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Mackenzie

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Plural

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Workman 1

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Review

**Alex Turgeon** is an artist and educator currently in residence at the Cité internationale des arts, Paris. Usually, he is based in Toronto, Canada. 

_Blue_, the last film ever produced by the British filmmaker Derek Jarman, depicts a single blue screen for the duration of one hour and 19 minutes. Soundscapes produced and narrated by Jarman, describing the director’s process of dying from AIDS, are overlaid onto the blue field of the screen. Blue in all dimensions, without horizon, without beginning or end, the colour engulfs the narrator and the viewer in a complete world of mourning. The film thus operates as a death mask, portraying the colour as a spiritual threshold between the transition from life into death by stating that “blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits.”[^1] A colour, as the film proposes, is used here as a tool to see beyond our very human condition, beyond our flesh and bone, into diverse spiritual dimensions.

American artist Paul Thek died of an AIDS\-related illness in 1988\. Ever since, his work has proven to be an art historical enigma. Thek made a name for himself in New York for his _Technological Reliquaries_ (c. 1964–1967), a series of sculptures depicting grotesquely convincing fantastical forms of meat and limbs produced in wax. The fictional flesh was sculpted into forms such as a bloody tiered birthday cake adorned with candles or, in collaboration with Andy Warhol, incorporated inside a Brillo Box. Thek’s work incorporates the macabre of religious iconography, myth and Catholicism, with his early works describing the body as material in the most visceral depiction of our fleshy forms. In response to a visit to the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Italy, he expressed that “it delights me that bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers.”[^2] These bodies on display were the most realistic depictions of death; corpses venerated as objects, tokens or talismans with which to decorate the space of worship, operating as devices for communication into the afterlife.

The dual exhibitions of Jason Dodge and Paul Thek at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin mark the end of a series of exhibitions curated by Nina Pohl titled _Porzellan und Vulkan_ (“Porcelain and Volcano”) focusing on the subject of artistic collaboration. The exhibition series culminates at the juncture between Thek and Dodge, their practices brought together to examine “ideas of authorship, artistic subject and division of labour.”[^3] The exhibitions of their work take the form of two parallel worlds composed one on top of the other. The Schinkel Pavillon is, most recently, made of up two octagonal exhibitions spaces that maintain the building’s former GDR grandeur. The upstairs exhibition space is nearly 360 degrees of floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto Berlin’s historic city centre, while the basement is windowless and flanked by painted wooden walls and mirrors installed inside the nave of the ceiling. A church and crypt in tandem for art’s reverence, eloquently constructed with Jason Dodge’s unnamed installation occupying the upstairs gallery and Thek’s works resting in the basement, operating as hieroglyphs inside of a tomb.

The aura of blue is sewn like a thread through the exhibition _Paul Thek Newspaper Drawings / Little Paintings_. Upon entry into the lower exhibition space, we are confronted with a panorama of blue seascapes _Untitled_ (Island series) from 1969\. Five gouache and ink paintings on newspaper hang in a row, the horizon line extending across the series at the point where the blue of the sea meets the blue of the sky. The panorama sets the constellation of the other works on exhibit awash in a blue disposition. The series depicts a lone island in the distance, a sequence of renderings describing a fleeting narrative through which the island reveals itself on the horizon, only to have it illustrated as falling further out of reach– a melancholic mirage, much like a phantom, forever alluding commitment and evading evidence. In her book _Bluets_, Maggie Nelson asks, “is to be in love with blue then to be in love with disturbance? \[…\] And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?”[^4] How can the dead, much like a colour, be used to render an intention? What agency do they have in collaboration? Blue only communicates in one direction; blue may allude, but never puts out. 

The upper gallery exhibits a site-specific installation by Jason Dodge made of found objects occupying the airy, classical architecture of the Pavillon. The work has no title, but is described as an ongoing organic response to the atmosphere and architecture where these artistic interventions take place. A cosmology of esoteric craftsmanship, each new and used piece of detritus is placed with pious intuition. Dodge’s intervention operates a codec of potential meaning for which the viewer, or practitioner, may define: three upright vacuum cleaners divide the space between seemingly coherent and seemingly bedraggled objects and debris; an amethyst cluster in place of the bag for a vacuum cleaner suggests a cleansing of energy, a tool employed in some sort of séance that has taken place here. An assemblage used to expunge the space of its past or to suck the spirits of the dead from distant, more abstract dimensions, back into this one.

The combination of these two artists speaks to each other’s sense of devotion, to melancholy and to mysticism. During the final stage of Dodge’s exhibition, the installation was moved downstairs to the lower gallery, making space for a reading by CAConrad, a writer with whom Dodge has worked previously as an artist and publisher. Reiterated into the basement space, the objects mirrored their former constellation upstairs, the tomb now activated by spiritual offerings for the afterlife. To describe a form of collaboration describes an equalizing consent of both parts, both intentions with which to draw upon. In the space of defining collaboration with the dead, there is only one side to the story, one perspective on how to navigate the detritus of the deceased: to be strung around the room like decorations, becoming objects for the use in someone else’s ritual of definition.

Writer

Land

issue-134-p62-64.pdf

This is a review of the dual exhibitions of Jason Dodge and Paul Thek, both of which took place at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, from February 4 to March 5, 2017.

Jason Dodge and Paul Thek

**Rose Bouthillier** is Curator (Exhibitions) at Remai Modern in Saskatoon. Previously, she was Associate Curator & Publications Manager at MOCA Cleveland.

There’s a thrumming pulse to the Whitney Biennial 2017 – a lucid, bodily insistence. Co-curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, the exhibition skews decidedly younger and more diverse than recent iterations.[^1] Many of the 63 featured artists and collectives have been given substantial amounts of space in the museum’s new building, with the exhibition stretching across two entire floors, the theatre, terraces and interstitial spaces throughout. Individual subjectivity, conflict and community are major threads, all pointing to larger questions about how we know (and create and fail and deny) one another and ourselves. This Biennial was developed during a protracted period of civil unrest and political hysteria, and opened during the first months of a tumultuous and divisive administration. How do you hold up a mirror to a country that has trouble recognizing itself these days? Locks asserts in her catalogue essay that the works on view remind us that we have the capacity “to consider more imaginative ways of being human together.” At times, it feels like more of a _responsibility_.

GCC’s sculptural installation _Local police find fruit with spells_ (2017) is first seen from the street as a curious yellow orb hovering over the city from the museum’s fifth-floor terrace. The work relates to a viral video uploaded by the Sharjah Police, who were called in to neutralize a washed-up melon bearing marks of black magic ritual (outlawed in the United Arab Emirates). With its foreign incantations and sketched body punctured with nails, GCC’s billboard-sized upscale of the object speaks to rising Islamophobia stoked for political gain. It’s also a false front — the side facing the museum is flat and black — in keeping with the collective’s interest in the gaps between what is outwardly presented and inwardly known.

Cauleen Smith’s opulent banners are the first works encountered in the museum’s lobby, making proclamations with resolute but ambiguous text (“Black” – “Stop” – “I cannot be fixed”) paired with blazing motifs of eyes, blood and eight balls. Satin, velvet, sparkly and embellished, they merge protest with regal celebration. Another procession of sorts, Ajay Kurian’s _Childermass_ (2017) leads viewers up the museum’s main staircase with strange, cartoonish figures clinging and dangling from ropes — a giant, puffy white toddler; chrome chameleon; moon-headed and masked adolescents. The installation calls up gym-class rivalry as a metaphor for class warfare; some of these creatures seem to fiendishly thrive on the tumult itself, while others appear resigned, defeated.

Very much of its moment, the Biennial has a strong sense of immediacy, at times laced with notes of claustrophobia. This finds intense expression in Postcommodity’s _A Very Long Line_ (2016), a four-channel video of fences lining the US-Mexico border that was shot from a moving car. Projected on enclosing walls, the piece centres viewers in a dizzying cube of containment. Pope.L aka William Pope.L’s installation Claim (2017) stands as a room apart, covered top to bottom, inside and out, with a gridded array of bologna, the slices push-pinned to the wall, weeping and curling as they cure. Each also has a dollop of paint and a small, blurry black-and-white image of a person on it. The “logic” of the piece is delivered via a framed letter-sized sheet of paper, hung next to an open bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 Habanero Lime-Arita. The 2,755 slices of bologna represent 25 percent of New York’s Jewish population; the portraits, however, are taken of random people who may or may not be Jewish, and the number is off by 2, and several slices have been removed. “When we quantify,” the statement opens, “we point with a wavering finger.” Gridded order gives way to the sticky absurdity of categorizing one another.

In the days and weeks after the Biennial’s opening, Dana Schutz’s _Open Casket_ (2016), an abstracted rendering of lynched African American teenager Emmet Till, became subject to petitions and heated debates on appropriation, exploitation, artistic freedom and censorship. In 1955, photographs of Till’s disfigured body – bravely released to the public by his mother – became a flashpoint in the civil rights movement. There are few images that convey such vulnerability, horror and historical weight, and the painting fitfully articulates its own inadequacy and trespass. I saw the protests before I read about them; a wall of young artists standing in front of the work, engaging visitors in discussion. This obscuring from view felt critical and profound, exposing the painting, and its conditions. It also stressed something about a particular mode of seeing in art galleries, of not really registering other people, a selective blindness allowing for exclusive focus on one’s own experience.

The exhibition’s violent undertones reach fever pitch in Jordan Wolfson’s virtual reality piece, _Real Violence_ (2017). Fast, brutal and terrifying, it drops the viewer in close proximity to a vicious beating (carried out by the artist) on a sidewalk in broad daylight (the victim is an animatronic doll enhanced in post-production). Part of me was expecting to discount the work as a cheap shock, but I couldn’t deny the affect it wrought: the dizziness, gutting sickness, awareness of my own body, vulnerability and reflexes. It burrows into your brain with a sharpness that also disorientates and dulls. It’s no accident that the verdant environs of Asad Raza’s _Root sequence, Mother tongue_ (2017) installation are situated immediately nearby, the warm light and humid air – suffused with customized scents – offering therapeutic comfort. Home to 26 trees of different species, the red-carpeted room is occupied by a cast of caretakers who tend to visitors as well as the trees, and who punctuate the planter boxes with their own personal belongings. There’s an affable sincerity to the room, but it verges on saccharine after Wolfson’s bitter pill. 

The Biennial features a good deal of painting, but much of it gets lost amid the boisterousness. Works by Henry Taylor are exceptions, for their sheer size, and undeniable physicality. Taylor’s towering tableaus include one of Philando Castile that seems to suspend time, to ache for its reversal (when the Biennial closes in June, not even a year will have passed since Castile was fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop). Some quieter moments hold their own in the fray, such as Harold Mendez’s poignant array of two and three-dimensional works. These include _Elmina Castle_ (2016), a tightly-cropped photograph of a departure port used in the slave trade, and _American Pictures_ (2016), a stump of wood, pierced by wrought iron and coated with blood-red pigment of cochineal beetles, framed by a metal grate and strewn with carnation petals. Mendez’s works distill fragility, distress, cruelty and endurance into haunting material forms.

While photography and moving images suffuse the exhibition (Oto Gillen’s _New York_ \[2015–ongoing\] and Lyle Ashton Harris’ installation _Once (Now) Again_ \[2017\]) bring personal worlds to life through steady image flows), other forms of digital technology have a lighter presence. Irena Haiduk’s slick, mirrored network tower provides access to a web app hosted on a .YU domain, through which female-identified visitors can join the _Frauenbank_ (2017) cooperative and put money towards the purchase of collectively owned land in the former Yugoslavia. Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s obscene, poetic computer games can be played in private cubicles, treating players to rollicking, hyper-textual mindfucks. Economic unease is highlighted in different ways: in the newest version of their _Debtfair_ project, Occupy Museums charts student loan delinquency, the ArtPrice Global Index and assets managed by BlackRock Inc., in a graph incised into a gallery wall. For _Public Money_ (2017) Cameron Rowland directed the museum to invest $25,000 in a Social Impact Bond, a recent development in government oversight that allows for social good programs like recidivism reduction to be privately invested in, with returns based on presumed public savings. Frances Stark’s paintings, blown up from pages of Ian F. Svenonius’ book _Censorship Now!!_ (2015), drive home home the point that “free” speech is bought and paid for in a capital-driven society. There’s clearly a mounting anxiety towards economic systems and the disparities they create, often no more glaring than in institutions that rely on free artistic labour. In the exhibition catalogue, note is made that the curators insisted, for the first time in the Biennial’s history, that all of the artists be paid – but they are clear to state it amounted to a “symbolic acknowledgement.” Why only this?

On my last day in New York, I returned to the museum to see Puppies Puppies’ _Liberty (Liberté)_ (2017), which the artist aptly describes as “a drag performance and sculpture,” on the eighth floor terrace (outside of scheduled hours on the weekends, the Statue of Liberty costume is sometimes filled by a mannequin). It was an unusually cold and windy day, and locking eyes with the person behind the stoic mask, I thought I sensed desperation (maybe only weariness?). Or perhaps I was projecting, as this moment seemed to say something so clear about all of the contradictions and compromises and aspirations of the Biennial, and the country itself.

[^1]: Lew and Locks also consulted with an advisory team, led by Scott Rothkopf and including Negar Azimi, Gean Moreno, Aily Nash (also co-curator of the film program) and Wendy Yao.

issue-134-p60-63.pdf

This is a review of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, which took place at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The exhibition was co-curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks and ran from March 17 to June 11 2017.

Whitney Biennial 2017

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