A.R.T.I.S.T. S.T.A.T.E.M.E.N.T., 2011

Being a fan of Tim and Eric, and ridiculous and annoying stuff in general, when I found Dave Greber’s The Eleuthromaniacs, I was thrilled. Dave was surprised when I inquired about it, describing the series as “universally disliked by everyone who ever saw it” and told me that it was rejected by almost every film festival except Indie Grits in Columbia, South Carolina. “It’s failures were the reason I became a visual artist.” In 2009, Dave shifted his focus away from the festival scene and commercial viability. He began seeking out spaces to exhibit his work as video installations.

Idea, 2010

I’m excited, 2010 was his first installation which he describes as “a reality show purgatory.” It’s looping and repetitious dialogue inspired more loops, presenting absurd philosophy as collaged ads in his Primer, a 3-channel installation. One of two installations this year, Interior Deterious, a collaboration with Andrea Ferguson, was written about by Doug MacCash of the Times-Picyune who saw the exhibit as part of our 21st century challenge to “reconcile our craving for digital magic and our nostalgia for old- fashioned tactile hand craft.” May’s Art Forum presents a review of Spaces at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, featuring the work of rising artist collectives in the St. Claude Avenue area, and includes Greber’s parody of his own collective, The Front: on Display, 2012.

Dave Greber, Rise From Your Grave, Interior Deterious, 2012

Is it a contradiction to poke fun at the art world, you know, being an artist?

No, I don’t think it is a contradiction, rather a responsibility of the artist to critique the art-world, as it is an extension of our corrupt societal and institutional structures in general. But, I actually feel extremely grateful that there is still a “vocation” (contemporary artist) in our society where it is acceptable to channel wild spirits and are encouraged think as free as possible, albeit, as long as you can keep your shit together enough to act like an intellectual some of the time.

What is your relationship to the commercial world? Is it okay to love tv?

I worked as a freelance video producer and made local commercials for advertising agencies for a few years after college. That world was so dark. I think when you are in advertising, [you] embrace hatred. Freelancers in advertising are like atheist mercenaries fighting psychic wars in the name of gods they don’t believe in, against unarmed civilians who don’t even know there is a war going on. I felt so much guilt when I made commercials. I had to totally change my paradigm of what I imagined life was about in order cope with my actions day-to-day. Needless to say, “it’s not for me.”

It’s okay to love TV as long as you can also love yourself, your neighbors, and [the] source which gives us life.

You are a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, and you were selected for the Oxford American’s 100 under 100 superstars of southern art in their latest issue. Could you tell me what it is to be a southerner, or to make southern art?

I didn’t start making art until I lived in the South. I felt entitled to start making and showing my work because there was a really cool visual arts scene already happening here in New Orleans. I joined The Front, my art collective, through an open call, which opened up my first opportunity to exhibit my own work in a gallery. From my shows at The Front I was invited to be in Prospect 1.5 New Orleans and high-end commercial galleries like Arthur Roger Gallery, all in the course of a few years. I have always been supported by the community here. I guess I’ll never know for sure, but I don’t feel like it couldn’t have happened anywhere else.

Stilllives, 2011

Rigo 23. Autonomous InterGalactic Planetarium, 2009-12; installation view, REDCAT, Los Angeles, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Pedro Pica Piedra, Beto, Santiago Marcial, Monserrat Blanco, Gabriela, Marcos Sanchez, Domingo Santiz Ruiz, Mia Rollow, Paulina, Adrian Quiroz, Manuel Hidalgo, Ivan Pablo Soria, Pablo Milan, Miguel Hidalgo, Caleb Duarte, Jacobo Lagos, Erwin, Salvador. Photo: Scott Groller.

The Portuguese artist Ricardo Gouveia, or Rigo 23, might be best known for his series of larger-than-life, one-way-sign-inspired murals, painted on buildings across San Francisco, where the artist has lived since the 1980s. For the better part of the last decade, however, Rigo 23 has produced a series of projects with underserved and underrepresented communities. The latest of these, Programa Espacial Autónomo InterGalactico (Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program), has just docked at REDCAT, CalArt’s theater and gallery space in downtown Los Angeles.

The culmination of more than three years of coordination and labor by Rigo 23 and artisans from Chiapas, Mexico, as well as members of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), Programa Espacial represents a convergence of multiple worlds.¹ When Rigo 23 met with the members of the Good Government Junta of Morelia, Chiapas, to propose a collaborative art project between himself and artists from the region, he asked, “What would happen if they got an invitation to attend an intergalactic meeting somewhere other than the Milky Way; how would they travel?”² The junta members accepted this proposal but made it clear that the project was not a priority and would only be accomplished if he won the support of a local artist.

Because Programa Espacial is a collaborative project between an artist and various indigenous communities, and because those communities are under the jurisdiction of the EZLN, the exhibit brings up questions of commodification and appropriation, but these questions seem to have been of lesser interest to Rigo 23 than the question of positionality. The spiraling path a viewer takes through the exhibit evokes (within the limits of California’s fire code) the curve of a snail’s shell, creating interplay between a viewer’s sense of being sympathetically “inside” the EZLN looking out, or an outsider looking in.³

Read more.

Phyllida Barlow, untitled: 21 arches, 2012, Polystyrene, cement, scrim, paint & varnish, variable dimensions, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

The majority of her sculptures are towering structures that dwarf the spectator as if one were standing in a forest. Barlow dilutes the nature of her mundane media by her exquisite use of color, whether included by virtue of fabric, electrical tape or spray paint. For siege, Barlow exhibits her characteristically massive structures as similar to pieces I have seen previously, such as untitled: 21 arches (2012) and untitled: crushed boxes (2012). In pieces such as untitled: balcony (2012) and untitled: broken stage (2012) however, she adds more of a tangible architectural thread that differ slightly from her conceptual-based sculptures. Her work mimics the urban environment in both materiality and the nature of the imposing structures that swallow – or impede upon – the viewer.

Phyllida Barlow, untitled: crushed boxes, 2012, Polystyrene, cement, scrim, paint & varnish, variable dimensions, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

With pieces such as untitled: crushed boxes (2012) Barlow depicts weight through the manner in which her boxes pile upon a fabric cushion, thin or bulging in parts, depicting the sensation of being crushed. Her work maneuvers within a certain corporeal consciousness similar to the work of Eva Hesse or Robert Morris in which the weight – or the interior – of the body is made manifest through the use of material. With aspects of both Arte Povera and Minimalism, Barlow’s work is sensational in its rawness, and though I rather missed the space at Hauser & Wirth London that added an irreplaceable dimension to her work, Barlow’s structures are not to be missed in the immense setting of the New Museum’s spaces.

On the third floor, Tacita Dean’s (b. 1965, England) exhibition entitled Five Americans explores the theme of preservation and memoriam through filmmaking as it intersects with various artistic mediums such as painting, writing and dance. By way of 16mm films, Dean features five influential American artists spanning several generations: Julie Mehretu, Cy Twombly, Leo Steinberg, Claes Oldenburg and Merce Cunningham. Works such as Edwin Parker (2011) and Manhattan Mouse Museum (2011) follow artists Cy Twombly and Claes Oldenburg respectively in their studios, spaces that despite the aura attached to these renowned artists by name are places of quotidian banality of comings and goings.

Tacita Dean, Manhattan Mouse Museum, 2011, 16mm film, color, optical sound, 16 min, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London

There is an aspect of prescience in Dean’s works, as each are bound by a common thematic thread that deals with the notion of expiration. For instance in The Line of Fate (2011), Dean sits with art historian Leo Steinberg as he finishes his last book about Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo before his death months later, a fact unknown at the time when making the film. This is a similar case with Edwin Parker in which Dean films Cy Twombly in his studio amongst what would be his final artworks during his last months alive. Even in her other works albeit more subtle, the theme of preservation becomes contingent upon the cognitive artistic process that she poignantly captures.

The Parade presented by Nathalie Djurberg (b. 1978, Sweden) with music by Hans Berg (b. 1978, Sweden) is found in the museum’s next-door space ‘Studio 231’. In an eccentric field of dazzling puppetry, a parade it is. A snaking trail made up of hundreds of exotic and fictitious birds scatter the floor under spotlights, frozen in mid-preen and warble. Each bird installation – whether sparrow or human-sized – has the craftsmanship of a Julie Taymor theater prop, with each muslin feather painted in an ombré of fanciful hues. Alongside her puppets, five animations are projected on the walls playing to the discordant melodies of Hans Berg’s compositions.

The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg, 2012, exhibition view: New Museum

Immediately upon entering the space, the menagerie comes alive with the eerie tinkering of chimes, a soundtrack that gives life to the nightmarish aspect of Djurberg’s mad animals and sinister animations. Her animation videos typically depict women as the central character in an anti-heroic role, often times as victims of absurd cruelty flecked with sexual overtones. Her videos feature handmade puppets both animals and humans, crudely rendered from clay, fabric, string and dolls hair, with lumps, bumps, spidery limbs and clownish faces. The Parade as a body of work exists in a similar abject vein as her various other works, yet in this exhibition she focuses on the avian rituals of flocking, mating and pageantry. Her videos portray explicit aspects of cruelty, betrayal and greed, in which her characters – both animal and human – play out instances of physical and psychological savagery.

The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg, 2012, exhibition view: New Museum

Djurberg’s work is brilliant in its manner of transparency. I am taken with the way in which she casts a light on the undesirable or abject aspects of human and animal behavior as the cynosure of her métier. And as usual, Berg’s musical compositions coupled with Djurberg’s claymation videos and theatrical installations presents a captivating mastery that dutifully emanates from their projects time and time again.

Phyllida Barlow’s siege runs through June 24^th, Tacita Dean’s Five Americans runs through July 1^st and The Parade by Nathalie Djurberg with Hans Berg runs through August 26^th. For more information visit the New Museum’s site.

Spread from Paul Thek notebook #63, 1974; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph © Estate of George Paul Thek; Photograph Jörg Lohse

As part of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, approaches to translate the subjective experience into the artistic process were explored in In the Shadow of the Hand and Back to the Things Themselves. Questions were raised on the nuances and distinctions between notions of the subjective, personal and self-indulgent. These borders disintegrate in the exhibition Paul Thek – ‘If you don’t like this book you don’t like me.’, on show at The Modern Institute till 2 June 2012, where fragments of the life of an artist, as narrated through pages of notebooks, become a part of the works on display.

Paul Thek; Untitled (cityscape with twin towers), 1972; Acrylic on canvas; 241.5 x 165 cm; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph Ruth Clark

In the past two decades, there has been an explosion of exhibitions and publications on Paul Thek, perhaps as part of an effort to re-insert him into the history of art. Though well-received in Europe during the 1970s, he died in relative obscurity in 1988 after his return to the United States. Thek’s name is often cited in relation to the Technological Reliquaries or “meat pieces”, a series of works made in the 1960s where body parts appearing as chunks of flesh were presented in geometric vitrines, a revelry of one’s fleshly mortality within the confines of the composed exterior of minimalism. While these sculptures were solid and dense, he also made works from ephemeral materials with collaborators, creating immersive environments that lasted for the duration of the exhibition. While little documentation remains of these installations, about 80 of Thek’s notebooks were retrieved and carefully preserved after his passing.

Paul Thek - If you don’t like this book you don’t like me. Installation view, The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph Ruth Clark

The Technological Reliquaries are materially absent in the show. Knowledge of it is acquired through the supplementary reading materials provided. The artist’s notebooks, usually occupying this secondary position for signposts to an artist’s intentions, instead forms the core of the show, presented in the main artery of the gallery space alongside several of his paintings, and photographs by Peter Hujar in the gallery’s upper level.

Bust of Tomb Figure (Paul Thek) 1967/2010; Pigmented ink print; Sheet 51 x 40.6 cm, image 47 x 32 cm; Photograph Peter Hujar; Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York

His notebooks reveal repeated scribbles of self-motivational phrases to meticulous lists and copying of religious texts.  Illustrations, drawings and watercolor works suggest a mind filled with both doubt and idealism, on the possibility of fulfillment within one’s earthly existence and a continual search for a higher spiritual being. Enclosed in vitrines, most of the notebooks are spread open to specific pages. Several remain shut. While the open pages disclose paradoxes, exuberance and anxieties that intimate the intentions behind the hybrid approach to the form and style of his works, it is the pages withheld from view that provokes one to consider the subjective voice of the hand behind how one is to like the book, and Paul Thek.

Cover of Paul Thek Notebook #68, 1978; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph © Estate of George Paul Thek; Photograph Jörg Lohse

TENT in Rotterdam asked fifteen artists to think about the concept of a secret garden and make a work for their current exhibition. They interpreted the secret garden not just as a hideaway or a place of contemplation, imagination, mystery and beauty, but also a place of debauchery, derelict and danger. The secret garden is shown as a place that evokes sensuality – brilliantly depicted in the stylishly pornographic images by  Schilte en Portielje – or the deserted home of a cannibalistic tribe.

The secret element of these gardens is taken very literally by Diederik Klomberg, in the work Kura Di e Mente/Garden of the Mind, 2012, which consists of plant pots, mirrors and hallucinogenic drugs. This three-dimensional installation uses light effects to unveil a hidden breeding ground for mind-expanding experiences and shows the secret garden as the kind garden you find in attics and basements, and occasionally in newspapers after a police raid. It is, obviously, the kind of secret garden you’d expect to find in Rotterdam. In the same room is a video animation by Olphaert den Otter, entitled Drawn, 2012. It reminded me of a conversation I recently had with a friend, about a book in which bacteria are seen as the species at the top of the food chain which will eventually kill and survive all other living animals (my conversations with friends are generally quite cheerful). The hand-drawn video animation shows the slow, natural changes of a desertlike piece of land. There are some remnants of human presence – skulls and bones – but generally it shows the planet after human life has gone.

Another work worth mentioning is the spectacular installation by Guiseppe Licari, called Humus, for which the roots of several medium sized trees were cut off and attached to the ceiling. The lights in the room are dimmed, and walking around the room it feels like you’re underground, like a mole making it’s way through the soil. There is something sinister and exciting about being in the underbelly of the forest, surrounded by the roots of dead trees.

These gardens are fantastical places, literally gardens of the mind. They show the dungeons of the artist’s imagination, and make you walk through their nightmares and dreams. They’re brilliant for a thoughtful meander, but they’re not great places for cups of tea.

40,000 bottle rockets make for a lot of noise and a lot of glare. Especially when they come hurtling toward your face. On April 7, 2012, artist Cai Guo-Qiang — known for his gunpowder drawings and performative “explosion events” — opened Sky Ladder at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary location with just such an experience. Called Mystery Circle, the event was pure spectacle. Over a thousand people showed up to watch Guo-Qiang use the rockets to burn images of crop circles and a Byzantine alien onto MOCA’s side.

Danielle Sommer: This is your first West Coast exhibition?

Cai Guo-Qiang: The first solo exhibition on the West Coast.

DS: Did that influence how you conceived the work? Is there anything specific about Los Angeles or the Western U.S. involved?

CGT: So back in the mid-nineties, when I was about to move from Japan to the U.S., I had a friend who was the editor of a major art magazine who told me that the West Coast is the closest place to the universe in the world. There’s a lot of hi-tech development, and also the aerospace industry is here.

DS: You’ve said that the role of art is to provide a distance for people to see certain issues and certain events – and that that distance is necessary to find the meaning below the surface. What it is about art that creates that distance? What is the meaning below the surface of this work?

Crop Circles, computer rendering for the exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: Sky Ladder, 2012, courtesy Cai Studio.

CGT: Because the exhibition is titled Sky Ladder, there is a sense of distance between humans on Earth, and the universe and outer space. It’s also a pictorial review of my art career and the past works and projects I’ve done through the years.  With the crop circle installation, it’s a reversal of the normal perspective, where we humans are looking from outer space onto Earth.

DS: You talked about your first rocket painting being a tiny canvas in your studio. Do you still have a studio practice? Do you do things that are just for your own eyes?

CGT: I still have a studio, but when I mentioned that I was working with that canvas thirty years ago, it was in my hometown in China. Of course, now my studio is located in New York, but it’s where I conceive ideas or make sketches. When it comes to using gunpowder, because you need a permit for that, we go out to Brookhaven and Long Island.

"Desire for Zero Gravity," 2012, gunpowder on canvas, 340.36 x 1066.8 cm (134 x 420 in.), commissioned by The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, photo by Joshua White, courtesy The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

DS: Jeffery Dietch said that he considers your work both spectacular and intimate.  How do you feel when you’re experiencing it?

CGT: A lot of times very anxious — very excited in anticipating the event. When that happens, I feel at one with the audience.

DS: We all jumped back together.

CGT: I got hit by a few rockets!

DS: I saw that!

CGT: You saw that?

DS: I did.

Sky Ladder is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, through July 30, 2012.

Louise Bourgeois working on Sleep II in Italy, 1967. Photo: Studio Fotografico, Carrara. © The Easton Foundation.

In 2004, two boxes of what have been labelled Bourgeois’ ‘psychoanalytical writings’ were discovered by her assistant in her Chelsea home, and a further two in 2010. These thousands of loose-leaf sheets of paper recorded Bourgeois’ inner conflicts, dream recordings and self-probing analysis, commencing during the period when the artist began undergoing intense psychoanalysis at the hands of Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, a follower of Sigmund Freud.

Louise Bourgeois, loose sheet, 13 September 1957, 26.7 x 20.3 cm. LB-0219, Louise Bourgeois Archive, New York. © The Easton Foundation.

With these in hand, curator Phillip Laratt-Smith published a volume of Bourgeois’ writings, and conceived the exhibition, Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed. Currently tucked away in residential North London, the works could not have found a more suitable site than The Freud Museum – a home firmly entrenched in psychoanalytic history, where both its patriarchal namesake, and his daughter Anna, remained until their deaths.

With Bourgeois’ writings, drawings and sculptures housed throughout Freud’s former possessions and collections, a challenging and quite perilous dialogue is created, laying the groundwork for a very dangerous obsession that may inextricably fuse Bourgeois to Freud.

Louise Bourgeois's bronze Janus Fleuri, 1968, suspended over Freud's couch at The Freud Museum, London. Courtesy The Easton Foundation. Photo: Ollie Harrop. © Louise Bourgeois Trust.

Hanging above Freud’s psychoanalytic couch, the original brought with him from Vienna, is a work by Bourgeois often referred to as a self portrait of the artist. The bronze sculpture Janus Fleuri is a ambiguous form with connotations of sexuality, metamorphosis, and struggle. Swaying above the place where free association was born, Janus Fleuri looks both to the past and to the future, and as Laratt-Smith has argued, embodies the artist’s Oedipal deadlock -  an unresolvable struggle between Bourgeois, her father and her mother, stalemated by her mother’s death.

Louise Bourgeois, Cell XXIV (Portrait), 2001, steel, stainless steel, glass, wood and fabric, 177.8 x 106.7 x 106.7 cm. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth and Cheim & Read. Photo: Christopher Burke. © Louise Bourgeois Trust.

Bourgeois’ work functions as an expression of her psychic unconscious – a way of giving form to anxieties she could not articulate, which she then subsequently analysed in her writings. While Freud focused on ‘the word’ – translating thoughts and dreams into articulations – Bourgeois moved freely between the two. Her writings reveal struggles, at times debilitating, to define herself within the roles of mother, daughter, wife and artist. And works like Cell XXIV (Portrait), embody this struggle. With three heads and three mirrors, Cell XXIV presents a multiplious identity further broken down by its external reflections – the kind of fragmented view of the self that Bourgeois struggled with throughout her life.

But it is this struggle, and her torment, that fueled her work. This Bourgeois understood well. Speaking specifically about Freud, Bourgeois wrote:

‘The truth is that Freud did nothing for artists, or for the artist’s problem, the artist’s torment - to be an artist involves some suffering. That’s why artists repeat themselves – because they have no access to a cure … the need of artists remains unsatisfied, as does their torment.’

While Bourgeois embraced Freudian psychoanalysis, she was aware of its limitations for herself as an artist. Her writings were not an attempt to cure herself or ease her suffering, but were rather used as fuel for the fire. And it is here, with Freud and Bourgeois under the same roof, that we find ourselves immersed in the realm of a very dangerous obsession.

Sarah Forrest / Virginia Hutchison, In the Shadow of the Hand: cymbal (cast lead cymbal on stand). Image courtesy of artists.

These interviews will be published in two editions–check back in with us tomorrow for our interview with the artists from Back to the Things Themselves. This post features In the Shadow of the Hand which is on show at Market Gallery and presents new work by Sarah Forrest (SF) and Virginia Hutchison (VH). Reflecting on the process of evaluation and critique in the development of artistic practice, both artists create texts for each other that are cast in lead. The lead is then melted and recast into an object by each artist in response to the text, forming part of a series of exchanges exploring subjective responses to an objective call, and the relationship between object and text.

MC: Could you talk a bit about your individual practice? I saw Sarah’s work in the exhibition P is for Protagonist and couldn’t help but think of that exhibition when I entered gallery 1.

Virginia Hutchison, Excerpts from 7 sunsets (temporary intervention with gold leaf, IOTA public art projects, Inverness, 2010). Image courtesy of artist.

VH: A lot of my work is site or context-specific interventions in the public realm. Quite often it is objective or brief-led. Recent projects have required interaction between the work and people, and an exchange of skills. What has become more important for me has been the dialogue in the making of the work, for example with people installing the work and having conversations about the space and the work.  Through the conversations, I’ve become interested in the different roles, of whether I am the artist, or they are the artists because they help to make the work come to full cycle. That was what made us decide to collaborate. Both of us were dealing with relationships between viewer, artist, object, audience, and how all these roles shift. I was at the point when I was really quite keen to just reflect on all the work that I was doing.

SF: My practice is much more gallery-based and I do creative writing with texts published independently of the visual work. I was in an exhibition at Transmission Gallery and my starting point for my work was the voices of objects. In the run-up to the exhibition, I was undertaking a lot of research on the voices of objects and I became so lost in theory that I almost lost myself. The work I presented, Part 1: for the voice, was a white sculpture narrating with a pair of headphones. Everything had gone white, and it was about a voice that was missing. By that point, I had a desire to move away from intellectualizing, come back to a much more subjective space, and find different ways to talk about a creative practice. That was when we began speaking about evaluation and critique, in relation to the art object. I am interested in creative writing as a response to a visual experience and I think that’s when our conversation started.

Sarah Forrest, Part 1: for the voice, (2010), installation with a framed text, a monitor playing a video, a white sculpture made of plaster, paper, wire mesh and gloss paint which had headphones emitting a female voice attached to it. Duration 10.23 minutes. Exhibited in Days, a three-person show at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow. Image courtesy of artist.

VH: I haven’t done a lot of creative writing myself but what I like is how it made me think differently about the projects I was doing. I thought that it was important to find a way to present a narrative of the conversations I was having. When we started off, I thought it was going to be very linear, when we had text, object, text, object, and one would follow one from the other. In reality, when responding to Sarah’s text, I was thinking of my text, and I was also thinking of what object she might be making in response. So many things started to feed in, including our conversations.

SF: We started off with texts that each of us had written or appropriated that were cast into lead letters in Edinburgh. We would respond to each other’s text with an object.  The size and weight of the object was dictated by the size and weight of the texts. It was a really simple relationship between text and an object, and a playful way to work and structure a collaboration. There was a point when I was making a symbol that was in response to the the the and I was asking for advice. We spoke about ideas of repetition and rhythm, the the the being like a stutter almost, and talked about the idea of making an object like a stutter. We began to collaborate in the making of the object.

Sarah Forrest / Virginia Hutchison, In the Shadow of the Hand: the the the (typeset text on paper). Image courtesy of artists.

VH: Even in the making of the work, we had to share our skills quite a lot. What I found healthy yet scary was letting go of ownership of something, as well as authorship. Although I know what texts I wrote and what objects I made, because Sarah has a text that sits with my object  – is it mine or her’s? Is it somebody else’s?

MC: I was interested in the decisions that both of you had decided to take, in relation to what you considered physical and immaterial within the exhibition space. The materiality of the objects could be very seductive just by looking at it. Yet these vanish into a two-dimensional screen. I personally found the texts very three-dimensional. One of the texts had instructions for a person to inhale and exhale and it made me feel my own body.

VH: From the standpoint of public art that I work in, issues of permanence are things I am always considering. What is permanent or temporary? It could be a day or 20 years. I like the swopping round, of the text becoming the object, and the object becoming quite two-dimensional. Once an object disappears, it has a different narrative.

SF: What is it that sticks with you when you’ve left the exhibition? What is the echo of the object and how do you narrativize that memory of the object?

MC: I think that because I’m unable to move around an object, it changes how my narrative of an experience is made. When the object is presented on a screen, perhaps it changes the way you remember it?

VH: I think definitely. Although it is projected on a lead screen, almost as the last remaining object…

SF: … and the size of the screen relates to the weight of the object.

Sarah Forrest / Virginia Hutchison, In the Shadow of the Hand (gallery image). Image courtesy of artists.

MC: An objective framework has a determined set of values. In shifting from objective to subjective evaluation, are there still values? For example, when you were talking about the conversations that had occurred, are you suggesting that for any kind of critique, there has to be a relationship between two people, or an emotional involvement?

SF: I think it’s a part of communication. For something to have value, there has to be a sharing of what is important and some kind of agreement on what things are important, which is what has happened in this whole process.

VH: I think you’re always going to have a relationship with somebody whom you’re critiquing or evaluating a piece of work. If it’s a media-driven thing then there is definitely a separation. I think that’s the problem – there is a separation when you are not encountering somebody on a face-to-face, real time situation. When you think about the context of making work, it might reveal a lot about the people that create it and how they have conversation with folk. Are they dominant in a conversation and does it reflect in their work? Does their work allow people to put their own selves into it in some way?

SF: That was always a concern with the project because it’s a call-and-response between us. We had to think about how it is interesting to someone else and not just about our personal relationship. The installation became important as a space where you can read and you can sit. I was quite aware of not becoming quite closed and this feels like an experimental exhibition. It’s the first time I’ve collaborated on an exhibition and the work, when presented, still feels very active. As soon as you present something as an exhibition it takes on a position, as a thing in the world.

Tatsuyo Miyajima, 'Death Clock' (detail) 500 black and white framed photographs, 3 LCD screens, 3 programmed Mac minis Image courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia © the artist

The revamped Museum of Contemporary Art Australia opened its doors with Marking Time, an exhibition exploring time, duration and mortality.

Jim Campbell’s ‘Last Day in the Beginning of March 2003’, a reimagining of the last 24 hours in his brother’s life, is a transfixing experience. One enters the dark space into the sound of rain.  Pools of flickering light illuminate wall texts identifying single moments such as the slamming of a car door, windshield wipers, the sound of a car radio, the lighting of a cigarette. Apparently random, banal – even meaningless, until they are connected by other texts identifying moments of nausea, anxiety, and the monitoring of medication levels to become a compelling, mysterious narrative. Lights rhythmically dim and brighten, suggesting the ways that memories of traumatic events blur over time, becoming disconnected and fragmentary.

Tatsuo Miyajima’s ‘Death Clock’ is chilling. 10,000 participants entered personal information in a ‘contract’ with the artist, nominating a time to die which activated their own ‘death clock’, an online countdown of their remaining seconds. 500 still images and 3 screens show the inexorable progression of each human life towards the inevitable. Like a 17^th century Vanitas, this work forces each viewer to confront their own mortality.

Tatsuyo Miyajima, 'Death Clock' (detail) 2011 - 2012, 500 black and white framed photographs, 3 LCD screens, 3 programmed Mac minis Image courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia © the artist

Katie Paterson worked with Osram to develop a unique bulb that emits light identical to a full moon. Consisting of 288 halogen lightbulbs with frosted, coloured shells, simulating the colour of the moon’s glow, and a single hanging lit bulb, ‘Light Bulb to Simulate the Moonlight’ is evocative rather than confrontational. If each bulb burned out one by one they would last for 66 years, the average human lifespan when Paterson made the work in 2008. Daniel Crook’s ‘time-slice’ video work ‘Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement)’ starts with an elderly man performing morning Tai Chi in a Shanghai park, and develops into an alternate reality where physical matter dissolves into a viscous digital abstraction. Time is stretched like toffee and the laws of physics appear entirely mutable.

Lindy Lee’s ‘weather drawings’ are suspended scrolls which have been exposed to fire and water. Works such as ‘Conflagrations from the End of Time’ reference the teachings of Buddhist masters who likened the universe to an infinite net. In some works intricate patterns are created by holes burned in the paper with a soldering iron, casting lacy shadows on the wall behind them. They are suggestive of the movement of constellations across night skies and the passage of rain and wind. Burnt and stained surfaces reveal the processes of their creation – Lee leaves her scrolls of paper outside in the rain and the sun allowing time and natural phenomena to make their marks.

Lindy Lee, 'Conflagrations from the End of Time', 2011, paper, fire, Chinese ink, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

In similar vein, Rivane Neuenschwander‘s ‘Continente – Nueven – Continent – Cloud’ consists of a false ceiling, lit from above, containing small fans and thousands of tiny white Styrofoam balls. Activated by timers, the fans blow the balls around the ceiling in great drifting clouds.  Audiences are invited to lie on the floor watching the slow movement which at times evokes ink dissolving into watercolour paper, or the movement of leaves or grasses in the wind,  suggesting the ephemerality and fragility of both the world we inhabit and ourselves.

Lindy Lee, 'Conflagrations from the End of Time' (detail) 2011, paper, fire, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

David Shrigley, How are you feeling today? (2012), billboard, 25 x 75 feet, courtesy of Anton Kern Gallery

Running alongside Tenth Avenue for approximately twenty blocks in Chelsea, The High Line has become a household term amongst Manhattanites since 2009 when it first became accessible as a public park. Since then – and especially within the last year – The High Line has ignited widespread murmur relating to its breathtaking architecture, imaginative urban integration and more recently its emergence as the local gallery district’s – if not New York’s – most imaginative sites for exhibiting contemporary art.  Opening April 19^th was The High Line’s first ever group exhibition entitled Lilliput which included the works of Oliver Laric, Alessandro Pessoli, Tomoaki Suzuki, Francis Upritchard, Erika Verzutti and Allyson Vieira. Alongside this exhibition, Uri Aran’s sound installation opened on the same day only then to be followed by Alison Knowles’ public performance Make a Salad on the 22^nd. David Shrigley’s How are you feeling? (2012), presented as a giant billboard over West 18^th Street, and Sturtevant’s Warhol Empire State (2012), a video projection that starts at dusk of Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) video, debuted earlier in the month to launch the Friends of the High Line’s 2012 Spring Art Program and High Line Commissions program for public art. The openings this month, surpassing the previous years in numbers of art pieces alone, has proven that this year’s arts program is making a vigorous effort to present art to the public with a bang.

Sturtevant, Warhol Empire State (2012), video projection, image courtesy of the artist

The High Line as we know it today exists upon the skeleton of a freight line that once was the manifestation of a public-private project called the West Side Improvement during the 1930s. However, that was the date that the freight lines were lofted 30 feet above street level after having existed as street-level railroad tracks some odd eighty years prior. During this time, The City and State of New York agreed to take on this massive industrial project due to the fact that Tenth Avenue became known as Death Avenue, a nickname indicative of the innumerable deaths caused between street traffic and the railroad. This was no small project, not least of all financially as it was quoted to be a $150 million dollar expenditure then, and that’s more than $2 billion dollars today.

Building the high line, November 20th 1932. Image courtesy of www.thehighline.org

Trains of food freight and both manufactured and raw goods ran until 1980 at which point the ensuing minimization of the railroad became obsolete due to redundancy and the upsurge of trucking transport. In the face of threatening demolition, Friends of the High Line was established in 1999 as a non-profit by Joshua David and Robert Hammond to preserve the historical lineage and neighborhood aura that the High Line had solidified. An all-star architectural and landscape design team made up of James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro (along with a large selection of horticulturists, gardeners, etc) was chosen in 2004 and by June 9^th 2009 the first section (Gansevoort Street to West 20^th Street) of The High Line as a public park opens, with the second section (West 20^th Street to West 30^th Street) to follow in 2011.

Allyson Vieira, Construction (Rampart) (2010), Bronze, 14 x 14 x 18.5 inches, courtesy of Laurel Gitlen Gallery, New York

Since 2009, The High Line has become known as a trendy jaunt-spot in Chelsea where the ultimate people-watching activities and pleasure strolling can be had. This year the public will see the launch of a program called High Line Commissions with the opening of the first ever group exhibition Lilliput to be held on The High Line. This exhibition will present the works of six artists working internationally with, as the title would suggest, small sculptures placed along The High Line’s pathway. This title is taken from Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels in which the imaginary country of Lilliput is home to gnome-sized people no bigger than six inches. The various diminutive sculptures are set within the various niches of landscape along the park walk and offer a sort of Easter-egg hunt of sorts, inviting the public to uncover the various works of art.

Pieces such as Allyson Vieira’s Construction (Rampart) (2012) respond to the local vegetation and ecology of the area with her pyramid of bronze cast paper cups that fill with rain or fallen leaves from the garden bed above. Other works such as The Seduction (2012) by Francis Upritchard are less so adapted for the localized flora but speak to the Lilliputian theme of fairyland idols with two miniature-sized apes frozen in an explorative embrace. Also apart of this spring’s High Line Commissions is Uri Aran’s sound installation Untitled (Good & Bad) (2012) provides a spoken list of arbitrarily categorized animals into “good” or “bad” that billows from gardens below. Coming in May, a much anticipated installation of Thomas Houseago’s sculpture Lying Figure will be on view under The Standard.

Francis Upritchard, The Seduction (2012), Bronze, 18 x 9 x 8 inches, Courtesy of Kate MacGarry, London

Friends of the High Line have initiated other programs such as the High Line Performances, High Line Billboard and High Line Channel that serve as varying avenues whereby art mediums can be exhibited. Opening on April 5^th, David Shrigley’s 25-by-75 foot billboard How are you feeling? presents a short dialogue in black and white speech bubbles, hovering over a parking lot at West 18^th Street. Shrigley’s dry and melancholy humor severs the socially fabricated fluff in monotonous conversation and pinpoints exactly what we all may be feeling but are too nervous to say: “I’m feeling very unstable and insecure […] I am in a bit of a rut creatively as well”.

This year’s itinerary for the High Line Performances will include performances by three female artists (Alison Knowles, Channa Horwitz and Simone Forti) on and around the High Line, the first of which was preformed last Sunday April 22^nd by Alison Knowles’ Fluxus score Make a Salad. Originally performed in Baltimore, Maryland in 1962 has been performed several times around the world and includes the preparation of a salad for a large group of people. Launching the High Line Performances program, Knowles’ piece included the preparation of locally sourced salad ingredients tossed from the upper level to the lower level of the walkway and then served to the public. Though it was a rather cold and rainy day, otherwise unpleasant to be frolicking out of doors to eat a salad, the performance was lively and ignited a grouping of people of all ages in an appropriately themed Earth Day get-together.

Alison Knowles, Make a Salad (1962–present), Image: Tate Modern, London (2008)

I have to applaud the work and organizational efforts of the Friends of the High Line for their inception of the public art programs, and not to mention their unmentioned but as equally remarkable endeavors in the realms of music and food. The High Line as a public park has provided the support for not only a exceptional pleasure destination, but also a cutting-edge platform for contemporary art. I am always fascinated with the seemingly pervasive dialogue relating to the inaccessibility of contemporary art and thus I have always been an advocate for the commissioning of public art. Public art, as inconspicuous or ostentatious it may be, has the power to engage a public (a cross section in a vast demographic) who may not otherwise seek out an interactive relationship with art. Pieces such as the ones mentioned above all own that quality of engagement: the characteristic of calling forth a questioning, a reflection or even a happenstance double take, and sometimes that’s all an art piece needs to fulfill its role in the social sphere.

Please visit  www.thehighline.org/art for a schedule of past, current and upcoming exhibitions and performances on The High Line and additional information on artists. Please visit the site for further information regarding The High Line’s events, public programs, memberships and history.

Zhan Wang, My Personal Universe, Video still, 2012. Image courtesy of UCCA, Beijing.

In The Savage Mind (1962), Claude Lévi-Strauss made a case for “the intrinsic value of a small-scale model” of art, legitimising the art of the miniature because it “compensates for the renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of intelligible dimensions”. The miniature or the microcosmic representation is, as Lévi-Strauss rationalised, a schematic reduction permitting immediate intelligibility, because it essentially constitutes a bona fide experience between viewer and work on a metaphorical level.

Zhan Wang, 2012, My Personal Universe, Installation and Video View. Photo: Courtesy of UCCA, Beijing.

My Personal Universe (2011-12) at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing was Chinese conceptual sculptor Zhan Wang’s endeavour to do just that, in a re-imagination of the first millisecond of the universe’s genesis to its present evolved state, articulating this momentous event in an exhibition through an artistic process whose scale seemed to mirror its colossal significance. As the dominant scientific explanation for the origin of the universe, the Big Bang theory hypothesises that all matter and energy existed in an infinitely small point of infinite density, and in an inexplicable moment, began to expand outward continuously, forming the vast cosmos as we know today. Drawn to the concept of initial states of being, Zhan sought to evoke the earliest moments of our universe through a carefully planned explosion of a boulder in China’s mountainous Shandong province, recording the blast and its aftermath in a two-minute film capturing the event in extreme slow motion. Collecting all 7000 fragments of pulverised rock, Zhan made stainless steel replicas of each one, suspending them in the exact formation in which they landed after exploding.

Zhan Wang, Singapore Tyler Print Institute, image courtesy of STPI.

Zhan’s Universe (2012) at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute is materially and thematically fashioned after My Personal Universe, employing – in a vastly scaled-down version – similar artistic processes and reiterations of the physical dimensions of shattered rocks. Lacking the flashy pizzazz of its predecessor and constrained by certain spatial parameters, the mode of production and the materials differ in this show; rocks were shattered with a sledgehammer instead of a dynamite, and later re-assembled as aluminium-coated replicas on paper slabs and on highly polished mirrors. The original rock fragments were pounded by hand into fine sediment and mixed with cotton pulp to produce a solid paper base; the resulting effect is one which reveals the natural mineral pigments of clay, slate and granite.

Zhan Wang, 小宇宙 My Universe 27, 2012 © Courtesy of Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

In both iterations, Zhan’s works encapsulate energy in its basest, most raw form at the moment it is discharged, serving as the genesis metaphor for the conceptualisation of art: the primordial, choatic sea of colliding ideas on which artistic process and practice are established. Universe is not a crystalline model of time or one that demands a fixed vision of scientific history; it is rather, focused on an infinitesimal moment that has no witnesses but about which countless speculations have abounded. Zhan’s works are also built on a premise that is inherently contradictory: he destroys only to (re)create; the resulting assembly of rock fragments are near-negligible visual cues demonstrating an outcome of a significant event – the cosmos that we understand today – to the audience. However, it is the scientifically unrecorded events – the existing theoretical conjecture surrounding the details of the universe’s formation – that force us to delve deep into the universe of our own imagination.

To some extent, the resulting effect of the Universe series is one that seems to casually pitch the presumptuous confidence of scientific authority against the deep uncertainty and unknown variables yet existing in the vastness of space – that yet lies beyond humanity’s comprehension. If Universe then, strives to unhinge the rote dependence on scientific observations and hypotheses for explaining natural phenomena, its subtle emphasis on creating a framework which allows ambiguity is a seductive idea because it leaves the mysterious where it needs to remain: in an inscrutable realm of wonder and reverence.

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Conceptual Sculptor Zhan Wang (b.1962, Beijing,China), graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (Sculpture) from The Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. He has exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries across the world including the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Saatchi Gallery, London; Kunst Museum, Bern; MoriArt Museum, Tokyo and the Asia Society Museum, New York.

Universe will be on show at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute until 28 April 2012.

B. Wurtz & Co. at Richard Telles Fine Art, Installation View

Two years ago, I met this guy, an artist from New York who was in L.A. to collaborate with an Indie rocker. I met him the day I was rendezvousing with someone I’d met through Twitter — we both wrote about art-like things, had similar taste, knew some of the same people and kept responding to one another’s tweets. So we thought we should meet in person. The Twitter friend had blogged about this New York artist (the one collaborating with the rocker) once and so the New York artist texted the Twitter friend to say, “Hi, I’m in L.A. Want to meet up?” The Twitter friend thought the New York artist was someone else, someone he knew better, and invited him to breakfast. After he figured out with whom he was breakfasting, and after they’d finished their meal, the Twitter friend, whom I had yet to meet in person, brought the New York artist with him to rendezvous with me. By the end of an afternoon spent gallery hopping in Culver City, the New York artist and I were convinced we’d met before. “Maybe at an opening or a party,” he said. “It’s a really small world we traffic in,” I said, meaning the art world is small. “I know,” he said. “It’s embarrassing.”

B. Wurtz & Co. at Richard Telles Fine Art, Installation View

I thought he was right: it is embarrassing to go to a meeting, reading, or opening and recognize half the people there. It impoverishes the world’s bigness and, sometimes, makes my own likes and interests seem about as wide and deep as a cocoon. But sometimes it also feels cozy.

B. Wurtz and Co., the show that’s up now at Richard Telles’ West Hollywood gallery, feels cozy. It’s about B. Wurtz — the New York-based artist who has been working since the 1970s, making delightfully, elegantly underwhelming art out of raw wood, plastic bags, wire hangers, stray socks and the like — and how he resonates with other artists who do or have worked in similar veins. The curator, Matthew Higgs, directs the New York alt space White Columns and chose the show’s title because he liked the title of a 2001 photography show that started at MoMA and traveled to The Getty: Walker Evans & Co. This earlier show delved into resonances between Depression-era documenter Evans, his contemporaries and his successors. Of course, Wurtz is different than Evans, in that he’s less famous and probably less immediately legible, but still, writes Higgs, the “serendipitous correspondences – both formal and psychological” between his work and the work of other artists are worth noting.

B. Wurtz, Untitled, detail, 2012, wood, plastic bags. Courtesy Richard Telles Fine Art.

When you walk in, you see plastic bags of staggered heights hung on thin wood poles attached to a wood stand by B. Wurtz. You see a pyramid of cobbled-together cat photographs by Vincent Fecteau on one wall and, on another wall, strips of rubber, locks of hair and paper twisted together by Richard Hawkins cascading down toward a shoe box on the floor. There is a framed collage of coin package wrappers lined up by Gabriel Kuri. Found objects are carefully re-purposed and composed in formally intelligent ways. Nothing even veers toward maximalism; this is minimalist abstraction made out of what you’d find blowing through the streets. It’s easier to appreciate if you’ve seen what minimalist abstraction looks like when it’s highly, expensively fabricated and commanding. This work commands and demands nothing; it’s happy to just exist for those who care to notice.

In an interview B.Wurtz may have conducted with himself (I have yet to confirm this, but the questions were certainly posed by someone particularly familiar with the artist), the interviewer asks where Wurtz made his work for a 1998 show. Wurtz answers, “in my apartment, the roof of my building, my studio, or a close friend’s garden. I saw no reason to go further.”

Alice Shaw. "Gum Print," 2012; archival pigment print, 20.5 x 28.5 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery 16, San Francisco.

The profusion of works and materials in Alice Shaw’s Landscape Update at Gallery 16 leaves viewers with the impression of a frenzy. The twenty-six works on view are made from an exhaustive array of media: paintings of oil and dye on linen; sculptures of cast bronze and concrete; photographs, including pigment, Van Dyke brown, and gelatin silver prints; and drawings or hybrid works of charcoal, ink, and gold leaf. Though the artist’s goal of exploring the landscape through various methods and materials is admirable, the effect is less comprehensive than it is schizophrenic. There are moments when Shaw’s depictions of a natural world sullied by human presence do shine, but overall the exhibition could have been improved by the notion that less is more.

Despite the show being weakened by the surfeit of approaches, there are many works that are intriguing and funny. Gum Print (2012) is a close-up, black-and-white photograph of a tree trunk that nearly blocks the view of the wild valley and pine-studded ridge beyond. The proximity of the trunk provides rich details of the rugged bark, showing bits of moss and an old bent nail stuck amongst its crevices; the image is so crisply captured that a viewer can almost feel the rough textures. However, the print is contaminated by a wad of actual chewing gum stuck nonchalantly to the center of the trunk: a rose-pink blot of detritus that undercuts the serenity of the scene. The wad is in a rounded, larval shape that could be an organic part of this natural scene if it weren’t for its man-made color. From an oblique angle, a viewer can see threads of sticky pink residue that stretch from the print to the inner surface of the framing glass—the same way that trodden gum stretches from the urban pavement to one’s shoe. For Shaw, no pristine vista will remain untouched by human carelessness.

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He Xiangyu Artist beside his work Skeleton (2010) Courtesy of Pearl Lam Gallery, Shanghai Photography: Garry Trinh

There are numerous contemporary works in which the artists’ choice of physical ‘matter’ contains within it their intended meaning. Xu Bing’s poignant ‘Where the Dust Itself Collects’ made from dust collected in the streets of Manhattan after the destruction of the twin towers falls into this category, as does Marc Quinn’s self-portrait made of 9 pints of the artist’s own frozen blood. Sydney artist Shoufay Derz used silkworms and indigo in her elegiac work ‘Depart Without Return’. And from Warhol and Wang Guangyi to the urns inscribed with the Coca Cola logo by Ai Weiwei, artists have used iconic commercial ‘brands’ as signifiers, making works intended as a critique or sometimes a celebration of western popular culture.

He Xiangyu’s ‘Cola Project’, showing at Gallery 4A in Sydney’s Chinatown, takes these elements of contemporary practice into new territory. His project does not use the iconic imagery of the brand, so representative of America in all its 20^th century wealth and power, but rather takes the product itself, its physical matter. He ‘cooks’ the cola in an industrial process, boiling enormous quantities of Coca Cola down into a black crystalline solid. This coal-like substance is piled in a heap on the floor of the gallery, smelling faintly toxic and looking dangerous. Gao Minglu, in his catalogue essay, ‘Cola Project as Anthropology’, comments on the paradox of this transformation of a product of consumer desire into something disgusting and disturbing: a reminder that the fast pace of urbanisation and technological change may come at the cost of our consumption and destruction of nature. The artist admits that he himself drinks cola every day, and has grown up knowing nothing other than the globalised, materialist, fast paced ‘new China’. He represents the ‘consumption culture’ which now pervades almost every corner of the globe in both a physical and a metaphysical manner.

Installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art Courtesy of the artist and White Space Beijing Photography: Zan Wimberley

Other elements of the installation support this interpretation. Lying in a museum style vitrine, faintly glowing in the darkened space, is a jade skeleton. This very beautiful object has been partially corroded and destroyed by being boiled in Coca Cola.  What at first appear to be traditional ink paintings of misty mountainous landscapes on the walls of the gallery have actually been painted with ink made with Coca Cola: representations of China’s ancient culture literally painted with the global brand. In another glass case lie the tools, discarded gloves and protective clothing used by the artist and his assistants in the process, all covered with a viscous tar-like coating. Photographs of the industrial ‘cooking down’ process are reminiscent of Cultural Revolution images of heroic workers engaged in steel production – but they are actually engaged in this somewhat pointless act.

The documentation of the artist’s physical actions recalls Joseph Beuys, whose influence on contemporary art in China is enormously significant. It is also very deliberately a pastiche of science and industry, suggesting the museological display of the remnant artefacts of an ancient culture. While Ai Weiwei’s ‘Coca Cola Urn’ works of the 90s inscribed the iconic logo of western capitalism onto ancient urns representing the destruction of Chinese history and culture, He Xiangyu’s work suggests a more complex 21^st century reading of consumerist desire. No longer signifying the forbidden ‘other’, global brands take on new meanings in a world struggling to come to terms with the destruction wrought by modernity:  a kind of reverse alchemy, turning commercial ‘gold’ back into its base constituent element.

Installation view at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art Courtesy of the artist and White Space Beijing Photography: Zan Wimberley