The following interview was originally posted by Michelle Schultz on November 3, 2011:

The work of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg is defined by duality. A partnership between artist and musician, their stop-motion animation videos and haunting audio tracks precariously balance horror and humour, immersing child-like puppets in a world where perversion, violence, aggression, and power dominate. In their latest exhibition in London, the artists explore the medium of glass and its materiality – fragility becomes threatening and desires are laid bare, exposing the traits that both define us and may lead to our demise. On the occasion of A World of Glass at Camden Arts Centre, Nathalie Djurberg, Hans Berg, and Michelle Schultz sit down to discuss puppets and process – and the relationship between art and music.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, film still, 2011. Courtesy of the artists, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan.

Michelle Schultz: Most of the materials you use – clay, fabrics, even the music – have a strong sense of malleability and fluidity to them, but in A World of Glass, the focus is on a very unyielding material that is both fragile and, I find to be, quite threatening – could you speak a bit about the significance of the glass for you?

Nathalie Djurberg: What this entire project is about is fragility – and transparency – and while it can be perceived as threatening in the way that it stands on the table, for me, it is almost like a shipwreck that has been washed up on a beach and reassembled again. It is almost apocalyptic. That is also how I made them, taking things that I could find – glasses, plates, and bowls – assembled them, worked on them with clay, and then had them moulded and casted.

Hans Berg: There were all these ugly parts – some things were just a pile of clay, made with the hands, and then you stuck glass on it, but then, through casting, it is turned into this crystal clear, fragile figure. I think that’s where you will find a connection between the frightening and hard stuff, and how fragile everything looks – when it is transformed.

I think that glass has so many different layers – it is about, like the title suggests, how the world is really fragile, but then the films are also about the fragility of the mind, or the transparency of the mind. At the same time that it is fragile, the large amount of glass almost makes it baroque as well.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, installation view, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Camden Arts Centre. Photograph by Andy Peake.

MS: Much more of your recent work is immersive installations, as opposed to singular videos that stand on their own – was this a purposeful decision that was made?

ND: Yes, I had the idea about three years ago, about the same time as I started working on the piece we showed in Venice at the Biennale, the Experiment (2009). However since it has taken such a long time to realise it, the outcome is very different from the original idea. But we’re planning on making something small and singular after this.

MS: An animation?

ND: Well you have to go where the ideas take you – if I get really excited, and have an urge to see it, it means that I have to make it. What we are going to work on after this is something different – I am making visuals for Hans’ music, which is a mix of club music and the music he makes for my animations. I am excited about that, since it can be shown in a context where there is not just people who are used to looking at art, but also people who don’t usually look at art.

MS: It will be very interesting to see how these videos differ, as right now the visuals comes first and the audio is composed afterwards – but now it will be the music that initiates the work.

ND: It will be possible to work in a different way as well – in a more abstract way, and to really explore that.

HB: I always thought that art and music were really more connected, but they are not. And this is a very unusual occasion I think – that we have a show with Haroon Mirza at the same time at Camden Art Centre, who also works in music that is more towards the pop side, like mine. Usually, no one in the music world knows anything about art, and no one in the art world knows anything about music, so it is nice to try and bridge that gap.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, film still, 2011. Courtesy of the artists, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan.

Also, the music that I do for the installations and the films, it’s not difficult, it’s not sound art, and I think that’s pretty unusual as well. The sound or music for video art, is often very strange, people make it extra strange, so it’s extra ‘arty’, and I don’t really do that so much.

MS: For this exhibition, did you find it difficult to make one piece of music that fit with all four videos simultaneously?

HB: In the beginning, yes. At first I thought I would make four different tracks – one for each film – that would fit together. But then I started, and I was thinking, and I locked myself in the closet. We both work at home – Nathalie has one and a half rooms for her studio, and I have a corner in the second room. So I locked myself in the closet, with glasses, vases and water, and recorded all the samples for the music.

The music turned out so minimalistic, and when I looked at all four films, it turned out that it fit, so I choose to use it for all four – because, in the end, four different soundtracks would go against the whole idea for the whole installation, which is very minimal itself.

ND: What the music also does is bring the concept of the glass out everywhere. You can stand in the corner and still hear the glass clinging.

MS: It really does serve to immerse you in glass.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, film still, 2011. Courtesy of the artists, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan.

MS: Now, in your videos, often the distinctions between humans and animals are blurred – I have seen a man turn into a dog, a woman takes a tiger as a lover and a bear become the captor of a child. And in these new videos, the divisions between humans and animals are quite inconsequential as well.

ND: I think we are more similar than we like to think, at least at some level. But using animals is mainly a way to express something – sometimes it is easier to work with a metaphor than to work with an actual person – and sometimes that’s stronger. If you use a puppet that is a human being, there is so much baggage that comes with how it looks and the clothing.

MS: But the animals always have their own traits that accompany them as well.

HB: Yes, if you use a wolf, you get a certain set of ideas coming with that animal.

ND: But it is almost the same as the way that you use clothes on a puppet – if you choose not to clothe a puppet but you use it naked, then you can’t determine what part of society it comes from, or even the country. But with every layer of clothing you put on, you determine how it is seen. So using no clothing on a puppet makes it more open to interpretation. With animals it becomes more of the idea of the trait than the actual trait – if you use an animal, it is more of a symbol.

MS: With your videos, I have always found myself highly attracted to them and disturbed at the same time – and I think what is really engaging, and intriguing, about your work, is that there is a very precarious balance between horror and humour – one never dominates over the other, at least for long.

ND: [laughs] It’s a balance.

It’s also the medium of animation that really invites you to ridicule something. Sometimes that can be scary when I am in the studio – I have to forget that there will be an audience, otherwise I might be too shy to do something that I really want to do. And sometimes I wonder if I am allowed to turn this into humour? But it is almost impossible not to, it is really just there. And I think it is comical – you have to look at things with comical eyes. It’s about making it bearable.

And it’s not always that intentional – it’s where the puppets take you as well. I work with these heavy subjects, but then it is still these tiny little figures, which become caricature as you enhance some things, and disenhance other things. Just in doing that it becomes much more comical.

The good thing that animation can do is it can make you stay – even when you otherwise would have walked away. And it might approach you from a different angle as well.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg, A World of Glass, film still, 2011. Courtesy of the artists, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan.

MS: When you are making your films and you are looking at the characters, do you create entire lives for them? I know when I watch the films, such as We Are Not Two, We Are One, with the fusion of the boy and wolf, or in this exhibition with the bull in the shop of glass, I am always curious about how they got there and construct stories in my head about what happened before – do you ever think about this?

ND: [laugh] No, but I like that you think about it.

Sometimes, when I really enjoy working on a film, I think a lot about the persona, but more how it exists right now, and in comparison to myself. One really old film that I made is a charcoal animation of a wolf – in the beginning he is just standing there on the white paper but the more I work on him the more particular he becomes, and I give him more and more personality. While I was making this, during the night when I would go to sleep, I would think a lot about him, and eventually during that animation I started making him talk about me.

MS: Do you think you will ever return to making charcoal animations?

ND: Yes, that is kind of what I am going to do with the videos for Hans. It is going to be in colour, with crayons and paint, but it is still going to be two-dimensional. When I do have an idea that does not fit with clay, an idea that fits only in two dimension, then I make a charcoal animation. But that urge and those ideas do not come so often – there is a bigger urge to do three-dimensional things.

The following article was originally published on September 3, 2008 by Seth Curcio:

Opening next week at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art will be works by artist David Shrigley in his latest self titled exhibition. Shrigley is best known for his dead pan humor and intuitive drawings that illustrate simple yet absurd situations. The exhibition will also feature the artists object-based sculpture, which often plays with scale and have included items such as stuffed animals, doors, ladders, tents and sleeping bags. The artists has exhibited internationally and gained much popularity through a series of weekly illustrative contributions to The Guardian, since 2005. Shrigley has exhibitions this year with BQ in Cologne, Anton Kern Gallery in NYC and CASM in Barcelona, and a forthcoming exhibition at Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris next year.

Want even more David Shrigley? Check out the more recent coverage of his work in the group show, ‘The Curtain Call’ at the Roundhouse. The article below was originally published on August 18, 2011 by Michelle Schultz:

Summer tends to be a time of spectacle in London – massive installations, blockbuster shows, international festivals and grand theatrical events. With smaller galleries closed and many leaving for a break from the claustrophobic city and intellectual rigour, the spectacle is relied upon to attract the attention of the audience who remain.

Israeli designer Ron Arad’s massive undertaking at the Roundhouse, aptly titled Curtain Call, is at the height of the spectacular – a three-storey high circular curtain comprised of glowing amoeba-like silicon tubing which serves as fluid canvas for artists to work with. With a transparent sheath, the 360 degree screen, onto which videos are looped, can be viewed from the outside – but most do choose to push aside the swaying curtain and experience the work from within.

Ron Arad, Curtain Call, 2011. Installation at the Roundhouse. Credit Stephen White.

It is a stunning architectural structure – technologically magnificent and psychologically affective due to its vast size – but it is void of any prolonged engagement. However, it is interesting to see how artists have used this unique backdrop and translated their work through it. Shape and scale take front row here – the directionless circular structure of the screen requires a rethinking of the linear quality of video, and the enormous size forces the viewer into a land of giants.

Mat Collishaw, still image from Sordid Earth, 2011. Image courtesy of the Artist.

Mat Collishaw’s video Sordid Earth immerses you in an apocalyptic world of desire and decay. A digitally rendered vision of a dystopic future where decrepit, insect-ridden flowers blossom and dissolve amongst violent storms and unstoppable waterfalls. Collishaw’s world imperceptibly rotates around you, in a continuous cycle of life and death without a trace of human presence, making our microscopic existence disappear into nothingness.

David Shrigley, still image from Walker, 2011. Image courtesy of the Artist.

In David Shrigley’s animation Walker, a blank-eyed, hairy patched man wearing nothing but a pair of heavy boots stomps slowly around the circle with great effort, pausing only to grunt and groan. Translating Shrigley’s caustic depictions of flat, trivial characters onto a larger than life screen serves to intensify the acidic humour ever present in his works and give Shrigley’s ‘outsider art’ further dimension.

Christian Marclay, Pianorama in Ron Arad, Curtain Call, 2011. Image credit Stephen White.

The golden boy of Venice, Christian Marclay, has joined forced with experimental jazz pianist and often-collaborative partner, Steve Beresford to create Pianorama – an surround sound piano which Beresford appears to play from all angles. Marclay’s interest in music and splicing of video fragments are extended here into an endless instrument, surrealistically played by a multitude of giant hands reaching around you.

Ori Gersht, still from Offering, 2011. Image courtesy of the Artist.

In Ori Gersht’s Offering, the structure is exploited not only for its formal qualities, but is used as an integral part of the thematic approach of the work. A man begins to dress in a room, but it only slowly becomes clear what he is preparing for. His audience emerges on the opposite site, waiting in anticipation. We have entered a bullring, exposed to the intimate, individualistic side, removed from the bloodshed and controversy – instead looking at the delicate preparations and directly into the eyes of the supporters who solemnly wait.

Ori Gersht, still from Offering, 2011. Image courtesy of the Artist.

How do you break down the linear structure of video and work with a screen that has no beginning and no end? With light, sound and video, these artists have used a giant canvas to explore and extend facets of their work – the dark, the humourous, the surrealist and the controversial – all within a great spectacle.

If you’re lucky enough to have been in New Mexico last month while planning to be in London next month, maybe you’ll see both exhibits. If not, take another look Nadjowski’s article and keep an eye out for The Forgetting of Proper Names.

Agitated Histories:

Grasping the nebulous zone of art and politics can be arduous at best. The curatorial project of Agitated Histories attempts to do just that by compartmentalizing the political narrative. The Re-enactment, The Archive, The Persona, and The Intervention give some scaffolding from which the viewer can approach the work. The artists in this exhibition engage with the political, the social, and the personal through formal concerns and artistic research. We are looking at history (recent) here, through a distinctly political lens.

THE RE-ENACTMENT

Yoshua Okón,

One of the most compelling pieces in the exhibition is Mexican artist Yoshua Okón’s Octopus (2011). Created during a residency at the Hammer Museum, the 4-channel video piece grapples with what is both humanizing and alienating. Day laborers re-enact the civil war in Guatemala, wearing in black or white clothing, depending on which side they had fought for. On the set of a Home Depot parking lot, the laborers replay scenes from their country’s history, but now the opposing sides point invisible weapons at an invisible enemy, not at their historical foes. “Octopus” is Guatemalan slang for the United Fruit Company, alluding to the company’s ambiguous role in Guatemalan politics and complicating the narrative further.

THE ARCHIVE

Sam Durant,

The pliableness of the document becomes evident through Zoe Leonard & Cheryl Dunye’s The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993-1996). A fictional African American performer is created through an archive of snap shots, film stills, and head-shots. Photography’s role in the construction of history becomes clear as we are left to conjecture about the possibilities of this figure.

While The Fae Richards Photo Archive plays with the divide between fact and fiction, Mike Tribe’s The Dystopian Files (2009-present) solemnly takes on the task of chronicling history. An archive of clips from footage of protest and the policing of these actions is gathered together as something that Tribe refers to as “ritualized conflicts”. The single channel video is disrupted by omnipresent black bars slowly creeping across the screen as eerie, unidentifiable tones collectively moan, the audio’s consistency giving a sense of a cohesive moment from the catalogue of moments.

THE PERSONA

Eric Garduño & Matthew Rana, “People v. Bruce (Parrhesia)”, cardboard, comedy club lights, and audio track, 2011

A cardboard fabrication of a courtroom witness stand and judges bench illuminated with the theatrics of comedy lights and the occasional laugh track enact notions of truth in The People v. Bruce (Parrhesia) (2011). The term “parrhesia” loosely translates to free speech with an obligatory edge. In this installation, collaborators Eric Garduño & Matthew Rana engage with the trial and conviction of obscenity against comedian Lenny Bruce as a way to address the fluidity of truth and free speech amidst the conflicting territories of where one can expect to hear truth spoken – the comedy stage and the courtroom.

In the series The First and Last of the Modernists: (Charles and Michael), Lorraine O’Grady links the public personas’s of poet Charles Baudelaire and performer Michael Jackson through the language of conceptual photography, implying modernism’s hand in the cult and commodification of celebrity.

THE INTERVENTION

Deborah Grant, “Suicide Notes to the Self”, 2008 / Geof Oppenheimer,

Perhaps the least convincing of containers is The Intervention, in which “works recall charged events in history that register cautions about the future”. Maybe it’s a matter of semantics, but I don’t equate “registering cautions” to “intervention”, which for me has a very active implication. At any rate, Geof Oppenheimer’s Mason Dixon Lines, Raised and Lowered (2007-11) is a “two-unit” piece that encapsulates a formal tightness with a conceptual looseness. A neon portrait of Alan Greenspan leans against a wall, somehow in dialogue with a distant placed steel geometric form wrapped in red bandana material perched askew on an unfinished pedestal. There is something about systems and structures here, but ambivalence reins.

Geof Oppenheimer, Mason Dixon Lines, Raised and Lowered (2007-11)

If you are after the redemptive, look elsewhere; what this exhibition offers are objects of discontent, agitation. In the context of our current political climate, we encounter the spiral of history in these works, rather than it’s unfolding.

Agitated Histories will run through January 15, 2012 at SITE Santa Fe, in New Mexico. It was presented earlier in 2011 at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore.

The following article was originally published by Amelia Sechman on May 18 2011:

Friday, May 13^th, at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, five Magnum photographers and one writer gathered to kick off their road trip christened, Postcards from America. Paolo Pellegrin, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Alec Soth, Mikhael Subotzky & Ginger Strand will spend the next two weeks living together on a bus named “Uncle Jackson,” traveling from San Antonio, Texas to Oakland, California.

Postcards from America is certainly reminiscent of the 1935, Farm Security Administration (FSA), a project part of the New Deal for which photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and others, were sent out to document the condition of rural families and areas during the depression. The difference in this contemporary iteration is that it is completely conceived and motivated by the photographers themselves, instead of any government or institution. This crucial characteristic gives the road trip the qualities of a trip with friends, one driven by adventure, curiosity, and the desire to show a side of the US that is often swept under the proverbial rug.

The project originated as an idea by Jim Goldberg and Susan Meiselas at one of Magnum’s annual meetings. In efforts to try to re-establish the way photographers and viewers experience the US, they brainstormed how to “see what America really is instead of just reading about it,” they “wanted to see and feel America.” (Meiselas)

From left to right: Carlos Loret de Mola, Lara Shipley, Ginger Strand, Paolo Pellegrin, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Alec Soth, Mikhael Subotzky.

Like most road trips, this one started with a handful unforeseeable set backs (maybe Friday the 13^th should have been a day spent in hiding); San Antonio experienced massive flash floods; Jim Goldberg caught the flu; the projectionist at the Ransom Center had technical difficulties during almost the entire panel discussion – but they approached the entire situation with the sense of humor shared between friends, which helped the audience, myself included, laugh along with them and appreciate the spontaneity and organic development of the project. As Alec Soth said on Friday, “the spirit of the road trip is you let it take you.”

Paolo Pellegrin, San Antonio, TX

While the projector was being fixed, each photographer and the writer, Ginger Strand, introduced him or herself by talking about their approach to the trip and what they had already experienced the day before in San Antonio. Each individual set off in search of something, and the amount of incredible material, images and stories they encountered in just one day was astounding. Once we saw images from the day before, it was clear that the project will reveal a truly diverse view of the US.

Alec Soth, Mu Man from Burma, San Antonio, TX

The Postcards from America project will conclude with a pop-up show at the Starline Social Club in Oakland, Ca on May 26^th. For more information, check out the Postcards from America site to track the group on their journey, through their blog, twitter and facebook updates.

This article was originally published on October 6, 2010 By Rebecca Najdowski.

Terreiro: Marilá Dardot and Fábio Morais, Longe daqui, aqui mesmo (Far from here, right here)

What makes an art exhibition political?

The 2010 São Paulo Bienal, There is always a cup of sea to sail in, uses Brazilian poet Jorge de Lima’s line as a metaphorical container to address the ambitious theme of art and politics. The head curators Agnaldo Farias and Moacir dos Anjos see the title as an expression of the essential aspiration of the exhibition, “to affirm that the utopian dimension to art is contained within art itself, not outside or beyond it; to affirm the value of poetic intuition in the face of ‘tamed thought‘ that emancipates nothing, though it permeates political parties and even formal educational institutions.” (29th Bienal Catalogue, 21) This is an infinitely large concept in the palm of ones hand.

Guest curator Chus Martinez sees the political as a resistance to the slogan, the summary, and the pamphlet. Through artistic research and practice, reorganizing information and reinventing research contributes to how we see the world. If art itself is a political act by way of it’s disruption of current logics and the opening-up of space to conceive and experience new possibilities, then what is at stake when mounting an exhibition that considers the world outside of the cup?

Joachim Koester, Tarantism, 2007, 16mm film loop. Courtesy Galleri Nicolai Wallner, photo: Joachim Koester

What is the resonance of an exhibition like this?

The scope of the biennial format has the potential for wide impact; organizers anticipate a million visitors and have implemented a large educational project. In training 40,000 teachers to educate students about contemporary art, the potential for art’s rethinking of conventions to seep beyond the contained art world is an exercise in politics. The biennial’s geographic and geopolitical location has impacted the curatorial choices reflected in an awareness of its southern position; a constellation of relationships between art produced in Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia are in a robust discourse here.

The resistance to articulate a cohesive comprehension of the politics of art is evident in the titles of the Terreiros or “yards” – architectural spaces produced by participating artist and architects as discursive areas for discussion, contemplation, and socializing inspired by the function of Brazilian public spaces like plazas, courtyards, and the street. The titles of these six spaces are dominated by dichotomies: O outro, o mesmo (The other one, the same one), Dito, não dito, interdito (Said, not said, indirect), Lembrança e esquecimento (Memories and oblivion), Longe daqui, aqui mesmo (Far from here, right here), Eu sou a rua (I am the street), and A pele do invisível (The skin of the invisible).

Tatiana Trouvé, 350 Points towards Infinity, 2009, installation.

For all it’s ambitions, the biennial remains an act with skin, there is an outside and an inside. The edges of the exhibition are flexible, morphing and incorporating new elements, yet barriers remain. This is not necessarily a bad thing; if movement and change is to occur, then we must visualize an edge of difference.

The challenge of summing up an exhibition who’s purpose is to resist the summarization of experience is massive. So instead, in the spirit of the anti-slogan, the works presented here are simply and unapologetically a smattering of what one would find in the biennial.

Carlos Bunga, Simultâneo, fragmentado, descontínuo (Simultaneous, fragmented, discontinuous), 2010, site-specific installation.

Spain-based, Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga’s architectural installation of columns made from cardboard, tape, and white paint could, if for only a moment, be a part of the existing architecture. The facade of this is only momentary though and deception doesn’t seem to be the crux of the piece – instability, fragility, and eventual ruin does. As much as the work is an installation, it is an action: to build and destroy.

350 Points towards Infinity (pictured above) is a circular installation of hundreds of pendulums hanging in contrasting diagonal directions. Here, movement is interrupted and paused. Paris-based, Italian artist Tatiana Trouvé’s static installation gives the sense of time suspended just before imminent impact.

Henrique Oliveira, A origem do terceiro mundo (The origin of the third world), 2010, site-specific installation.

Exploding from the angular, severe architecture of the biennial building Henrique Oliveira‘s The origin of the third world’s round form swells into the exhibition space. The Brazilian artist constructed with thin, rough plywood an interior space for the visitor to explore. Suggesting a primordial space of knowledge and make-shift architecture common in Brazil.

Danish artist Joachim Koester’s black and white silent film loop of dancers performing convulsive movements (pictured above) is based on an obscure dance performed in Southern Italy until the 1950‘s. The dance’s function was to enact a therapeutic spasming in order to work out the poison of a tarantula bite. For Koester, it is the space of freedom that the dance offered in a world controlled by Catholicism. The video exhibits a choreography of possibility, and perhaps, through sympathetic magic, seeks to regain and harness some of that space of freedom.

Chim Pom’s (Inaoka, Mizuno, Okada, Hayashi, Ellie, Ushiro), Brazil Love, is a 3-channel video installation of the Japanese art group members cavorting in different locals in Brazil. The trickster group uses offensiveness as a tactic, at one point we see the words ‘Crack Land’ appear on screen as members interact with locals on a beach. A consistent prop that accompanies the group is a giant plywood effigy, which morphs as new maneuvers are acted upon it over the course of their ventures. Japanese pop enters a dark and ironic place through subversive shock and determined political-incorrectness.

Gil Vicente, Autorretrato IV - matando Ahmadinejad (Self portrait IV - killing Ahmadinejad), 2010, charcoal on paper

The series Inimigos (Enemies) are drawings depicting the artist, Gil Vicente, with a knife or gun to various figureheads of institutional power, from the Pope to Brazilian President Lula da Silva. These symbolic assaults make visible the disillusion with political leadership. The suggested violence has resulted in the demand of their removal from the biennial and threatening of legal action by Brazilian Bar Association president Luiz Flávio Borges D’Urso.

After New York’s MoMA denied a loan of Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 series for the biennial, Sandra Gamarra Heshiki painted copies of the works in conceptual tone that doubles Richter’s original paintings.

In an attempt to incorporate other social groups and different forms of art, a group of graffiti artists who where persecuted for tagging within the last biennial where invited to participate this year. Extending the breadth of the question of political art is likely not the only motivation, inviting the artists to contribute video and photography of these urban acts also appeases some of the criticism that the institution received in how they handled the graffiti acts of the previous biennial.

Francis Alÿs, Tornado, Milpa Alta, 2000-10 video documentation of an action (55 minutes). Courtesy David Zwirner, New York

In Tornado, the artist Francis Alÿs recorded himself over the period of 10 years chasing and thrusting himself into twisters in the dusty Mexican landscape. The ritual of Alÿs attempting to reach the eye of these storms is a way for the artist to grapple with notions of chaos, order, and change through natural phenomena.

Steve McQueen‘s Static is a looped video of images shot from a helicopter circling the hyper-iconic statue of liberty. At times it seems as if the truncated statue is floating silently through the landscape, while at other points, the silence is violently chopped by the audio of the helicopter, that familiar sound which tends to conjure up violence and war. The work’s strength is the lack of suggestion or proposition, rather it provides the audience with an open space to interpret the alternative view of an iconic image.

Simon Fujiwara, The Personal Effects of Theo Grünberg, 2010, video, performance, installation.

Simon Fujiwara morphs histories, fictions, and evidence in his installation, the culmination of a research project that follows the stories of three men named Theo Grünberg. The artist acquired the library collection of university professor Theo Grünberg, which led him to discover two other men of the same name, a Nazi prisoner and a botanist who’s research brought him to the Amazon. The physical materials and accounts of the three men become one story here, where reality and fiction weave a narrative of 20th century Germany. A fuzzy collective memory as seen through the material accumulation of specific characters.

Kiluanji Kia Henda’s, Icarus 13, photo and sculpture-based project looks at post-colonialism in Africa through a quasi-utopian narrative of man’s first journey to the sun. The title recalls the Greek myth of Icarus who, escaped Crete with wings his father crafted from wax and feathers, so capricious with the sensation of flying, he accidentally flew too close to the sun. The wax of his wings melted, and flapping only his bare arms, Icraus fell to his death. Blending a futuristic vision with an archeological tone, Henda re-imagines possible histories and futures.

Sophie Ristelhueber, #24, WB series, 2005, inkjet photograph on wallpaper.

French artist, Sophie Ristelhueber contributes wallpapered photographs of newly-formed, make-shift barriers and roadblocks in the West Bank. In these images geological time is ushered forward as a means to morph political territories. Throughout the biennial, these photographs of dirt and rock dividing roadways architecturally intervene at various points of the exhibition.

Oscar Bony, La familia obrera (The working-class family), 1968/1999, performance, documentation.

Conceptual Argentinean artist Oscar Bony in 1968 produced an installation performance of factory worker Luis Ricardo Rodríguez and his wife and son. The family mimicked daily activities while audio of domestic sounds played in the background. The result was a performance of oscillating identity, between portraying and being. In the biennial, the viewer experiences the work as a framed, large-format family portrait / performance documentation along with wall text describing the 1968 performance.

Jonathas de Andrade, Educação para adultos (Education for adults), 2010, 60 posters on photographic paper. Courtesy of the artist

Recife, Brazil based artist Jonathas de Andrade’s project uses the aesthetics of an adult education method to disrupt fixed notions of every-day vocabularies and themes. Making adjustments to pre-existing posters owned by the artist’s mother, Andrade playfully questions the interpretive veracity of image and text while exposing ideological residues in education material.

The 29th São Paulo Bienal runs September 25th through December 12th in Oscar Niemeyer’s modernest pavilion in Ibirapuera park.

This article was originally published on July 21, 2010 by Seth Curcio:

On the north-west corner of Trafalger Square in London lies a structure simply coined the Fourth Plinth. Originally designed in 1841 by Sir Charles Barry, the massive pedestal was intended to display an equestrian statue, but the sculpture was never finished due to a lack of funds. Since the late nineties, the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts has commissioned several sculptural works for the Fourth Plinth including works from Marc Quinn to Rachel Whiteread.

Last summer, British artist Antony Gormley was also invited to complete a project utilizing the Fourth Plinth. Instead of creating a static sculptural form to sit elevated on a pedestal before the city, the artist took a risky move to randomly invite 2,400 people to occupy the structure for a period of one hour, twenty four hours a day for a total of 100 days. Titled One & Other, the pieced allowed each person that inhabited the plinth to become the work of art,  leveling any hierarchy that defines who should be represented in a work of art. Each attendee occupied the structure alone, but was allowed to do anything they like for the hour, providing that it is legal in the UK.

For a brief period, participants could address the world at large and speak to any issue that is of concern to them.  Certainly a momentary equality of voice doesn’t exactly elicit the illusions of grandeur that are usually associated with political or societal utopias, but the ability to speak openly to an audience about an idea or issue that you are invested in without consequence is certainly the first step to identifying a common ideal. To further extend the impact and reach of each participants voice, every minute of the 100 day project was streamed live over the internet and then archived for indefinite public access.

However, Gormley’s work isn’t just interested in the idea of or struggle for utopia in relation to society, politics or even a specific place. Most often the work quietly references the notion of balance and harmony as a state of being. Gormley’s training in archaeology, anthropology and art history at Cambridge University, mixed with years of practice with Buddhist meditation in India and Sri Lanka has positioned him in a unique place to express the experience of inner balance to a greater audience though the language of visual art. When describing the material usage for the majority of his figurative sculptures, the artist will state air as a fundamental material. This is because Gormley is as interested in the inner ‘space’ of his forms as he is the ‘outer space’ that the form itself occupies.

For his first US public art project, the artist is presenting Event Horizon, a current project that includes 31 life-sized figures cast in iron and bronze modeled form the artist’s own body and now populate Madison Square Park and rooftops throughout New York’s Flatiron District. In an area that is vibrant, hectic and anything but still and quiet, these forms serve as a reminder of the balance and utopia that can be obtained inwardly even in the most chaotic of locations. However, this reminder often happens in an abrupt and oddly irritating way. In a recent interview with the New York Times, the artist addressed this notion stating, “You could almost say the insertion of the sculpture is like the insertion of acupuncture needles within a collective body. And seeing how the body as a whole reacts to the presence of this irritation is very much the point.”

This article was originally published by Catherine Wagley on June 10, 2011:

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Peter Hujar. Thek at his work table in Oakleyville, Fire Island, 1967 (reproduced from the original color slide). ©1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC; courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

Sometimes, an artist strikes a chord with his contemporaries, and affection for him ripples through culture more distinctly and effusively than anything he’s actually made.  Paul Thek was that kind of artist, perhaps better suited to being a muse than to having one. Homages began coming his way before he’d cleared thirty-five and,  lucky for us, this means countless, compelling bits of him course through the arts and ideas left over from recent decades.

Even before you enter Paul Thek: Diver, the artist’s first-ever museum retrospective, you’ll see a photograph of Thek, blond, big-eyed, wearing a wife beater, surrounded by the eccentric trappings of his trade. Taken by Thek’s then-lover, photographer Peter Hujar, the image radiates deeply shared admiration—born George, Thek took the name “Paul” so that he and Hujar could move through the world as the ecclesiastical “Peter and Paul.” Then, in the foyer before the first main gallery,  you’ll see a screen test of Thek, even younger, with short hair that made him more boyish and less willowy then he later became, excerpted from Andy Warhol’s 13 Most Beautiful Boys. Though the show makes no explicit reference to Thek homages by Mike Kelley, David Wojnarowiz or virtuoso critic Susan Sontag, by the time you’ve wandered through, you’ll have a sense of what charmed them. Everything he made, whether memorable in itself or not, felt drenched in a moment, even though Thek routinely rejected the minimalism and pop sleekness that dominated his era.

"Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective." Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. May 22 – August 28, 2011. Photography by Brian Forrest.

Paul Thek: Diver arrived at The Hammer Museum via The Whitney late in May, the love-worn project of Whitney curators Elisabeth Sussman and Sondra Gilman and Lynn Zelevansky of the Carnegie Museum.  The exhibition includes two decades of work: gory but still-vibrant flesh sculptures (“meat pieces”), wax effigies, whimsical installations and notoriously “bad” paintings. Its layout, roughly chronological, follows the nomadic artist to his various international destinations. There are rooms dedicated to his early life in New York, his time at a foundry in Italy, time in Paris and Scandinavia, and, finally, his return to NYC. Each phase is particular, though all throughout, stories of loss or near-loss accompany his sometimes exquisite, frequently haphazard objects.

Thek was expelled from a Rome foundry when it went bankrupt in the late 70s, and he lost a portion of The Personal Effects of the Pied Piper, small, seemingly charred bronze sculptures of items that could have populated a campsite. Dwarf Parade Table, a long dining table held up by dwarfs he  learned to make from a craftsman of garden statuary, was installed as part of documenta 5 in Lucerne. Three years later, a curator from the Kunstmuseum Luzern asked for permission “to drop all wooden material” from Thek’s work—the museum just couldn’t store it any more. The parade table survived in whole, others not.

Paul Thek working on The Tomb in his studio, circa 1966. Photo © Peter Hujar

In the early 80s, when Thek was back in the states for good, he received a call that a piece he’d made in 1967, The Tomb, had been sent back from Europe, where it had been on exhibit. A wax cast of himself, dead with two psychedelic plates on his cheeks, the piece had been dubbed The Death of a Hippie, though Thek said it never had to do with hippiness. He didn’t pick it up, and it remains, in the words of curator Richard Flood, “one of the great, lost works in American art.”

But such  loss seems a small tragedy for Thek, whose bodies of art were always more instinctively diverse and immediate then tightly directed toward posterity.  In fact, in moving through the Hammer show, the works that have survived appear to have done so by accident, because Thek left them somewhere safe, or happened to craft them out of more or less indestructible material.

“Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses,” wrote Susan Sontag in her 1964 essay, Against Interpretation, dedicated to and likely inspired by Thek (a year after his 1988 death, of AIDS, she would dedicate AIDS and its Metaphors to him as well). “All the conditions of modern life–its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness–conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.” At the Hammer, Thek is present en mass, but he’s best in his specificity, experienced one piece, one phase at a time–not because the pieces are singularly fantastic in themselves, but because each was meant to exist in its own time, and each had its own quirks and inspirations.

The works of Sarah VanDerBeek and Leslie Hewitt are now on view at the Austin Art House‘s current exhibition,  The Anxiety of Photography – On view until December 30, 2011

Walead Beshty recently exhibited Securities and Exchanges at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, China

Daniel Gordon’s Still Lifes, Portraits and Parts are on view at Wallspace Gallery in NYC until December 17, 2011

This article was originally published by Rebekah Drysdale on November 23, 2009:

Walead Beshty

The Museum of Modern Art in New York is currently presenting New Photography 2009, this year’s installment of a series that began in 1985 with the aim of exhibiting the most compelling recent work in the field of contemporary photography.  Organized by Eva Respini, Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA, the exhibition brings together six young artists, Walead Beshty, Daniel Gordon, Leslie Hewitt, Carter Mull, Sterling Ruby, and Sara VanDerBeek, in a visually diverse body of work.  Most of these artists actively produce work in other media, such as drawing, video, and installation, and each one has an innovative and distinct method of constructing a photograph.  Collectively, these artists investigate the making of a photographic image in the twenty-first century, often utilizing processes of collecting, assembling, or manipulating other images or items.

With the advent of contemporary aesthetics and technologies, photography, long characterized by its ability to capture and represent reality, is again the subject of critical debate. The historical definition of the medium is challenged by the rise of digital capabilities and software programs, which allow photographers to combine their own images with others that are digitally uploaded or scanned.  The abundance of imagery now available at the click of a mouse has led artists towards a deeper analysis of the role of an image within society.  The six artists included in the exhibition create their pictures in a studio or darkroom, investigating the expanded vocabulary of digital processes and its technical and theoretical implications for photography.   The exhibition highlights an epochal moment of transformation for the medium, showcasing the work of artists who critically confront our media saturated world, and open a new era of possibility for photography.  Some works reference traditional techniques of the medium while others are constructed from online images; the works included range from abstract to representational.

Leslie Hewitt

The monumental polychromatic photographs of Walead Beshty (b. 1976) dispense with specific content and outlying subject matter entirely, instead reflecting the technical and historical means of image production.  At a time when chemical photography is slipping into obsolescence, Beshty works completely without the use of a camera in the secluded space of a darkroom, removed from the outside world.  His psychedelic photograms, such as Three Color Curl (2008), result from exposing the sensitive material surface of the photograph to a range of various light sources and chemical applications.  Portions of photographic paper are exposed multiple times to cyan, magenta, and yellow lights.  Since the exposure process must take place in total darkness, a set of closed operations are administered, but largely left to chance, in the creation of these spectral compositions.  The surfaces of the photograms are treated as objects in themselves, released from the role of description.  Beshty pares down the photographic machinery in the creation of self-reflexive works that record the event, or the surrounding conditions, of their own production.  Beshty began employing this evidentiary photographic process after a trip to Berlin in 2006, where he took several conventional documentary shots of the unoccupied Iraqi embassy.  Upon crossing the border on his return to the United States, Beshty’s undeveloped film was accidentally exposed during the security scanning process, producing warm vermillion washes over the otherwise static architectural compositions.  The element of chance and its creation of non-referential, but highly indexical, information characterizes all of the artist’s subsequent work. Each Three Color Curl is the outcome of the direct manipulation of photographic elements.

Daniel Gordon

For other artists in the exhibition, the photographic image is the end result of a creative endeavor that begins with sculpture or collage.  The photographs exhibited by Daniel Gordon (b. 1980) represent the final stage of a process that starts with the construction of life-size figurative sculptures made from cut paper and other images, often culled from the internet.  In an interview conducted by DailyServing earlier this year, Gordon describes his pictures as “a collaboration between me and everybody on the internet.”  Using online search terms such as ‘skin’, the artist compiles image results to use in the fabrication of his three-dimensional temporary collages that are then photographed.  Produced entirely within his Dumbo, Brooklyn studio, the crude figurative sculptures (often female) depict bizarre and sometimes unsettling situations; detached objects and anatomical parts mingle and merge with one other to form grotesquely appealing images, such as Red Headed Woman (2008).  Gordon’s photosculptures exist somewhere between two and three dimensions, visually interrupted by his disjunctive cuts which recall the photomontages of the Dadaists.

Sara VanDerBeek

Sara VanDerBeek (b. 1976), daughter of experimental filmmaker and animator Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984), takes a similar approach to image making, appropriating current and historical photographs from various sources, including newspapers and exhibition catalogues.  She then creates temporary structures that exist only to be photographed.  A Composition for Detroit (2009), a multipart photographic work consisting of four panels, reflects the country’s current economic situation by exploring the state of postindustrial cities.  Media photographs from the 1967 Detroit riots as well as a Depression-era photograph by Walker Evans are symbolic markers in this cultural commentary.  Leslie Hewitt (b. 1977) combines personal and historic narratives within her photographs, examining how nostalgia and cultural meaning can be held within an image.  Hewitt meticulously composes and then photographs still life arrangements of personal artifacts, such as family snapshots or the 30^th anniversary issue of Ebony, placing them with historic relics from the civil rights era.  In two of the works exhibited, Hewitt turns the orientation of the photograph upside down, causing visual tension for the viewer.

Carter Mull

Works exhibited by Carter Mull (b. 1977) include Los Angeles Times Tuesday, August 5, 2008 and Los Angeles Times Monday, February 23, 2009, for which the artist photographed the front cover of the L.A. Times, his local newspaper, and at least two pictures responding to that page, and manipulated them using both digital and analog techniques.  Mull draws attention to the parallel between the transformation of photography and print media in the digital age with his vibrant and often patterned prints.

Sterling Ruby’s (b. 1972) digitally constructed photographic collages on display at MoMA, Artaud (2007) and Animal (2009) are based on graffiti found in the Cinque Terre region of Italy and in Venice, respectively.  Ruby took pictures of existing graffiti and digitally manipulated these photographs by adding his own painterly touches with Photoshop, resulting in rich and complex layers of imagery.

The six artists included in New Photography 2009 are expanding the medium by introducing new ways of working with an image, whether referencing traditional techniques or exploiting the proliferation of images in our media saturated world.  Beshty, Gordon, Hewitt, Mull, Ruby, and VanDerBeek are blurring the lines of photography with other disciplines as they participate in the lively debate on the nature of photography in the twenty-first century.

New Photography 2009 will remain on view in The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery on the third floor of MoMA until January 11, 2010.

The following article was originally published on May 21, 2008 by Annette Michalski:

A collection of works by acclaimed Chinese conceptual artist, Ai Weiwei is currently on show at Sherman galleries, Paddington. The display, entitled Under Construction focuses primarily on two artworks by the artist. The installation piece named Through fills the entire exhibition room and is comprised of fragments of tables and temple pillars that date back from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Weiwei has reconstructed them so that the angular beams often impale the tables and lean against them.

His second major work featured within the exhibition is a three hour film entitled Fairytale, which documents his performance piece of the same name, completed for Documenta XII in Kassel, Germany last year. For this work Weiwei invited a diverse range of 1001 Chinese citizens, stemming from different ages and provinces to come to Germany and view Documenta XII as part of his performance. He arranged their passports and accommodation and even gave them spending money, allowing them to create their own plans. In correspondence with this, the artist also organized the importation of 1001 chairs from the Qing and also Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) to be situated around the city of Kassel throughout Documenta XII’s duration.

Weiwei studied at Beijing Film Academy and Parsons School of Design. After being born and raised in China he moved to the United States in his early 20s, where he lived for over a decade, before later returning to his homeland, where he currently lives and works. He helped design the National Olympic Stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and was the co-curator of Fuck Off, a notorious exhibition showcasing shocking Chinese art that coincided with the Third Shanghai Biennale in 2000.

This article was originally posted by Seth Curcio on September 29, 2010:

Through the process of documenting America’s foundation through both mythology and quotidian objects, photographer Taryn Simon reflects on the heart of national identity by capturing that which is often obscured. Her recent series An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), investigates objects and scenes that are often literally and metaphorically out of visual reach by the average citizen in the United States.

For this series, the artist photographed a wide range of subjects such as nuclear waste encapsulation and storage facilities to a recreational site for death row prisoners. An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, is the culmination of a four year project and demonstrates the lengths that the artist will go to photograph her desired subject.

Simon is currently presenting a new body of images titled Contraband at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. For this series, the artist lived in John F. Kennedy International Airport for five days and nights, extensively photographing seized goods from passengers entering the United States. A vast array of items such as counterfeit clothing and electronics, drugs, endangered animals, gold dust, Cuban Cigars, and steroids were commandeered by airport security and then photographed by the artist.

The series includes 1075 photographs of over 1000 items. Photographed and cataloged in a fully objective dead pan aesthetic, similar to that which was pioneered by German photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher, these images are removed from all context and are imaged on a stark white background. By capturing such a vast amount of diverse material in a very short period of time, Simon is able to better understand what drives the underground economy in the United States and what goods Americans desire to own, but which are legally out of grasp.

Contraband was also produced in book form and will be exhibited this year at Lever House in New York and Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels. Simon is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow.

This article was originally posted by Seth Curcio on November 24, 2009:

Artist Cy Twombly has created a new series of sculptures, under the humble title Eight Sculptures. These new objects are currently being presented at Gagosian Gallery‘s 980 Madison Ave location in New York City. The exhibition is a companion to a new series of paintings, titled Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves, on view at Gagoisian’s Athens gallery. In addition to the shows at Gagosian, the acclaimed artist also had two major museum exhibitions on view this fall, Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works 2000-2007‘ that inaugurated the new wing of The Art Institute of Chicago, and Cy Twombly: Sensations of the Moment at Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna.

Eight Sculptures is a continuation of Twombly’s acclaimed formally driven, pedestal-based objects. While the earlier forms were created from accessible materials and objects, generally coated in gesso to create hauntingly white forms, the new sculptures are cast bronze with a white patina creating a very similar effect. Each sculpture references the unearthed fragility of an object of antiquity, while remaining distinctly modern in its formal presentation.

This article was originally posted on January 21, 2010 by Rebekah Drysdale:

Courtesy of the artist and Civilian Art Projects

Civilian Art Projects in Washington, D.C. is currently presenting Don’t Look Now, a multimedia exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist George Jenne. Don’t Look Now consists of manipulated movie posters, sculpture, and graphite drawings, all reflecting the artist’s interest in the horror movie genre. Jenne sees a correlation between the unease and trauma delivered by such films and the unsettling experience of early adolescence. The artist states in the press release, “For me, there is a strong connection between the act of warning or revealing and the portentous atmosphere of pre-pubescence, thus a strong connection between the abject, mutated form of the monster, and a person’s tenuously pristine state of mind during early adolescence.”

Hellion (2007), a mixed media sculpture constructed of plastic, resin, embroidery, Fun Fur, polyethylene, wood, sound and light, both tantalizes and torments the viewer. The sculpture resembles a boy scout, but the formidable stance, monster’s head, and bloody knees indicate something more malevolent. Upon closer examination, the viewer encounters such sinister details as cigarette and swastika “merit” badges carefully adorned to the sash, and a wooden plank with the words “Be Irreverent” emblazoned beneath a crest.

Courtesy of the artist and Civilian Art Projects

George Jenne, who currently lives and works in New York, received his B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995. He is the founder of Bandolier, Inc., a commercial prop making company. Jenne has recently shown his work in New York at Exit Art, Jack the Pelican Presents, Envoy Enterprises, and PS122.

This interview was originally posted on March 3, 2011 by Bean Gilsdorf:

Laurel Nakadate’s work uses unassuming means to memorable effect. Oops! (2000) is a video of a young woman in a tank top and tight jeans dancing a choreographed routine while a man in late middle age dances (or stands) awkwardly beside her. It is mesmerizing in its ambiguity: is she making fun of the man? Which one is being exploited? Beg for Your Life (2006) shows Nakadate holding a gun to the head of various men while they perform the title action. Over and over, her work explores the power and beauty of events that teeter on the edge between anxiety and exhilaration. With her ten-year retrospective at PS1 in New York and various screenings and openings, Nakadate’s time is in short supply. I managed to wring this interview from her in record time before she jetted off to her next engagement.

Laurel Nakadate, Oops! (2000). Still from video.

Bean Gilsdorf: Your work explores the power dynamic between men and women. Is this a personal thing?

Laurel Nakadate: What it’s about, for me, is two people in a room and the discomfort and beauty in the space between them. There’s this idea that anything can happen in a room with two people: there are problems and concerns, implications…sometimes this person is at fault and sometimes that person’s at fault, but most of the time something beautiful can come out of the power struggle.

BG: You’re often physically present. Is the work biographical?

LN: No, it’s a construction.

BG: So you’re a stand-in?

LN: I’m an actor. I’m a performance artist or an actor in that scene. It’s not me, it’s some sort of hybrid with me in my body going into the space as a character. I definitely see it as a performance. It’s not Laurel.

Laurel Nakadate, Beg for Your Life (2006). Still from video.

BG: There’s so much risk involved. Do you ever feel frightened? And how do you move past that?

LN: I think there’s something thrilling about the unknown. I certainly feel like it’s work that challenges people to worry or not worry about the protagonists. But I’ve never done anything where I thought I was risking my life. I’ve made work that in retrospect seems that it was risky, or took chances, but when I made the work it was never about setting out to kill myself or get killed. It was always about this investigation. Now I look back at some of the work and I think, God, I was really lucky! But mostly I look back and I think I was really brave.

BG: The work seems very experimental and open-ended. How do you conceptualize what you’re doing when you’re about to go into it?

LN: It’s about telling stories that are difficult to tell, stories that are wily and winding, and what I love about them is that anything can happen, anything is possible and there can be any ending. It’s as complicated as any unknown, which we unravel through chance and creation and sorting through stories. I have a hard time categorizing things, I feel that it’s dismissive and not fair to the work. It’s performance-based work, and so by its very nature, experimental. And what I love about performance is that it can only happen that one time and that one way. You can try to recreate it, but it will never be the same and there’s something beautiful about that. But I find trying to label a piece of art as a specific thing problematic and reductive. Every painter has the right to say they are actually making sculpture, and every sculptor has the right to say they’re doing performance art. And every audience member has the right to read it as something else. Open and generous is where you have to be.

Laurel Nakadate, Exorcism in January (2009). Still from video.

BG: A lot of your work seems dark, but you’ve also talked about how the act of being in a space with someone else is an act of love.

LN: I certainly see darkness in the work, absolutely, but I don’t think darkness is bad. I think darkness is lovely.

BG: And you’ve also talked about the work as an exorcism. Once you’ve done a performance, are you done with it?

LN: It’s always different. Sometimes you’ll do something and you’ll feel like it’s resolved, and sometimes you’ll keep pounding on that door. You can’t win, because if you don’t keep pounding on the door people say that you’re a one-hit wonder; if you do keep pounding, people say you’re narcissistic or obsessed.

BG: What are you working on now?

LN: I’m writing a screenplay and working on a book project. I’m also kind of babysitting the MOMA/PS1 show in the sense that I’m still talking about it a lot. It just opened, so it’s still really new and exciting for me. I’ve got a show of new work opening at the end of April. I’m just going to take the summer to work on the screenplay.

BG: Can you tell me what it’s about?

LN: It’s about adults, that’s what I’ll say now. Consenting adults.

The following article was originally published by Julie Henson on February 16, 2010.

I have to admit, there is nothing more impressive to me than a well executed painting, and spending some time with the work of Johannes Kahrs has done nothing but revive this fascination. Living somewhere between film, modern news media and history painting, Kahrs’ work seamlessly merges the beauty and tradition of painting and portraiture with banal yet grotesque objectivity, seducing the viewer into a reductive, saturated palate only to confront them with an aggressive yet all too familiar imagery. Choosing images generally experienced through second hand sources of information, Kahrs infuses his paintings and drawings with the drama of film, creating a sense of constant motion and closeness within a still and fragmented plane. Claiming imagery typically referenced through our daily interaction with media sources, Kahrs builds on the diversity of photographic images infused with the seductive palette of artists such as Richter and Tuymans, but invests them with a grotesque, bodily relationship to the viewer seen in the work of Jenny Saville. Kahr’s dark and alluring palette creates an ominous sensation surrounding his shrouded, anonymous figures that instantly builds a narrative within his intentionally extracted context. Kahrs’ film-like color references the emotive palette seen in work such as Luc Tuymans’ Gaskamer, but builds another narrative context that remains familiar but unidentifiable.

Nevertheless, it is his hybridization of media that keeps me coming back to his work. The sensation of moving film, rather than a captured photograph, comes not just from rendering from video stills, but showing sequences of images with a subtle shift in time. Kahrs employs a blurring and shifting of images, but also blurs the identity of his subjects, contributing to his seamless combination of the banal and the grotesque. This obscuring of subjects to a point of abstraction, allowing faces to melt off the subjects like those of Francis Bacon’s portraits, elevates while disguising the identity of the mundane, drawing on our cultural over saturation and disconnection from the physicality of violence. Further complicating his role in creating the image, Kahrs paintings and drawings are often shown behind glass, emphasizing the viewer’s separation from the work and further masking the artist’s hand. This masking and obscuring of time combined with the multiple references to media builds more questions than answers, giving someone a place to investigate and question both the history of painting and its relationship to modern life.

Kahrs recent exhibitions have included solo shows with Luhring Augustine in New York and GAMeC in Bergamo, Italy, in addition to several group shows at the Phoenix Art Museum, the SFMOMA and Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal. Kahrs currently lives and works in Berlin.