Today’s article comes from Slovakian curator and art critic Richard Gregor, who takes us through a recent work by Veronika Rónaiová/Julián Filo that features the members of the band Pussy Riot. Two days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he will free Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 24, and Maria Alyokhina, 25, who were jailed after performing an anti-Putin “punk prayer,” at Moscow’s Christ the Savior cathedral in February last year. In a press conference earlier this week, Putin said, “I feel sorry not because [Pussy Riot] went to prison, but because they committed that provocative act, which degraded women,” but as Gregor remarks on this painting, “The force of the work is all about being inappropriate.”

Veronika Rónaiová/Julián Filo. Shape of the Gesture, 1989/2012; acrylic and oil on canvas, 104 x 104 cm. Photo: Daša Barteková

Some years ago Veronika Rónaiová inherited several paintings done by her father, the famous Slovakian painter Julián Filo (1921-2007). Because their life-long relationship was good, and because of his great influence on her art, she felt that many things between them remained untold, so she started a risky and heretical dialogue with him by adding a new layer to some of his paintings (this series contains 5 paintings in total). In Shape of the Gesture (1989/2012), originally painted by Julián Filo only black-and-white, one can see the artist’s double self-portrait standing in some kind of anonymous sacral space with the Shroud of Turin in the back—and here the viewer must bear in mind that even the simple admission of being religious might have cost you social status during Socialism. More than 20 years later, his daughter Rónaiová added a little portrait of herself to this scene, repeating the same gesture as her father. There are  several models of how one might interpret such a painting, discussing, for example, the Electra Complex, etc., but perhaps the most important part of this work appears on the opposite side. The arches of a Gothic vault provide evidence that the whole scene is happening in a western church and the three members of Pussy Riot are marching right inside. The inspiration for this painting came at the moment when these three young Russian women were arrested. In East-Central Europe this was a very intense moment, not only because of the erratic behavior of the Church, but also because of the feeling of solidarity with this group’s courage in the epicenter of the former Eastern Block’s hegemony.

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Jeff Depner’s commitment to one medium, in this case to painting, is rare in the current climate, in which artists work across increasingly varied platforms and often combine mediums. Depner’s paintings simultaneously explore paintings’ storied and experimental past and burgeoning future. Most of his richly layered acrylic works systematically investigate the possibilities of the medium by following a similar internal logic that in turn gives his oeuvre a remarkable coherence.

Jeff Depner. Drifter, 2013; acrylic on canvas; 24 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Each of Depner’s works begins with one central shape—a circle, square, triangle, diamond, rectangle, or some combination of the five—that becomes the basis and governing principle for a specific repeating pattern. At times, and in specific areas within his paintings, Depner’s patterns appear unrelated and unpredicted, but when taken as a whole, the component parts adhere in surprisingly organic fashion.

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Despite its universal connotations, Secret Citadel, a mixed-media installation and video projection by Canadian artist Graeme Patterson, explores the nuances of male bonding and friendship from an intensely personal perspective. The narrative of the exhibition, currently on view at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, unfolds in four parts featuring two distinct characters—a bison dressed in blue and a cougar dressed in orange—at seemingly disparate stages in life. The exhibition’s aesthetic is quirky, technically intricate, and somewhat menacing despite its playfulness. The detailed maquettes on display, complete with paperclip lawn chairs, fun-fur grass, and Popsicle-stick ductwork, contain mini-projections of the stop-motion animations filmed within, while also breaking a fourth wall of sorts by reproducing the maquettes within themselves. This presentation heightens a self-referential narrative that asserts the artist’s presence and hand. Across the hall, the installations merge in a thirty-minute stop-motion animation that took Patterson over four years to create, accompanied by a complex, emotive score he composed himself.

Drawing on personal experience and memories, the initial installation, The Mountain, traces Patterson’s relationship and his longing to reconnect with his first true friend, Yuki, whose family moved out of town when the artist was nine years old. Patterson represents himself as the blue bison throughout the exhibition, while the orange cougar stands in for Yuki, or later, the idea of Yuki as an idealized, platonic male companion. The Mountain depicts these childhood friends’ homes in rural Saskatchewan with reverence for memory, with the mountain serving as a childlike, mythical representation of the large hill that separated their houses. Fort-like in appearance, the mountain is built on a tabletop and covered in blankets that mimic snow. Inside the mountain, we see the parallel narrative of Patterson struggling to reconstruct these memories; his studio, in various stages of disarray, is laid out before us. In addition to various stop-motion scenes, the houses on either side of the mountain contain slow-motion reenactments of the artist participating in various sports as an adult. These videos, combined with the adjacent installation Grudge Match, perhaps mine the idea that physical manifestations of platonic male friendships are often relegated to sports or other socially accepted activities after a certain age within patriarchal society.

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Peggy Phelan said it best: “Performance’s only life is in the present.”[1] Slippery in designation and impermanent by nature, a performance is not the same as the video of a performance. The viewer must be present for not only the sights and sounds of the performer, but also the smell, the temperature, the crowd, the fidgeting in a folding chair, or standing on a concrete floor—in other words, part of what differentiates a performance from its documentation is not just the body and actions of the performer, but also the body and unmediated perceptions of the viewer.

Julia Heyward. God Heads, February 28, 1976; performance, as part of “Performances: Four Evenings, Four Days” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Courtesy of the Artist.

Rituals of Rented Island, now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is only a brief, disembodied impression of performance art in 1970s Manhattan. No reproach, actually: Rituals is an enlightening—and productively frustrating—exhibition of documentation of works by artists who were beginning their careers at that time.

There are plenty of performers in the exhibition who went on to become art stars: Mike Smith, Laurie Anderson, and Vito Acconci all have works here; but it’s mostly the lesser-known artists who steal the show. The work of Julia Heyward, in particular, is a revelation. In the video documentation of Shake Daddy Shake (1976), an excerpt from the performance series “Three Evenings on a Revolving Stage” at Judson Memorial Church, she appears on a tiny lazy-Susan platform, speaking in an exaggerated southern drawl about her father. Shake Daddy Shake is stripped-down and bare, emphasizing Heyward’s ability to manifest characters in the fashion of a spiritualist medium. Likewise, the video excerpt of This Is My Blue Period (1977) shows the artist wearing a blue dress and talking about a woman named Mary, alternately enunciating clearly and croaking through strained vocal cords to emphasize different words. With the modulation of her voice, Heyward embodies a tumult of personae in quick succession, shifting so rapidly within the same sentence or phrase that she evinces these characters almost simultaneously.

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The Museum of Modern Art, New York, pays homage to the quintessentially Surrealist decade in the career of Belgian painter Rene Magritte with Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-38. Surrealism flourished as the preeminent art movement between World Wars I and II in Europe. The MoMA exhibition, traveling to Houston and Chicago in 2014, showcases Magritte’s prolific Brussels and Paris years and proves the continued viability and accessibility of the Surrealist aesthetic.

René Magritte. La Clairvoyance (Clairvoyance), 1936; oil on canvas, 21 1/4 x 25 9/16 in. © Charly Herscovici.

Magritte’s paintings, while traditional in technique (often oil on canvas), are innovative and witty in concept. Doubling, fragmentation, displacement, and irrational juxtapositions are his favored strategies. Like Marcel Duchamp before him, Magritte used his background training in commercial sign painting to execute his works. And as with Duchamp, language games are a preeminent concern. “This is not a pipe,” proclaims Magritte’s painting of a pipe. The paradoxical proclamation is correct: It is a painting of a pipe. Near this work is a small painting of a piece of cheese resting inside an actual glass cheese tray. Title? This Is a Piece of Cheese. Gotcha! Through the combination of text and image, Magritte questions not only reality, but representation itself. This is art about art. Given the continued post-conceptual trend in contemporary art and the continued questioning of the politics of language, the popular appeal of Magritte comes as no surprise.

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#museums #diversity #nostalgia #representation

Proximities 2: Knowing Me, Knowing You was the second of three exhibitions of Bay Area contemporary art curated by Glen Helfand for the Asian Art Museum. This series marks a departure from AAM’s customary focus on artists from remote geographic locales and the museum’s heretofore sporadic commitment to exhibiting contemporary art. The second exhibition resolved the primary concern that I raised in response to Proximities 1: What Time Is It There? This concern involved the first show’s emphasis on Western artists’ imaginings of Asia, a premise that reinforced rather than corrected historical biases dating to AAM’s founding by the San Francisco tycoon and collector Avery Brundage. The second installment of Proximities considers the experiences of Asian diasporas. Though stronger, this show is not without clichés, introducing a trope of “nostalgia”[i] so ubiquitous in any discussion of immigrant mindsets that its complexity as a concept is largely overlooked.

Michael Jang. Aunts and Uncles, from the series The Jangs, 1973. Gelatin silver print.
11 x 14 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Stephen Wirtz Gallery. Photo courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery.

In Proximities 2, the emphasis is on Asian and non-Asian American artists with “connections to Asia.”[ii] The show includes numerous artists of Asian descent. Particularly exciting in this context is a photographic series from the 1970s by Michael Jang. This documentation of the artist’s working-class Chinese American family represents a necessary and overdue introduction of this community into the artistic dialogue at AAM. The images are playful and surreal, revealing that the photographer’s life is filled with blended influences. These works are effective precisely because they forgo nostalgia and rely instead on character and situation to establish their narrative. Read More »

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, Suzanne L’Heureux reviews Bon/anza 3: Dress for This, at n/a gallery in Oakland, California.

Bon/anza 3: Dress for This, Installation View, n/a Gallery windows, 2013. Image courtesy of the Artists.

Bon/anza 3: Dress for This, at n/a gallery, is a visually satisfying and conceptually engaging collaborative exhibition, featuring sculpture, film, and painting by the collective bonanza (Conrad Guevara, Lindsay Tully, and Lana Williams).[1]

Loosely inspired by Irit Rogoff’s talk How to Dress for an Exhibition, the show underscores how artistic presentation, like dressing, responds to and is contingent on context, and remains open to a multiplicity of interpretations.

The artists acknowledge and play off n/a’s varied functionality: The space is simultaneously a gallery, a home, and a venue for talks, readings, and film screenings. Fittingly, many pieces span materials and are collaborative. Several are wholly dependent on their installation within and around the gallery, including its plate-glass windows.

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