Janet Cardiff and George Miller. The Infinity Machine, 2015 (detail); mixed-media installation in the byzantine Chapel of the Menil Collection, Houston.

Dominique de Menil’s son, François, designed and built the Byzantine Chapel for the express purpose of housing a group of 13th-century frescoes that had been looted from a small church near the Cypriot village of Lysi. After having been rescued and restored by Mme. de Menil, the frescoes were installed in the exquisitely designed chapel in 1997, where they were on continuous display until being returned to Cyprus in early 2012. The space was then left vacant and unused, but after due deliberation, the Menil Collection decided to reuse the space for a series of yearlong site-specific installations.

The inaugural installation, The Infinity Machine, by renowned Canadian audiovisual artists Janet Cardiff and George Miller, opened on January 31. It is an immersive installation comprised of a monumentally scaled mobile, with associated lighting and a sound collage that fills the main interior space of the Chapel building. The word “mobile” conjures images of Calder’s graceful, colorful constructions floating passively in space, but The Infinity Machine is not of that ilk: It activates the otherwise inert interior space with motion, sound and light. More than 150 antique mirrors and other objects rotate at a constant speed in the center of the space. Hung at varying heights and oriented in varying directions, they are illuminated from three sides, reflecting light in all directions, while otherworldly sound fills the space.

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Loris Gréaud. The Unplayed Notes Museum, 2015; installation view, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas.

I suppose in the event of a chemical attack or nuclear apocalypse, a crowd of Dallas Contemporary patrons would be as good company as any to be stuck with. They are certainly relaxed, orderly, and polite.

I found this out on Saturday night at the Contemporary. Halfway through the opening for the long-anticipated Loris Gréaud show, a group of actors disguised as party-goers walked into the building and began pulling works off the walls and flinging them to the ground, and kicking over plaster sculptures. Another group of actors disguised as security guards immediately began to wrangle the half-bemused, half-blithe crowd toward the exits. Lights flashed, a few sirens sounded. People kind of good-naturedly lumbered out.

On the way, a few dozen hands shot up holding cell phones set to “photo” or “video,” but not as many as I would have expected under the circumstances. No one tried to get around security to join in the destruction, just as no one tried to intervene. Though few people in attendance knew what was meant to go down, you’d think that everyone there had all seen it before, like a rerun of a classic episode of Seinfeld or something.

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William Kentridge. Drawing for the film Other Faces (Crowds in City Streets), 2011;
charcoal and colored pencil on paper; 27.5 x 48 in.

As part of the meticulously curated Menil exhibition Experiments with Truth: Gandhi and Images of Nonviolence, five animated short films from William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection series are on display. Four of the five were made between 1989 and 2003, and the fifth is a more recent work from 2011. All feature the post-apartheid South African industrialist and land developer—Soho Eckstein—as protagonist.

Born in Johannesburg in 1955, Kentridge is perhaps South Africa’s best-known artist. His early education was in politics and African studies, and he later studied at the Jacques Lecoq International School of Theatre in Paris. As an artist, his background in theater is obvious, performing Shostakovich’s operatic transposition of Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose to wide acclaim in New York and Lyon, France. But his continued interest in politics is evident as well, not only in that production, but certainly also in his film works.

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Deborah Roberts. Untitled No. 33, n.d.; mixed media on paper, 14 x 17 in.

With the exception of one misstep, One and Many, Deborah Roberts’ current solo show at Art Palace, is raw, painful, beautiful, grotesque, vulnerable, and vicious. The first line of her handout quotes James A. Baldwin: “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” Roberts carries on her shoulders the Post-Black ideologies that she grapples with. Through paint, collage, and sculpture, she is locating herself within three histories she has inherited—of being black, of being a woman, and of being an artist working within the largely white, chauvinistic modernist vocabulary of photocollage and abstract painting.

The most compelling of several fourteen- by eleven-inch collages is Untitled No. 33. A black woman’s face appears halfway down the paper, a face that has been crudely sliced off at the neck and forehead. Roberts cracks open the woman’s skull, exposing the private thoughts residing in her head without her permission, and it shows. The woman stares at us head-on, her eyes emanating a complex mixture of defiance, sadness, and disgust. Three lab monkeys with red-tipped party hats pop out of her head, screaming. Roberts has replaced the woman’s body with a blind contour drawing in pencil. With disproportionate shoulders and fumbling cleavage, the body Roberts has given her is drawn in a way that is curiously investigative and abject. The pencil drawing may at first seem hurried and dismissive, but it is as important as the monkeys, which are visually more pronounced. The woman’s face and screaming monkeys blare anger at full volume, but the quiet body replenishes the work with a kind of self-deprecation and uncertainty. It’s the anchor that keeps it multi-dimensional, and prevents it from becoming overly didactic.

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Logo of the sports drink “Brawndo,” from the 2006 movie Idiocracy, directed by Mike Judge.

The dumbing down of the art world continues apace.

At first glance, the headline “Everybody’s an Art Curator” of this article had me thinking the Wall St. Journal was merely delving back into the ongoing use of the word “curate” for non-art things, as in, nowadays people “curate” their own bookshelves, etc. Anything that can be grouped or categorized along someone’s tastes or idea or theme is considered “curated.” I don’t care. Language goes through these changes.

But as I read the subheading and first paragraph, it was clear that the story was about the general public being invited into the traditional halls of real art and then making the decisions about what goes on there, beyond the kids’ hands-on sections (or outdoor billboards): We’re talking “curating” an art museum. This is for the sake of repopularizing the museum experience. Keeping the doors open, really.

This isn’t that new or surprising. For years now, museums have been trying out all kinds of novel ways to get the public back through their doors in this world of neverending entertainment options. Encouraging non-art people to feel validated and involved in what has been, in our increasingly dumbed-down world, categorized as “elitist” is one way to solve the problem. Museum directors are pressured into tapping new crowds. Some of the “crowdsourced”  or interactive shows mentioned in the WSJ piece seem, in isolation, mostly harmless. It’s the slippery slope that worries me.

Read the full article here.

Camille Henrot. Grosse Fatigue, 2013; video: color, sound; 13 min. © ADAGP Camille Henrot. Courtesy of the Artist, Silex Films, and kamel mennour, Paris.

Two videos currently on view in Houston share unexpected affinities, tackling heavy, potentially dry subjects and distilling them into engaging works full of humor, poignancy, and energy. Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .Mov File (2013) and Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue (2013) are part of very different group exhibitions at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art and the CAMH respectively. But it is not a surprise that the videos feel like kindred spirits, as they were both included in The Encyclopedic Palace exhibition at the 55thVenice Biennale, with Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue taking home the Silver Lion prize.

Rather than resorting to lo-fi tactics to show the guts of an image or its mechanisms, both are crisp, hi-definition videos with top-of-the-line production values. Yet in their own way Steyerl and Henrot layer and expose the internal machinery of how we produce and access visual knowledge: the green screen, computer monitor, and browser window.

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Simon Starling. Black Drop, 2012; two stills from single-channel projection (35 mm film transferred to HD); 27:42. Image courtesy of the Artist and Casey Kaplan, NY. © Simon Starling and Casey Kaplan, NY.

The transit of Venus between the Sun and Earth is the rarest of predictable, observable astronomical phenomena, occurring in pairs eight years apart with more than a century gap between them. Beginning in 1639, observations of that planet’s tiny silhouette passing in front of the Sun have been key in our understanding of bigger-picture spatial relationships, allowing us to estimate the size of the Solar System and the distance between the Sun and the Earth.

On the occasion of the most recent Venus transit in 2012, British artist Simon Starling documented it and created Black Drop—a film that explores the history and significance of Venus transit observations, as well as the nature of perception, observation, and recorded image technology. After premiering at Oxford’s Radcliffe Observatory last year, Black Drop has made its Texas debut at the Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts in Spring, Texas, alongside Starling’s related sculptural work, Transit Stone. The show opened in mid-June and is now in its final week. Starling’s 28-minute film—an interesting, almost deceptive mixture of straight documentary and poetic meditation on its subject and itself—takes its name from the biggest puzzler of transit observations over the centuries: the distorted elongation of the planet’s silhouette as it intersects the very edge of the sun. This stretched “black drop effect” has presented challenges in drawing accurate conclusions from Venus transits. The importance of this little visual distortion makes this history as much about our vantage point and modes of perception as it is about the movements and scale of the Solar System.

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Sandra Ono. Untitled, 2013; mop heads and glue, 37.5 x 49 x 9 in.

Banal, low, cast-off: These are all words that could accurately describe the San Francisco-based Sandra Ono’s material list for low tide. While sandwich bags and shoe inserts are not particularly spectacular in everyday life, in the hands of this artist, moments of virtuosity punctuate the plain and ordinary with twinges of comedic clarity.

The show at Dallas’ Conduit Gallery is sparse and understated. Though the works are assembled collections of junk, the space is anything but a hoarder’s trove of keepsakes. Instead, banal materials have been assembled into two strains of works: lurching masses and ethereal constructions.

The more substantial and hulking pieces include everyday objects like mop heads and shoe inserts, which are stacked and fused together. These two works exude an air of sturdiness and quasi-monumentality, but they are far from the sincere attempts by minimal artists to create reductive monolithic objects. Ono’s works hearken back to her West Coast predecessors like Mike Kelley and Ed Kienholz with castoff materials and self-effacing humor, but with greater restraint and reductive tendencies. Substantial yet farcical, the mop-head work bends and rests its bulk on a wooden ledge. Similarly, the collection of fused shoe soles leans against the wall, unable to stand on its own, a possible subtle and lowbrow nod to the West Coast minimal artist John McCracken’s planks. Both works, given status and presence through their assemblage, have a newfound vulnerability in their awkward mass.

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