From our friends at KQED, today we bring you a review of Work in Progress: Approaching Utopia at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Author Sarah Hotchkiss notes, “…the exhibition makes an irrefutable argument for the importance of art as a tool of social change. The artists’ models, socially engaged artwork, and narrative experiments approach utopia, question it, and allow viewers to process the larger issues behind collective attempts at creating paradise.” This article was originally published on October 15, 2013.

Elisheva Biernoff, The Tools Are in Your Hands, 2013. Steel, acrylic latex, magnets, pprox. 15 ft. 8 in. x 24 ft. Courtesy of the artist and Eli Ridgway. Photo: Johnna Arnold.

In a compelling show at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, three artists present work that addresses conceptions of and attempts towards utopia. In very different visual languages, Elisheva Biernoff, Oded Hirsch, and Ohad Meromi stage interactive tableaux, captivating videos, and participatory sculptures, putting collective effort at the forefront of the exhibition. The idea of utopia is in constant flux, Work in Progress posits, and it is only through combined visions and repeated attempts at understanding that any true progress can be made.

The exhibition cleverly responds to both ‘progress’ (advancement toward a better state) and ‘in progress’ (in the course of being carried out). Several of the pieces are literally in progress, whether they are documentation of an ongoing film project or an interactive magnetic board open to visitor additions and rearrangements. Most importantly, the artists’ work doesn’t feel forced into what could be a heavy-handed or onerous theme. Biernoff, Hirsch, and Meromi all bring the viewer into their highly personal subject matter through the appealing aesthetics of their work and their ability to make small, individualized experiences take on broader implications.

Read the full article here.

This Friday we bring you an article from our partner site Art Practical. Written by A. Will Brown—yes, the very same writer who brings you Daily Serving’s Fan Mail twice a month—this article is the first in Brown’s new series An Exhibition, Postpartum, which investigates, “the components of making contemporary art exhibitions in order to encourage readers and art practitioners to evaluate an exhibition as a process rather than simply as a finished product.” We encourage you to follow Brown’s column on Art Practical.

Julia Couzens. Heavy sacrifice, 2011; Insy-outsy, 2013; Weakest link, 2013; Sweet, 2011; all works, mixed threads, wire, rope, yarn, and found textiles. Courtesy of the di Rosa Art Foundation.

At nearly fourteen feet tall, Dave Lane’s futuristic steel sculpture, Device for Creating Stars, Model A(2010–12), is the exhibition’s most attention-grabbing piece. Opposite it hangs Julia Couzens’s delicate sculpture, Fading fast, but slowly… (2011). Composed solely of semi-transparent, green-plastic fruit baskets woven together like a climbing net and draped from the ceiling, it is the highlight of the exhibition. Set against a dark grey wall, the delicate baskets vary ever-so-slightly in hue, appearing as an array of deeply saturated greys, blues, and greens as the afternoon sun shines through them. To the right of Couzens’s piece is Nathan Cordero’s, It has been so long since someone has touched you like I have (2013), a three-dimensional collage of hundreds of small scraps of metal—tiny relics the artist unearthed via metal detector—mounted away from the wall on pins and nails. It’s hard not to take in the piece’s immensity while being drawn close to examine its minutia. Overhead, hanging from the rafters, is Chris Daubert’s The Wind (2013), a series of black acrylic boxes, each containing an LED that illuminates a brilliant red outline of a bird.

Read the full article here.

Something tells me the National Security Administration is monitoring Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s phone calls, and not just because the NSA monitors everyone’s phone calls. Since the early days of the War on Terror, the artist has built up an impressive arsenal of devastation. Starting in 2003 with Cloud Prototype 1 – a shiny amorphous blob reminiscent of a mushroom cloud, or a deformed variation of Warhol’s Silver Clouds – Manglano-Ovalle’s practice has centered on aestheticizing historical military objects of the game-changing variety. In 2007, he built a mobile biological weapons laboratory similar to the truck-based labs featured in Colin Powell’s infamous 2003 presentation before the U.N. arguing for disarmament of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In fact, Manglano-Ovalle’s Phantom Truck was nearly identical to Powell’s doomsday laboratory, appearing like a life-sized 3-D version of the speculative computer-rendered models the former Secretary of State was certain existed in real life. 2008’s Dirty Bomb returned to the theme of atomic war. At his show Happiness is a state of inertia at moniquemeloche gallery, Manglano-Ovalle’s object of fascination is the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle, or more commonly, a drone), a deadly symbol of 21st century mechanized warfare.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. Untitled (Drone 1), 2013. Archival pigment print, 12 x 18 inches. Courtesy of the artist and moniquemeloche.

Dominating moniquemeloche’s relatively compact exhibition space, Drone Wing (2013), a life-size three-hundred twenty and a half inch replica of a UAV wing spans the length of the gallery diagonally. Suspended from the ceiling, the wing is an imposing object, standing in for a full-sized drone like a phantom limb in reverse: you can feel the scale and presence of the airplane, even though it’s absent. A sleek synthetic fabric called solartex acts as a skin over the wing’s plywood armature. The construction is flawless, but still obvious in its artificiality, giving the piece an overall D.I.Y. affect.

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Taner Ceylan’s Lost Paintings series, marking the Turkish artist’s first New York solo exhibition since joining the roster of Paul Kasmin Gallery, makes for a suitably impressive debut. Begun in 2010, it consists of ten stunningly detailed hyperrealist paintings, each of which alludes to a particular figure from Turkish history or the canonical Western depictions thereof. Ceylan here aims to upset the attendant nationalist/Orientalist narratives and revivify their subjects with frank, often non-heterosexual eroticism. In 1640, the title of which refers to the year of Sultan Murad IV Ghazi’s death, a slender, young slave washes the thigh of his burly, bearded master—a reference to the acceptance of such asymmetrical homosexual relationships throughout Turkish history, and the brutal Ghazi’s documented predilection for them in particular. 1881, a reference to the birth year of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, captures the lusty and defiant stare of a fez-clad man who suggests the Republic of Turkey’s revolutionary patriarch, as cigar smoke curls around his lips.

Taner Ceylan. 1881, 2010; oil on canvas; 55 1/8 x 70 7/8 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery.

Prior to the Lost Paintings, Ceylan was largely producing work with decidedly more explicit sexual content. Many of these depictions are straightforwardly tender. Others, like Taner Taner, a self-portrait of the artist entering his double from behind, are more provocative; they seem to betray a naughty glee in monumentalizing images that many viewers, especially in Turkey, would find taboo (curator Dan Cameron notes how the sexual dimension of Ceylan’s work has, unsurprisingly, “brought him outright abuse in the press”). Abstraction of Nothing, Ceylan’s 2009 exhibition at I-20 Gallery—his first U.S. solo show—found the artist flirting with outright vulgarity. One work depicts a group of men pouring champagne on a kneeling woman as she fellates one and manually stimulates another; in another, a cropped penis rests on a semen-splattered close-up photograph of fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

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Robert Heinecken is an artist who is hard to pin down. A photographer who rarely used a camera, he founded UCLA’s photography department in 1964. Skeptical of the documentarian role of photography, he mined images from mass media, prefiguring the appropriation strategies of Pictures Generation artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine by at least a decade. Despite this, he was never able to achieve the notoriety accorded these artists. The exhibition Robert Heinecken: Sensing the Technologic Banzai, now on view at Cherry and Martin through November 16^th, aims to set the record straight with a reconsideration of his oeuvre.

Robert Heinecken, P.P. Three Women A, 1990; Cibachrome photogram; Edition of 3; 14 x 11 inches, 35.56 x 27.94 centimeters. Courtesy of Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Covering work from the 1980s—the second third of Heinecken’s career—the show features four main bodies of work, each showcasing a different artistic technique. Perhaps most well known are his magazine photograms, which he began making in the 1960s (the ones in this exhibition are from around 1990). To make these, Heinecken treated magazine pages like negatives; the resulting image is a composite of both sides of the page. Using mostly advertisements, Heinecken’s only artistic intervention is the selection of the pages. The final images appear natural at first—front and back unified by the common language of seductive luxury—but the more one looks at these, the more an awkward dialogue between the different sources causes an unsettling disjuncture. Heinecken’s skill as an editor is what makes these images so compelling; they attract us with the aesthetics of advertising, and then thwart our gaze by subtly complicating their messages of desire.

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HELP DESK is where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling–or any other activity related to contemporary art. Submit your questions anonymously here: http://bit.ly/132VchD. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. HELP DESK is co-sponsored by KQED.

I have a gallery in LES [the Lower East Side of New York City] and I want to fill it with great art and sell a lot and do cool things. The problem is that I cannot find artists to represent. How do I find them?

Surprising as it may seem, I rarely get phony questions for Help Desk; and when I do, they are fairly easy to spot and my policy is to ignore them (for the record: dead twin guy, I’m on to you). But you, dear reader, were kind enough to provide a link to your gallery’s website, and after a bit of poking around it does indeed appear that your query is not some sort of complicated hoax inspired by a combination of whiskey and boredom.

But after verifying your information, I confess that I am completely mystified. You have a gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and you don’t know where to find artists? How did this come to be? I mean, you have an art space in the ostensible center of the art world and yet no art to hang in it. This is a disturbing case of putting the office before the business, if you see what I mean.

Gretchen Bender. Total Recall, 2013; 8 channel video on 24 monitors and three projection screens, 18 min. Soundtrack by Stuart Argabright. Courtesy of The Kitchen.

Nevertheless, here we are. You have a gallery. You need art. You don’t know where to find it. You wrote to me. Your position leaves me scratching my head in perplexity, but help you I must. What you need is an education, and beyond the next four hundred words it’s going to be entirely self-directed. I can lead you to water, but the drinking is up to you.

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Today From the DS Archives we bring you a post on one of William Kentridge‘s highly regarded video pieces “Black Box/Chambre Noire.” His work is currently on view at Marian Goodman in New York and will be up through October 26. The following article written by Georgia Haagsma was originally published on September 12, 2012.

William Kentridge. Installation view of Black Box/Chambre Noire; miniature theater, Photo: John Hodgkiss, courtesy Deutsche Guggenheim

At the end of William Kentridge’s miniature theatre piece Black Box/Chambre Noire (2005) a rhinoceros gets shot. The shooting, taken from old black and white film footage and projected onto the theatre’s back screen is clumsily executed by a clearly inexperienced rhinoceros hunter. After the deed is done, said hunter runs back and forth between the animal and his original position to check the status of his prey, anxiously trying to ensure he killed the beast and did the right thing. The awkward killing foregoes a celebration of the victory over the immense powers of the rhinoceros. Seconds after the first shot, a group of human beings is seen strapping the animal’s legs together, preparing it to be carried away. A strange mixture of guilt and pride can be sensed in the hunters’ eyes.

Black Box/ Chambre Noire is a 21-minute performance, starring sometimes quirky but often deeply sinister motorised creatures in a theatre crafted from paper and wood. The creatures, including a melancholy megaphone and robotic soldiers who commit violent killings, move in rows across a multi-layered stage. In the background, images of charcoal drawings, postcards, documents and archival video footage are in an intentionally chaotic manner projected onto the theatre’s structure. The work draws inspiration from what the UN named the first genocide of the 20^th century. In 1904, in what is now called Namibia, over 80.000 people found their death when the indigenous Herero and Nama people came into resistance against the German colonists. Many died instantly through the force of the violence, others were forced into the desert and died from exposure to extreme temperatures and draught.

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