Wind explored the death of Michael Jackson, one of America’s most important and mythical pop figures. For the exhibition, Genzken created a series of large sculptural monuments and wall works that level both the hierarchy of sculptural materials as well as that of contemporary and historically saturated figures. In this series, images of Michael Jackson sit in close proximity to that of Michelangelo’s David with the same unfamiliarity as that evoked from seeing pristine copper plates, fabric and cheap xerox prints all on the same artistic surface. Through the peculiar coupling of both the materials and images exhibited, Genzken is able to explore our ongoing cultural consumption of both material and myth. The following review was written by DailyServing’s Bean Gilsdorf and was published on January 10th, 2010.

In William Gibson‘s 1986 novel Count Zero, an abandoned but sentient AI robot composes art objects from detritus found in space.  Despite being built by a computer from discards and rubbish, these objects have a deeply human gravity—both a grace and a yearning for grace—and are highly prized.   It is precisely this evocative use of materials and imagery that Isa Genzken gives us in Wind, her response to the death of Michael Jackson.  This recent work, at Neugerriemschneider Gallery in Berlin, expertly conjures the agitation between glory and coarseness in celebrity culture.

Five monumental mixed-media works, all from 2009, are hung from the walls of the gallery.  The outlier of the group in materials and scale, Wind (Rom), is composed of pages torn from a floral wall calendar, plastic, satin ribbon, spray paint, and tape.  The other four works are larger and a more intriguing mix of temporary and durable materials: the weight and chill of large copper and aluminum plates clashes with flimsy photocopies provisionally clamped to their edges, and the glitz and promise of mirrored disco tiles is defeated by the crassness of cheap blue painter’s tape.  To say that the work is abject would be somewhat misleading; the scale and materials often point to permanence and beauty, even though it falls short of being fully realized.  In Wind, Genzken tells us that true beauty is not possible under current historical and cultural conditions.

The particular mix of images gives the work lyric force.  Wind (Michael/David)—made of plastic, poster, photocopies, mirrored foil, colored paper, spray paint, and tape—depicts Jackson in his prime: styled, dancing, iconic.  Gold spray paint adorns the cheap posters, giving Jackson a top hat or circling his exposed chest.  The composition is also inflected by a centrally-placed image of the famous marble statue; a small copy of Lochner’s Altar of the City Patrons; and multi-colored curving marks that look like an enlarged thumbprint.  In this way Genzken points the viewer to the distinction of Jackson’s oeuvre, inviting connections that signal individuality, singularity, and exceptionalism.   But on closer inspection she undercuts her own assertions: the posters of Jackson are printed with © Annie Liebowitz, the original author of the photo; ripped from a book, the tattered reproduction of Lochner’s altar has his name and information about the piece at the bottom.  It’s as if Genzken wants to build a new Oz, and then perversely delights in drawing back the curtain on her own construction: The gold? Cheap paint. The rainbow? A tacky photocopy. Our heroes? Well…

And yet, there is a scavenged poetry, too.  Wind (Michael) uses repetition to evoke a sense of loss.  Against a background of alternating copper and aluminum panels, the piece depicts Jackson in concert, leaping into the air in a dance routine.  The photos (more cheap photocopies) are attached to the first two of the three copper panels, establishing a visual rhythm that points to the blankness of the last panel.  Despite the heroic scale of the piece, the apparent permanence of the metal, and the brightly colored papers, the piece is cold and despairing.

The various compositions of the pieces are anarchic but not disorganized.  Materials, too, are severely contrasting but not completely unharmonious.   If the work is, as stated in the press release, “concerned with the depiction of this immaterial force of nature,” it seems that Genzken shows us a wind that can simultaneously elevate and sully.  In the end, the work feels less specifically about the adoration and dejection of Michael Jackson than about the society that produced him.

For nearly a century, Disney’s eclectic assembly of animated characters have persisted the hopeful notion of Happily Ever After. (And the certitude that a duck without pants is always quick to anger.) Like modern-day mythology, Disney stories take seemingly ordinary characters and place them into extraordinary circumstances, through which they eventually persevere and often learn a lesson along the way. Boy meets genie and earns the heart of a princess after he discovers that true value lies not in material riches but in love. Girl meets a gang of small men and learns that a prince’s kiss will revive her after she has been poisoned by a witch. (This one’s less about perseverance and more about Happily Ever After.) Mouse, Duck and Dog take an unpredictable drive through the countryside in a house-turned-precariously hitched trailer, during which time their bond of friendship strengthens. In any of these cases, the ultimate lesson or happy ending is revealed via the entertaining exploits of characters whom we grow to love. Disney characters are iconic and far-reaching. They are recognized the world over for bringing joy to children and adults, alike.

One community of particularly exuberant Disney fans has caught the eye and intellect of Cyprus-born artist, Christodoulos Panayiotou. In researching the city of Limassol’s Municipal Archives, Panayiotou has discovered that Limassolians have a decades-long tradition of dressing up as Disney characters during the town’s annual carnival parade. Since the 1970s the people of Panayiotou’s native town have adopted some of Disney’s most beloved personae. In his 2008 piece, Wonder Land, Panayiotou depicts this curious tradition through 80 color slides. While the phenomenon might appear as nothing more than eccentric to some of us, the artist—who refers to it as an “obsession”—has a much deeper interpretation. In a conversation with Nicos Charalambidis, published in Art Papers, Christodoulos Panayiotou says, “The parade is a kind of revelation of everything we would like to be, of everything we know we cannot be, and of everything we cannot afford to accept that we are.” In explaining how Wonder Land came to be, he says, “When I began my research at the carnival parade’s archives, the unusually large number of Disney-themed floats, costumes, and masks struck me…I interpreted it as an indication of a kind of popular, subversive reformatting of the official aims of the parade, which presents itself as a continuation of the Hellenic tradition, in both historical and mythological terms. I then tried to isolate the many Disney themed photographs, as I realized that their inner logic reflects my concept of the complexity of the island’s identity.”

Wonder Land and other new and recent work by Christodoulos Panayiotou is currently on view in a solo exhibition curated by Michelle Cotton at Cubitt Gallery in London. Panayiotou was born in Limassol in 1978 and studied dance and performing arts in Lyon and London. He has exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art Oxford; The National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens; Taipei Biennal (2008); Busan Biennale (2008); MoCA Miami; Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul and Künsthalle Zurich.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Dennis Hopper, "Double Standard," 1961

When they were newlyweds living in Switzerland, my grandparents met Terry Southern, the beatnik bad boy who would eventually co-write Easy Rider. My grandmother worked with Southern’s wife, Carol, at the United Nations nursery school in Geneva. Carol charmed her. “What a sport she was,” my grandmother remembers, “and a super gorgeous woman who would do anything to keep her husband.” Southern, on the other hand, struck my grandmother as “shy, moody, and insecure,” albeit talented. The one time my grandparents went to the Southerns’ home—they’d been invited for all-American apple pie—Southern sat brooding in a corner rocking chair. He abandoned his silence only to comment on his wife’s baking: “Well, Carol, this pie sure isn’t up to snuff.”

Not long afterward, the Southerns left Geneva for Spain. “How can I possibly write when day after day I look out the window and see gray?” Southern purportedly asked his wife. In Geneva, the mountains often block the sunshine.

In the decade that followed, Southern divorced Carol and settled in Los Angeles. There he met actor and artist Dennis Hopper, whom he profiled for Vogue in 1965. Hopper, like Southern, saw a keen connection between the way he lived and the art he made. “Bred despite the wild sterility of Dodge City, [Hopper] is now morassed in a creativeness that is almost as hopelessly complete as that which spread and drowned the great Cocteau,” Southern wrote, connecting Hopper’s success not only the century’s premiere polymath but also to Hopper’s ability to transcend mid-western roots. Both the writer and the actor-artist seemed to be searching for the same thing: big, mad, momentous experiences that would make them feel intensely alive. That kind of experience would undoubtedly awaken creative genius.

At the time Southern met him, Hopper, his Nikon practically glued to his face, was religiously photographing both the burgeoning art scene and political upheaval. He found a thrill in being close to the action. Southern found a thrill in worrying about Hopper’s thrills:

‘Hopper, take care!’ I charged him when last we met, on the eve of his madcap jaunt to photograph the Selma march. He threw a quick masculine look for support to Brooke Beauty [Hopper’s wife, Brooke Hayward]—who responded only by shyly lowering her great doe eyes, sensual lips pursed into the sort of Mona Lisa smile which seemed to say: ‘Don’t you know you are both mad as hatters?’

In 1968, the mad hatters, who had by then both separated from their supportively gorgeous wives, joined forces with Peter Fonda to make Easy Rider, a film in which everyone more or less plays himself (and the film is full of him-selves). Hopper once said of Easy Rider, “Nobody had ever seen themselves portrayed in a movie before.” He meant that no film to date had portrayed the ‘60s as an acid-drenched blur that felt real.

Even if it was scripted, Easy Rider blurred fiction and non-fiction so effortlessly that it could, at times, pass for cinéma-vérité. The film’s acid trip scene, set in a New Orleans cemetery, remains one of the most poignant pieces of video art I’ve seen. It’s crisp then blurred, honest and then flamboyant. On the merit of that scene alone, Easy Rider belongs not alongside Blow Up, Breathless, or Zabriskie Point, but alongside Bruce Conner’s and Bruce Nauman’s gritty experiments.

The scene begins when Billy (Hopper) and Wyatt (Fonda) venture into the cemetery, accompanied by two prostitutes, Karen and Mary. They drop acid –“what’d you do with it?” asks Karen; “just shut up and take it,” says Billy–and then descend into a kaleidoscopic group confessional. The Lord’s prayer echoes in the background. Karen says she wants to be pretty. Mary strips. Billy laughs a lot. Fonda as Wyatt climbs up into the lap of a classical goddess and caresses her, mourning the suicidal death of his actual mother, Frances Seymour: “You’re such a cruel mother and I hate you so much.” Hopper rolls around on the grass and forces Karen to roll with him. “I can feel the inside, but I can’t feel the outside, okay?” says Karen.

Denni s Hopper in "Easy Rider," film still.

Dennis Hopper passed on May 29th, and a much-talked-about exhibition featuring his oeuvre will soon open at MoCA L.A. The show will likely include a range of “in-the-moment” creations, images and objects Hopper made because they reflected the creative morass he had worked so hard to live in–and reflected what everyone else was doing at the time. It doesn’t bother me that his style is hackneyed. His ability to be a chameleon exposes him as a fan: he had a Cartier-Bresson phase, a Robert Longo phase, a Keith Haring phase. But his art did remain bogged down by the myth of the artist as someone who always catapults head-first into experience. It’s not living hard that makes art good.

In his anti-fiction manifesto, Reality Hunger, David Shields quotes an unnamed source:

The body gets used to a drug and needs a stronger and stronger dose just to experience the thrill. An illusion of reality—the idea that something really happened—is providing us with that thrill right now.

All throughout his career, Hopper seemed to be looking for that drug. And the best part about the scene from Easy Rider is that it cuts through in-the-moment madness and exposes the drug as a drug.

"Spell List (Resist Planar Alignment)," 2009. Marker, spray paint, and house paint on paper. 30 x 22"

Michael Tomeo: I’ve read that you use Dungeons & Dragons dice rolls to inform your compositions…how does this work?

Kadar Brock: It isn’t so much about the composition per se; it’s about determining an amount of marks. Each piece adopts a rule set from a D&D spell. These rules involve rolling a certain type of die a certain number of times, and the resultants determine how many of those zigzag marks the piece will get. That then determines the composition. But really the use of D&D is just a system or a set up. It takes away certain decisions from me and forces more onus on the mark making and paint handling to communicate things. It also sets up an analogy with abstraction – both essentially being belief systems and participatory experiences.

MT: This reminds me of how 60s artists like John Cage or Robert Rauchenberg would use the I Ching to create music or dance. I feel like the spiritual and Zen-influenced side of their work kind of got trampled by the onward march of minimalist sculpture. At the risk of sounding corny, does any spirituality from the spells influence your work? Are you into any thing like Jospeh Campell or the idea of the monomyth?

KB: Not corny at all – in fact incredibly spot on…this is what I’m getting at, while trying to co-opt/include self-criticism. It’s post-cynical romantic, i.e. incorporating and coming out on the other side of my doubts, while still maintaining and believing in this stuff I choose to call “other content” like the sublime, spiritual, romantic (essentially the lineage I find myself to be a part of). It’s about finding meaning and creating meaning. The I Ching is a set of rules too, and something that is given belief, given meaning, by the person playing by those rules or using those rules. That participation is a creative act. For me I’ve always felt that, and this really ties into Campbell, it’s my job/endeavor/whatever as an artist and human being to come up with my own sense of meaning for this life, to come up with what would be my own mode of myth. It’s the only way not to succumb to some other person’s story and the power that exerts over you, it’s also, at least for me, the only way to be sure that life is “fresh” or new to me.

I’m also very much into the spiritual connotations of spells and magic. My parents were hippies, I was raised all new age, and the reason I got into abstraction was because of its spiritual, metaphysical, and Gnostic underpinnings, and the relationship between that and my upbringing. I like the idea of abstract paintings being spells and being magical. I think using this set up, calling them spells etc. co-opts any cynicism I have about it and incorporates it, takes in my doubts and beliefs. It comes out on the other side with something.

"Combust," 2010. Marker, spray paint, and house paint on canvas (diptych). 72 x 96"

MT: About being a post cynical romantic, correct me if I’m wrong but it seems like you are taking up where Gen X left off or maybe it’s that you don’t have to follow their well-worn paths. To generalize, Gen X seemed to know more what it didn’t want to do rather than what it did. I’m thinking of John Cusak’s famous “I don’t want to buy anything, etc…” rant from Say Anything. You don’t have Gen X’s weighty sense of nostalgia/regret and you seem to combine some ideas from the literary sense of romance, like a belief in the supernatural, but your work is also firmly placed in the unsentimental present.  In other words, your work has feeling and you believe in things but you’re not like Lloyd Dobler standing with a boom box over his head in the rain, right?

KB: Yeah, I think I do believe in things. And that pretty much sums it up, I think I do… or better yet, I think about what I do believe in and challenge that, but as a means of clarifying all of it, not trying to get that nihilistic “I don’t want to do anything.” I have these moments of intensity. I have these things I relate to and feel moved by. And I see people in the past that talk about these same things, these same moments. So maybe it’s something other people relate to also. That said, maybe not everybody does, maybe some paintings ain’t gonna do shit for someone and they’ll be meaningless to them.

I think abstract painting really exists on a precipice of being meaningful and meaningless, and I really embrace that. For me the paintings are meaningful, but for someone else – nothing. Same like D&D – for someone invested in that system, someone putting into it and participating – wow! I read a study about how role-playing was able to cure someone’s social anxiety, and another one about how it cured someone’s depression. I also watched a documentary about a live action role playing community outside of Baltimore, and man, that game, that world, the characters these people played, gave their life a more pointed sense of purpose and meaning and worth. I mean, couldn’t you say by being this art maker I’m doing the same thing? I get to think and feel all these things that are incredibly important and crucial, and make all this stuff.

But yeah, for me, I am concerned with this romantic stuff. I had been taught to be cynical about it in school, to make fun of it, or use it winkingly. I’m over that though, but I also feel a responsibility to not just weep and bleed out a painting (in fact I think that’d be boring). It’s like how do I experience that moment of intensity, how do I talk about that moment with some self-awareness, that precipice of believing and feeling, while still giving into the feeling and the belief. And that in itself is another precipice between letting go (which I do in the act/action of painting), and staying self-conscious.

But to get back to your analogy, I think if I were going to be Cusak in the rain though, I’d be him in High Fidelity, figuring out relationships and feeling some shit.

"Disintegrate," 2009-10. Spray paint, house paint, and pigment dispersion on canvas (diptych). 96 x 144" (courtesy private collection)

MT: What I like is that even though you’ve poured a lot of energy into a painting, you acknowledge that someone looking at it just might not get it, and that’s ok. I don’t think you’d ever be offended by a reading of your work that might not match your intentions…

KB: Not exactly, but I’m definitely not offended if people don’t respond to it. Everyone is different, and that’s ok. Some people will get into it and others won’t and that’s fine. I do want the people into it though to get into what I’m into, and to experience that in someway. And if their interpretation is a little different, all the better, because then they’re participating more and making it more their own, which in the end, I think is more meaningful and will be more significant to them.

MT: When did you start to fully engage with myth? Did that have anything to do with a tendency toward reduction and the monochrome I’ve noticed in recent works?

KB: You know, I’m not totally sure when it started. I’ve really always been interested in that mode of thinking and relating. I mean, I’ve always thought, since like high school, that it was my job to come up with my own belief system or synthesis of belief systems in order to relate to the world in a more direct and meaningful way. I mean if you want to look at it one way, I would always draw comic book characters and fantasy characters when I was a kid – those subjects are rife with mythological content.  I was reading myths in college too and making some drawings related to them – the subjects ranged from Siegfried in the Nieblungenlied to Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And I’ve always been fascinated by the myths I related to about being an artist – ideas of heroes and shamans, the magic of the painting practice and inherent communication that happens in the act of painting. The possibility to talk about things words can’t really touch on. The ability to get all this complexity of thought and feeling into on object/moment, that then can unfold and change before someone.

The shift towards monochromatic work came from wanting to challenge my belief in the myth of painting’s inherent communicative qualities and wanting to put as much pressure on my gesture/mark making as the touchstone of communicating subjective content. So yeah, it definitely relates to a myth I believe in and want to investigate, challenge, and potentially validate.

MT: Although my experience is limited, what I always liked about D&D is that despite its endless volumes of rules, the nuance of the game lies in the dungeon master’s discretionary or even improvisational application of them. Does improvisation play a role in your current work?

KB: It’s really funny, Michael, I’ve actually never played either! I wish I had, and actually would still like to now (if there’s anyone out there who’d be into it, email me). But yeah, there’s a lot of freedom in the framework – and again, it really comes down to a belief system and participating, and internalizing and making it one’s own.

In regards to the painting though, I think improvisation is everything in the work. I mean that’s where all the feeling is going to come from, all the wet “other” content. How a piece gets folded, what sort of spray/marker/house paint/other paint combination is used, how many drips, footprints, scratches, whatever, are all in the moment.  The whole system thing is just that, a system, a box, a set up, so I can have as much freedom in the act of painting as possible. If I know what I’m painting, have all these limitations, the only place for the stuff I want to come through is in improvisation in the action of making it.

– Kadar Brock’s work can currently be seen in Substance Abuse, curated by Colin Heurter, at Leo Koenig Projekte, up through July 3rd, and in In.flec.tion at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art through July 26th. Conjuring and Dispelling, a solo show at Motus Fort, Tokyo, Japan, opens on June 18th.

Courtesy: Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Photo credit: Zeno Zotti

A myth is a foundational narrative that may be based in truth or fiction but either way it tells a story of who we are. Thus self-consciousness is constructed by a shared narrative and helps us to give shape and even name our identity. If we think of identity in the usual terms of religion or nationalism, some examples of these mythological narratives include the King James Bible or the story of George Washington cutting down a cherry tree. But in the art world, there are strains of mythology that are built on identity formations like artist, curator, or critic.

Photo: Zeno Zotti

Maurizio Cattelan is notorious for using unabashedly bad-boy black humor to resist easy classifications of identity. He does so through imagery and institutions that are deeply tied to religion, nationalism and the art world. In his exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston, Is There Life Before Death, Cattelan has worked with the curator Franklin Sirmans to explode the distinctions between a number of categories. The exhibition includes art objects that are situated as “interventions” in the galleries of Byzantine, African and Surrealist art, culminating in a haunting set of works in dialogue with Arte Povera works from his native Italy. As a result the work is both art object and its context within the museum. In this sense Cattelan plays both artist and curator.

This blurring of boundaries is one of many attacks against authority that Cattelan perpetrates. But as Sirmans notes in the accompanying catalog, Cattelan has a long tradition of work in and out of normative roles. In addition to making sculpture and installations, Cattelan also worked on the publication Permanent Food and acted as curator for the Wrong Gallery and the 2006 Berlin Biennial along with curators Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick. This kind of interdisciplinary activity cuts against the grain of traditional divisions of labor in the art world. The myth of these divisions is based on the notion that artists are dumb mute expressionists who use innate talent to make objects that are interpreted by critics, bought by collectors and arranged by curators. By resisting this mythology, Cattelan capitalizes on the expansion of artistic practice by many artists of the twentieth century such as Duchamp and Warhol found in the Menil Collection.

Courtesy Kunsthaus Bregenz, Photo: Markus Tretter

But Cattelan also challenges more traditional mythologies such as Christianity. His Untitled, 2009, a taxidermied horse on its side with a wooden sign reading INRI staked in its flank, was placed in a dark gallery of dreamy Magritte paintings. This obviously references the Latin acronym inscribed on Jesus’ cross declaring him to be king of the Jews. But placed on a dead horse, a symbol of foolishness, what does this mean? In the Menil’s comment book there were some Christian visitors that were very much offended by this work, assuming that is was heretical along with Untitled, 2007, a sculpture of a woman face down and crucified in a shipping crate.

Photo: Hester + Hardaway, Houston

These gestures cause controversy because they rupture the fragile fabric of our expectations. When these Christian visitors walked into the Byzantine section of the Menil Collection they were looking for something old and true. They were expecting artifacts that would deliver on the promises of their identity’s myths. Instead they were confronted by a Trojan horse, an object that trafficked in similar iconography but proposed something less clear and concrete. This was the true heresy, for mythology cannot tolerate ambiguity and skepticism. Myths are made to describe truths and their reproductions and meant to reaffirm them. But artists like Cattelan use mythology along with the strategies of artistic, critical and curatorial practice to reveal that a story is only as good as its teller.

Arena #10 (Dogs) (1990) Stuffed animals on afghan, 11.5 x 123 x 32 inches.

These seven works, all created in 1990, puncture the mythic preciousness for which stuffed animals and handmade baby blankets are renown.  Generally, cloth is used by artists for its connection to the body and domesticity, and Kelley manages to bring these associations along while still creating a colder, more antagonistic ambiance.  In addition, Kelley also manages, despite the suave white cube setting, to deflate the illusion that art need be urbane or polished.

Arena #10 (Dogs) is one of the most playful and visually-pleasing compositions in the show.  On a bright red, orange, and brown striped afghan sit eight stuffed animals that seem to be engaged in a tug of war to divide the centermost animal, a two-headed dog.  Most of the other animals are also dogs, but some are silly, ambiguous hybrids like the snake/dachshund/duck concoction or the cheerfully anthropomorphic tomato.  Arena #10 is just fun-n-games; yet look at the display for perhaps too long, and you’ll see that some of the dogs’ expressions are not quite right.

Arena #7 (Bears) (1990) Stuffed animals on blanket, 11.5 x 53 x 49 inches.

In Arena #7 (Bears) five stuffed animals are poised at the perimeter of a satin-edged receiving blanket on the floor: two monkeys, one taupe bear, and twinned golden bears that could be the uglier younger brothers of Pooh. The colors of the animals harmonize with the cream-colored blanket.  The animals sit at the edge of the square as though playing Monopoly, or waiting for a referee’s whistle to blow and a game to begin.  It is one of the sweeter, more innocuous pieces in the show, but even so, the second-hand blanket is on the floor and the bears and monkeys are bedraggled, adulterating the potential innocence of the scene.

Arena #9 (Blue Bunny) (1990) Stuffed animal on blanket, 7 x 60 x 74 inches.

In contrast to #10 and #7, Arena #9 (Blue Bunny) feels stark.  A lone light-blue knitted rabbit sits in the center of a grubby light-blue blanket, smiling somewhat sheepishly with arms raised.  The ambiguity of the gesture—is this an expression of the victor alone at last on the playing field, or a sign of mommy-pick-me-up dependence?—gives the piece a heightened emotional force.

Arena #5 (E.T's) (1990) Stuffed animals on blanket, 7 x 97 x 87 inches.

Arena 5 (E.T’s) is, no pun intended, the most alien.  Here, the field is a large goldenrod-colored blanket.  At one corner sits a lone alien, facing toward the other actors but solemnly looking down.  In the diagonally opposite corner, two cloth E.T. dolls inspect a prone pink humanoid dispassionately.  The attitude and position of the dolls and the emptiness of the territory turns a pilled old throw and some fabric toys into a diorama with all the warmth of an operating theater.

It’s a mild case of what anthropologist Mary Douglas called “pollution behavior”: activities likely to cross closely-held boundaries or repudiate cherished designations, like putting boots on the kitchen table or eating spaghetti in bed.  In this case, and especially in the context of an urbane Upper East Side gallery, it’s the contact with the floor that evokes pollution.  Not just by using obviously worn and recycled objects, but by literally reducing art objects to the level of the floor, Kelley manages to interrogate assumptions about art and also the viewer’s feeling for handmade and beloved objects.  Kelley melds the personal, cherished nature of stuffed animals and security blankets and the costly, refined nature of blue-chip art to show us how flimsy the narrative of sacred objects can be.

Christodoulos Panayiotou, Wonder Land. 80 color slides, 2008.

Searching for the perfect way to introduce a concept as illusive as Myth lead me down the rabbit hole of trying to capture the essence of the word. Yet, what I found was that such an ethereal notion that seems to be a major focus in the work of so many visual artists is rooted in our collective understanding of our own cultural identity. In each of the artists featured this week, the work somehow struggles to puncture or abuse a particular myth in our collective conscious, just as the stories from Greek mythology reached to enlighten the Greek public.

But as I reflected on this concept, what interested me most is how we as individuals adopt these roles given to us through our own contemporary mythology. Whether it is through the idea that Disney brings joy, as shown in the work of Christodoulos Panayiotou, or the concept that an artist should desire something big and mad and bad, as in the work of Maurizio Cattelan or the legend that is Dennis Hopper, our cultural identity is rooted in generations of stories, auras, heroes and events with no determinable basis of fact or natural explanation. I doubt that anyone could deny that much of our cultural and personal identity is built on this concept, but what many of the artists working today provide is an access point to these stories – where we might all take a step back and recognize, appreciate or question the world around us.

Maurizio Cattelan, All, Marble, 2007. Courtesy Kunsthaus Bregenz, Photo: Markus Tretter

Throughout this week, we hope you take a chance to question your own relationship to Myth through the work of these artists. Each of them take on a very direct conversation with our culture’s identity, adopting an anthropological investigation into various facets of our lives, and we hope that you will be willing to take on the same kind of questioning about our concepts of Myth or your own personal or cultural identity through their work.