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Manifesto at the Park Avenue Armory

admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 08:00:38 +0000

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, Bai Yuting reviews Julian Rosefeldt: Manifesto the Park Avenue Armory.

Julian Rosefeldt. Manifesto, 2015; installation view, Park Avenue Armory, New York. Courtesy of Park Avenue Armory. Photo: James Ewing.

This winter, the Park Avenue Armory presents the German cinematographer Julian Rosefeldt’s thirteen-channel video installation, Manifesto (2015). Drawing from more than fifty early writings of artistic legends like Claes Oldenburg, Kazimir Malevich, André Breton, and Sol LeWitt, the work weaves some of the most poignant thoughts of the 20th century into thirteen powerful monologues. Superbly performed by Cate Blanchett, each soliloquy corresponds to an aesthetic movement in the history of modern art, including Fluxus, Dadaism, Futurism, and Constructivism. Detached from their historical backgrounds and reimagined as contemporary realities, the dated manifestos are invigorated through the characters’ refreshing feminine voices.

The Armory’s artistic director, Pierre Audi, known for breathing new life into classic works, presents Manifesto as a cutting-edge, immersive art experience. The towering, 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall delivers an impressively theatrical aura. As I enter the cavernous space, I encounter a massive screen that displays images of flickering flames. In a soft voice, Blanchett recites excerpts from Karl Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party. Following the map included in the playlist-like press release, I turn to the left. On another screen, unrecognizably impersonated by Blanchett, a homeless vagabond staggers along apocalyptic industrial ruins, debunking capitalism with words from Guy Debord’s Situationist manifesto; the press release provides all sources of Blanchett’s script and an introduction of Situationism in lay terms.

Julian Rosefeldt. Manifesto, 2015 (video still). © Julian Rosefeldt and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy of Park Avenue Armory.

From there, on eleven more screens throughout the space, Blanchett appears as radically different yet equally fascinating personas. One moment, she is a deadpan newsreader quoting Sol LeWitt: “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” The next moment, she is a teacher who lectures little children on the golden rules of Jim Jarmusch: “Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.” At some point in all of the films, Blanchett turns to the viewer and starts to sing an operatic, high-pitched monotone. Her voice echoes off the soaring ceiling of the hall, creating dramatic effects. While each film is immersive, the two-channel sound system allows an observer to hear multiple Blanchett voices simultaneously when standing at the center of the room. The experience is like eavesdropping on a roundtable meeting of artists, except the participants are conflicting identities of the same schizophrenic. As I steer through the kaleidoscope of aesthetic and political discourses, I find myself seeking identification with one or another. With this work, Rosefeldt proposes the many possibilities of existence for a contemporary human being.

Julian Rosefeldt. Manifesto, 2015 (compilation image of Cate Blanchett as twelve characters). © Julian Rosefeldt and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy of Park Avenue Armory.

Like in a cinema, the only sources of light in the hall are the screens. Due to the screens’ significant scale, the space is bright enough for navigation. At the same time, the relative darkness of the enormous hall offers a sense of privacy and intimacy often lacking in art spaces. I become a pure spectator: my body at ease; my mind fully absorbed in the wildly imaginative, larger-than-life vignettes. In many ways, Manifesto is a transcendent art experience. Pushing the boundaries of art installation and cinema, the exhibition is a full embodiment of both intellectual sophistication and creative passion.

Manifesto is on view at the Park Avenue Armory, New York City, through January 8, 2017.

Bai Yuting is an independent curator and writer. She is also a Curatorial Fellow at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Best of 2016 – Kapwani Kiwanga: Ujamaa

admin — Fri, 30 Dec 2016 08:00:10 +0000

As we look back over a decade of the best in arts writing, our final selection comes from our communication manager, Jackie Clay: “This year I would estimate that I’ve read nearly 90% of Daily Serving‘s articles from beginning to end. This one stuck with me. As deftly described by Marisol Rodriguez, artist Kapwani Kiwanga’s solo exhibition, Ujamaa was an open-ended, but not opaque love letter to imagining different presents, futures, and the arguable productivity of failed resistance. As many of us gird ourselves for war–real, imagined or metaphorical–Kiwanga’s work and by extension Rodriguez’s review remind us that the path to now wasn’t linear, direct or uncomplicated.” This article was originally published on September 22, 2016.

Kapwani Kiwanga. White Gold: Morogoro, 2016; installation; 236 x 196 x 157 in. Courtesy of La Ferme du Buisson. Photo: Emile Ouroumov.

In a major solo exhibition, Ujamaa, at La Ferme du Buisson in the Parisian suburb of Noisiel, Kapwani Kiwanga addresses Tanzania’s uprisings. Known for using methodologies from the social sciences without being didactic, the artist draws on two significant moments in the history of the eastern African country to remember and question the ideals of pan-Africanism. The first is the 1905 revolt of Kinjeketile Ngwale, who—believing in the magic powers of a herbal potion of his creation called maji-maji, meaning “water of life and immortality”—led the first revolt against colonial rule, known as the Maji Maji Rebellion. The second is Julius Nyerere’s post-independence introduction of a socialist program of collective farming, called ujamaa (a Swahili term for familyhood, extended family, brotherhood).

A monumental installation, White Gold: Morogoro (2016), welcomes the viewer and acts as the show’s contextual and museological heart. The evocative work is composed of a generous amount of sisal suspended from steel strings. Originating from southeast Mexico, the resistant fiber has been successfully cultivated since the late 19th century in the region of present-day Tanzania, once part of the colony of German East Africa.[1] Its production has played a major role in the country’s economy, from the colonial era through independence.

Kapwani Kiwanga. Kinjeketile Suite (detail), 2015–16; installation; variable dimensions. Courtesy of La Ferme du Buisson. Photo: Emile Ouroumov.

The installation grounds the artist’s explored narratives in material relations of production; even when Kiwanga refers to alchemy or explores the interplays of politics and culture, specters of exploitation and struggle linger in the background. Next to White Gold: Morogoro, which appears like an innocent white cloud, Kinjeketile Suite (2015–16) occupies two facing rooms in which archival materials related to Nyerere’s efforts are arranged to create symbolic interplays with references to Kinjeketile’s revolution. For instance, photographs of monuments and street murals reminiscent in style of the art that Emory Douglas produced for the Black Panther Party are positioned next to a copy of the Arusha Declaration, in which Nyerere originally presented his policies of self-reliance. In the same room stand twelve pots of castor bean, one of the deadliest plants in the world and an important ingredient of Kinjeketile’s maji-maji.

Invocations of the shaman-turned-national-hero run throughout the exhibition: in the plants he used to create a magic potion that would transform German bullets into water; in the distinctively patterned Kanga fabrics worn to signify tacit support for the Maji Maji rebels; and in the Swahili song that Kiwanga sings (“This man, Kinjeketile, he is courageous! In the mountains he defeated the colonizer!”). The artist’s voice is heard around the ground floor of the exhibition, recounting stories of liberation and unrest, successfully connecting the otherwise awkward architecture while elevating orality over the hegemonic texts of history to keep alive memories of power conflicts.

Kapwani Kiwanga. Uhuru ni Kazi, 2016; video installation. Courtesy of La Ferme du Buisson. Photo: Emile Ouroumov.

Upstairs, Uhuru ni Kazi (2016) offers a fascinating window into the thoughts of regular farmers trying to make sense of ujamaa during Nyerere’s presidency. Here, six short black-and-white films made by Gerald Belkin during the 1960s document discussions and candid exchanges among men, some of whom are reluctant to accept the ujamaa principles (“Everybody likes exploiting—I like exploiting, you like exploiting—everybody!”) while others point to the practical paradoxes that the introduction of development brings to the socialist project: “Do you believe in living together, or do you believe in building an economy?” a young man asks straightforwardly in one of the films.[2] In the background, wallpaper patterned with alternating phrases—“Uhuru ni kazi” (meaning “freedom is work”) and “Uhuru ni jasho” (“freedom is sweat”)—creates a clear contrast between these once-official slogans and the substantial complications that come from their application.

Somewhere between idealism and pragmatism stands Ujamaa (2016), a three-channel video installation placed in an adjacent darkened room, where a montage of documentaries produced in 1976 and 1977 by Yves Billon and Jean-François Schiano show smiling women, children, and men plowing the Tanzanian land with melodic rhythm, telling with their physical gestures a story of joy and solidarity beyond the grip of propaganda.

Kapwani Kiwanga. Ujamaa, 2016; video installation. Courtesy of La Ferme du Buisson. Photo: Emile Ouroumov.

Kiwanga neither celebrates nor judges the objects of her examinations, and although the works presented rely heavily on archival material, the attention of the artist is clearly on the future, an idea she elegantly conveys in Nursery (2016), which occupies the last room of the show. There, a gallery assistant gracefully explains the plants’ healing and subversive properties and their roles in diverse uprisings around the world and across the ages: some are hallucinogenic, some produce or heal rashes or even provoke abortions. Insisting again on the power of orality (and the lack of it in most museums and galleries), Nursery hints at something growing and perhaps eventually maturing into a renewed rebellion.

Neither Kinjeketile’s revolt nor Nyerere’s regime were entirely successful. The warrior was beheaded in 1905 and his movement crushed in 1907 after heavy human losses, and Tanzania was independent until 1964; the statesman stepped down after twenty-one years in power, having decreased infant mortality, increased life expectancy, and increased literacy to eighty-five percent while failing to achieve any long-term economic stability. Still, the exhibition conveys hope that, as articulated by Franco Berardi, “Revolt against power is necessary even if we may not know how to win.”[3]

Ujamaa will be on view through October 9, 2016.

Notes:

[1] In Mexico, sisal has its own history of political conflict, war, and systematic human exploitation. A history of the haciendas offers an introduction to the industry of sisal (or henequen, “Yucatan’s green gold”): https://www.jstor.org/stable/25119171?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.

[2] Afrotopia, by the Senegalese economist and thinker Felwine Sarr, provides a current take on the neocolonial weight of development for African countries. Sarr’s views are conveyed in an interview (in French): http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2016/03/29/l-utopie-africaine-selon-felwine-sarr_4891657_3212.html.

[3] Franco Berardi, Heroes, Mass Murder and Suicide (London: Verso, 2015).

Hammer Projects: Simone Leigh

admin — Fri, 07 Oct 2016 07:00:15 +0000

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, Colony Little reviews Hammer Projects: Simone Leigh in Los Angeles.

Simone Leigh. Althea, 2016; terra-cotta, india ink, porcelain, cobalt, epoxy. Courtesy of the Artist and Hammer Museum. Photo: Brian Forrest.

Simone Leigh uses sculpture to tell stories that transcend time and space. In her first solo West Coast exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Leigh draws on Africa’s colonial past while remaining rooted in the present, incorporating political resistance and performance to craft a decidedly modern aesthetic.

The exhibition features five onyx-colored sculptural busts adorned with raffia skirts, beads and headdresses made from small porcelain roses in shades of indigo, gray, white, and gilded 14-karat gold. Distinct facial expressions and gestures distinguish each bust from the others. None of the sculptures, however, have eyes. If eyes are the windows to the soul, their absence creates a façade; their obfuscation may be a protective emotional shield. One sculpture stands apart from the rest. A black hole in the center of the bust surrounded by black flowers in india ink replaces the details of her face. With her identity unknown, the piece becomes a mirror for the viewer to project their own narrative onto the work. When looking at her, I couldn’t help but think of Nina Simone’s powerfully emotive song “Four Women.” The song invites us into the lives of her subjects, engaging us in simple, vivid stories of pain, history, and perception. Viewing Simone Leigh’s work through this lyrical storytelling lens, I saw these sculptures as an abstract adaptation of the song. The artist extends the narrative by including the faceless woman whose story is unknown.

In Leigh’s exhibition, music strategically fills the void left from the absence of the spoken word. A work that sits across from the five busts in the gallery deploys music in this way. In a large-scale piece called Cupboard V, Leigh incorporates dance, improvisation, and music into her sculptural practice. A large, raffia-covered hut kisses the gallery’s ceiling, taking up three-quarters of the space in the small room. Its entrance is obscured from the front of the gallery. Music plays within the hut, beckoning the viewer toward the entrance at the back of the gallery. Inside, the video installation Aluminum plays. This piece features performance artist Rashida Bumbray dancing in a studio, her ankle shakers rhythmically accentuating her moves in harmony with the piano accompaniment.

A key to this exhibition lies in the many possible ways viewers can interpret how the two sets of works connect. The combined works in the exhibit represent a multigenerational and trans-Atlantic exploration into the origins of African and African American storytelling traditions that resonate throughout the diaspora.

Simone Leigh is curated by the ICA’s Jamilla James and is on view at the Hammer through January 8, 2017.

Colony Little is a Los Angeles–based writer and founder of Culture Shock Art. As a Bay Area native and long-term Southern California resident, Colony covers emerging contemporary art in California, the aesthetic of urban culture, and is a champion of African American art and media.

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Kapwani Kiwanga: Ujamaa