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Patty Chang
New Museum of Contemporary Art
By Lily Faust
Shangri-La in 1933, a fictitious region in the Himalayas
that evokes seductive images of utopia in our imagination,
originates in British novelist James Hilton‚s bestseller,
Lost Horizon.
1937 — Frank Kapra‚s Oscar winning film, Lost
Horizon, based on the Hilton novel, expands on the virtues
of this mythic terrain, further popularizing the existence
of Utopia.
1997 — Zhongdian, a town in the Chinese province of
Yunnan, near the Tibetan border, portrays itself as the inspiration
for James Hilton‚s Shangri-La, hoping this will attract
tourists; in fact James Hilton had never set foot in Zhongdian.)
1998 — Several towns adjacent to Zhongdian proclaim
their town the “True Shangri-La,” causing havoc
in the minds of tourists.
2001 — The Chinese government intervenes, authenticating
Zhongdian as Shangri-La, the certified namesake of an imaginary
terrain.
2005 — Patty Chang, a performance and video artist
of Chinese descent, travels to Shangri-La to make a video
about the idea of Shangri-La.
These are the elemental facts surrounding Shangri-La, the
factoidal Utopia; Shangri-La, the town; and Shangri-La, the
40-minute Patty Chang video, commissioned by Hammer Museum,
L.A., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and New Museum
of Contemporary Art, New York. The work plumbs different aspects
of the idea of Shangri-La, inserting the pyramid shaped mountain
of the original story in unlikely, and amusing juxtapositions.
Shot in south-central China near the Tibetan border, the
video begins with a view of the snow-covered mountains towering
above Shangri-La and progresses jerkily along a loosely handled,
chopped up narrative structure. With sub-titles that clarify
the direction of the minimal conversation, the segments cohere
around models of Shangri-La, symbolizing the fabled land of
the iconic triangular mountain. Inside a hotel atrium, a replica
of the snow-covered mountains offers a theme-park view of
the myth to the guests. Outside, under a makeshift enclosure,
two Chinese laborers attempt to replicate the mountain range
in white styrofoam, sawing off and layering triangular pieces
to match the mountain‚s varying facets. They reference
a photograph of the mountain from time to time to ensure they
get the angles just so. The wind blows granules of the styrofoam,
about the size of snow flakes, around the laborers, creating
an artificial approximation of the area’s climactic
conditions.
Deviations occur. A photographer takes images of a Chinese
bride (Patty Chang as the bride) and her Western groom. The
bride is instructed on how to pose in the formulaic choreography
of still another vision of perfection. Red-robed Tibetan monks
enter the tubular oxygen chamber to get a relief from altitude
sickness. A baker and his assistant create a small angel-cake
imitation of the mountains, slathering the cake in white icing
(or is it white plaster?). A miniature copy of the tubular
oxygen chamber, also covered in icing, is nudged against the
frosted mountains on the cake, like reality knocking on the
door of dreams.
Elsewhere in town, in pursuit of capturing a new likeness
of the myth, three men begin to construct a more ambitious
interpretation of Shangri-La, one that resembles a multifaceted
crystal mountain (Think Bruno Taut’s fantastic drawings,
Alpine Architecture, 1920, and Thomas Mann’s The Magic
Mountain, 1924). With its plywood backing supporting triangular
mirrors, it presents a dazzling façade, reflecting
fleeting images of all that passes by. As it gets loaded on
a bright blue truck, it catches bits and pieces of the environment
but settles mostly on the clear blue sky, a metaphor for nothingness,
the x-factor of the unknown. And then it travels down a meandering
highway, and beyond.
Chang’s video is supported by the inevitable judgment
that Utopia is a myth, and that any attempted representation
of it is, at best, naïve. In aligning mock-reality as
a substitute for the fictive perfect, the people of Chang’s
Shangri-La become both victims and perpetrators of a cosmic
joke; a futile quest for heaven on earth. The work revels
in the flaws of inept representations of Shangri-la, doling
out botched-up versions of the mountain range, in cake, in
styrofoam, and in the playful illusions of the cascading mirrors.
Paralleling the town’s efforts in its crude commercial
aspirations, Chang creates a video that leaves loose ends
throughout. (What happens to the bridal party? Why is the
Shangri-La cake placed on a shelf among other decorated cakes
and then removed? Does anyone get to eat it?) Weaving a jagged
story line, the work devolves into a collage of playful scenes,
interspersed with performances of what could be considered
gestures within daily Chinese life. Lacking the intensity
and theatricality of Chang’s earlier video/performance
work, such as In Love (2001) or Shaved (At a Loss) (1998)
Shangri-La becomes a state of mind, commenting obliquely on
the branding of idealization.
Adjacent to the video room where Shangri-La is screened,
a viridian green Ford Ranger XLT is parked. An actual truck,
it is reminiscent of the blue truck of the video.
With its right front window rolled down half-way, its windshield
cracked, its rear-view mirror pulled off its adhesive and
left on the dashboard and its key left in ignition, the truck
appears set to go. The truck-bed holds the glass mountain;
its multitude of facets cut out of shimmering mirrors, and
its silhouette outlined in red on its plywood back. In Chang’s
words, the mirrored mountain constitutes “a cross between
a prayer wheel and a disco ball.” Shimmering and fun,
the work is a prankish monument to the lexicon of longing
and desire, mirroring illusions in jagged, fragmented reflections.
Through 9/10.
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Bruce Busby / David Brody
Pierogi Gallery
By Mary Hrbacek
Eloquent and ethereal, Bruce Busby's silky parachute Creativity
Enhancement Shelters mirrors professional camping equipment
with a difference: these tent-like structures approach an
expressive fragility that stresses their esthetic attributes
above and beyond utilitarian functions. The carefully crafted
works evoke a sense of utopian purity and other-worldliness.
Rather than serving as a shelter from natural elements, they
become private sanctuaries from the worldly distractions that
stand between artists and their creative productivity. The
pure white suggests a high state of being, but here bliss
is equated with peace and refuge.
Busby's imaginative pencil on paper drawings resemble crushed
paper bags that have been reopened and reconfigured into shapes
that suggest monumental mountainous terrain. Slender, ribbon-like
shapes trail out expressively around their edges to create
indeterminate hybrid forms sometimes seen in cartoons. They
add a light touch that elicits a playful viewer response.
Employing lines of pale ethereal wash, Brody fashions fluid,
fragmented, stream-of-consciousness forms that flow through
and around what appear to be monumental architectural arenas.
Subtle fluctuations of luminous tones and lines build interior
areas that alternately suggest rock faces and ancient ruins.
The lack of specific definition in the surrounding space draws
the viewer closer,trying to discern what is taking place in
the indeterminate zones where clarity gives way to amorphous
linear marks. As such, these pieces bear a relationship to
Ursula Von Rydingsvard's recent wood sculptures.
The most intriguing work, Planet of the Archbuilders, yields
structures that are loosely defined by complex ghoulish heads
or classical stonework. Here nature and architecture, past
and present, co-exist in a balanced vision that is fraught
with a heightened tension fueled by our uncertainty as to
the actual status of the open-ended images portrayed.
5/27 through 6/27.
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Lee Friedlander
Museum of Modern Art
ByJoel Simpson
This thorough and ambitious survey of 71-year-old photographer
Lee Friedlander’s life work consists of over five hundred
of the photographer’s images, curated by MoMA’s
director of photography, Peter Galassi. Friedlander came up
as one of the American social documentarists emerging in the
1950s and 60s, along with Gary Winogrand, Larry Clark, Robert
Frank and William Klein. His idol was Walker Evans, the pioneering
American truth-teller of the Depression (and of course Dorothea
Lange).
From his first published photographs in the 1960s, Friedlander
revealed a fascination with the visually contingent. In one
of his earliest images, for example, a television set’s
picture contrasts with its environment — the macho motorcycle
rider on the small screen is flanked by a somber radiator
three times its size in an otherwise empty room, suggesting
a tougher reality inhabited by the consumer of the image.
He masters the art of ironic juxtaposition — the power
of photography to reveal the surreal in the real, according
to Eugène Atget, writing in the 1920s — and this
understanding combines with his sensitivity to the visual
meaning of what others might regard as extraneous.
Objects other photographers might have edited out, according
to the classic rules of clarity and simplicity of statement,
Friedlander, somewhat impishly, keeps in: the pole in front
of the dog, the chopped off face, the unsightly chain-link
fence. Armed with this sensitivity, he expanded his surreal
sense of juxtaposition to make momentous statements on the
banality of modern life: a drunk lies bent under a liquor
store window displaying a large inflated bottle of Stock vermouth,
whose neck is similarly bent, while passersby look on walking
in opposite directions. Or he finds humor in the super-imposition
offered by store windows. A sample bedroom show window, featuring
a garish knit quilt, gives way in the upper part of the frame
to a receding perspective of a city street, surmounted by
an old-style street lamp and a church spire with transverse
telephone wires, while the ghostly fluorescent fixtures of
the store interior intrudes through that space. The bed thus
becomes the setting for a dreary urban dream-scape, with the
light fixtures adding bureaucratic punctuation.
Friedlander took the theme of American banality and gave
it a historical twist in his collection of photographs titled
The American Monument (1976). Here he presents a series of
statues and memorials — to Civil War battles, generals,
presidents, and other notables, even the riderless horse of
film cowboy Tom Mix — in their sometimes trivializing,
and sometimes sobering settings. One of the more iconic images
shows the eight-foot statue of Father Duffy in Times Square,
enveloped by the galloping commercialism of the place. The
point seems to be that our history is ineluctably there, whether
we are paying attention or not, grave, noble, neglected, silent
— but present.
A series of young female nudes occupies one wall. Here Friedlander
manages to avoid both extremes of figure study and pornography,
by posing these young women quite matter-of-factly, with often
hairy vulvas prominently displayed. Their apparently distracted
mood contrasts sharply with the intimate, almost clinical
self-revelation, leaving the viewer either in mild shock,
or reflecting on what bodies really look like under those
civilizing clothes.
In more recent outdoor work, Friedlander’s combined
interest in the contingent, the banal and the ironic blossoms
into a fascination with what might be called busy foreground
screens. In a series of five or six photographs of the Chicago
Art Institute in Jackson Park, the building is always seen
through the branches of various trees. In another taken at
Mount Rushmore, we are looking at the glassed-in side of the
visitor center, with tourists peering at the mountainous sculpture
through binoculars or other devices, while the Presidential
figures themselves reflect distantly in the glass above. Later
in his Sticks and Stones: Architectural America (2004) he
returns to the urban landscape, but in full possession of
his juxtapositional and obtrusive style. A cityscape is dominated
by the head of a stoplight on a pole, with a pedestrian in
the background; the chain link fence becomes a major screen
motif, filling most of the frame.
Along the way Friedlander did fine work documenting workers
in his Factory Valleys: Ohio and Pennsylvania (1982). We see
working people intent on their jobs, looking into computer
screens at their desks, working complicated machines, presiding
over loaves of bread about to be baked. In this last one,
the worker is wearing a tee-shirt showing portraits presumably
of two family members, perhaps including herself, the kind
of thing one has made at a shopping mall. Her breasts fill
up these portraits in a sly physical analogy to the loaves
of bread she must bake, laid out in front of her.
He also made many portraits, apparently mainly of friends
and people he knew, including fellow photographers such as
John Coplans and Gary Winogrand; artists such as the American
expatriate R. B. Kitaj; and especially New Orleans musicians
such as Sweet Emma Barrett and Billie and Dee Dee Pierce,
as well as tender renderings of New Yorker Alan Jaffe and
his wife, founders of Preservation Hall.
During the 1990s Friedlander turned to the Hasselblad medium
format camera with its square frame. He attached a super-wide
angle lens to it and headed out to the deserts of the Western
US. Here he seems to have become fascinated with the energy
of desert brambles, for most of his images are filled with
twisted masses of branches and twigs—his newest screen.
The Grand Tetons themselves are almost an afterthought, far
in the background, while a tangle of branches occupy center
stage. Friedlander seems to discover a Jackson-Pollok-like
energy in these branches, all realized in yard-square black
and white prints. We’re at the opposite pole here from
the gripping scenics of Ansel Adams, or the dramatic graphics
of Edward Weston. More and more, Friedlander focuses on complex
patterns of line, leaf and dapple.
Through it all, Friedlander’s own image, and those
of his family members, play an ever-growing role. They start
out in the form of the photographer’s shadow, as in
the famous one of his crew-cutted head projected on the back
of a blond woman’s fake fur coat (1966). We see him,
handsome and thin in the 60s holding his Leica, and finally
as portly and round-faced in the 90s in a series of frank
self-portraits, in which there is always some play of light:
shadow, projection, reflection. We feel by this time, in this
well exceptionally well organized show, that Friedlander deserves
his bow.
6/5 through 9/29.
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Los Caprichos & Here Comes the Bogey-Man
Chelsea Art Museum
By Jari Chevalier
This innovative exhibition pairs Los Caprichos, Goya’s
original set of eighty etching produced in 1799 with the work
of eleven contemporary artists from today, whose work is influenced
by Goya’s masterpieces. Dubbed Here comes the Bogey-Man,
the new work is hung interspersed among Goya’s etching.
Los Caprichos is a picture book of human vanity, cruelty,
arrogance and stupidity — Gothic social satire with
a Freudian twist. We see aristocrats in their finery with
a retinue of grotesque and bestial attendants; throngs of
coarse and pious peasants; a crowned idiot-child with pointer
finger in his drooling mouth; a monkey painting a portrait
of an ass; asses riding on the backs of men; people with padlocks
on their ears; the grooming, primping and pampering of horrible
creatures by obsequious, resigned inferiors. These are but
a few of the poetic, libidinous and confrontational images
that abound in Goya’s prodigious works. He invokes Freud,
Nietzsche, Darwin and Marx at once.
The content of Los Caprichos, (The Impulses) is highlighted
by their u niformity of size, color, technique and framing.
Goya is also not averse to repeating himself, perhaps because
he takes as his subject the mechanisms through which human
suffering is perpetuated; confronting the viewer with depictions
of ignorance, sadism, denial, hypocrisy, manipulation, ridicule
and domination.
One of the most disturbing is Todos Caeran (All Will Fall).
A chicken with a human head whose open eyes scream horror
and whose mouth shoots a jet of fluid to the ground is skewered
from the rear, being readied for roasting by two rotund, indifferent
women. A third stooped, deformed and elderly female raises
her gaze to the perched chicken-people in the bare branch
above while others fly into the scene.
Perhaps not surprisingly, none of the contemporary artists
is as graphic and unsettling as Goya. Even Yasumasa Morimura’s
effective staging of Goya’s images in her life-size
C-prints lack the impact of the motivating originals. Morimura’s
theatrical realism brings Technicolor mercy to images Goya
uses to poke at our psyches through his scratchy monochromatic
surrealism.
Yun-Fei Ji’s works, however, are tonally reminiscent
of the Goya pieces and they share socio-political concerns,
yet these, too, do not pack the punch.
Ray Smith’s Acrobacia Canina series comes closest to
approaching Goya’s impact. His pointy-eared dog-men
suggest both a sophisticated understanding of Goya’s
iconography and an authoritative personal rendering.
The novelist E. M. Forster said that a function of art is
to make us feel small in the right way. Surely this exhibition
has that “right way” about it.
Through 9/24.
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Robert Wilson
12th Annual Watermill Center Summer Benefit
By Nicollette Ramirez
This year's Watermill Center Benefit for its international
artist-in-residence program, which took place at the Center’s
secluded six acre site in Hamptons during the summer, focused
on Brazil for its thematic punch. The artists in residence
included Paula Gabriela, Os Gemeos, Tatiana Grinberg and João
Modé. During the month long residency they worked independently
and in collaboration with Robert Wilson and artists from some
thirty-two countries, creating an impressive range of visual
art and performance pieces.
The Center was founded by Robert Wilson in 1992 and has since
then functioned as a hub of creativity, bringing together
an international mix of artists and artistic disciplines,
ranging from drama, design, painting, sculpture and dance.
These works, made during the residency, remained on view through
August.
For the opening festivities, Paola Gabriela did a performance
with a colleague in the middle of a table of hors d'oeuvres,
chanting a Portuguese phrase that equated Food Nutrition with
Art Nutrition as they nibbled on the fare. The chanting fell
against the backdrop of birch trees and wooden shavings that
covered the earth, suggesting the ritual of forest ceremonies
like the ones performed by legendary Druids of the past. Paolo
also constructed the large wall sculpture composed of iron
tubes, silver yarn and pipes of varying shapes in red, black
and blue that snaked in and out of the structure of the building.
Tatiana Grinberg made a wooden construction with cut-outs
that allowed light to pass through and create shapes in the
dark of the night. One such cut-out was placed in the center
of the auction, and this proved popular with the children
who played with a costumed character painted in silver with
round mirrors adhering to his silver bodysuit. Another cut-out
wall construct of plain wood stood in the center of the open
area.
Also a big hit with visitors was João's Modé's
wooden sculpture in the birch trees. A precarious ladder led
one up to a view of a long plank that fell off in the distance.
To be sure, after being curious enough to climb up and see
what’s going on, it begs the question: Was is it worth
it? Here the line between performance and participatory art
is cleverly obscured.
Party-goers played under a net made from yarn of different
colors that stretched between the trees; it looked like a
man made spider web with people having fun, taking pictures.
The playfulness of this piece seemed a fitting metaphor for
the playfulness of the whole atmosphere of the benefit. The
artists, both performers and visual artists, made the natural
space and the man-made structures come alive.
Os Gemeos made a large wall mural in which his signature
flat characters stare out at the viewer with childlike frankness.
One of Gemeos's paintings was also presented in the silent
auction.
This year's benefit featured both a silent and a live auction
led by Simon de Pury of Phillips de Pury & Co. Lithographs
by Jeff Koons and Willem de Kooning were favorites of the
silent auction. Spencer Tunick's C-print from an installation
in Buffalo proved to be another popular work. A small sculpture
from Kiki Smith’s kiln-cast lead crystal, Tail (1997),
garnered a lot of attention along with a 1979 self-portrait
by artist Chuck Close.
Besides contemporary art, there was also a sampling of antique
sculpture from Asia on display that came from Mr. Wilson's
private collection.
Dubbed the destination of choice for art partygoers in the
Hamptons, this gala gathering seems to get better each year.
Funds raised during the evening support Watermill programs
and a capitol campaign for the completion of a permanent facility
at the Center.
7/30.
Ed Note: For more information about
the Water Mill Center, contact Charles Fabius, Executive Director
of the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation, tel: 212.253.7484
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Tete A Tete
Greenberg Van Doren Gallery
By Chris Twomey
This group show, curated by Augusto Arbizo, pairs contemporary
masters with emerging and newly established artists who share
similar esthetic and conceptual concerns. The drawings, paintings,
photography, and sculpture of some thirty artists deftly juxtapose
the familiar with discovery of the new. Along the way, tantalizing
questions are raised, complimenting the visual matchmaking.
A 1979 Jennifer Bartlett is paired with a 2005 Louise Belcourt,
both sporting cool, blue backgrounds to support white shapes
in a confabulated space. Dorthea Rockburn and Mark Grotjahn
each exhibit elegant line renderings, with the linear focus
converging to center.
Several 2000 Chris Ofili watercolor portraits hang next to
a 1986 Jacob Lawrence portrait made with silk screen and stencils.
Here, differing techniques shown by these two artists; watercolors
and silkscreen, produce surprisingly similar graphic effects.
An obscure suite of Andy Warhol silk screens titled Abstract
Sculpture hangs adjacent to paintings by young conceptual
artist Wade Guyton. These "paintings" are really
inkjet on linen. Uncannily alike, the large standard formatted
size of Guytons’ work give his piece the contemporary
edge. Richard Deibenkorn and Brice Marden also make a welcome
appearance. Their line matrixes read like maps leading to
two different countries.
A 1970’s portrait by Barkley Hendricks titled Vendetta
(Bitch) is matched with a recent Diva Fiction portrait by
Kurt Kauper, adding a deeper context. Hendrick’s painting
exudes sophistication in his use of photography-like cropping
and color. The white field and clothes on his black woman
model, framing her skin in near silhouette, enhances Hendrick’s
social commentary. In contrast, Kauper places his more recent
Diva Fiction in a full body pose, center frame, complete with
painterly modeling and rendering. The effect is stylized,
questioning whether the 1970’s ever really happened.
Ultimately, the premise of Tete a Tete takes on a more complex
reverie.
Why are these young artists using the style and manner of
mark-making, imagery, and subject matter of their precedents,
even thirty years later? Is it coincidence that these images
are so alike, or is this a symptom of a long gestation while
the role painting in the 21st century is reconsidered?
Imagine the names of the artists to be switched, along with
the huge price differential between old contemporary masters
and new. The question now becomes: What are we valuing? What
happens when we remove context, the written adjunct to all
image making? It is here, where curator Arbizo becomes coyly
subversive, undermining the status quo by raising the stakes.
6/9 through 7/8
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The Photograph In Question
at Von Lintel Gallery
By Chris Twomey
For all of the technological advances, photography is still
in the infancy of its re-invention. Artists increasingly break
the rules and appropriate the best and the worst of this ubiquitous
discipline and its digital offshoots. The hybridization of
the medium has, nevertheless, come a long way even over the
past few years. One of the first exhibitions to explore this
theme, Impure Photography III, broached the idea in a 1999
group show at Gallery Taranto in Chelsea The gallery has since
taken a hiatus, but is this older and presumably wiser exhibit
at Von Lintel Gallery offers a lush sampling of crossbreeding,
self-referencing, and pure technical virtuosity created by
some of the more astute practitioners of photo informed image
making today.
The works of some twenty-two artists represented here could
be loosely grouped into technical categories of photographic
“impurity.” Artists who manipulate the photographic
image using digital means include Matthias Geiger, Deborah
Roan, Penelope Umbrico and Laura Carton. Each of these artists
displaces, removes, or overlaps elements of the photographic
picture, refocusing our reading of the altered photograph
for deeper meaning.
Those who print on unusual materials include Arnold Helbling,
whose appropriated media figures glow like sacred icons when
processed onto a cloth-like surface. Orit Raff applies blueprint
techniques to the imaging of large scale poetic renderings
of her empty bed, and Roger Newton fabricates his own lenses
and formulas to create enigmatic objects that are printed
directly on coated wooden panels.
Utilizing innovative photo process, John Chiara’s large
scale, inky blue landscapes are shot with a hand-built camera
that is big enough to stand in; James Welling exposes light
directly onto colored paper resulting in a painterly color
field effect; and Gary Schneider’s gorgeous black and
white compositions from his Genetic Self-Portrait series present
microscopic blow-ups of his retinas.
Physically altering and re-interpreting the photograph by
hand is another effective method of photographic rule-breaking.
Taking this one step further, Marina Berios’ precise
drawings meticulously copy the abstract photographic negatives
she culls from trees, road sides, and fireworks, so the end
product is actually a drawing on paper. Vik Muniz recreates
his photographic image from household materials, such as sugar
crystals, and then documents this glued recreation with a
final photograph. John Reilly’s Polaroid collages and
Richard Galpins skeletal structures utilize cut-and-paste
methods while William Anastasi draws directly on photograph
negatives.
Eric Hanson, Mel Bochner, Shimon Atties, and Sarah Charlesworth
operate from conceptual premises which dictate the use of
the conventional photography methods they employ. Charlesworth’s
ethereal photograph, at first glance, reads like a faint white
geometric shape submerged in white liquid. It is actually
a photograph of a book veiled with white silk, which obscures
the printed words. She examines language and its relationship
to how we read images. What we see in this show is often not
what it appears to be; it is so much more.
6/9 through 7/29.
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On the Official and the Unofficial
The 51st Venice Biennale
By Leeza Ahmady
The 51st Venice Biennale has been expanded considerably,
with more countries participating than ever before. For the
first time in its 110 year history, Albania, Morocco, China,
Belarus, Afghanistan and a cluster of Central Asian nations;
Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan were represented.
Afghanistan inaugurated its pavilion with two artists. Lida
Abdul, who was born in Kabul and lived in Germany and India
as a refugee before coming to US; and Raheem Walizada, a rug
designer who also owns a gallery in New York. Both artists
live and work in between Afghanistan, US and Europe.
Abdul’s short film, Clapping with Stones was shot on
location in Bamiyan, in front of the famous defaced Buddha
statues. The artist returned to Afghanistan to create three
new works that were shot in 16mm film and transferred to video
for the Biennale. In another work, White House, Abdul is seen
painting the ruins of a building white, while in Landscape
I, men dressed in black carry a large tree trunk across a
barren landscape.
Most of these videos are silent performance-based works charged
with visual potency. Experiences of loss, tragedy and fragmentation
are explored through ritualized exercises that sanction expression
to the artist’s profound desire for understanding life’s
events.
In 1997, Sislej Xhafa wandered around pavilions at the Venice
Biennale carrying a soccer ball, and listening to a match
on a radio while asking people to play soccer with him. He
had painted his torso red, and had a small Albanian flag stuck
on to his backpack. "He was the roving Albanian pavilion".
Like Afghanistan, Albania too finally got a proper pavilion
this year. Xhafa, who is known for activities that often push
the envelope, continued his onslaught against societal norms
with a giant sculpture of a Ku Klux Klan mask, titled Ceremonial
Crying System. The enormous mask, which really did cry, was
prominently placed at the entrance of the Giardini, visible
from miles away.
A year and half ago in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, Kurama Art director
Churek Djamgerchinova spoke of her dissatisfaction with the
art world’s ignorance in regards to Central Asia. Her
decision to change this fact as well as the collective efforts
of many artists and art practitioners in the region, and abroad,
drove her to commission the Central Asian pavilion at the
Venice Biennale.
The pavilion was curated by Viktor Misiano, whose strategy
for the exhibition was to archive more than a decade of works
by 20 of the most dynamic artists in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan
and Uzbekistan.
This year’s Biennale was especially strong in the area
of video. From Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain (2005), to
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Reading for Corpses (2002),
to Kim Sooja’s A Needle Woman series, (2000-2003) the
best works incorporated an element of video. Central Asian
artists too, have been making video, mostly performance-based
works in an extraordinarily efficient and effective manner.
Maybe it’s their inheritance of centuries of myth &
ritual that so fluidly and simply allows them to articulate
realities of their collective, but also that of the world
society at large.
One striking piece at the Central Asian Pavilion was the
work of Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djoumaliev, a husband
and wife team who began their work at the end of the 1980’s
in Kyrgyzstan. Trans Siberian Amazons (2004) is a video-installation
about the lives of women whose means for economic survival,
since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has been to trade
imported goods on trains to passengers who are as poor and
as spiritually weary as they. Much like "bootleggers
"during the prohibition era in the United States during
the 1920s, "suitcase traders" has become a massive,
social manifestation in post-Soviet space during the last
fifteen years.
Almagul Menlibayeva is said to represent the modern image
of a female nomad traveling in art as freely as in real life.
For the Biennale she created a room installation that incorporated
many of her video works Steppe Baroque (2002), Apa (2003),
A Wild Sheep Chase (2002) and Vagon (2002). Trained in Kazakh
painting and batik traditions, she is set on using symbolism
& decoration to create the sense of the magical in her
works. Almagul’s aluring videos transport us to a world
of beautiful women tasked with strange rituals in fantastic
places, sometimes nude, sometimes half dressed, dancing in
the snow, or tumbling through beautiful landscapes in colorful
turbans, scarves and shawls. It seems that the old boy’s
network has finally given way to make room for the rest of
the world at this year’s Venice Biennale.
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