Lower East Psychedelic

In an article last month I discussed solo exhibitions by four artists at galleries on the Lower East Side whose work deploys psychedelic color palettes and alternately abstract or surreal forms to unveil completely mesmerizing visions for viewers. I enjoyed Marilyn Minter's surreal and brilliant photographs, paintings and videos of beauty and baking projects seen from so close that they become ugly (as seen in Green Pink Caviar above) at Salon 94 Freemans and David Shaw's strange rainbow sculptures extrapolated from branches and tree trunks at Feature Inc.

The delightfully colorful and creative cut-out sculptures, totems and masks of Michael Velliquette at DCKT Contemporary were a little less interesting, as they seemed caught up in their own cuteness. My favorite of the four, though, was Jen Stark's mesmirizing show of abstract sculptures and drawings at LMAKprojects. Click here to read the whole article.

Wicked Artsy: Picturing Cultural Memory

Check out the latest edition of my weekly art column for The L Magazine, Wicked Artsy, in which I discuss three exhibitions that question how art reflects and shapes the ways we create, preserve and re-evaluate cultural heritage and memories. To say that art is simply a way of preserving a culture is incredibly naive, and all three exhibitions I addressed seemed aware – to one degree or another – that to mediate cultural memory is immediately to change and adapt it. The most sophisticated engagement with this double-edged impulse towards conservation was undertaken by Yeondoo Jung in his current show Handmade Memories (pictured at right) at Tina Kim Gallery. Read the whole article here.

Two Shows at MoMA Right Now...

That Don't Involve Salvador Dalí or Pre-fab Housing

Sure, shows about crazy mustachioed Basque surrealists and homes made in factories are interesting (seriously, Home Delivery and Dalí: Painting and Film are great exhibitions), but they're also perpetually packed and difficult to enjoy after the first half-hour MoMA opens its doors (at 10:30am Wednesday through Monday). Two less-popular (and more brainy, weird...) exhibitions well-worth your crowd-ducking moves at MoMA these days deal with very specific artistic production at fairly specific times and places.

The newest is Looking at Music (through January 5, 2009), an exploration of (mostly) American multi-media art beginning in the 1960s with the sudden wide availability of audio-tape recorders, portable cameras and electric guitars. A wall-sized projection of a close-up on John Lennon smiling benignly (filmed by Yoko Ono in 1968) greets visitors and bluntly states a recurring theme in the show: the intermingling of rock and roll and early video artists in America's 60s and subsequent avant-gardes. Accordingly, several music video-looping TVs occupy the show's second room (featuring The Beatles' "Penny Lane" and Bowie's "Space Oddity" among others), and an accompanying screening series features a plethora of brilliant short films set to hot tunes both classic and recent. There are also collections of envelope-pushing music sheets and indie magazines from modernist musicians and composers that will certainly thrill the music theorists in the audience.

Multi-media videos and installations are the bread and butter of this show though, so Laurie Anderson's "Self-Playing Violin" (1974), standing staunchly upright as if saluting gallery-goers while it solos, is a particularly fun entry (especially when one reads that Anderson used to accompany the violin on another instrument in live performances). Meanwhile, Joan Jonas's "Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy" (1973), a video of the artist performing a variety of roles for the camera while donning a series of masks and peering into mirrors, questions how one performs in everyday life and to what extent the camera undermines those performances. It's an effective exercise, boiling ideas Altman, DePalma and Romero have spent entire films (careers?) addressing down to a clever shorthand. Works from the likes of Nam June Paik, Jack Smith, Bruce Nauman and John Cage round out a dense and (thankfully) small crash course in the seminal early works of multi-media and mixed-media art.The second easy-to-miss but not-to-miss show recently opened at MoMA, Kirchner and the Berlin Street (through November 10) looks at Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's densely creative period in Berlin between 1913 and 1915. The core of the show is a series of large-scale portraits of sex workers on Berlin's streets, rendered in an incredibly jagged and enchantingly colorful aesthetic. To one side of the central series we see smaller drawings and prints (some studies for the larger works, others stand-alone pieces) taken from the period that feature similar subjects from Berlin's bustling nightlife and streetscapes. At the dim gallery's opposite end are works from Kirchner's previous period in Dresden as a member of Brücke (a group of Expressionist painters he co-founded).

Taken as a whole, the show is an argument for Kirchner's contribution to German Expressionism, and for the vitality (and daring) of this phase in his career. The style of the works clearly falls under the umbrella of "Expressionism", but it's also starkly individual, Kirchner's highly-developed distortions evoking a bustling city's rich street life, under whose elegant fashions and urban rituals a not quite covert brand of salesmanship (saleswomanship, really) thrived. In one work, "Potsdamer Platz" from 1914, a war widow dons a veil while walking leisurely, announcing her mourning but also her availability to all those she passes (a frequent practice in post-WWI Berlin, we are told). His recurring choice of the liminal sex workers as subjects also intimates Kirchner's isolation in the big bad city, experiencing a rich public life that is nonetheless deeply isolating. So head to MoMA and avoid the cattle lines of alienating crowds and find some gems in these satisfying, intimate exhibitions.

This double review also appears on The L Magazine's "Your Blog About Town."

Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung: Residential Erection

Postmasters

Agent provocateur extraordinaire Tin-Kin Hung’s installations and videos are what you’d get if the creators of South Park were commissioned to make political cartoons using CNN screen grabs and bad web art. Parodying American political culture, Tiin-Kin Hung’s work is relentlessly sarcastic, hyper-sexual, grotesque, clever, and shameless. Closes 5/10.

Tue-Sat 11am to 6pm. 459 W 19th St, between Ninth and Tenth Aves (C,E to 23rd St) 212-727-3323 postmastersart.com

This review will appear in the April 23 issue of The L Magazine.

David Claerbout: Then Came This

Yvon Lambert

In the first of four works, night falls quickly while a woman moves extremely slowly. Neat trick, and questions raised about narrative time recur throughout the show. Two projections show brief events from innumerable angles. Aesthetically, each image could stand alone, but together they reveal a story. While bridging still and moving images, Claerbout adopts techniques from both. Closes 4/26.

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm. 550 W 21st St, between Tenth Ave and West St 212-242-3611, yvon-lambert.com

This review will appear in the April 16 issue of The L Magazine.

"The Odd Couple" by Gnarls Barkley

Originally slated to hit stores on April 8, the second album from the uncatagorizable duo Gnarls Barkley came out online on March 18 and gradually became available in stores from that date onwards. An accompanying press release claimed the move was a tactic for pre-empting the distractions of late-March, namely college basketball and the beginning of Spring. More likely, though, the early release came in reaction to significant internet leaking. And with some buzz generated from MTV’s banning of the album’s first video (for “Run”) for fears it could cause epileptic seizures, why not strike while the iron is lukewarm? That video, which has yet to cause any seizures, goes from being a mundane retro club dance number into a visual frenzy that should be seen by fans of video art everywhere. It also features Justin Timberlake as a video jockey-within-the-video.

The album itself suffers from acute sophomore blues. Or perhaps its audience does. Gnarls Barkley’s first album, 2006’s St. Elsewhere, came out in that pre-M.I.A. era when blending dissonant musical genres brought on the kind of giddy excitement reserved for taboo-breakers. Two short years later Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo have put together a very similar album that’s just not as satisfying. Some of The Odd Couple’s problems might come from poor song ordering, which is arguably an antiquated skill in the post-album age. Nonetheless, part of St. Elsewhere’s strength was its attention-hijacking five opening songs. Once listeners were through shaking it to the initial onslaught, the album could mellow out without losing their attention.

The Odd Couple, sadly, starts with a couple of downers, and the first fast-paced pop/rock-laced song ‘Going On’ can’t make up the difference. The Odd Couple is also surprisingly short, with its thirteen tracks totaling less than 40 minutes. At that rate of track turnover, some great songs end before listeners even get into them. That’s the problem with ‘Whatever,’ one of the more successful experiments on the album that lasts just over two minutes. Halfway into the experiment, apparently, Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo just said ‘whatever.’ Part of what made St. Elsewhere great was that willingness to experiment, but that spirit of innovation seems to be lost on The Odd Couple.

A similar version of this review appears in the March 26 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Life after the radio star

Good music videos rock. No matter your musical preferences or taste in films and TV shows, a bumpin’ music video can transcend all personal prejudices and make you want to jump up and dance. Unfortunately, MTV and Muchmusic seem to have forgotten the magic of music videos in favour of boring programming consisting mostly of so-called reality TV. So where can disowned members of the MTV Generation such as ourselves go to get our fix of music videos? Why, to the museum of course.

Until October first, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) is screening a selection of 26 music videos from the present all the way back to the medium’s origins with Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975. The series, entitled simply Music Video, can be seen in the cavernous Beverly Webster Ralph hall, which is in the building’s basement and free of entry during the MAC’s opening hours. Much better than confining the videos to their traditional flickering boxes, the projection takes up an entire wall in the room, and the powerful speakers behind the screen give the music the power it deserves.

The videos selected for the projection show the evolution and progression of the music video form, all the while illustrating the recurring tools and tropes used by filmmakers. Though the videos are, for the most part, not very technically innovative, the daring creativity and originality which the short and generally loud format allows is intoxicating.

The first video in the series, for the aforementioned Queen song, consists chiefly of concert footage. Most of the videos from the 1980s, however, try to explore the possibilities of the budding medium. Several of the videos from this decade are pieced together in a jarring montage and make repeated use of abandoned urban spaces and found items, for instance those directed by Zbigniew Rybczynski for Art of Noise and Belfegore. These allusions to abandoned places and objects reflect the short-term promotional ends for which the music video format was first conceived.

However as the decade evolves more polished and innovative music videos appear. Some make imaginative use of animation such as Steve Barron’s video for a-ha’s Take On Me, or Stephen R. Johnson’s video for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer, which invokes the pixilation technique invented by National Film Board legend Norman McLaren. Other directors begin to infuse their videos with narratives as a way of keeping the distracted viewers attention. Good examples of this come in Zbigniew Rybczynski’s video for John Lennon’s Imagine, or the Steve Barron animated adventure mentioned earlier.

As the projection passes into the 1990s a decidedly cleaner aesthetic emerges, one anticipated in the series by the 1984 Jean Baptiste Mondino video for Don Henley’s Boys of Summer. Videos like the one directed by Stéphane Sednaoui for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1991 hit Give it Away show a much greater attention to detail in their direction, editing and artistic design. All the featured videos from the ‘90s employ surreal (Jonathan Glazer’s video for Street Spirit by Radiohead) or futuristic (Chris’ Cunningham’s video for All is Full of Love by Björk) visual styles, or both as is the case in the Mark Romanek-directed video for Madonna’s Bedtime Story. The careful craftsmanship and sombre sleekness of these videos contrasts sharply to their cheap, gritty and trashy predecessors from the 80s. This testifies to the legitimacy music videos have gained as promotional tools, but also as vehicles for artistic exploration and expression.

A tendency to abandon dark imagery and start having fun again is clear in the post-millennial films, such as Spike Jonze’s famous video for Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice starring only Christopher Walken. Many videos since the year 2000 also return to themes and concepts first elaborated in the 80s. Thus, the circular narrative of Mark Romanek’s video for John Lennon’s Imagine is cleverly readapted in the Michel Gondry-directed Come to my World by Kylie Minogue. The creative use of animation in the Peter Gabriel and a-ha videos mentioned earlier re-emerges in another Michel Gondry video, this one for the White Stripes’ Fell in Love with a Girl, as well as in Joshua Deu’s video for the Arcade Fire’s Laika and the Louis-Philippe Eno-directed Montréal -40 °C by Malajube.

At a time when music videos are a dime a dozen, and finding a decent one tends to require hours of online searching only to be confined to disappointingly inadequate computer screens and speakers, this projection is invaluable. Do yourself a favour: go to your local museum basement and rediscover that latent love for music videos in the perfect setting.

Note: This article was originally published on 11 September 2006 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website here.