In Uniform

"You got it," Steven Wirtz said to me. "I'm so glad you got it!"
Oh yeah. I got it.
And the poster. I want to tape it to my wall.
Like I said to the gallerist who said encouragingly, "We have payment plans..."—"Free. Right now, free works for me."

Steven Wirtz (he's so nice) is showing new work by Melanie Pullen. Remember how she created crimes scenes, down to the last gritty detail in the dark back alley, trashy and smelly? That's how good they were—you could smell the sour fetid garbage. And then the victim, strangely well-dressed. High Fashion crime scenes. Un-nerving to snicker at the hanging corpse.

For the last couple of years she's been at work on the details of a very different scene. Studying and recreating historic depictions of battle, Pullen's been sussing out the high fashion sensibility of war.



First there is the glamour of the heroic pose. She's created these magnificent life-size portraits of soldiers. In period uniforms, models stand as in the original paintings. She had to recruit fashion models, because friends just could not carry the command of the gaze. It makes complete sense. The image of heroism is one of grace and strength, composure and a sort of humble assurance. The hero must be beautiful. The heroic transcends the ordinary. It is something to be admired and aspired to. A model or actor, trained to project, can fill those boots to affect the look. Achilles was always described as beautiful, he was the son of a nymph after all.

Man in a uniform
(hut)
That's what I am
Man in a uniform, uh,
That's what I am
(Prince)

In 1918 when General George Patton was getting into the swing of things, he wrote his wife: "I often think with regret of how badly I used to dress... Now I am a regular Beau Brummel. I wear silk khaki shirts made to order, khaki socks also made to order. I change my boots at least once during the day and my belts are wonders to see they are so shiney and polished. I have the leather on my knees blancoed every time I ride and my spurs polished with silver polish. In fact I am a wonder to behold.... Tomorrow I'll have my new battle jacket. If I'm to fight I like to be well-dressed."



There is charismatic power in a suit—business suit, suit of armor, well-fitted uniform. The uniform makes uniform the ranks, but makes the person a soldier with all the strength, will, and containment that word implies. A soldierly demeanor is formed with discipline and righteousness. This is the very thing the old painters tried to convey and Pullen has distilled in these portraits. Out of the mists, back-lit the soldierly appearance, the embodiment of calm before the storm of battle.

I love a man in a uniform
I love a man in a uniform

The girls they love to see you shoot
(bang bang you're dead)
I love a man in a uniform
(they love a... they love a... they love a... bang bang)
(they love to see you shoot)
(Gang of Four)

In the second series, Pullen recreated scenes of battle on the streets of LA and in a Hollywood studio. The twenty realized scenes re-enact historic photos, in a sense replicating the iconic imagery which we understand as scenes of war. Depictions of depictions, as it were. This is a distancing from the mortality of engagement (with it's grit and grime and blood and guts) and yet at the same time an investigation of the very nature of creating an archetypal image—one that provokes a whole range of response. That is what is so interesting about her work. She is pin-pointing the image of war. And for there to be an idea of war there must be an attending image. Homer provided it. Capa. Pullen.



This is not "realism," not documentary photography. Not like the photos of combat by Eddie Adams or of wounded veterans by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. But this is also real, this examination of the creation of an idea. For our experience of the world is through our idea of it. So how does one create the image of history? Just so. And does this force the question of our belief in the depiction of history? I think so.

The show is called Violent Times and since the uniforms date back to the Revolutionary War, we're talking a long time. But I don't think Pullen is merely, ironically, critiquing the war effort. There is no getting around the fact that her portraits of these soldiers and the details of their familiar uniforms elicits a pleasing response. They are beautiful to look at. And the battle scenes thrilling. What do we make of that? How do we digest that appeal? Can we enlarge our purview to say, War is brutal: war is beautiful. -? I think we must, otherwise we will be at cross-purposes to our goal of living in harmony with ourselves. As Pogo said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Strange Light

This is Steven Cohen, performance artist.

Not just your usual gender-bending monster-mime drag queen clown.

No. Nor your ordinary homo-probe, eros-busting, crazy-assed Jewish shaman-priest. With a prosthetic leg. Or horn feet even.

No. This is Steven Cohen, performance artist, out of South Africa.
Didn't expect that, huh? I didn't either which says something about my own assumptions about what comes out of Africa. The fiercely bent alphabet and ferociously queer vocabulary that might peg him as Californian, say, still makes perfectly good sense for a white gay Jewish South African artist with drama queen pretensions. This is the ground he dances on; this the culturally complicated, politically implicated land he grew out of and belongs to. Denying history and denying the present to say his too isn't the face, a face of South Africa.

So. I went to see Test Patterns: Recent Video from South Africa at SF Camerawork. Steven Cohen's video, Chandelier, stood out—got me by the balls as it were—and not just because I like men in hose. No, this film, this performance, goes beyond the personal into the politically powerful and ricochets.

Seems to me, performance art is made with a certain amount—or a lot—of personal courage. Especially if the artist is doing particularly intimate material. And more so if the material is outrageous, which by definition is contrary and provocative and inspires outrage—then you never know what's going to happen. That's where Cohen likes to go. Ratcheting it up a notch, he goes off-stage, outside the gallery, into "art-unlikely" spaces, as he calls them.

In his list of past performances there are these which speak for themselves.

Jew at the Mall - Rosebank Mall and Mutual Square, Johannesburg
Ugly Girl at Rugby - SA vs Wales, Loftus Versveld, Pretoria
Crawling to register - Independent Electoral Commission, Johannesburg
Limping into the African Renaissance - public road, Sigangeni, Swaziland

And then in 2001 he did Chandelier - intervention at demolition of squatter camp, Newtown.



About these interventions into everyday surroundings Cohen says, "People of the outside step right into the work. They can change the choreography (deny access or 'come this way') and they can change the plot (yell and shout, hit, call the police)." This is in South Africa, mind you, where everyday surroundings include areas of abject poverty—just outside your studio door.

The story goes, Cohen had been working for some time on refashioning a wrought iron chandelier into a wearable tutu. When the piece was compete he decided to premier it in the neighborhood of his studio. So costumed in chandelier and hose, made up and twinkling with lights, he walked out on stacked platform heels down the underpass squatter lanes, camera trailing. As chance would have it, his inaugural presentation coincided with a government action—crews had been sent out to evict the residents and demolish their board and tarp homes.

Chandelier documents this most extraordinary collision, a synchronistic convergence of histories and meanings. The humble people of the squatter camp seem bemused and befuddled by the pale stranger, a statuesque apparition for sure, come turning, teetering, and gingerly stepping through the mud and debris. A woman steps up and curtsies; another holds back an agitated angry man wielding a fighting club. In his re-constituted emblem of higher living—the crystal chandelier—and his very skin, white, which together speak of colonialism and rank he towers over the field of residents, and yet he walks on fetish platforms in near nakedness, completely upending his gender position. One man, tweaked by this specific aspect, pushes forward. He's got Hustler magazine in hand. He gestures animatedly, "Same, same!" Cohen wearily sits down. The man flips excitedly through the pages, he opens the centerfold, waves it around, shows the camera, smiling. It's got to be one of the weirdest, most uncomfortable art-meets-real life encounters I've seen. Little black man grinning, he's got the white pussy shot and the girl-boy right there in the flesh, right there in the mud and mess of a sanitation-less encampment of apartheid refugees.

When the orange-clad workers enter the scene demolishing the ramshackle dwellings with crowbars, the performance turns from bizarre to deeply disturbing. Even as Cohen raises his arms in some fashion of supplication, there is nothing really but dull dejection in the act. People sit in the rubble waiting out the destruction. Ruination is everywhere. The chandelier is a light in the descending dusk. But there's one more thing. I haven't mentioned the Star of David painted on his head. There's plenty of time, as Cohen steps and stumbles through the wreckage, to consider the implications, to allow the host of associations to come to mind—the pillage and devastation the star has seen. History repeats itself.

It is difficult for me to dare to speak but even harder to keep quiet. And making these secrets public is to enter in a very dangerous relationship of confidence. Dancing up to our own limits, in the heart of contradictory forces, memory and imagination, the personal and the public mingle. I evoke our pride and shame about who we are, genocide and hope, fascination and reality, the macabre and the everyday. I am a Jew and an anti-Zionist. My works deals with the pain of being human and the joy of living and, as our lives are, this work is a complete and incomplete experimentation.

Powerful work. I love it. Steven Cohen does the dance and takes the cake.


Chandelier photos by John Hogg from Paris Autumn Festival and NYTimes.

Seeing is Believing

Just as painters from the 16th century onward (Titian, Rembrandt, Fragonard, Turner, Cézanne, and de Kooning, to name a few) began to foreground their medium and make it almost as much a subject of their pictures as what the painting nominally represented, photographers, over the course of the last 50 years [—] have been doing the same.

Reading this in an article by Peter Plagens in Art in America (Feb. 09) about the Met's exhibition Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography, made me think immediately of things said last night by Nathaniel Dorsky about his films screened at SFMoMA.


Still from Sarabande, 2008, 16mm, silent, 15 min.

Dorsky creates gem-like short, silent films of collaged takes of iridescent flickerings, shadows, and light. In his films, he says, the screen is a leading character. He emphasizes his preferred stock—16mm Kodachrome, and specifically its lower register of color. He says he's not interested in still photography—even if many of his sequences would be stunning still photos. He likens his work with film to painting.

He is dogmatic about his approach—in the old sense of the word dogma, a symbol of truth. His assertion seems to bristle people in the audience, but it is a positive affirmation of himself, the truth of himself. That he stands behind himself and the unique output that is a result of his own eye, hand, effort must seem an affront to those less self-contained... I don't know. It only bothers me when he suggests to do otherwise is to make rot. I think the word he used was poison. One man's poison is another man's drink. And as for the rest of us...


also from Sarabande

The photos in the Met's show are concerned with another truth. The exhibit tracks the evaporation of the belief in photography's ability to represent reality through the work of 17 photographers who mess with our assumptions. At issue here is Is it real?


This is from Hilter Moves East (1975, Gelatin silver print) by David Levinthal. These are little toy Nazis, but the effect is real. We know the long-standing discontent about Robert Capa's photo of the soldier shot in the Spanish Civil War. This step further into verisimilitude turns the question upside down.

Dorsky says he isn't a great thinker. His films don't come from ideas; are not about film as an idea, but film as an experience.

The rule was that photographs possess enough veracity to, upon occasion, help find people criminally guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and send them to prison. The 'truth' that a photograph represents (i.e., re-presents, presents again), its direct physical relationship to something that actually existed, can still make me weak in the knees. I tear up at certain 19th century photographs. My god, I think, those people picnicking at that lake, looking like living, breathing souls, walked the earth a century and a half ago. And then, today, there are photographs of ice on Mars, I get breathless looking at them.—Peter Plagens

Weak at the knees, breathless, that's the experience of watching a Dorsky film. What surprises me is that no one in the crowd gasps out loud, no one sighs in wonder. It may be a cultural thing, but here in a packed theater in California, everyone participates in the silence that holds the light. For 20 some minutes everyone interacts with the screen, taking in its truth, glorying in its veracity.

Dorsky's films are saving grace. See them when you can.


Levinthal photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Stills from Sarabande courtesy of The Auteurs recent interview with Dorsky and from Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Solo, So Very Fine

I ducked in out of the rain and into the Jonathan Solo show at Catharine Clark Gallery, SF.

Like walking into a white cloud, not exactly diversity-heaven, but diversity dream, an alternate dream world where anything is possible.



I say white cloud because these precious, precise, hand-drawn images are placed in vast vacant spaces of cream paper—a lot of light and space around these extraordinary drawings, even more so hanging in this white and bright gallery space. With the background context blanked out, there's nothing to do but contemplate the particulars carried on the face, on the body of the subject. A picture says a thousand words goes the adage. This is just how it feels when you are a man in a dress. "All anybody notices is my nails," says my tranny friend.



I say extraordinary drawings because Solo's subjects are more-than-ordinary, meaning not-commonplace as well as extra special. That they are sometimes (always?) composite portraits first composed of diverse elements on the computer before rendered in fine-line pencil is just part of the story. The other part is the singular, unconventional, gender-variant embodiment and presentation that certain individuals carry—sometimes secretly, sometimes out loud.

Solo's portraits point to the tension inherent in being out of the ordinary. This is What's Your Secret?, 2008, graphite & cut paper. Perhaps if you look closely you'll see the string which ties these genitals to the ring.



And then, like this, he points, reflexively, to the mixed reception cross or mixed gender presentation can get. This is stoggaF, 2008, graphite & cut paper.



Like the title of the boy-in-dress drawing above, I Keep Trying, Solo keeps trying to put the pieces together, like a puzzle, working out the equation to explain himself/herself/the self that is sometimes disjointed by one person's definition, but is always unique and deserving of a place in the universe.

In the alternate reality of his universe, there's a lot of mixing and matching, but unlike your usual cut and paste collage, in these drawings, it is hard to determine where one thing begins and another leaves off. The result, though, is quietly disarming. The subjects, composite or not, are exposed in an intimacy so rarely seen—and as you take in these signifiers of precarious difference, you notice, they stare, blankly, back at you. What are you going to make of it? Very powerful, very fine work.

Under the Milky Way

I've been thinking about this show I saw at Queen's Nails, every time I hear some song from the 80s... Thinking about what it means to feel sentimental about a song, about sentiment in music, about conditioning experience.

As part of the extended reach of the 2008 California Biennial, Queen's Nails Projects hosted D'nell Larson an LA based artist who works with video, performance, installation. There was a performance for this show, Under the Milky Way, which I did not see, but the video, Close Your Eyes and Think of Me, I suspect represents the experience of being there.

Sometimes when this place gets kind of empty
Sound of their breath fades with the light
I think about the loveless fascination
Under the Milky Way tonight

In this show, Larson is concerned with differentiating her identity from the milieu of her upbringing—the parental and collective culture—specifically in regards to music and musical memories. She wonders "what is inherent in one's own emotional response separate from the rest of the world?" The rest of the world, in her case, includes parents who are wedding singers. Not everyone is rooted in such an atmosphere of popular romanticism. Wedding singers, like lounge acts, sing to set a sentimental mood, to elicit a certain saccharine response that befits an occasion of romance. Well-known, popular songs are stripped of their defining characteristics and synthesized into a cliché of the original. What is retained is the core melody and the lyrics. Ah, the lyrics. The lyrics which are often banal, usually maudlin, certainly evocative. Everyone can sing along, for the performance triggers the memory of the band, the era, the album, the track, and all the associated memories of time and place.

So what did Larson do? She filmed, simply and without embellishment, her parents, Dennis and Arlene Larson, singing a selection of personally meaningful songs, in their studio. They are dressed casually; the camera is set for a middle distance shot. They sing versions of songs by The Cure, Nirvana, Interpol, to drum machine, synthesizer & tambourine. The video lasts 17 minutes and then it loops again.

Love, love will tear us apart again...

When I was there, I watched the screen for a bit, then turned and watched the street through the window, cars and buses passing, people strolling by, with Joy Division the audio track for the scene. Will I associate that stretch of Mission Street with that plaintive harmony from now on? For sure it is now wedded to the memories of driving to the album in Southern California, memories embedded in the emotional-response-portion of my mind.

But even more interesting to me is the way that these songs can reach in and elicit such feelings of longing, tenderness, dismay. The heart seems particularly susceptible to this kind of sentiment, across these musical lines, despite how they are delivered. After I adjusted to what I was seeing and hearing, especially after I looked away from the screen, I was reconnected to the original songs and their emotive effect. Powerful stuff.



In a second untitled video, Larson created a a moving image from hundreds of still shots of birds flying over water. While mesmerized by the halting image which wavers and repeats, and somehow curiously replicates looking overboard at undulating water—meanwhile, through earphones came the sound of Larson singing The Killing Moon by Echo and the Bunnymen.

Fate
Up against your will
Through the thick and thin
He will wait until
You give yourself to him

The film is a reconstructed memory, with feeling tone and meaning supplied, I suppose, by the song—which is sung à la familia. It is a beautiful piece in itself, but it also serves as a self-portrait. Here she works with the parental vocation, reconditioning songs, recreating associations, at the same time as reconstructing/constructing something of her own experience.

Wish I knew what you are looking for
Might have known what you would find
Under the Milky Way tonight

Larson, searching for her own singularity, found it interwoven, indistinguishably, with her world, culture, era, upbringing. Even memory of a particular moment carries all these associations. But the truth is, there is no I there in identity—or better said, I, as I experience I, is an amalgam of all that I am, I being a composite figure.

And all this because of a song.
What was it Walt Whitman said?

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
—Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself

Insects and Artists

Sometimes I wonder about the timing of things. Insects for instance. Butterflies here, crickets there. Not exactly the same, and to a different purpose. But still.

What I am on about is two very different shows that connected yet bounced off each other in a very... unsatisfying way.

The Haines Gallery, SF, is showing new work by Binh Danh including three of his signature leaf-portraits and a series of daguerreotypes. The series is called In the Eclipse of Angkor: Tuol Sleng, Choeung Ek, and Khmer Temples. There are photos of temple ruins, of young monks, of the museum displays in the killing grounds of the Khmer Rouge. These works reflect Danh's ongoing exploration into a period of time when a shadow passed over a culture. His work is an unearthing in a way, bringing to light a dark period, but in a delicate soft light as befits a memorial gesture.

In Cambodia, in the 70s, the Khmer Rouge regime killed some two million people in the span of a few years. Tuol Sleng prison and the area of mass graves in Choeung Ek are now memorial sites Danh visited and photographed. He makes a leap into the deep past by also photographing Angkor Wat, a huge, ancient temple site situated in the same region the Khmer Rouge originated. In Angkor, carvings depict Rahu, the dragon snake who periodically attempts to eat the sun and moon throwing the earth into a dangerous period of darkness.

Eclipse is just the right word for these works: in the daguerreotype the image is only seen when one passes before it. You see the ghost image in the shadow of your own reflection. These pics below do not do the objects justice, for until you stand in front of them, they appear as pearl-like, moon-like mirrors.


This is Ghost of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum #1, 2008.


This the Killing tree against which executioners beat children, 2008.

The daguerreotype itself, as a medium, serves perfectly—as vague as memories, unclear, wavering in the changing reflection of the viewer's breathing. I found the experience of standing in front of them profoundly moving—the image of the dead, or the torture site, clarifying only against my own living body.

And then I turned and caught sight of the butterflies. In three frames, each with a leaf-portrait—faces are brought forward out of the shadows of anonymous history and printed on fallen leaves—and a butterfly, a sacrifice to the dead.


Iridescence of life #6, 2008, chlorophyll print, butterfly specimen & resin.

Walking, reflecting on the weighty experience of Binh Danh's transformative work, I go a few doors down the street and check in at the Marx & Zavattero Gallery. Boy howdy, an insect of another color. Just goes to show you it takes all kinds.

Paul Paiement paints insect-gadget hybrids with scientific precision in watercolor and egg tempera. Paiement is a popular-with-the-press painter, but not one to get on the band wagon, I gotta say I found a serious lack of oxygen in the room like when you fly too high. Pop! oh shucks, the balloon burst and here I am on the ground again.
Paiement is interested in imaging life forms in context of the technological which is to say he is interested in cyborgs, the fusion of the organic and inorganic. The Marx & Zavattero press release says these paintings provide optical amusement as well. Hmm. About as much amusement as synthetic sugar. Far too laboratorial for me.


This is Hybrids H - Hyalophora Xboxcontrolerae watercolor on paper, with attached bits ( “Ben Day dot/half tone patterns”), approximately 20 inches all around.

More Than Just Coping

The sage returns to the original: a block of wood. A block of wood can be made into tools, but tools cannot be made into a block of wood.—Mencius

Before a block of wood is split, it can take any shape. Once it is split, it cannot be round if it is square. It cannot be straight if it is curved. Lao-Tzu tells us to avoid being split. Once we are split, we can never return to our original state.—Sung Ch'ang-Hsing

Of course, it is an artist's (read: human) natural inclination to make things—to split wood, nail it, build it.

It's a complicated business determining What's natural? When is it nature and when is it human? But certainly the split is felt and it is uncomfortable.

In Journey to the Lower World, Marcus Coates takes a shamanic journey on behalf of residents soon to be displaced from their high-rise apartment building. He doesn't find them a protector as hoped, but receives a healing image: a bird extends its wing to show its feathers are separate, not joined together. They are split, not whole. Coates suggests the residents need to band together. I'd suggest they return to their original state.

This unadorned video is part of the fantastic, complex group show at David Cunningham Projects, SF, Trying to Cope with Things that Aren't Human (Part One). Ian Brown out of England (and a member of the juxtapositioning Common Culture) guest curates the show and edits the accompanying book of (mostly) text-works. Journey is the lynchpin of the show and it's philosophical intent. Nothing better conveys the range of emotions caused by the split than the handful of residents trying to cope with the extraordinary manifestation of the non-human right there in in front of them in the innocuous person of Marcus Coates. (Albeit Marcus Coates dressed in full stag skin, complete with rack of horns.) The witnesses to the ritual are at turns nervous, giggling, astonished, serious, and seemingly embarrassed for the hooting and squawking man twirling in their living room.


British NeoHooDoo.

It seems to me we are in general confused by our relation to the "natural" world as much as we are embarrassed by our animality. And then there are those of us feeling alternately guilty or hostile for our collective creations, especially the technological kind. Thus the split and the effort to cope.

One response to guilt and uncomfortableness is to retreat to the meditation mat to redress our imbalance and return to our original nature (as prescribed by Lao Tzu and countless Zen teachers). On the other hand... Another option: get cynical, sarcastic—something smarty-pants humans do when confronted by the nervous-making. The international artists in this group show, happily—oh what a relief—grapple gently with the non-human and mostly make light—with a bit of irony and whimsy. Ian Brown's VW Golf, for instance, parked out front and labeled eventually I will rust and die/ before I go I will take some of you with me. Or is that not irony? Perhaps just too true.

Certainly the works in the show made me happy. The aged parents' deadpan response to living with a new technology in Annika Ström's video Min Mobil/My Mobile made me laugh. Disarming interviews uncovering cell-phone habits (under the pillow, in the closet) spliced with mobile-moments—daily disruptions to animal-like face-to-face, body-to-body contact—showed just how pressed we are, to the wall, by our own invention. Her text-painting Please remove me from your mailing list speaks to the same point.

And then there's Alex Pearl who creates his own cast of characters and plays (while holed up in a hotel room or gallery space). To play is not to complain; is in fact a psychologically healthy response to stress, or at least that's how Jung explained his periodic retreats to play with pebbles on the sea shore.




Pearl makes fuzzy little films of his curious robots: bowls of ping pong balls inching across the room on stilt-like legs, duct-taped square guy clamoring on a pillow, beetle-bug like things scuttling into each other and across the floor. These films are a glimpse into a surreal happenstance world and are completely engaging.



This is Study for Earthwalker (Caribou) one of three Lambda prints on display by Heather and Ivan Morison. They are part of a larger project that, as I understand it, looks at our study of natural history (these caribou are stuffed and on display at the American Natural History Museum) though the lens of a (fictional) alien culture. That's otherness twice removed.

And then, last week, the card, one of a thousand, arrived from England. The Morisons have been sending out bulk mailings of cards since 2001. They're always the same, plain white square cards, 135mm x 135mm, with text printed on one side, sent anonymously to a personal or gallery list. The card reads:

I used to love her, but look what she's done.
I hate her. I hate her.

[in fine print]
Tasmania

The cards used to relay something discovered in their garden project. Something like:

Today Ivan Morison planted six hundred and sixty four bulbs in his garden

And then as things evolved, the cards would report something altogether different:

Chinese citizen Zhou Peikun and his wife have been breeding pigs for many years. Tonight he will stab her twice, attend to the swine and then strangle himself with a silk thread. The couple had no other occupation.
Songinskhairkhan district, Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia

I must say, even though that was a clearly distressing story, I felt just as jarred as I read the painful relational turn printed on the card I received. A couple of very effective lines.

In relation to the show, they make me think of two things. First, these lines remind me of Richard T Walker's incredible dialogues which run on just this kind of love/hate hinge. For this show he also produced a letter to be read accompanied by a soaring instrumental soundtrack. His locution is more long-winded than two lines, but I'll share this: The letter ends, "But I also feel that it is my duty to inform you of what could have been." What might have been is always such heady stuff.

The Book

The other thing the Morisons' text reminds me is to say something about the book produced in conjunction with the show. The artists I've mentioned ('cept Coates) each have texts in the publication, and these also happened to be the pieces that resonated with me the most.

Annika Ström's usual statement paintings are here extended entries in block print. They are personal poignant struggles in the busyness of the every-day.

In his introduction, (which is a surprisingly comprehensive inditement of the uncertain position we find ourselves, betwixt and between nature and the human-made), Ian Brown makes the point that "we often hear ourselves 'escaping to' or find ourselves in nature 'getting away from it all'." Get away or get it together. This is one of Stöm's texts:

A long walk. A long rapid
walk. A rapid walk
collecting my thoughts.
Get my thoughts together.
My head together. A long
rapid walk to clear my
head and get my thoughts
together. A long rapid
walk to get my head
together and get all in
place. A long fresh
uplifting walk to get my
thoughts together and get
me focused. A long walk
to get myself together
and get my thoughts
together. A long walk

A series of diary entries by Alex Pearl called Trains excerpts from Alex Pearl is not in Antarctic (which is funny in itself) concludes,

On my way home a woman sitting opposite me was trying to learn Hebrew and reading Psalms. One line read: 'My zeal wears me out.'

That just about sums up the dilemma of making an effort on behalf of art and relationship—or sex at any rate.

There are two first-person entries by the Morisons, one about a tree being felled, and the other about running away and the tension-filled encounters on the way away. Like Pearl, the writer is sensitive to the ugly little hotel, on edge with strangers, and then there's the anxiety of going home, or not. The piece ends with a disturbing near mishap on an escalator, the moving staircase that never stops. There's a sense of anxious fragility these pieces all share.

Richard T Walker is, on the other hand, standing still in his printed piece. Standing still, caught in the moment of holding on (and what that signifies about attachment and togetherness) at the same time as needing to let go. That this precarious moment, with all his signature multifarious particular dialog about it, concerns, in fact, the point in time when he is impelled to let go a leaf (as in the appendage of a plant) in order to scratch an itch is, well, just perfectly, neurotically, wonderful. His discrimination of the layers in the immediate present reveals relational communication between himself and his body, his skin and hands, his hands and the other, the other and the morning, the morning and curtains, etc., etc,. "Although talkative, the itch didn't have a lot to say." And yet, and yet...

I am not sure if an accidental scratch arrived before the itch, and the itch had then taken advantage of the situation, or whether the itch had instigated the whole event merely to distract you and I from whatever might have been.

Walker isn't going to let us get off thinking that there is a split between Things and Humans, let alone anything else. The world is alive and conspires to engage (or disengage) us at every turn. We just need to pay attention!

I loved this show (can you tell?)! There was so much interesting thoughtfulness packed into this—and I haven't even mentioned Mariele Neudecker's resin mountains in water tanks...



This is Heaven, the Sky (as installed in the Singapore Biennale). "Heaven; the sky" is a secondary definition of the noun cope. A perfect metaphor for the show, these humans contending with the issue. Just so, weightiness, under the surface, and the surfaces, water and glass, reflecting, refracting, setting up new images, and meanwhile the water changing, clouding—a whole new world. A really fine show: three cheers! Drinks all around!


Taoist commentary, trans. Red Pine (Bill Porter), 1996.
Coates pic courtesy Facebook.
Morison pic courtesy of Danielle Arnaud Gallery.
Neudecker pic from ArtNet.
The book (recommended) is available via the David Cunningham Projects gallery.