Installation view, "Madame Oktopus," Maryna Baranovska, image courtesy of Simon Vogel and AJL Art

Baranovska’s larger paintings operate on a modernist plane of ambition and graphics, aspiring to German Expressionist grandeur; a fever-pitch of scale and gusto achieved by Anselm Kiefer among others.  Her more modest endeavors, in contrast, are awkwardly haunting and idiosyncratic, like bright, frothy companions to the drawings of Alfred Kubin.

The smaller paintings have a folkloric quality that is strong and clear.  The characters, in contrast, are often less defined.  They are engorged in tufts of painted smoke, or air, creatures with variable dimensions.  There are allusions to mice, peacocks and Eastern tigers, but these remain enigmatic and obscured, allowing viewers to fully engage in a prognostication of form.

"Daemon," 2011, Maryna Baranovska, image courtesy Simon Vogel and AJL Art

To compare someone to Chagall these days is an affront to more refined aesthetic sensibilities.  Chagall is the default sophomore-dorm-room poster; more Russian regionalist than avant-garde.  This Chagall-backlash derives in part from a certain earnest sentimentality, imbued with a childish spirit.  Like Chagall, Baranovska is invested in Eastern European Jewish folklore, and attempts the difficult, if not impossible, task of documenting mysticism through painting.  

Her paintings celebrate supernatural ambiguity, and call to mind a central figure in Slavic folklore: Baba Yaga.  Baba Yaga is an old woman who lives in a hut built on chicken bones and is able to shift and morph into a number of forms and elements (wind, for instance).  An animal called the “Firebird,” features prominently in the Baba Yaga stories, and one can imagine Baranovska’s grandmother (who lives in the forested regions around Kiev) cultivating her interest in otherworldliness.

Installation view, "Madame Oktopus," Maryna Baranovska, 2013

Although this bit of biography is not irrelevant, Baranovska is an artist equally invested in painterly innovation.  In the strongest works her two impulses exist together, leaving the viewer to sort through form, myth and authorship.

Bottom floor of the Berlin Biennale, "Occupy Berlin," photo courtesy http://universes-in-universe.org

To transport an Occupy movement to the sanitized dominion of a museum is, as my art historian friends would say, problematic.  This year’s incarnation of the Berlin Biennale (the seventh) has thus far received anemic reviews, with some hinting at real vitriol.  The exhibition is partly as curator Artur Zmijewski envisioned it; full o’ problems.  In interviews Zmijewski offers cryptic monologues about equally cryptic solutions.  I think there are plenty of strategies to be found in the Biennale, but they are buried beneath sprawling and lofty ambitions, making it feel, as Frieze writer Christy Lange writes, like “an awkward slog.”

The impulse to undermine traditional artistic hierarchy by including documentary filmmakers, self-identified social activists and other non-artist-artists is good and worthy and exciting.  And there are moments in the Biennale where ideas ignite and excite viewers to imagine a world with a more porous understanding of art and the things it can accomplish.  The Biennale is awash in beautiful gestures: Lukasz Surowiec transplants trees from Auschwitz-Birkenau,  Yael Bartana stages the first ever international congress of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, Khaled Jarrar creates postal and passport stamps for the non-existent state of Palestine.

But these gestures are at times overshadowed by an exhibition layout at Kunst Werke that is heavy-handed and foggy.  It’s like it was curated by the gruff classist landlord of a turn-of-the-century New York tenement: the poor students and occupy protestors have the ground floor where they take care of the garden, ride a solar revolution bike and lead wacky seminars about street art and self-sustaining garden communities.  They conduct casting calls for a porn movie, make mandalas out of tobacco shavings and read leftist literature on the ragged arms of a hand-me-down couch.  There are no museum guards there (trust!) and the offices of Kunst-Werke employees are conspicuously ajar (transparency!).  It’s a dirty little utopia in the middle of one of the richest streets in central Berlin, a hypocritical, twingy concession in a district full of wealthy patrons and designer yogurt.

Meanwhile, the “real” artists can be found on the remaining 3 floors.   This architectural caste system is no exaggeration; the participatory element ends with the blackboard paint (which covers the entire ground floor).  Suddenly the walls become the shade of primeval white that we as gallery attendees are accustomed to.

 Marina Naprushkina’s oversized comics hang in the stairwells on the way “up.”

*Sorry, I don’t want to indulge in this super easy metaphor; I’m just really tired (maybe the curators were too?).

Marina Naprushkina with newspapers © Olga Karatch, image courtesy artnet.de

Naprushkina’s pieces are lovely and sincerely concerned with gender inequity and Russian nationalism in Belarus.  She uses graphic works to disseminate information, and last year created a comic newspaper documenting the police brutality that took place against protestors in Belarus in December of 2010.

Naprushkina is one of few object-makers in the Biennale, as the Biennale is focused largely on ephemeral actions and intervention (and the resulting footage of said ephemeral actions and interventions).  Pawel Althamer combines these pursuits with his beautiful if somewhat staid exercise in communal creation; a draw-in called “A Draftsmen’s Congress” at the St. Elisabeth Church.

This Biennale was one of the more anticipated in recent years, in part because it was helmed by controversial Polish artist Artur Zmijewski along with the Russian activist group Voina acting as associate curators.

Zmijewski received quite a bit of attention for his short film Berek, which was pulled from an exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin last year.  Zmijewski includes Berek in the top floor, offering one of the Biennale’s most affecting statements.  In it we see men and women of various ages, naked, engaging in a game of tag inside a former nazi death camp gas chamber.  Their child-like delight at the game borders on manic glee, an emotion belied by damp and ghastly surroundings.  Their nudity, innocent and liberating, forces us to imagine those for whom nudity was neither innocent nor liberating.

Artur Zmijewski "Berek", 1999 (Videostill), Foto: © Artur Zmijewski, Courtesy Foksal Gallery Foundation

Occupying most of the top floor is Berlin-Birkenau, an installation and acccompanying video by Polish artist Lukasz Surowiec.  Surowiec brought 320 Birch trees from the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau to Berlin, planting many of them in front of Kunst-Werke, enlisting the help of local students in his effort.  Surowiec offers Biennale visitors the chance to take a birch sapling with them, along with a certificate of ownership and directions for its care.  He asks that participants report the final location so as to be included in a “living  archive” of repurposed history.  Maybe it’s a bit treacly, but watching German kids plants those trees made me cry.

I wish I had equally touching reactions to the other videos screened at Kunst-Werke, but the majority were installed next to each other in one giant room, with cries from Tahrir Square co-mingling with anti-capitalist chants from European Action Day.  I would have liked to spend more time with each video, but instead I just got annoyed at the buzzing amalgam of multiple videos sonically invading each other.  And I think this might sum up the Biennale; it’s full of great moments, but the noise around it can be deafening.

Installation view, "Evil Dead 2," 2012, courtesy Horton Gallery

Horton Gallery, with its evocatively titled two-person show Evil Dead 2, pays homage to Romero’s glorious second stab by exploring expansive and ever-mutable revision.  The setup seems sitcom-like; two artists and friends from Brooklyn display their process-heavy paintings shoulder to shoulder in a kind of Oscar/Felix cohabitation.  Matt Jones is deep and celestial (the messy one), while gallery-mate Kadar Brock aims towards a final inanimate cleanliness (Felix).

Kadar Brock, "deredemitsdi," oil, acrylic, flashe, house paint & spray-paint on canvas, 2009-2012, courtesy Horton Gallery

Brock’s canvases are the result of violently scouring and gouging older works to reveal a brittle, bone-colored surface pitted with holes.  Not strictly subtractive, Brock adds synthetic neon sheens reminiscent of mini golf courses, Myrtle Beach and the mottled underside of skateboards.  These nostalgic associations, aimed so heart-wrenchingly at the 90’s shaped hole in my heart, are belied by the obsessive and superficially embarrassed gesture of Brock erasing his past.  The older work (colorful patterned paintings with compositions derived from Dungeons and Dragons) is literally expunged or “whitewashed” from his youthful oeuvre.  Brock’s paintings are in a constant state of flux, and this latest iteration seems like the fragile and abused last stop.  But maybe it’s not.  The cheery anchor to Brock’s practice is that his constantly shifting system of reuse avoids preciousness, entropy and stagnation.  Which is not completely unlike Romero’s lingering, pervasive spirit world.

Matt Jones meanwhile, displays large meandering starscapes that relay a surprising illusory depth.  His “Energy Paintings,” made onsite, hint at a deeper, mystical method of mark making.  On his website, Jones states:

“We live in a universe piled on other universes, each expanding a multiverse of near infinite possibilities and potential.”

Matt Jones, "Energy V," acrylic & urethane on canvas, 2012, courtesy of Horton Gallery

Jones’ paintings seem like the natural outpouring of a curious adventurer who is still convinced that art is porous, open and navigable.  The immediacy of his process is echoed by works that are seemingly unencumbered/unconcerned by their size and objecthood.

The artists’ paintings enjoy a kind of playful fraternity, hung glibly over doorframes and directly next to one another.  Both are invested in capturing a zeitgeist of spirit through games of process and chance.  And both distance themselves from the cynicism of art production to arrive at a surprisingly sweet and reverential take on painting.

"You Killed Me First," 1985, Richard Kern, film still courtesy Richard Kern.

You Killed me First (1985), one of Richard Kern’s longer films starring David Wojnarowicz and Lung Leg, could be read as a clear teenage allegory of the Cinema of Transgression itself.  A girl (Lung leg) bristles at the religious directives of her parents, asserting her right to personhood outside demure hairstyles and turkey dinners, constructing voodoo dolls and entertaining other manners of dark drawing in her dank emo-den.

When confronted with the humanity and hypocrisy of her tormentors, the young antihero vanquishes their belief systems (and bodies) asserting, “You killed me first!”

Nick Zedd, in his manifesto describes the Cinema of Transgression’s proponents as “a new generation of filmmakers daring to rip out of the stifling straightjackets of film theory in a direct attack on every value system known to man.”

You Killed Me First: The Cinema of Transgression at Kunst-Werke Berlin is the first exhibition devoted solely to the Cinema of Transgression.  This allows viewers, for the first time ever, to see a remarkable amount of cinematic defiance in one place.  Among the 19 films shown, there is an insistent interest in constructing purposeful rebellion during a time when Reagan-Era family values were becoming a “revitalizing force” in America.

In You Killed Me First, Cinema of Transgression members explore necrophilia, dismemberment, rape, patricide and death-by-impaling.  But (thankfully) these subjects are imbued with a kind of adolescent cheekiness.  According to Zedd and other Cinema of Transgression members, a sense of humor was essential to good art.

"The Manhattan Love Suicides: Stray Dogs" 1985, Richard Kern, film still courtesy Richard Kern.

There is an adolescent charm to much of the Cinema of Transgression.  In the Manhattan Love Suicides; Stray Dogs ( 1985) we see a young man so crippled by passion that he is physically coming apart, a frightening visual metaphor for high-school longing.

In KW’s front room viewers can enjoy the solidly archetypal Nymphomania (1993) directed by Tessa-Hughes Freeland, in which a young virginal nymph is consumed and destroyed by a hyper-sexualized Pan.  Nymphomania differs from many of the videos in You Killed me First in that it features an idyllic green space rather than the gritty urban landscape of the lower east side in the 80’s.  But like the entirety of the show, it delights in making literal our goriest Freudian impulses.

*Upstairs one can see David Wojnarowicz’ infamous A Fire in My Belly, which is actually one of the tamer pieces in the show.  Oh Europe.

"Fear of Disclosure: Psycho-Social Implications of HIV Revelation," 1989, David Wojnarowicz and Phil Zwickler, film still courtesy David Wojnarowicz and Phil Zwickler

In another black-lit room Wojnarowicz’ collaboration with Phil Zwickler titled Fear of Disclosure: Psycho-Social Implications of HIV Revelation (1989) is screened.  In this short film one HIV-Positive man recounts his poignant revelation to a love interest as luscious male bodies dance across the screen, showing the psychic fissure of living with the disease in 80’s New York.

In its hallways and upper exhibition spaces, KW superficially scatters hallmarks of 1980’s underground New York: black lights and neon paint, scrawled cryptic texts and a hallway strobe light.  During the opening, accompanied by swarms of people, this made sense, but I assume it’ll make for a strange viewing experience on a normal Monday morning.  Moreover it seems like an insincere gesture for a cinema that was, if nothing else, extremely sincere.  After watching the films in You Killed Me First, one believes Nick Zedd as he proposes they break all the taboos of their age by “sinning as much as possible.”

Tomás Saraceno, Cloud Cities, installation view, image courtesy Berlin Art Link

This winter the Hamburger Bahnhof’s exhibitions are (mostly) devoted to artists influenced by utopian architecture, a decision made to coincide with Tomás Saraceno’s Cloud Cities, an investigation into sustainable living that borrows heavily from the language of visionary architects and futurists like Buckminster Fuller.

Saraceno’s “biospheres” are fun, enormous and inviting, with long lines of art-goers waiting for a moment of awkward repose over the Bahnhof’s hangar.  They allude to the plasticity of our “futures” (Saraceno prefers the plural) but they also seem kind of garish, like giant floaties at an eighties-themed pool party in West Hollywood.

When compared to Saraceno’s epic balloon opera, the drawings and models of early German modernist architects like Bruno Taut and Hanzel Weblik are pleasingly modest.  These are displayed downstairs, in small dark alcoves as part of the sprawling Architektonika exhibition.

Architektonika offers up a few real gems, among them Dieter Roth’s scrappy and feral Gartenskulptur, a garden-environment-installation that was added to, catalogued and maintained for thirty years by the artist and his son. Then there are photographs and remnants of Gordon Matta Clark’s 1977 Office Baroque in which the artist sliced open a building in Antwerp and created a teardrop shaped hole in the façade (which was slated for destruction).  The result emits a bodily pathos unusual for the inanimate.

Paul Laffoley, The Orgone Motor, 1981, courtesy of Kent Fine Art, New York

Upstairs Paul Laffoley offers his take on utopia as part of the Hamburger Bahnhof’s new Secret Universe series.  I’m really excited about this exhibition series, which will last for three years and focus on visionary artists whose multi-disciplinary practices may have been overlooked by the larger art community.  Finally, we can see what the weird uncles of the art world are up to.

Laffoley is a former architect who merges Eastern religious dogma, Futurism (among many other “isms”) and Carl Jung into intensely weird diagrammatic paintings.  His aims are lofty, and he seeks to illustrate complex imaginary systems like time travel, the fifth dimension and “Absolute Life.”

Laffoley, an artist devoted to the possibilities of other worlds spent many years making these paintings in a one-bedroom apartment he dubbed “The Boston Visionary Cell.”   Mandala-like, they aspire to a kind of “utopic space” with their own visual hierarchy.

In a lecture given in 2001, Laffoley stated about his mission to explore utopic space:

I have developed this task by means of symbols, perhaps the only way an individual can approach such a project. Real symbols move the mind up to and through metaphor and finally beyond to a semiotic state that has never been successfully named.

Laffoley goes on to claim that the concept of utopic space should serve “as a neutral sounding board for all attempts at plumbing or prophesying the future.” His paintings are filled with repetitive symbols including eyes, circles, stars, outstretched hands multicolored rays.  In another context, this could be a Bikram Yoga invite hidden underneath a windshield.  But with Laffoley, these symbols read as sincere parts of a dense personal lexicon.

Laffoley offers the occasional autobiographical nod, charting his lucid dreams in black and white panels, in one recounting sticking his finger into someone’s “soft eye.”

Paul Laffoley, The Renovatio Mundi, 1977, courtesy Kent Fine Art

He offers advice culled from Eastern ideas of non-resistance in vinyl letters, claiming that “All suffering is the separation of boredom and care.” His works are taped off, crisp and obsessive, but possess a kind of sympathetic craziness, like Laffoley isn’t being intentionally obtuse, he’s just your everyday Shaman, trying to spare you psychic pain.

Presenting a less utopian vision of the future is the neighboring National Gallery Prize for Young Art, exhibition, which shows the work of the four artists who competed for Germany’s annual 50,000 euro award.

Cyprien Gaillard, Artefact, film still 2011, courtesy Sprueth Magers Gallery

This year, the prize went to French artist Cyprien Gaillard, a headline-grabber who moves between mediums like beer and neon.  At the Hamburger Bahnhof Gaillard shows the more nuanced “Artefacts,” a slow moving cinematic collage of contemporary Iraq, which weaves together tropes of Babylonian antiquity and American militarism.  Gaillard lingers both on the famed Ishtar Gate as well as soldiers shooting green lasers into a receding desert.  The film was shot originally on Gaillards’ Iphone, but was transferred later to 35 mm, creating an anachronistic loop, which is reinforced by the repeating phrase “Babylon,” from the David Grey song.

Klara Lidén, a beloved Berlin artist whose urban interventions, sculpture and performative acts are usually so sharp, offers up a lackluster contribution in the name of institutional critique. Liden presents a video of herself climbing into a trash can, set to the tune of “Helpless” as well as a manicured hedge at the museum’s entrance in the shape of a dumpster.

Andro Wekua’s film and adjoining installation are more ambitious, but rely too heavily on saturated colors and the tropes of surrealism.

Kitty Kraus is the only artist to eschew video, but her kinetic sculptures share a sequential and rhythmic similarity to film nonetheless.  The pieces, like minimal metal characters, are forged from found handles and made in reference to the guillotine.  They seem dangerous and unhinged (literally).  Kraus’ work questions the way we move in the world with austere and poetic precision.

Theo Solnik, Anna Pavlova Lives in Berlin, film still, 2011, courtesy of the artist

A new addition this year is the National Gallery Prize for Young Film-Art.  The winning film Anna Pavlova Lives in Berlin by Theo Solnik is an enthralling black and white character study of a party girl whose exploits in Kreuzberg seem more elegiac than depraved.  Through drugs, alcohol and sex, Anna Pavlova clouds her own reality, creating a romantic vision of herself and the world.

Amy Sillman, Installation View "Thumb Cinema," courtesy Capitain Petzel, 2011

Amy Sillman’s new suite of paintings at Capitain Petzel are large and spatial, with an airiness well-suited to the glass paneled façade of her new Berlin gallery. Sillman’s latest canvasses still have the brute gestural force of a paint-conjured “id,” but also possess a kind of nimbleness and play alluded to in the exhibition’s title, Thumb Cinema.  Her palette is quiet, with lavender and forest greens evoking visions of British dales and naked Roccoco picnics.  A sense of solidity rarely appears in these works, replaced instead by misty shapes and raucous lines, which recall the rhythmic playfulness of Kandinsky or Mondrian.

The comic (in both senses of the word) aspects of Sillman’s paintings are belied by the massive size and scope of their Abstract Expressionist roots.  Sillman’s work is made more powerful because it diminishes the self-seriousness of AbEx, instead extolling the sensual, personal and indulgent mark.

Sillman gestures coyly towards the monolith of man-painting by digitally altering a Nancy cartoon for her exhibition poster.  In the cartoon we watch as the loveable girl scamp discovers a painter in the heady process of CREATING and then, duly impressed, offers him some (rather phallic) candy through a hole in the wall.

Although Sillman’s paintings sometimes read as the residue of an instinct-driven process, she is clearly an able draftsman who investigates the immediacy of mark with informed skill, giving primacy to whatever instrument she has on hand.  She underlines these corporeal interests by giving the paintings titles like TEETH and MOUTH among others.

The sensualized mark-as-body idea is made literal with three charcoal drawings that are more direct in their headless, mirrored figuration and recall Primitivist interpretations of the female form.  There is a brutality to these untitled works which, when taken with the pieces downstairs form a larger historical riff on the tropes of modernism.

Amy Sillman, Installation View "Thumb Cinema," courtesy Capitain Petzel, 2011

Alongside her paintings and charcoal drawings, Sillman presents a new animation titled Pinky’s Rule along with a room full of printed stills, specified to be sold only for the price required to make them; 43 dollars.  In recent shows Sillman has displayed zines, posters and CDs with her paintings, offering up a democratic gesture that implicitly contradicts the idea of painting as luxury totem.

Sillman’s animation, made on her iPhone is a departure in medium if not in visual language.  The stills from Pinky’s Rule are arrayed across a back room, covering almost all of the available wall space and blanketing the viewer in double bodies, eyes and orifices, blooming and spewing with joyous pixelated abandon and completing a pleasure-centric vision that feels whole and exciting.