Today from our partner Art Practical, we bring you a review of photographer Paz Errázuriz’s work, on view through tomorrow at the Berkeley Art Museum. Author Danica Willard Sachs notes, “By immersing the viewer in the peripheries of Chilean society, into the brothels and gyms populated by socially isolated men, Errázuriz’s photographs not only put an individual face on oppression, they also highlight a resilience inherent in the human spirit.” This review was originally published on March 3, 2014.

Paz Errázuriz. La Palmera, Santiago, from the series La Manzana de Adán, 1982; gelatin silver print; 19 2/3 x 23 ½ in. Courtesy of the Artist and Galeria AFA, Santiago.

In intimate, candid black-and-white photographs, Paz Errázuriz transports the viewer to another place and time: Santiago, Chile, in the mid-1980s. With General Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship as her backdrop, self-taught photographer Errázuriz set out to document people living largely in secret, on the fringes of Chilean society. Paz Errázuriz/Matrix 251 at the Berkeley Art Museum displays two of the resulting visual essays: La Manzana de Adán (1982-87) and Boxeadores (1987).

La Manzana de Adán documents a community of male transvestites working in underground brothels in Santiago and Talca. Made in collaboration with journalist Claudia Donoso, the resulting photographs were paired with passages relating the personal stories of the men, and gathered into a book published in 1990 after Pinochet’s ouster. The exhibition features thirty of the one hundred photographs that make up the series, appearing alongside excerpts from Donoso’s text.

Read the full article here.

In Joe Webb’s Stirring Up A Storm (2014), the nearly full moon peers resolutely down like a removed voyeur, while a continent-sized Sunbeam Mixmaster Junior (an electric mixer from the 1950s) stirs Earth’s atmosphere with its twin silver beaters to create massive, hurricane-like weather patterns. From the description alone, issues of global warming and energy crises come to mind; however, the well-crafted humor, imaginative aesthetic, and a subtly wry irreverence in Webb’s collages ensure that his message is successfully communicated.

Joe Webb. Stirring Up a Storm, 2014; collage; 12 ¾ x 8 in. Image courtesy of the Artist.

Webb makes his collages by combining and removing imagery from vintage magazines and printed ephemera. While he describes his working methods as “analogue” and “luddite reaction(s) to working as a graphic artist on computers for many years,” the works strike particularly contemporary notes, both formally and conceptually.

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Last Wednesday, Kadist Art Foundation and curator Christina Linden hosted a conversation with artist Laurel Ptak, the author/founder of Wages for Facebook, a manifesto (based on the 1975 manifesto Wages Against Housework) that calls for a reconsideration of what it means to participate in a system of for-profit social exchange. To a packed house, Ptak began her talk by showing slides of publications that have printed information, opinions, and reactions to her project Wages for Facebook; then transitioned the crowd to small-group discussions of four questions regarding Facebook and value; then to a whole-group discussion/Q&A session.

Ptak presents and criticizes Facebook as a business model that accumulates enormous capital based on the activity of unpaid individuals (its users). One participant at the Kadist event noted that the nature of the evening mimicked the very structure it claimed to subvert, and pointed out that the small-group discussions funneled energy and intellectual production (labor) into a format where only a single individual (Ptak) stands to benefit. In this case, the social and intellectual capital accrued by presenting at a prestigious institution such as Kadist stand in for the capital of a financial asset—although one can surmise that future monetary benefits might also be gleaned in the form of awards, residencies, speaker fees, etc. Though the event was certainly thought-provoking and raised interesting questions about the role of  labor and  intellectual property in social media, the inherent contradictions of the project also warrant further discussion. The images below show the different portions of the event, and we encourage our readers to learn more about the project and come to their own conclusions.

Laurel Ptak (left) and Christina Linden (right).

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Again, now at 47 Canal, presents a new set of paintings by Trevor Shimizu featuring more of the artist’s characteristically banal domestic caricatures. Of these, Shimizu’s sex paintings are his best. Featuring sketches of video monitors displaying stick figures engaged in BDSM porn, a vaginal close-up nestled next to a box of tissues, or a pop-up ad for penis enhancement, the paintings read as swiftly funny one-liners about the lonely, trivial, and frank atmosphere of masturbation.

Trevor Shimizu. Again, 2014; installation view, 47 Canal. Easter Bunny, 2013; oil on canvas. Times Square Family, 2013; oil on canvas. Goofy, 2013; oil on canvas. Courtesy of 47 Canal.

The paintings themselves are cursory in the way masturbation often can be: Shimizu barely paints at all. Consisting of a few impulsive, gestural strokes, sometimes built up in muted hues but often left against a stark white canvas, they flesh out fleeting moments. Shimizu uses painting as a fast way to get his ideas down, and the results are weird, bleak little snapshots. These quick scenes seem ephemeral, somewhat out of reach. Shimizu’s simplicity skimpily clothes the intangible.

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“Southern Asia, in general, is the seat of awful images and associations. As the cradle of the human race, it would alone have a dim and reverential feeling connected with it… [the] mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, histories, modes of faith, &c., is so impressive, that to me the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual,” wrote Thomas de Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821).

Of course, Quincey’s opiate-fueled reflections of Asia as an imagined site of mystic sublimity have all the familiar trappings of a particular system of thought that has dominated Western representations of Asia in the past few centuries: the power of the gaze to fabricate and invent an eroticized and exoticized Other. For a large part, the rhetoric of Paradise Lost, the inaugural exhibition of the newly established Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Singapore, plays to this outdated but still oft-studied dialectic with three major video works by Fiona Tan, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Zarina Bhimji, all of which seek to question the politics of migration, cultural identity, and transnational boundaries.

Fiona Tan. Disorient, 2009 (film still); double-screen video installation; color HD installation, 5:1 surround, 2 HD-cam safety masters, 2 HD projectors, 2 computers, 2 surround amplifiers, surround speakers. Courtesy of Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem.

Fiona Tan. Disorient, 2009 (film still); double-screen video installation; color HD installation, 5:1 surround, 2 HD-cam safety masters, 2 HD projectors, 2 computers, 2 surround amplifiers, surround speakers. Courtesy of Frith Street Gallery, London. Photo: Per Kristiansen.

Fiona Tan’s Disorient (2009) is a two-channel production commissioned for the Dutch Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale that contrasts discordant perceptions of Asia. The first video delineates a fictional but richly textured space curated to showcase objects found and gleaned from an exotic Other. Accompanied by a voice-over narration of Marco Polo’s travel accounts that were written at the end of the thirteenth century, Tan’s theatrical set—designed to emulate the exotic appeal of a cabinet of curiosities—imagines Polo’s lived experience of the material world, with shelves filled to the brim with figurines, taxidermied beasts, and other unnamed ornaments. But if the cabinet of curiosities is often meant to provide a visual narrative for the classification and analysis of the material world, Tan’s enormous Kunstkammer seems solely designed to disorient and to celebrate the act of collection for its own sake, highlighting perhaps the West’s centuries-old unilateral perception of the East. Yet the pursuit of capturing atavistic myth, so intricately drawn out in the first video, is dashed away by the jarring contemporary footage of the second video. The unsentimental, poverty-stricken urban landscape of East Asia, derelict and in disrepair, concurrently provides an ironic counterpoint to Polo’s romanticized configuration of these same regions, and bluntly questions the ideology presented in the first screen.

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#globalization #museums #access #representation #decolonization #history

A recent conference at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, “Collecting Geographies—Global Programming and Museums of Modern Art,” invited participants to question the responsibilities accrued to arts institutions when they present works of global cultural production as a response to market interest. Each of the topics raised by these questions—globalization, colonial collections, and the critical history of the museum among them—could easily justify its own conference. Holland Cotter writes of museums’ difficulties in shedding a utopian take on globalization even in the face of globalization’s more sinister implications in this week’s New York Times. That tendency was also in evidence at “Collecting Geographies,” which was hosted by the Stedelijk in partnership with Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum and Stockholm’s Moderna Museet.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh. La Javanaise, 2012; film production still. Photo by Bárbara Wagner.

Among the keynote speakers, there was dissent between those who saw the conference as an occasion to reckon with Imperialist histories and those who viewed the global as something of an undocumented space, ripe for discovery. The post-1989 “global contemporary,” a paradigm established with the fall of the Berlin Wall, was repeatedly invoked as shorthand for a partial decentering of the European position of cultural superiority. Armed with this egalitarian vision, some leading academics and museum professionals spoke with more interest than experience on the subject of cross-cultural discourse. Only one featured panel, which included curators Wayne Modest of the Tropenmuseum and Jette Sandahl of Gothenburg, Sweden’s Museum of World Culture, and artists Kader Attia and Wendelien van Oldenborgh, addressed the shadow cast by history over contemporary global art activities. For the most part, the “global turn” was addressed broadly, optimistically, and fairly apolitically as a new and vital scholarly direction.

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Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Melissa Thorson Hause reviews RR&P: Repetition, Rhythm, and Pattern at the Lewis Art Gallery at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi.

L to R: Corey Escoto, Wheel of Fortune: I’d Like to Solve the Puzzle, 2010; digital prints, frames, plexiglass, 49 x 135 in. Corey Escoto, House of Cards, n.d.; plexi-mounted digital prints, wax balls; approx. 35 x 45 in. Lilly Zuckerman, 6”x4.5”x3”, 4”x4”x3”, and 5”x3”x3.5”, 2012, porcelain. Courtesy of Lindsey Landfried. Photo: Lindsey Landfried.

A century ago, avant-garde art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler asserted that geometry is “deeply rooted” in our processes of seeing—it gives us, he said, our “categories of vision” and constitutes the “necessary condition for all objective perception.”[1] Kahnweiler’s words resonate with the viewer of RR&P: Repetition, Rhythm, and Pattern, an exhibition of works by ten emerging and mid-career artists largely allied with reductive abstraction. All the works—from charcoal drawings to plexi-mounted digital prints, leaded glass, and mixed-media assemblages—propose a dialogue with the geometric; each represents the result of formal distillation, of visual reduction to a near-minimalist language. Kahnweiler would doubtless have approved.

Yet for all their geometric rigor, these works also hint at the off-kilter, not-so-tidy unraveling of mass-produced, machine-age modes. Kim Beck’s charcoal drawings (all titled Construction Fence [2013]), for example, give eerie personality to manufactured barriers, while Anna Mikolay’s two folded-paper “paintings”—Lines, Folds, Light, and Time, both from 2013—respond idiosyncratically to subtle changes in light, humidity, and the motion of the air. Lilly Zuckerman’s ceramic sculptures (6”x4.5”x3”, 4”x4”x3”, and 5”x3”x3.5” [2012]) transform spare white lines into three-dimensional doodles, and Megan Cotts’ Fig. 5 (n.d.) is an aluminum honeycomb structure that engages details of her family history.

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