Scott Grodesky @ SUNDAY

Scott Grodesky

Table

May 14th - June 14th 2009

SUNDAY

237 Eldridge St.

Lately I have been interested in seeking out art, particularly painting, that gives off alot more energy than it consumes or even speaks of -- or with.

In Scott Grodesky's latest exhibition, we are presented with a dwarf-epic of people in their domain on that very human scale. The pictures, the range of activity and subjects from the commonplace to the obscure here are rendered and analyzed aesthetically -- not intellectually -- by a sophisticated painter.

The artist is known for his intelligent and emotive play on certain conventions and imposed limitations of perspective and palette in creating a whole range of emotions and ideas through those formal 'tricks'. Often the paintings carry the feel of humanism: the family and depiction on an honest life and it's honest-yet-otherworldly-depiction, crafted through some seemingly unsophisticated gaze that is anything but.

Nothing new is the fact that there is quite a bit of faux-naive painting that gets made, and this doesn't qualify. The work is more akin to a Guston-like portrayal of reality where everything is so real and yet accomplished in caricature -- not in style but in emotion -- so that the full range of experience can actually BE seen.

In addition to Guston, consciously or not -- and in spirit or application -- the work fits into (and refers to) a strange lineage of 'questionable' artists with a range of interpretations and criticisms from hard line camps: J.J. Rousseau, Jacob Lawrence, Thomas Hart Benton, Pierre Bonnard, William T. Wiley, the Mexican muralists (Orozco), and the illustrations of Clement Hurd or Roald Dahl.

In the new exhibition, Table, there seems to be not only a progression in painting style but in the furnishing of these paintings. Often in the older works, perspective was placed behind the viewer rather than ahead, projecting us into the past rather than some anxiety of future. In the new paintings -- due to the painterly feng shui -- the future looks that much more bright, but only as seen through the current moment.

This sense of the incoherent led to some level of anxiety in the older works. It is is still present here, although downplayed and more prude, slightly tweaking the picture plane and creating that space of mild anxiety. Now its more a space to reflect on the present than some past or anxious future. A shift from dazed and confused to presence.

The works also depart from the last exhibition held at Zach Feuer in that it seems to have shifted from darker fairy-taled themes illuminated by pastel colors to lighter more close to home ones with: incredibly even-brighter palettes and closer intimate crops. The work really resonates on that level of intimacy in Sunday's more affectionate Lower East Side exhibition space. Here the works almost function in-situ, especially when viewed on a nice Spring day.

In this new work, everything takes the nature not of dreams but of a kind of hazed living-ecstasy seen through a an accomplished lens lathered with mayonnaise. In some ways, the paintings take on that 'soft' quality that Dali was interested in, also Oldenburg comes to mind where the reality seeps in through those softened 'real's.

In the main work, Table, 2008 spanning almost thirteen feet and hung at body height is a scene which encapsulates the vortex of possible activity that is a home. Going from experience from my own family, these surfaces become not the place of meals but the battleground of action figures, patina-ed by hardened residue of construction paste and chewing gum, and periodically the inaugural display place of various science fair projects.

The painting approach here is honed to the parameters of Goldilocks - just right - perspectival weirdness, while other projects such as Street Scene, 2009 and Mirror, 2008. create stoic vignettes onto old themes made anew and closer to home. Its almost impossible for me to describe these things further without reaching into my bag of verbal tricks, of which the artist makes unnecessary.

I left this active space feeling really good about painting and its possibility.

Table

2008
Acrylic & colored pencil on canvas
65x153"

Street Scene

2009
Acrylic & colored pencil on canvas
60x48"

Jaqueline Cedar and Gilad Ratman @ Columbia MFA

Gilad Ratman

Recently I was listening to a David Lynch lecture. In it he described "more wind" as a directing term which means more mystery.

In Gilad Ratman's work, videos seem to convey notions of poetics over concept. A poetics OF poesis - or the idea of any making in the plastic arts. The mystery transcends any logic of the films construction - very similar to Lynch's debut Eraserhead - and not coincidentally Gilad's video projects seem to transcend the video genre itself and become snippets of the cinematic, yet on his own terms and intentions.

The components and direction here are simple but the results are complex. The direction on the part of Mr. Ratman creates the soundtrack out of the event.

As creatures emerge from a pool of muck and one hears ambient sounds, the screen pans along with the contraption of tubes that he has devised to traverse from actors to instruments (dangling flutes from atop long branches) - a syphon of material.

These placed instruments give the effect of an anime fantasy - Miyazaki sublime - where the entire natural scene becomes alive and magic with bubbling activity and spirit.

Mud is visceral in that it magnifies and disguises forms underneath. The - never knowing what exactly is going on in there... - makes it conducive to the fetish and horror films Gilad discovered when he researched locations for his idea.

He found it via the internet in the deep south. A place that specializes in exactly those things.

Horror and sex films both have the quality of "the human" and the "super human" not just as in incredible or extreme feats and actions..but magnifying and - often consciously by the creators of horror films, but perhaps not picked up consciously by the average viewer - commenting on each aspect of humanity: pleasure, terror, anxiety, the perverse. The mud here gives it that skin, that shell of 'humanoid visceral surrogate" to inhabit whether it is some kind of unknown creature, or a disguised interlocking anonymous body parts.

Gilad seems to use that material in the same way to separate the 'actors' from their contributions to the videos, as if actors, sounds, materials, and landscape are one.

All of this has to do somewhat with the influence of the primordial or birth of creations. that anything can exist within the mud, and is still..well..mud.

When I discovered the writer Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell) I became drawn to his earliest of works: Swamp Thing

Most people assume that the character has typical Peter-Parker-esq origins: man is working on some kind of secret goo, ends up exploding and blowing him into a swamp...

Well, that might have been the original story, but when Moore took up the task in the 80's he decided that: no...he was not a man that merged with a bunch of microorganisms and swamp algae in some freak accident...'He' was a conglomeration of scum, vegetable matter and microorganisms that collectively had the memory and consciousness of a man whose physical form was destroyed!

Here, literary mastery develops when 'he' realizes this. There is a period of course where 'he' freaks out, gets depressed and all existential and why-me, and then eventually just decides to stop 'breathing' and other human habits and goes about kicking ass as his dematerialized non-bodied accepted self. There is this other part where this villain eats a yam of sorts that falls from Swamp Thing...its all very profound...

It's all in the details, and seeing things as more than their appearances, even if you are seeing uniform lines of lumped clay, it still has its details, or could be a comic book or well..mud... but true poesis will push up against gravity through the syphon.

More Wind.



Jaqueline Cedar

The appearance and function of the detail within the narrative..and what has been labeled by theorists as meta-narratives has been the focus - intentionally or not - of much contemporary art in the past decades. These groupings of meta-narratives becomes cliched or homogenized (although not speaking to the nth degree at this point) in the form of subcultures. Artists often take these groupings not only as their stomping ground but the basis for content AND subject matter for contemporary works. Sometimes it is possible for the work to describe these subjects..and loose integrity in regards to content, as these ideas simply get skimmed over or illustrated or re-presented in some gallery context.

in Jaqueline Cedar's work...there seems to be a discussion of many of these narratives, often intersecting both as the subject of the paintings...and also in their emotive and formal transformations of space.

There is an element of "Permanent Woodstock" here..thankfully without the pompous tropes of utopia strewn about. No shirtless androgenoids running around a fire, or sporting caveman garbs made of old sweaters. The essence of peace and vibrancy and child-like awe here is flowing through the mere formal distortions in the paintings. Similar to a Balthus painting..its HOW these things are painted that carries home the ideas, no separate plaque reading or overt symbolism required.

Often they depict children, in some kind of exploration of learning or raw-experiencing of the world. We seem to be part of their experience. WE see those objects and scenes as larger than life and slightly mannered and magical - as if through new eyes not mired by traditions and education.

If we are to believe in the power of our media or the more popularly oft misused term - memes - in their transformation of our thoughts from a very young age...than we MUST believe in the power for those same media to positively affect the cognitive workings of younger minds. I'm thinking of Harry Potter fans dreaming of 'Wizard School' and looking at their rote arithmetic and Moby Dick with intelligent skepticism. Is life STILL about some big struggle against nature and against oneself? or can it be about creation and the unknown?

Here the individuals always participate in social and even ritualistic activities with conscious and care towards the group, almost with an unconscious goal to transcend that activity into some kind of self-awareness or true learning. There is no theatricality or individual focus, but a group moving towards revelation but somehow kept in limbo or semi-ignorance by powers out of their control.

In pieces such as Planetarium, Petting Zoo, and Trust Walk, we are clearly exploring nature's phenomena in a very innocent way. Planetarium displays not the attraction: the planets, but simply the figures with the projected glows shone upon them. This shifts the perspective and creates patterns of color and light IN them, as they almost appear absorbed in some kind of cosmic scene that becomes borderline religious but rests intentionally in the unfulfilled.

At the opposite spectrum, in Funeral you have a depiction of a ceremony that is comply devoid of death and religiosity, but not of emotion. The scene is some kind of... transition of life with no magnitude.

To point out some formal interests. In Funeral, the trees (or murals of trees?) have some resemblance of Metzinger style cubism, but also have the airy feel of a Morris Louis painting via Alex Katz. In Petting Zoo, the planes appears almost 'stacked' as in a Cezanne..the background flops accordion-like into the vanishing point and into some equally 'toothy' mountains.

In general, the painting application is delicate and the tones somewhat muted with periodic high volume hues that are - generally speaking - fairly accurate to the figurations they describe, making them formally quite distinct from some of the other paintings that were in the same exhibition, and that have been coming out of the program in recent years.

I don't like to say this, but It seems like alot of work (not just @ Columbia) is under the guidance of the 'three wisepersons' of Dana Schutz, Garth Weiser, and David Altmejd. Ideas and forms and loads of Grumbacher paint satellite between those points on the triangle, sometimes combining them, but never breaking orbit or questioning those paths.

Some of the work in the exhibition seemed to be JUST those combinations of frankincense and myrrh and very much IN the triangle.

I think these two artists are in deep space.

[ note: Not speaking for everything, some work I didn't get a chance to spend enough time with or just happened to fall short only in the fervor of the opening ]



Planetarium, 2009



Funeral, 2008

The 588 Project, 2009 (featured) and older works

Stupid Fun Club

Computer-game visionary Will Wright, responsible for The SIMS and its precursor: Sim City, and the latest mega-success Spore

has released on Thursday that he is exiting EA Entertainment and focusing on his think-tank project Stupid Fun Club


He started Stupid Fun Club in 2001, with the focus is development of NEW forms of entertainment including movies, toys, as well as video games. He will be channeling all his energy here for the future.

Wright: "The entertainment industry is moving rapidly into an era of revolutionary change,"

"Stupid Fun Club will explore new possibilities that are emerging from this sublime chaos and create new forms of entertainment on a variety of platforms."


Personally, as an artist I like to think I participate in a lo-fi discussion/version of what he would call “possibility space” or creativity made available to a “user” by a program which allows for a seemingly infinite - yet clearly contained - set of parameters.

Wright is the visionary responsible for pushing the limits of user-customization and play and coining this phrase. The opposite of the spectrum is of course the academic or 'schools' of art and thinking.

I am speaking of the space opened up between the ideas and intention at conception and the forms that go on to symbolize those ideas. For me it is in increasing that gap which maximizes imaginative power.

Wright has claimed that his brainstorming for The SIMS came about after his Northern California house burned down (among many in the Berkley/Oakland fires) and after moving into a new home. In putting back together their life he would arrange things in a completely different way and observe the process. The game had been originally dubbed "Home Tactics: The Experimental Domestic Simulator."

even prior to that (the fire was in 91') Wright had already been schooling in domesticity.

from the New Yorker:

In 1986, Wright and Jones had a daughter, Cassidy, and Jones made Wright promise to share the parenting equally so that she [his wife] could continue painting. “He really did stick to that,” she told me. “He spent a lot of time with Cassidy.” While he was at home with his daughter, Wright began to turn over the idea for a new game, a kind of interactive doll house that adults would like as much as children. “I went around my house looking at all my objects, asking myself, ‘What’s the least number of motives or needs that would justify all this crap in my house?’ There should be some reason for everything in my house. What’s the reason?”

in another article on the web:

"At some point, I got more interested in architecture. The process that architects go through to design a house was really interesting to me. They start with a functional task description of where you spend your time and what kind of environments you need to support your activities. And that eventually evolves into a house plan. I was trying to figure out a way to turn that into a game about architecture. So I started down that path."

Wright was heavily influenced in his research by A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, an architectural theory book based on function rather than form. For Alexander, common sense rules about architecture were often overlooked/never consider or just treated as 'window dressing', such as "Don't make a balcony more than six feet deep or it won't get used much; and if a roof appears to be supported only by spindly posts, it'll make people nervous. " The results of this ignorance: pompous musing of architects about 'transparency' and Derrida, or conversely some kind of Michael Graves idealization and appropriation without context or content.

In Wright's research, he discovered a curious statistic: Home-design software was a big seller! It couldn't be that ALL these people were remodeling their homes, they probably just wanted to play with architecture.

One of his first projects with Stupid Fun Club was participating with his daughter Cassidy, in Robot Wars with the contender "Kitty Puff Puff", "who fought against its opponents by sticking a roll of gauze onto its armature and circling around them, encapsulating them and denying them movement. The technique, "cocooning", was eventually banned." (from wikipedia)

For Wright, getting people to focus on their environment - albeit virtual - is a trove of sociological study into how our environments affect our habits and conditions and CAN change behaviour.

That was his inspiration, that and spending time away from his office to be at home with his daughter..where he would play with her with her doll houses and watch her mind interact and dream.

Shih Chieh Huang Connected: Eject before disconnecting

Shih Chieh Huang

Connected: Eject before disconnecting
March 6-October 18, 2009
The RISD Museum
224 Benefit Street
Providence, RI

Fearfully cowering below the battle of the bland faculty show at the RISD museum is a lurking futuristic but sad 4-D super-being. Rendered in electronic appliances, toys, plastic bags and containers in participation with water, air, light motion sensors, computer and electrical parts and video footage this little guy communicates the effect of visiting a distant relative of the old-world on life support from a overburdened late 20th century.

Coming across at random in the dark and knowing nothing about the work or artist it was liberatingly enjoyable to experience the 'being' without any judgment of the idea from the artist or institution (too dark for plaques). It sorta was what it was. For me, the 'promises of technology' concept could have either been inverted or very well championed depending on your position or how well you interacted or were put off by the thing. My guess was it is both.

For those not experiencing it, I'd say it was pretty close to E.T. in cuteness factor. The creature, a casting call cast off from a "Matrix Reloaded" revival - Lower East Side play - circa 2069, contributes great ambiance but little utilitarian purpose. The creature floats at the top of the ceiling like pathetic caricatured balloons at a childrens' party - breathing in and out its own oxygen.

Visiting the space is like ogling any creature at the zoo, or some replication of a futuristic one. quite a feat on behalf of the artist showing in what amounted to a dead space between galleries, as I almost felt empathy for the thing. In fact, it reminded me of George Saunders' short story Pastoralia which featured a "historical reconstruction" theme park where humans are paid to reenact the banal cave life of eating imaginary bugs and drawing figures on walls while suppressing their desire to speak English or complain about their paycheck during work hours.

On further research, the artist's intent IS to showcase the alienating quality of technology in his self-created medium of "interchanging process between people and space." Technology for Huang inevitably separates us in our own little worlds, and not surprisingly in forms we did not anticipate such as existentially emitting from our twitter box and facebook. This is in stark contrast to the past conceptions of future alienation predicted in 20th century Sci-Fi, of which Huang's creation emulates like a drag queen.

The low tech - rather than being just a medium or trope as with much art - really encapsulates our foolish premonitions. think: VR (virtual reality) or hovercraft cars

Huang's achievement is constructing a creature that is far more organic than the master of the medium Nam June Paik. Similar to Brooklyn-based artist Noah Fischer (whose more recent emphasis is on a more sterile objecthood, and the fetish for Judd-esq sublime multifunctionality), this creature becomes the empathetic mascot at the pregnant intersection between waste and the promise of technology.

A being of absolute detritus, breathing in, breathing out, kept on life-support by the museum, but somewhat endearing at the same time. Each object in the piece (the main creature is surrounded by a less impressive entourage of blinking-trash-orbs), metaphors aside - is literally in flux of personality and energy, and since it is not really all that advanced exists as probably the most intriguing transformative DIY art I have seen in recent memory, especially considering the RISD surrounds whose halls I can only imagine have run amok with such tropes.

A creative Gollum, or harbinger for good art in boxed in times.
The title of course, referring to the warning message that flashes on a peripheral (such as an ipod) when it’s connected to another computer via USB. As if we do not have the ability to just walk away from the situations we create, we have to ask permission and sign out slowly.

images @Shih Chieh Huang http://www.messymix.com/