branches supplying the fuel needed for the transformation, others becoming the end product. With this charcoal he attempts to draw from memory the bush, now consumed, that began the process of primitive, smoky manufacture.

Like the corporations and products they represent, corporate logos have a life span. Introduced, they may fail to thrive and quickly disappear. Others gain some purchase in the public mind and the merchant’s shelves and from there can hope to become indispensable to the consuming public. If successful they might attain a cross-generational iconic equity; Encyclopedia Britannica’s thistle logo has heralded the product’s Scottish origins for nearly 250 years and Procter & Gamble’s moon-and-stars insignia enjoyed 130 years of success before being retired due to preposterous attacks as a symbol of Satanism, but Schlitz beer and its florid script device has gone from market prominence as late as the 1970s to the product ash heap alongside Ironized Yeast Tablets whose weight-gain advertisements warned that, “No skinny man has an ounce of sex appeal.” North Carolina native Tim Ripley understands our consumerist passion and combines two seemingly antithetical aspects of it. On one side there is our low price obsession that has created the Wal-Mart juggernaut, on the other is the luxury goods fetish––monograms and signatures as symbols of status for which we will pay dearly. His Building (a painting) Support 2000 features both postures. Through a veil of manufactured patina we recognize Elmer the Bull (husband of Elsie the Cow, chief spokes-animal for the Borden corporation), trademark of Elmer’s Glue-All, that cheap and ubiquitous adhesive found in every home, office, and classroom. Below and above the Elmer image is the refrigerator-style font spelling out Makita, maker of sumptuously essential power tools. Both are faded images however, in transit toward the way of all worldly goods, soon to be puzzled over like the side of a weathered building featuring the muted illustration of the beer that made Milwaukee famous.

To broadcast was originally a term to describe sowing. Artisan’s signs and heraldic shields are the forebears of Donald Trump’s hair and Apple Computer’s fruit-of-knowledge silhouette, the distilling of a greater entity into a recognizable and disseminable graphic nugget. These images were and are sown widely to generate the greatest return in profit, power, and persona. Dissatisfied with the failure of the Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea dollar coins Chicago artist Deborah Boardman has, in the tradition of eccentrics who crown themselves emperor and fashion their own uniforms, crafted her own currency of indeterminate denomination, hand-painted specie bearing the likenesses of Miami Indians instead of their more familiar 18th century counterparts. Similarly, Blue Emblem, 2003, shown above, is Boardman’s version of a regal cartouche wiped clean, an open gateway to possess and participate in a code of chivalry (self-authored), the notion of a champion (we all should have one), a wealth of heirlooms (our misplaced inheritance), and title to a romantic, if fictive, past.

NURSERY ANGST

2010-08-20T13:12:00.000-07:00

Tossing aside Freud and Lacan (as many of us would like to do––especially Lacan) it must be conceded that time travel began with Orpheus, whose prolonged and noisy mourning so pestered the Gods that they reversed their decree, allowing him to rescue Eurydice from the underworld. Much of our anguish, and our methods of relieving it, is an attempt to sieve the ocean of memory and experience and segregate the droplets containing shame and sorrow. How many of us would not, given the chance, exchange our lives for one less crowded with incident, one more rewardingly devised? Unfortunately, existence is a game of stud, not draw, so our revisionism remains in the realm of fancy but that does not prevent us from traveling back in time to revenge (or sometimes to simply replay––we take perverse pleasure in unscabbing our old wounds) wrongs done us in a vague and embellished past.

With childhood extending ever longer we find, if not entirely acceptable, at least tolerable, the 40-year-old skateboarder and the mother-daughter tandems in the tattoo parlor. Why should we not invest our juvenilia with curative powers? Psychology (see above) and Romantic poetry (Wordsworth and Blake) have so indoctrinated us that we seek our futures in our past.

The artists assembled in Nursery Angst; Marcel Dzama, Jon Pylypchuk, Adrian Williams, Sierra Mitchell, Datu Galang, and Martine Gilbert, indulge and lampoon this notion. Marcel Dzama shows us, in an ink line drawing accented with saturated color, a horse beheading a weasel. Both are dressed as humans but the horse, in an act of exclusivity, shows the weasel that only certain animals are worthy of anthropomorphism. It is class struggle among the animals. Horseracing is, after all, the sport of kings while weasels are, well, weasels. In a collage/drawing––made of simple notebook paper, cardboard, and correction fluid––of a woman kneeling at a well, Adrian Williams has led her there through partially obscured dance diagrams, covering her graceful footprints, as if she will be forever changed after tasting the new waters; a product of, but no longer bound to, her past. It is unclear whether this is a desire or a fear. The caviling conjoined twins, shown above, in Sierra Mitchell's tiny painting, Union, share an empty thought balloon from which their dream of separation has fallen, disappearing, behind them. The balloon still floats above, a vacant herald, transformed into a darkening cloud. From a recollection of childhood viewing of adult-themed movies Datu Galang has made the crudely painted and poignant The Death of Fredo from a scene in the film, The Godfather Part II. The errant brother sits praying in a small boat while his fishing partner, and murderer, raises a pistol. The moment is silhouetted in the moonlight reflection upon the water. Milwaukee, by Martine Gilbert, depicts a gleaming back brace, named for the city of its invention, designed to correct curvature of the spine. It casts a long, sinister shadow that heightens its resemblance to a device of torture. The strangest and most evocative work is by Jon Pylypchuk; another collage/drawing, it shows a weeping toucan, made of felt, being cast out by a larger, sandpaper-torsoed figure raising a broken arm to point the way to exile. Like a mediaeval painting it has ribbons of text that leaven but do not reveal the scenario. It is both a love story and an expulsion from Eden.

It is understandable that we should retreat from the complexities of adult life in an attempt to unburden ourselves, even briefly, from the obligations and entrapments we have invented, sought, and possessed, and that these strategies should be encoded enough for plausible deniability. Therapists and lovers are allowed only so deep into the root cellar of our vulnerability. We always reserve a distress too grievous to signal, a torment with which we so deeply identify that to master it would make us unrecognizable even to ourselves. We then, as if for sport, offer for display a series of fears, strong enough to wound but too weak too cripple, so that we might scrutinize these proverbial fish swimming lazily in the barrel while we take aim, accounting ourselves great hunters.

Max King Cap

2010-06-16T16:29:00.000-07:00

ONCE MORE WITH FEELING: JEREMIAH BARBER

The enormously popular silent film star Harold Lloyd lost his right thumb in a special effects accident and afterward wore onscreen a special glove to camouflage its loss. It did not alter his penchant for mad, physical trials. The prosthetic can be clearly seen in one of the most famous images in cinema, the daredevil comedian, high above the city, hanging from the hands of a clock. Performance artist Jeremiah Barber has yet to meet such a bloody interruption in his work but he is well on his way. The assorted sunburns and abrasions, strained muscles, sprains and cuts are simply the fine print of his job description. All of his works, however, do not involve extreme physical mortification. They are sometimes elegant and lyrical. His I Spend the Day Walking Through Clouds, and Walking the Earth (2007) is as tender a rendition of Thoreau’s ethos as might be conceived. The artist walks the more industrial precincts of the city, barefoot and gunny sacked, tossing into the air and walking through billows of flour as if adding his meager homage to the majestic sky. He, of course, becomes covered in white, transforming into a cloud himself. With his wife and collaborator, Ingrid Rojas, he inserts himself into nature as if attempting to reclaim a lost membership, a camaraderie abandoned but now deeply missed.

Unlike the traditional genus of performance art based on endurance, exhibitionism, and transgression Mr. Barber, with and without Ms. Rojas, creates works that are resonantly contemplative, despite the strenuous methods sometimes used to achieve them; theatrically engaging—there are no mundane actions elevated to mock poetry—and richly charismatic—the works possess a wit and complexity that delivers pleasure to its audience instead of demanding an ascetically virtuous and unrewarded patience. Old Growth (2008) pictured here was featured at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and is reprised in these photos in a Michigan forest. Through a sequence of athletic trials and errors the artist raises and vaults upon a heavy log until he manages to sit atop it, finally balanced. Conjuring thoughts of both industrialization and a return to nature Old Growth is a struggle with our desires and the consequences of our achievements.

Most ruminative of the recent works is House of White Water (2008), a tandem work with Ms. Rojas where she is both ship and siren. On a California shoreline staring into the setting sun the couple contort themselves into a historical tableaux of mythic vessel and mariner. Ms. Rojas, belly on the sand, reaches back to grasp her ankles, forming a bridge deck for Mr. Barber to helm. He sits athwart her, protected by her gunwale arms; she, a fierce figurehead, pointed brazenly out to sea. When the waves come they are deluged but resistant. Even the camera that documents their action is upended, filling with salt water, but they persevere, fully dedicated, indulgent in their madness that together they can circumnavigate the globe.

Max King Cap

2010-05-07T09:36:00.000-07:00

WANTON CHARM

There is currently ambivalence among actors of Arab descent in that while there are many more jobs available to them, most of the roles are the same: middle-eastern terrorist. The problem is not only, or even mainly, a matter of predictable typecasting. It is primarily that these roles are renditions of straw villains, mere placeholders for villainy––they are poorly sketched and easily defeated––while the true villain, historically significant or fictionally potent, is substantial and irresistible. We recall that in the play named for him, it is not Othello but his nemesis, Iago, who has the larger role, and that The Merchant of Venice is actually Antonio––Shylock is simply described as “a rich Jew”. That the villain is always the most interesting character is the basis for my series of self-portraits, Despots & Bardsmen. The characters in these self-portraits have no appetite for self-sacrifice. They do not want to be liked. They would rather be in charge. Despots & Bardsmen (the Despots are real life tyrants, the Bardsmen are Shakespearian villains, or inventions from an imagined apocrypha) are each theatrical and I have assigned myself the plum roles in both performances for these villains are proud practitioners of their art and invariably compelling.

In fiction villains are often marked in some significant way in order that their malefaction is made apparent. In this regard one is immediately reminded of the incorrigible Rufus in Flannery O’Connor’s, The Lame Shall Enter First. Pitied by bleeding hearts, this club-footed boy, into whom no kindness can penetrate, admits at the end of the story, “I lie and steal because I’m good at it! My foot don’t have a thing to do with it.” Similarly Aaron, from Titus Andronicus, one of only three black characters in Shakespeare, has his negritude as an outward indicator of his evil character. Aaron, too, glories in his evil, “I have done a thousand dreadful things as willingly as one would kill a fly, and nothing grieves me heartily indeed but that I cannot do ten thousand more”. Non-fictional villains, however, are not as accommodating. They are indistinguishable from the rest of us except for their love of intrigue and their quest for power, traits that are, most often, expertly concealed.

The imagery employed in these self-portraits is drawn from expected sources; 17th century portraiture, political propaganda, theatrical broadsides, self-aggrandizing currency and postage, and religious icons, as well as less direct examples; velvet Elvis paintings, romance novels, Saul Bass posters, advertising mascots, and mug-shots. The paintings and drawings are in the tradition of self-invention, as seen in the compulsion of Macbeth and Mobutu; a desire, no matter the consequences, to make palpable an imagined ideal self. The imagery the villain creates of himself, for himself, is the evidence he uses to prove his megalomania is not madness but a sign he is the chosen one and those who resist him are heretical, counter revolutionary, or unpatriotic and whom, for their own good, must be given a stern reeducation.

The self-portrait is a confession, constructed of vanity, doubt, and false modesty. We would like to see ourselves as an agent of action, a solver of problems but most of us, honestly assessed, fit the description of vanquished, not conqueror. The villain is jealously, if secretly, admired. His victims, even when memorialized, remain anonymous, expendable. As Idi Amin famously said, “In any country there must be people who have to die”. Of any scenario the villain is always the most memorable.

2010-03-08T16:28:00.000-08:00

MARTINE GILBERT
Member of the international art collective Tropo Mfg

His missing arm and leg, Jean Gilbert explained to his young daughter Martine, were taken by a sea serpent while he was crossing the Mediterranean. An old sailor had told Jean that years ago he had met and loved a mermaid and together they’d had a child but the lords of the deep would not let his daughter come to live on the dry earth. This old sailor implored Martine’s father to help him recover the mer-girl. During the deadly rescue Jean was nearly eaten by a fierce water dragon but used his last reserve of strength to swim to the surface again. So impressed was the mer-girl with his bravery that she remained upon the land and married him They had just one child, Martine.

The voyage was true but the arm and the leg were lost in an explosion during the battle of Algiers. French forces were eventually driven from the country and Monsieur Gilbert returned to his father’s butcher shop, the fragmented apprentice to a tyrannical master, “You should be hanging in the window instead of standing behind the counter,” his father was fond of saying. Jean married a year after his father’s death to a woman twenty years his junior. As a couple they were conspicuous; his missing left arm and right leg and Martine’s mother, Simone, with severe phocomelia (flipper arms) due to the poorly tested drug Thalidomide that her mother had taken during her pregnancy to combat agitation and morning sickness. Although the drug was not licensed in France several versions were available in West Germany. Martine’s grandmother was from the Alsace, a French region just on the border, where goods and services moved freely.

At the age of twelve Martine’s scoliosis required her to be fitted with a torso scaffolding back brace, a MEAL-oo-ah-KEY, as the doctor pronounced it. But this “circus family”, as some in their village referred to the Gilberts, was oblivious to the whispering. Their butcher shop was the only one for several miles and they were, despite their appearance, respected. Martine wore her brace like a crown, imagining it to be armor like that of Joan of Arc.

She now displays the brace over her fireplace in Lyon and will gladly tell anyone the elaborate tale of her father and the sea serpent and her mother born half mermaid. Drawing on this fantastic childhood Martine conjures macabre and humorous creatures as family portraits, notating and embellishing the events and stories in her life.

Martine graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux Arts de Lyon and her work has been greatly influenced by the painters Giorgio de Chirico and Conrad Klapheck, and the author George Bataille.

Martine met Datu Galang in 2005 at an artists’ residency in Indonesia, the Jatiwangi Art Factory.

2010-03-07T14:51:00.000-08:00

MINIMAL INVOLVEMENT:
R. SCOTT WHIPKEY

The political acuity of the graphic novel has increased greatly in the last several years, beginning with Will Eisner’s A Contract with God in 1978 and continuing with Art Spiegelman’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize winning Maus, followed by Joe Sacco’s The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo and more recently with Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi in 2000. The novel graphic approach in the work of Brooklyn artist R. Scott Whipkey distills political issues into sourly expressive nuggets that are long lasting yet impossible to spit out.

His New York Times, 2008, displays the famous logo of the “newspaper of record” as a brand name diktat of irreproachable gravitas, allowing it to display an arrogance similar to that of the former Soviet organ Pravda; its name in Russian meaning “truth” is a mantel the NYT swears is its own. Separated across three panels, New York Times reminds us of various trinities we’ve come to rely upon, father,son, holy ghost; liberte´, egalite´, fraternite´; judicial, executive, legislative; but their sum in his rendition reveals them as going, going, gone.

Meticulously depicted in graphite it has the flourish of an ostentatious autograph, much like the outsized “John Hancock” on the Declaration of Independence, well aware of its own importance and reveling in it. Featured in this exhibition is Untitled (Handshake), 2009, a triptych that echoes a slow motion replay of the history of the United States’ involvement in Iraq over the last generation. The work is three enlarged images, each fractionally different, of a videotaped 1983 handshake between Donald Rumsfeld, President Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East and Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq. The approach-avoidance dance between the two lasted more than twenty years and Mr. Whipkey’s three freeze frames of their clasped hands is a storyboard of the compromises of U.S. foreign policy, the Judas kiss of realpolitik. Mr. Whipkey’s faux digital triptych––the work is meticulously hand drawn, placing it in the realm of historical painting––is an endless loop of making a deal with the devil but already, to borrow a line from George Orwell; it was impossible to say which was which.

MAXKINGCAP.COM

2010-02-23T14:40:00.000-08:00

TWICE TOLD TALES: ADAM BROOKS
Adam Brooks is a rabbit puncher. His text-based works encircle his meaning and invariably surprise you from behind, like a De Maupassant short story or a festive rum drink. Scanning his art-making coordinate system his often witty, frequently grim, always satirical works are a radius, firmly planted at the origin of the x axis (flowers and clowns), and the y axis (sex and death), fiercely swinging through each quadrant. His current exhibition at Tropo Mfg is another eye-rolling romp through a time of wisdom and foolishness—namely, today. Bringing to mind Alexis de Tocqueville’s one hundred seventy five year old observation, “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America”, Adam Brooks’s new installation, Viva Socialism, takes aim at the current political climate in the United States and the absence of civility and introspection in our democratic discourse.

His long career of artistic social agitation has recently been augmented by his teaming with a fellow British expatriate to form Industry of the Ordinary, a duo that produces objects and actions that pan for the meaning in the everyday, finding a secret agenda in the most mundane of occurrences and entities, but it is his individual work that possesses the greater intellectual heft and moral gravitas. From his Freedom Wall (1994), a popular survey and ranking of heroes and idols printed on a graphically bold list that covers a significant portion of an eight storey building, to his opulent mosaic-laid quotations in the Chicago subway (2005), that, in their dignity and uplift, collectively read like a checklist from the Ministry of Truth. Brooks’s works have frequently assumed the position of gentle admonishment, like that of an indulgent parent (which he is), despairing his own failure to take a more strident and possibly more effective stand. He is far too gentle for that. His messages are really in the category of “note to self” lessons that he, in his persistent humanism, sets as goals, hoping there are others who feel similarly––the power of a single vote to turn the tide, though outside of storybooks this seldom happens. He is in love with the world so he is not angry, just very disappointed; a prophet with lazy and willfully forgetful adherents, he fears they will invariably live up to his grimmest expectations.

Purchasing a variety of message-emblazoned T-shirts, all white, from numerous thrift stores, Brooks has had the shirts’ content redirected by silk-screening the slogan, Viva Socialism, on the reverse side. Such garments, in their simple, used state, often make their way across the seas via missionaries or other non-governmental organizations, each with its own agenda, into the hands and onto the backs of our poorer brethren resulting in the too-common-to-remain-tragic-irony photographs of a child soldier wearing an “Ohio State Homecoming Dance” or a “Bob’s Big Boy” T-shirt. Yet it is also the inability of us, as citizens, to delay gratification and sacrifice for the common good. The ideological polarizations of our current public discussions have stripped words of their meaning, turning formerly unexceptional phrases into fighting words. For a text-based artist this is both a horror and a delight, allowing him to employ, without embellishment, the bizarre, self-negating utterances and illogical formulations that currently pass for measured debate. All of this on a simple white T-shirt––of course; who would ever trust a message from a black T-shirt?

Max King Cap

2010-02-23T14:15:00.000-08:00

WITH SIGNS FOLLOWING: JIM ZIMPEL

HORRIBLE CHILD MURDER– A LITTLE GIRL BEATEN TO DEATH
One of the most horrible cases of child-murder it has been our lot to record occurred on Sunday, on what is known as Waterloo Ridge, in Wisconsin. A little girl, ELLIE FIELD, was set upon by LIZZIE SICKLE, aged 15 or 16, for some cause unknown as yet, and beaten in a most brutal manner. When the child became unconscious, and was apparently dying, she became alarmed at her brutality and called in a neighboring woman. She said that the child had fallen from a chair by accident and had hurt its head. But it required only a glance at the mutilated body to show the falsity of this story. The body was one mass of bruised and broken flesh. The skull was broken, the forehead having been smashed in evidently by stamping it with a heeled shoe. The case justly creates great excitement in the neighborhood.
THE NEW YORK TIMES, NOVEMBER 18, 1867

The photographic works of sculptor and outdoorsman Jim Zimpel are homage, satire, and benefaction addressed to his north woods ancestral home; despite its surfeit of French names––Racine, La Crosse, and Eau Claire––Wisconsin is solidly Germanic. His affection for pop culture, oral history, and urban legend have led this peculiar artist (he will eat only meat that he has himself killed) on an illustrator’s mission, embellishing and inventing, casting himself as a contemporary Hogarth, a fuguist of the Wisconsin death trip.

In The Woodworker, 2009, above, Zimpel shows us a view best kept secret, the hidden basement lair of a one-eyed recluse. Through the unswept sawdust multiple electrical cords snake down the stairs though only one power tool is visible; where are, and more importantly, what are the others? The white-bearded man is caught in a shaft of revealing light, not surprised but perturbed, as if his important work can only be accomplished in darkness. On the drill press rests a wooden totem of a human heart.

In a state enamored of ice fishing and drunken driving (per capita, Wisconsin produces twice the alcohol-related fatalities of California) the Badgers have always swung from their polarities of frolic and gaiety; water shows and amateur pilot fly-ins, to melancholy, madness and murder; Gein, Dahmer, et al. It is the forest spirit that possesses them and Zimpel has captured that furtive manitou, and it is jealous.

The Getaway, 2009, above, demonstrates just such an instance of influence. In the intermittent illumination of a garage at night a third and final figure climbs into a pickup truck. The subject of this mysterious allegory, a youthful bearded man, sits in the bed of the truck, wearing a down-filled jacket and carrying an axe over his shoulder. He is as motionless as a Hummel figurine but the expression on the face of the woman in the cabin reveals a dire concern. These are Zim’s Fairytales, as fatalistic as their Teutonic model and the axe shown on the first page must be used on the last.

The last wild bear in Germany was hunted and killed in 1835. Like the forest the bear is a beloved symbol of Germany––it is on the seal of its capital city, Berlin. When, in 2006, another wild bear was found to be raiding hen houses in Bavaria he was shot dead. "This animal didn't just kill when he was hungry. He had a lust for killing," Anton Steixner, an official from South Tirol, said, "It's not that we don't welcome bears in Bavaria. It's just that this one wasn't behaving properly."

Max King Cap