Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Comprising only a large installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir’s Crepusculum – Latin for “twilight” or “dusk” – is a mixed-media, polyphonic, physical exploration of metaphysical structures that govern the human psyche, and speculates that an enigmatic and irrational system of signs, meanings and forms counterbalances the deceptively ordered exteriors of our existence.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Above all, it is an experiential and tactile show that prioritises evoking a multitude of emotions over engaging the intellect. A large, white spherical entity around which alchemic instruments are scattered sits on a pile of sand; music seems to leak out from all sides of the wall, surrounded by glass-protected ancient Icelandic calfskin parchments that record supernatural accounts of a medieval Scandinavian world inhabited by witches, trolls and dragons. The installation is populated with elemental components of the earth such as dust, dough, fire, blood, burlap and fur, but also overlaid with textures that are fur- or hair-roughened. An accompanying video bolsters the already-surreal installation as a narrator weaves a showy mythological universe with his droning words: a man guts slimy fish, a figure lithely unfolds itself out of clay “legs” and “helmet”, a figure wrapped in tattered cloths hikes laboriously across a sandy wasteland with another strapped to his back towards the self-same spherical entity.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Crepusculum’s allusive and mystical atmosphere appears to be as much a personal aesthetic journey as it is a collective memory of Iceland’s histories. Materially, the exhibition is about Friðriksdóttir’s continued creative experimentation with diverse materials and media that has been in part influenced by the breadth of Swiss/German Dieter Roth’s artistic processes and vocabulary. Friðriksdóttir’s starting point for Crepusculum is rooted in her own dreams – intangible tendrils of thoughts that bleed into each other are first allowed to drift unassisted into esoteric realms and subsequently thematically developed through a combination of simple sketches, sculpture and film. The overall effect is an imagistic universe comprising a choir of overlapping voices, an aggregate of signs and diverse earthy components, but it is hard to see beyond Crepusculum as an oracular endeavour to present nebulous connections to sexual psychology and pop culture while casting light on deconstructing traditional patterns of narratives located within Norse mythology .

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

But Crepusculum is also Friðriksdóttir’s personal re-imagination of a time in Iceland when folklore, gods and magic were fundamental tenets of existence, and where elaborate stories of creation were punctuated by moments of horror, melancholy and unquestioning didacticism. Augmenting her exhibition are twelfth century manuscripts and almanacs loaned from the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík for the first time; such is the reinforcement of the historical investment in Iceland’s national cultural heritage and the revelation of the intense grip that these traditions and mythology still have on twenty-first century Icelandic culture. Perhaps then, for Friðriksdóttir, this is simultaneously a profound ambassadorial undertaking on behalf of the Icelandic people, a cultural burden so complex that it could only be presented in ambivalent spaces as metaphysical considerations.

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Gabríela Friðriksdóttir: Crepusculum will be on show at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt until January 8, 2012.

In 2004, indigenous Australian Cameron Doomadgee was brutally murdered at the hands of a white officer while in police custody, sparking riots on Palm Island in North Queensland. Doomadgee was first arrested for public drunkenness and reported dead an hour later, having suffered from four broken ribs which had ruptured his liver and spleen. His death was recorded as “an accidental fall” in the coroner’s report and all charges on the officer were later dropped in 2007.

“Tall Man”, Four-channel video installation, 2010. Image courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

In his four-channel video installation, Tall Man (a reference to Aboriginal Shire Councillor Lex Wotton’s commitment to the rights of Palm Islanders), Ah Kee appropriates footages from mobile phones and camcorders, edited together with archival news footages to reconstruct the unfolding of events – footages that were ironically used in court as evidence to convict Wotton of inciting the Palm Island riot. But in the hands of Ah Kee, they tell a different story of the injustices faced by the Aboriginal community in Australia. In contrast to the video installation where Wotton is seen enraged and devastated in public, Ah Kee depicts Wotton with subtle and gentle lines – a non-threatening, calm and warm-hearted figure.

"Tall Man”, Charcoal, crayon and acrylic on linen, 2011. Image courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

The final component of the exhibition is a large text-based work that fills the entire front display windows of Gertrude Contemporary. Appropriated from Shakespeare’s Macbeth and reproduced as a run-on sentence, Ah Kee situates the relevance of the seventeenth-century allegory of man’s endless cruelty to man in the brutality faced by Aboriginal people on Australian soil.

“Fill Me”, Vinyl lettering, 2009. Image courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

As a whole, the exhibition exposes the superficial attitudes toward multiculturalism and the constructed representations of Australian history. If it is commonly accepted that history has only ever been written by the victors, why have we still stuck to this story? How is the Aboriginal community to exercise their freewill when they are ceaselessly prevented from demonstrating such rights? Just when it seems that Australia has been making some progress, this illusion is shattered once again with the recent major policy shift by the Baillieu government to dump the compulsory protocol of acknowledging the traditional Aboriginal landowners for being too politically correct. The resurfacing narrative of the Palm Island riot is an important reminder of the continuing lack of respect of indigenous culture.

Aideen Barry, Spray Grenade SG08/3#02, 2008; aluminum, brass, steel; 8.25 in x 3.25 in, edition of 5

Bean Gilsdorf: You often use the home as a site for your work.  What informs your sense of unstable domesticity?

Aideen Barry: I suppose there are two main parts that inform the work.  In 2006 I was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which manifested out of living in “Celtic Tiger Suburbia,” these estates  of cookie cutter homes that grew up out of the [Irish] boom of the ’90s.  It’s a very un-Irish landscape—and unlike in the past when you knew your neighbors and cared for each other—suddenly you didn’t know who your neighbor was.  The domesticity that I’m interested in came out of this space.  I was living in one of these houses and all of the people in the estate were all obsessed with materiality and being perfect and clean.  And this is where my anxiety manifested itself; I would spend all my time cleaning my house in order to fit in with my neighbors.  I wasn’t sleeping, so then I was more anxious, and I would stay up late cleaning even more to alleviate the anxiety.  And I would look out the window and that was what all my neighbors were doing!  And I tried desperately to fit in.  That’s definitely what drives a lot of the work, this veneer of perfection—but underneath there are cracks, something that’s not right.  I’m really interested in Freud’s notion of the unheimliche, the uncanny, something that can be familiar and strange at the same time.  For Levitating I spent seven days jumping while [filming] cleaning, so as to create the illusion of levitation.  And the spray grenades were a way of merging advertising on “the new war” which is the war on germs.  I took the familiar grenade and also the familiar cleaning spray and bastardized them together to create this seductive object.

Aideen Barry, "Heteratopic Glitch," detail view, 2008. Image courtesy of Anne Ffrench/Aideen Barry

BG: Talking about fear and landscape makes me think about Heteratopic Glitch.  That work changed the landscape, and inside the plastic balls the women were in a potentially airless environment.  At first it seems beautiful and playful, but then you are afraid for these women.

AB: It is potent with anxiety, that space.  They can’t puncture the ball or they’ll sink.  No one really knows what might happen.  That’s something I’m really conscious of in the work, that there’s an expectation or anticipation, but the future is a bit ambiguous.  In those works that involve a landscape I like to push beyond the realms of possibility; you don’t expect ten women to be able to walk on water…

Aideen Barry, "Heteratopic Glitch," panoramic view, 2008. Image courtesy of Anne Ffrench/Aideen Barry

BG:…it’s a fantasy…

AB: That aesthetic is important to me, the phantasmagorical, where something can behave in the most absurd and sublime way. In the 1980s we had only two [Irish] TV channels, both run by the state which was effectively bankrupt at the time. As a cost-cutting measure they would buy eastern European animations from Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Ukraine, Lithuania, etc…films by Jan Lenica, Jan Svankmajer, Walerian Borowczyk, and others.  The Irish TV censor didn’t see them as anything but children’s cartoons, but in actuality they were extremely dark, politically-motivated visual protests. Some of the scenes are so violent, and yet they could be seen as only a chair and a table moving around in stop-motion. The aggression and anxiety in these films really informed my aesthetic and my motivation with material and technical application.

BG: That darkness is so customary in your work.  I’m thinking of your video Possession where scissors attached to locks of a woman’s hair cut the lawn, and a pile of food travels down the table into her mouth…it’s partly normal, and partly macabre.

AB: Yes, I’m definitely looking at the domestic object and turning it into something fantastical, turning the garage door into a bread cutter and so on, and looking at other anxieties like eating disorders.  That’s also informed by the gothic.  Ireland has so many gothic writers: Bram Stoker, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and they were informed by Irish mythology.  That’s rooted in my practice, too, playing with the familiar.  The housewife in Possession is familiar, but there is a slippage between what’s real and what’s perceived to be real, a kind of madness.

BG: The stop-motion also serves to reinforce the repetitive nature or drudgery of everyday existence, but elevates it into this level of fantasy.

AB:  And the stop-motion makes the body jerk in an unnatural way.  The familiar, the drudgery is there but it has a different pace.  It’s faster, like a Buster Keaton film.

BG: You’ve talked about the work coming from a place of anxiety.  When you finish a project, how does it feel to step away from it?

AB: I don’t think it’s cathartic.  I don’t think it relieves the anxiety, I think that’s always going to be there.  I had to acknowledge that a couple of years ago, I just recognize the signs and I know how to control it so that it doesn’t spiral completely out of control.  I think the best part is to acknowledge that it exists.  Mental illness is a taboo subject in Ireland.  I’m sure it is here, too…I’m sure you’re not supposed to have a breakdown, there’s something wrong with you and therefore you’re damaged!  But I acknowledge that I am damaged.  Every now and again I go off my track, and the best way to put myself back on track is to make a comment on what set me off in the first place.

BG: And in all of this, do you think if yourself as a feminist?

AB: Feminist theory is as important now as it’s ever been.  Remember that in Ireland, we didn’t have a sexual revolution the way you did here [in the US].  People forget, but birth control only became legal in Ireland in 1995, we only got divorce eleven years ago.  But it’s beyond Ireland, it’s global.  All the references that I had when making the animations, you can totally see them in Desperate Housewives, women who are married to their property and who play a role in a restrictive society.  Not much has changed in that regard, so a comment has to be made.  And as a woman working in the art world you can definitely say the glass ceiling remains, and you have to challenge all those conventions by making a comment about where we are now.  The feminist critique is very much prevalent in the work.

Bruce Nauman, Going Around the Corner Piece, 1970, © Coll. Centre Pompidou. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian

In the self-explanatory show entitled Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010, the history and evolution of the video art genre are recounted through 50 video works and installations, drawn from the collections of both the Singapore Art Museum and Centre Pompidou. Having developed in tandem with the apparatus of television and the analogue and then digital video cameras, video art’s reconfiguration of the politics of image-making and its ability to place the spectator as an indispensable agent in a work’s existence are significant tenets on which the exhibition is established. The infinitely widening scope and scale for the production and interpretation of (moving) images, the mode of their dissemination, and the documentation of performances (technical or otherwise), pose several key but general questions around which the works are grouped.

The pertinence of such questions however, falters in the collaborative effort that has shown up more differences than similarities. Reconciling the inventory of the Singapore Art Museum with the Centre Pompidou’s reveals the tentative forays into the processes of historicisation that are only beginning to develop in Southeast Asia and the inevitable rift in the standpoints of Western art and Southeast Asian art history. The Pompidou’s international collection stretches back 4 decades to the genesis of video art; the Singapore Art Museum’s inventory spans approximately a decade that really began with the Asian Financial Crisis (1997-8) and is focused on works produced in the surrounding geographical region. The wider ramifications of this collaboration go beyond an overwhelming inventory imbalance and the expanded visual vocabulary that video technology provides; indeed the emerging ideological differences become apparent when speculative comparison – the attempt at a comparative video-art history, should it even exist – inevitably sets in.

Pipilotti Rist, A la belle étoile (Under the Sky), 2007, © Coll. Centre Pompidou. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian.

The seeming futile effort of historicising video art in this instance, is thus mitigated by several thematic (and loosely chronological) focuses that ground the show: television critique, the representations of self, the documentation of performance, installation in space, landscape as metaphor, video-as fiction and the deconstruction of narratives.

If early efforts by video pioneers such as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman and David Hall took the definition of an art object beyond its conventional parameters as a static entity produced for visual consumption, perhaps the greatest strength of video art triumphed in this show is the unprecedented potential of experiential interactivity between artist, installation and spectator. Peter Campus’ Interface (1972) invites the viewer to superimpose their reflection onto their projected image after which they simultaneously face 2 images of themselves – one of the video image and their reflection on the glass screen. The inherent sense of ego coupled with a measure of curiosity is a potent brew, particularly when facets of the multi-layered self are revealed in art. Like the literary Doppelgänger (the ghostly and sinister double), artists’ early efforts recognised the potential of video art in exploring the loss of existential reference in which the traditionally held view of the consecrated sense of self is destabilised. In Bruce Nauman’s Going around the Corner Piece (1972), the surveillance set-up is symmetrical and simple: perched in the corners in a white square-room are closed-circuit cameras and small TV monitors that capture visitor movements going around the corner of the enclosed space. The spectator’s image disappears from view as he/she rounds a corner; speeding up in an attempt to play catch-up with one’s image results in a unsuccessful tail-chasing endeavour – which is probably the glorious core and yet most vexing part of this work.

Peter Campus, Interface, 1972.

Departing from the investigative preoccupation with the apparatus and the monolithic hold that television had, video art had, by the 1980s, begun deconstructive strategies of memory and narratives, debunking on its way, stereotypes of sexuality, ethnicity and gender perpetuated by the very same mode. Nam June Paik’s semi-documentary Guadalcanal Requiem (1979) explores the subjectivity of memory through the deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of narratives, in a film that coalesces history, time, cultural memory and mythology on the site of one of World War II’s most devastating battles in the Solomon Islands. Surrealistic images of archival footage, interviews, Charlotte Moorman’s fragmented cello performances come together like a scratchy Hitchcock–Buñuel/Dali crossover. The haunting collage is often fraught with poignant tension and a sense of the macabre: interviewees with singular (or paltry) memories picking up where some have left off; Moorman playing a cello with a long palm leaf against a thunderous horizon, and at another time, performs concealed in a body bag.

Guadalcanal Requiem, Nam June Paik, 1979, © Nam June Paik Estate video still Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EIA) New York

A deconstructive approach to the moving image seemed to be video art’s trajectory from the 1990s into the early 21^st century, incorporating new developments of photo processing, digital editing and image layering in contemporary visual culture. Swiss conceptual artist Pipilotti Rist’s A la belle étoile (2007) moves between micro- and macrocosms on horizontal and vertical surfaces. As suggested by curator Christine Van Assche, such works operate on removing depth of field, redefining in the process, the spectator’s own rapport with space.

Despite the influence of the commercial mainstream, video art has nevertheless, retained its earlier forms: the performance documentary, mixed-media texts, or even the visual portrait. Such forms seem conceivably better suited to the preoccupation with art’s social purpose and its context of production that remain dominant traits in Asian-produced videos; perhaps most similar to the historical Western notions where art was produced within corresponding socio-political backgrounds. Just as Gustav Courbet’s post-romanticism was a rejection of academic and bourgeois juste milieu, much of Southeast Asian works are filled with the rhetoric of social change in which media artists show no desire to be unbound from their local cultural matrices. By continuing to invoke ties to tradition, incredibly varied configurations (or even fragments) of history that appear in Asian works at best, seem to read as disjointed narratives to the viewer unschooled in the intricacies of China’s tumultuous last few decades.

Yang Fudong, Backyard - Hey! Sun is rising, 2001.

Yang Fudong’s Backyard – Hey! Sun is Rising (2001) follows the Keatonesque slapstick antics of four young men enacting military rituals and traipsing around with swords, questioning the meaning of rituals in the wake of social changes. A richer meaning however, could be gleaned from Yang’s work if considered in the light of the communism’s wane, as well as in the historical traditions of Zen, martial arts and the aesthetic disciplines of poetry, painting and calligraphy – all of which are mirrored in aesthetic form and content in his videos. Like Yang’s disoriented characters who seem to seek penance in an environment marked by repression, The Propeller Group’s Uh… (2007) confronts Vietnam’s youth culture’s adaptations to the changing socio-cultural and political landscape through the symbolic use of graffiti, and the disorder and spontaneity it represents – the antithesis of Vietnam’s ordered socialist state.

Uh..., The Propeller Group, 2007, Singapore Art Museum Collection

Manet's Luncheon on the Grass and the Thai farmers, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Two Planets series, 2008, Singapore Art Museum collection

While Western artists like Pierre Huyghe and Issac Julien integrated mixed media installations with the spectacular and immersive experience of cinema, Asian filmmakers also tended to persist with the use of narrative (and at times, the meta-narrative) as a didactic strategy. In Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s The Two Planets Series (2008), Thai farmers – groups of people blithely oblivious to the cultural or economic baggage associated with canonical works of Western art history – talk about several cornerstones of modern European painting. Their discussions of Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (1863), van Gogh’s The Siesta (1889-90) and Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) are artlessly literal, context-less and extremely humourous, with the constant comical tendency to drift towards off-topic situations. Straddling the diverse worlds of rural farming and art history, Rasdjarmrearnsook raises questions of socio-cultural context, the parameters of interpretation and appreciation, but stops short of suggesting that our efforts in basting together a coherent narrative and interpretation of art are vain but significant detractors from the lost pleasure of looking.

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Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010 is presented by the Singapore Art Museum and the Centre Pompidou, and runs through 18 September 2011.

Ranu Mukherjee, Auspicious Picture, Multiple Sources of Power (2011). Hybrid film, 2 minutes 51 seconds. Edition of 5. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

What happens at the moment when energy becomes material, and how can we even dream of documenting it? The question has wide-ranging implications, from the memories stored in everyday objects to the effects of prayer. Ranu Mukherjee’s solo exhibition at Frey Norris Contemporary and Modern, Absorption Into the Nomadic and Luminous, takes up these issues. A former painter who now works mostly with photography and animation, the question has particular potency for Mukherjee, as it references the creation cycle of a painting (from pigment to paint to image), the balance between the intangible and tangible found in digital video, and perhaps the link between.

Ranu Mukherjee, Rajasthani Gypsy Shoes, Dr. Gabrielle Francis (2011). Ink on colored paper. 19 5/8 x 19 5/8 in. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

Nomadic and Luminous consists of a series of square paintings and a suite of hybrid films (so-called due to their combination of animation, photography, and video). In the first film, Auspicious Picture, Multiple Sources of Power (2011), an animated emanation, or halo, glows above a live action shot of ocean waves at night.  As the emanation fades and disappears, different articles of clothing and tapestry appear and disappear in the foreground, almost dancing, and we are left to contemplate each object—ocean, emanation, and clothing—as a source of power in its own right.

Ranu Mukherjee, Between the no longer and the not yet (2011). Ink on colored paper. 19 5/8 x 19 5/8 in. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

The second film, Abundance Picture, As Told By the Element Itself (2011), opens with the image of a checkered-cloth bundle making its way across a crocodile-filled river, with children’s silhouettes in the background. After a while the silhouettes fade, and the next image features bright clothing hung from tree roots, juxtaposed against a hand-painted landscape as yet another shadowy silhouette moves in and out of the frame, eventually revealing itself to be pile of gold.  The final film, Ecstatic Picture, Spilled Milk (2011), shows the infiltration and spread of a pitcher of spilled milk amongst a constant rain of flowers, Indian clothing and jewelry, and other objects. The empty silhouette of what could be a deity, or perhaps a mother and child, occupies the center of the screen. Eventually, a mass of cell phones appear and pour forth the rainbow equivalent of spilled milk, which mingles with rest of the animations and references the boon that cell phone technology has brought to India.

Ranu Mukherjee, Ecstatic Picture, Spilled Milk (2011). Hybrid Film, 5 minutes 4 seconds. Edition of 5. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

Taken together, the films provide a meditation on tangibility and intangibility; landscape, negative space, and sacred space; void, object, memory, and isolation.  And while Mukherjee describes the accompanying paintings as merely “note taking,” they should not be undervalued—particularly because they provide us with Mukherjee’s lexicon. The same pair of gold Rajasthani gypsy shoes, with their curled toes and red interiors, for instance, appears in both Rajasthani Gypsy Shoes, Dr. Gabrielle Francis (2011), and Auspicious Picture (2011). Similarly, landscape fragments based on lithographs of Indian deities, with the deities cut out, show up in multiple paintings, as well as both Auspicious and Ecstatic Pictures.

Ranu Mukherjee, Abundance picture, as told by the element itself (2011). Hybrid Film. 3 minutes 32 seconds. Edition of 5. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

To Mukherjee’s credit, the work never becomes ponderous, but remains uniquely well-thought out and mesmerizing. On a more personal note, the objects in the paintings also reference Mukherjee’s Indian heritage—just one more way long-stored energy materializes or becomes current.

Absorption Into the Nomadic and Luminous is on view at Frey Norris in San Francisco through July 30, 2011.

Marco Brambilla, "Civilization (Megaplex)," 2010, 3-D High Definition disc. Private collection, London.

“I believe we were born dead,” said motorcyclist-daredevil Evel Knievel, rambling to Sports Illustrated in 1968. He’d just cleared 16 cars in Gardena, CA, before crashing over the fountains at Cesare’s Palace, and was romanticizing about future stunts. “I have accepted the fact that dying is a part of living,” he continued. “If I make it across the Grand Canyon, I’ll be a millionaire. But I’m not all jacked up to make a big killing. I want to do this thing because I want to do this thing. I don’t know if it’s going to make a worthwhile contribution to society or transportation, but I’m going to do it.” He never jumped the canyon; no one with sway—the U.S. government in particular—would let him. But if he had, he’d have had an audience big enough to fill a stadium.  He knew it too: “if I have to get off halfway across[,] [o]ne hundred thousand people aren’t going to say ‘boo.’’’

Madness meets mechanics, brazenness meets skill—it’s the combination of real dexterity and superhuman (crazy) ambition that can turn a man with a motorcycle into a crowd pleasing phenom.

Stuntman Evel Knievel jumping 140 feet at 90 mph over 13 buses at Wembley Stadium, May 27th, 1975. He crashed upon landing. Photo by David Ashdown.

There’s something of this outlandish, expert ambition coursing through Marco Brambilla’s current exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Hailed as the world’s first exhibition of 3-D video art–a claim to fame that’s admittedly tinny (3-D film exists; how much back-patting does art deserve for catching up?)–the real pull of Brambilla’s show lies in the mad scope of its technique.

Angelino by way of Italy and New York, Brambilla has been filmmaking since the ’70s, experimenting, pushing buttons, keeping abreast of innovation. He’s known for appropriating blockbuster film clips and other iconic imagery, though the virtuosic density with which he pieces his appropriations back together is what makes him so singular. Most recently, he turned Kanye West’s egotism into magic, with his surreal, seductive video for the celestial single, “Power.” He also reportedly stole the show at the Loop video art fair in Barcelona, where Christopher Grimes Gallery featured his Evolution (Megaplex) in 3-D.

Marco Brambilla, "Wall of Death," 2001, Single-channel video. Collection New Line Cinema, Los Angeles.

The Santa Monica Museum show includes ten years’ worth of work, highlighting Brambilla’s savvy as  borrower as well as visionary.  When you enter the gallery—you’ll pick up your 3-D glasses on the way in, and save them until the very end—you first encounter Sea of Tranquility (2006), a grainy loop based on images of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing; then the pulsating, multi-layered Cathedral (2008), a kaleidoscopic fantasia of shots of mall shoppers; followed by HalfLife (2002), which, grainy again, invasively pairs surveillance footage of gamers with footage of the games they play. But it’s when you get to the fourth gallery space and see Wall of Death that the exhibition really begins to show its grit.

Long before Evel Knievel, motorcyclists performed the gravity-defying Wall of Death trick, often as a carnival sideshow. The “Wall” is the 20-30 foot vertical wooden side of a cylindrical drum that cyclists ride around after building up enough speed to coast horizontal to the floor. In Brambilla’s Wall, reimagined using black and white 1930s footage, the rider circles the drum endlessly, throwing up his hands in a magnetic gesture of showmanship. Brambilla used the Kinetoscope films popular in the early 1900s as the inspiration for his editing, and the loop has a quaint, vintage feel.

If Wall of Death depicts daredevilry, the show’s final two works, Evolution (Megaplex) (2010) and Civilization (Megaplex) (2008/2011), are themselves feats of daredevilry. They combine hundreds of looped videos from iconic films into scrolling inferno-like, 3-D opuses. They give gaping pictures of civilization as dark and complicated as Peter Jackson’s Mordor or Heironymus Bosch’s The Last Judgment. Crawling naked bodies from Pasolini’s Salo, Clint Eastwood striding forward, and the romantic soundtrack of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet—the panorama of references scrolls on and on. You feel as if you could fall in to the imagery headfirst and be lost for eons.

Yet, despite the undeniable impressiveness of Evolution and Civilization, it’s Wall of Death that remains for me the most exquisite and compelling of Brambilla’s works. To depict the totality of humanity in a manner worthy of both Spielberg and Dante is a feat, but to get at one man’s insatiable, tireless desire to perform the impossible? That’s precious because it’s particular.

Chris Doyle, "Smokescreen," 2010, Duratrans on LED light box. Courtesy Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles.

The same E.B. White responsible for Charlotte’s Web—still, to my mind, one of the most stabbing child-geared depictions of the circle of life—was also the obsessive stylist behind Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, that little book that told America, “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words” (and still receives hate mail). But long before he did either of these things he wrote essays—swaths of them, and most of them crafted, endearingly, almost to a fault. He would later refer to one particular essay, written in 1939 and called “Here is New York,” as a “period piece.” But today it feels weirdly prescient. Especially when, after meandering through idol worship (White was staying just blocks from where Earnest Hemingway punched Max Eastman in the nose), neighborhood boundary lines, and the “cold guilt” of the Bowery, White winds down with this: the subtlest change New York has undergone of late, “one people don’t speak much about,” is that the “city, for the first time in its long history is destructible.”

A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges. . . . The intimation of death is part of New York now: in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

White’s fixation on jets overhead had to do with World War II era paranoia; the twin towers hadn’t even been built.

But his foresight, however uncanny, isn’t what makes White’s essay compelling; it’s his reliability as a craftsman. I trust White to understand destruction because he understands the preciousness of construction so well, building up sentences word by word, and paragraphs sentence by sentence.

Chris Doyle, "History of the 20th Century I," 2009, Duratrans on LED light-box. Courtesy Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles.

Artist Chris Doyle understands construction too, as his current exhibition at Sam Lee Gallery in Chinatown shows. The landscape Doyle depicts, often industrial but never really urban, is far less specific than the cityscape White wrote about. It’s a series of built-up vignettes, shown in lightboxes, small prints loosely based on the dimensions of dollar bills, and, most prominently, a 6 minute, 26 second video animation. Called Waste_Generation (also the name of the show) and informed by the romantic ruins of Hudson River Painter Thomas Cole’s Desolation, the video cycles through images of nature and the trappings of manufacturing as they collide and merge with each other. These 6 minutes took a year to compose, and all images were hand-drawn on a computer tablet and then animated using flash. I imagine it’s quiet soundtrack, composed by collaborator Joe Arcidiacono, took a comparably long time. As a result, each moment has an immense intentionality to it, and the video’s careful craftsmanship seems, potentially, like an antidote to the man-made devastation it depicts.

Chris Doyle, "Green/Green," 2010, Duratrans on LED light box. Courtesy Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles.

The press release specifies that Brooklyn-based Doyle’s reinterpretation of Cole is, in part, an attempt to react to 9/11. It’s hard to forget a fact like that, though it’s just as hard to know what that means, and knowing probably isn’t that important. That the currency, buildings, and waste heaps that cycle through are treated as tenderly as the foliage and blooms is what’s important.

E.B. White ends his essay on New York with a tribute to a tree, a willow, “long-suffering and much-climbed.” Says White, “whenever I look at it nowadays and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: ‘This must be saved.’” Of course, it’s the effort White puts into constructing a description of this tree, a “marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death,” that preserves it, or makes preservation in general seem like a worthy cause. The weird, embodied foliage that grows and wilts in Doyle’s animation has a similar effect: by taking the time to create, carefully, these images, Doyle suggests an understanding of destruction goes hand-in-hand with an understanding of what it takes to craft destructible things.

FORCE OF FAILURE: DailyServing’s latest week-long series

Lynda Benglis, Phantom, 1971.

Lynda Benglis is a fearless artist. She added a much-needed sense of humor to first-generation feminism and imbued late 1960s/early ‘70s Post-Minimal sculpture with an even more needed sense of color. But a lot of her work is kind of awful. Her legendary status as an artist who went toe-to-toe with the biggest male egos in the New York art world is well deserved, and I’ll take her slumping blobs of polyurethane as examples of entropy in sculpture over Robert Smithson’s lame mirrors stuck in dirt any day. The nearly uniform praise for her current retrospective at the New Museum, however, feels like it’s based more on her historical status than on the work itself.

Lynda Benglis, Installation View, New Museum, 2011. Photo by Benoit Pailley.

The Fallen Paintings (Benglis’ signature poured latex floor pieces) are by far the best in show. Slabs of poured paint yield to gravity as they diffuse Minimalism’s rigid structure with Colorfield’s floating orbs and Jackson Pollock’s subconscious process. These works call to mind a sophisticated sense of order, like Merce Cunningham’s low center of gravity choreography.  However, the chicken wire, glitter, paint and plaster construction of the wall pieces, which was probably shocking in the ‘70s, just seems amateurish now. They don’t extend the properties of the material to anywhere near the same degree that the floor works do. They look good in reproduction, but in person they disappoint.

Lynda Benglis, Sparkle Knot V, 1972

As you move forward chronologically, Benglis’ work begins to reference the body in increasingly flat-footed ways and her forms get more cheesily symbolic. The Peacock Series from the late ‘70s/early ‘80s consists of vaguely vaginal decorated fans hung on the wall. Chiron, from 2009, is a big glowing pink egg. Even Phantom, five dramatic glow-in-the-dark dripping mountains (shown here for the first time since 1971) give off a distinct Led Zeppelin “Houses of the Holy” vibe. They’re cool in a geeky sort of way, but by the time I got to Primary Structures, (Paula’s Props), a room-sized installation of blue velvet drapes, some fake trees and Greek columns, I began to question Benglis’ taste for real.

Lynda Benglis, Installation View of Primary Structures, (Paula’s Props), New Museum, 2011. Photo by Benoit Pailley.

Where she completely kicks ass, however, is in her randy sense of iconic self-promotion. The photos of her at work on her floor pieces are classics, and the notorious advertisement from the November 1974 issue of Artforum, where she appears nude with slicked back hair holding a dildo between her legs, is still shockingly strong. Even though it’s been written about ad nauseum and reproduced a zillion times, it still packs a punch in person. Shot from below, Benglis appears as monumental as Michelangelo’s David and her image turns about 2,000 years of male-dominated Western Art History on its head. Set against a stark black rectangle, it’s as if Benglis is literally turning the page on Minimalism’s colorless form and gender hierarchy in the most in-your-face way possible. So what if feminists at the time hated it—Benglis was likely the first female artist to consciously construct a heroic artistic persona, and that took bigger balls than just throwing a vaginal reference or two into her work.

Centerfold by Lynda Benglis published in Artforum magazine, 1974.

If many of her wall sculptures don’t quite live up to her outsized rep, there are videos and Polaroids on display that certainly do. The Amazing Bow-Wow, 1976, is an uncannily watchable short film about a hermaphroditic human-sized dog that enters into a fateful love triangle full of jealousy and lust. It’s as unflinchingly gutsy as any Paul McCarthy, but with way more heart. Displayed next to the video is a series of Polaroids called Secrets that combine pornish images of Benglis and Robert Morris with close-ups of flowers. Here, the collusion between nature, sex and overlapping bodies is as palpable as it is in the floor sculptures. Rarely exhibited, the photos’ old wooden frames have the vibe of pre-boutique-era SoHo. Nostalgic art relic nerds, get ready.

Lynda Benglis, Advertisement from Artforum magazine, April 1974.

All of Benglis’ work might not stand the test of time. She’s like a classic rock band that put out three or four great albums with timeless cover art. Like a lot of those bands, Benglis synthed out in the ‘80s and never quite recovered, but it doesn’t matter. The lesson here is that she full-on embraced failure in her work, through both an entropic use of materials and by taking risks that few artists today would even consider. For all of her posturing and dildo-ing around, she still feels human and extremely relatable, and she’s more than paid her dues. Every New Yorker knows that she’s one of ours, so if she makes criminally bad art, it’s cool. We just look the other way.

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.

Les Samouraïs , 2010 Single-channel video lightstands, painted wood, projector 3 min 36 sec, sound Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Vidal Cuglietta

One might be tempted to call Lisa Tan’s exhibition at Arthouse in Austin poetic. But what would this mean? It is spare, filled with layered and complex allusions, much like a poem. The imagistic lyricism of two finches in a cage; a lone man smoking as he stares out a window; flashes of barren mountain peaks; and a doctor’s stark appraisal of an aging body might suggest something more than prose as an apt metaphor. But regardless of the correct literary comparison, this exhibition is an aggregate of images – a series of artworks that collect around a few themes. One of the most evocative is the notion of the double.

Letters From Dr. Bamberger, 2001 - ongoing Annual post-physical letters 9 5/8” x 6 5/8 inches each Courtesy of the artist w/ special thanks to the University of Gothenburg, Valand School of Fine Arts

Much of the work is about relationships, both real and imagined, between two bodies. Letters From Dr.Bamberger is a project that Tan begun in 2001 when her boyfriend at the time went to the doctor. He received a letter from the doctor after his physical that summarized his health. Tan followed suit and also went to this doctor, shortly receiving her own letter. Year after year Tan and her romantic partner would go to the doctor and receive a letter that detailed their physical health. These letters, standing in for each of these years stand side by side, wrapping around the exhibition. They speak to the luxury of health insurance and the shifting of a body’s physicality over time. They also speak to the relationship between doctor and patient, which Tan originally compared to the teacher-student dynamic in graduate school when she began the piece ten years ago.

National Geographic, 2009 Double slide projection and printed text Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist

Another work is National Geographic (2009), which is composed of two slide projectors and a screen. Tan took her late father’s magazine collection and cut out all of the images of mountains and photographed them. She then photographed the image that was on the backside of the page. In the dual projections this back-to-back relationship is splayed out in such a way that we see side-by-side comparisons governed by chance.

Les Samouraïs , 2010 - Single-channel video lightstands, painted wood, projector 3 min 36 sec, sound Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Vidal Cuglietta, Brussels

Les Samouraïs (2010) is based on Jean-Piere Melville’s 1967 film Le Samourai. This film, which was remade by Jim Jarmusch in 1999 as Ghost Dog, tells the story of an assassin who lives in relative solitude with only a small caged bird for company. The finch in the original film died in a studio fire shortly before the film’s completion and Tan memorializes it by digitally adding a second bird into the film, complicating the film’s tragic sense of isolation.

In Search of the Forgotten, Letters from Mme de Forget to Eugenè Delacroix, 2010 Archival inkjet prints with chine-collé in artist’s frame 6.3 x 19.7 inches Edition of 2 Courtesy of the artist & Arthouse at the Jones Center

Finally, there are a series of prints that record the correspondence between the nineteenth century French artist Eugene Delecroix and his friend and lover Madame Forget. Tan was fascinated by the wonderful associations that the English pronunciation of this woman’s name evoked. Was she indeed forgotten? What was her true relationship with this great titan of Romanticism? Tan’s process involved research in France and New York but rather than looking for concrete truths as an historian might, the artist is content with the richly ambiguous and open suggestions of correspondence and parallel gestures of expression.

VanDerBeek’s career was filled with experimental projects in film, early computer art, and the cybernetic-tinged utopian non-verbal communication that moved art into uncharted waters. If Al Gore invented the internet, than VanDerBeek envisioned it first. The working model of visual and cultural lateral leaps found in Mankinda (1957) carries through his later works like Newsreal of Dreams (1976). Each relies on associative leaps made out of a psychedelic arrangement of random things– frenetic, non-stable images morphing and fluctuating their meanings in the blink of an eye. The central work, a recreation of Movie-Drome, contains popular movies, art history slides, and contemporary music entangled in an overwhelming collage that is impossible to completely experience.

The show’s title comes from one futuristic option that came out of his Buckminster Fuller-esque dome for the original Movie-Drome, at Gate Hill Co-op in Stony Point NY. The idea was, that “non-verbal international picture language” could be beamed out via satellite to other domes. These were not motion pictures, but emotion pictures, filed with deep utopian notions of what we are capable of becoming in the future. Today we just make do with UbuWeb, YouTube, and tabbed browsing, but an alternative art broadcast system would be an excellent invention.

VanDerBeek’s cybernetic cold-warrior surroundings pop up in Breathdeath (1963) a few times. This and other works were a huge influence on Terry Gilliam, both during the Do Not Adjust your Set and Monty Python eras. Both Gilliam and VanDerBeek grew up in the post world war era and wore their politics on their sleeves. A central concern was if these new technologies would end in mutually assured self-destruction or if they would free us. There was a fear that technology was out to get us.

His Violence Sonata is probably the most utopian of the work shown. It’s a two hour video that was broadcast on channels 2 and 44 in Boston on January 12, 1970. He hoped that neighbors would get together and watch two televisions simultaneously. This experiment was designed to spark discussions about race relations and violence. There was even a live call-in portion and a studio audience who were asked  “Can man communicate?”

Part of VanDerBeek’s originality stems from his quoting. The use of altered, but popular and accessible images and their loaded messages allowed for cybernetic feedback loops and open systems that MIT was known for during VanDerBeek’s tenure as a Fellow at CAVS. I think in 2011 it is easy to see this type of artwork unconsciously quoted by freshman video classes, but this exhibition creates a coherent vision of VanDerBeek trying to harness these technologies for art’s sake, even if he wasn’t sure that it was possible.

Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom Will be on view at MIT List Visual Art Center from February 4- April 3, 2011. There will be a gallery talk by Fred Barzyk and David Atwood of WGBH on Thursday March 10 about Violence Sonata. March 31 there will be a screening of 16mm films not included in the exhibition. It will also be on view at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston from May 14- July 10, 2011.

When Marsha Norman began her play ‘Night Mother, she gave her protagonist Jesse one ominous line of dialogue: “We got any old towels?” It sounds utilitarian, but it actually dives right into the core of play’s tragedy.

As playwriting instructor Richard Toscan has pointed out, if Norman let all the implications of that line hang out, Jesse would have said something like:

Do we have any old towels, plastic sheeting or foam
rubber padding? I’m going to commit suicide in the
bedroom tonight with Daddy’s pistol as soon as I get
everything done for you and I need the towels so all the
blood won’t make a mess on your floor.

But Norman never would have written that. She’s a queen of subtext, and ‘Night Mother is about what isn’t said.

Kalup Linzy’s films hardly use subtext at all. The characters say what they feel and want with a frank degree of self-knowledge that would be prescient if their personas had a little more nuance to them. But like the stars of the soap operas Linzy takes inspiration from, his characters have fairly predictable preoccupations–love, rejection, betrayal, themselves–and embrace cliche guilelessly.

Linzy, who gained a swell of fresh attention for appearing in General Hospital with James Franco this Spring, is a Guggenheim Fellow who has been art-making for the past decade.However, Fantasies, Melodramas, and a Dream called Love, his current exhibition at Ltd Los Angeles, is his solo debut in L.A. It includes three short videos and a number of dumb-fisted cut-out collages that look like the quaint results of a Henri Matisse-Romare Bearden collaboration.

The videos, roughly made and surprisingly spare considering the flamboyance of their casts, are the exhibition’s highlight. Linzy overdubs all the voices, which gives the otherwise blatant dialogue an absurdly robotic quality. In Conversations wit de Churen VII: Lil Myron’s Trade, an animated short in which characters gallop across the frame as if riding invisible horses, two men have a sexual tryst that ends with one dead and one in prison, all because a woman in town chose to “run her mouth off.” Women are always running their mouths off in Linzy’s work. In Keys to Our Heart, two women, one a matronly Linzy in drag and another a wispy blond thing, try to help “John J.” navigate his “bitchy” lover. Linzy, playing “Lily,” says she “wants to do something positive,” then tells John, “If you can’t be an asshole to her, I suggest you leave her and find a good girl.” “I’m looking for a queen of my heart, not a shady spade,” declares John, once his female friends have coaxed him into breaking it off with his girl.

But even if Linzy’s characters purport to have their hearts on their sleeves, the over-the-top intensity of their acting always makes it seem as though their shallowness is a front for something deeper and heavier. In a way, the undercurrents in Linzy’s films are just as quietly ominous as the subtext in Norman’s play–his characters speak with a cockiness that suggests they know what they want and more or less understand their own feelings. Of course, they don’t understand themselves at all and that’s what makes listening to their “running off mouths” so exquisitely, smartly uncomfortable.

Irving Penn, "Bricklayer," 1950

Irving Penn’s Still Life with Triangle and Red Eraser (1985) currently hangs in a small maroon room in the basement of the Getty Museum’s West Pavilion. It’s part of the In Focus: Still Life exhibition, a charming but uneventful “best of” survey of the Getty’s images of objects. The print is a recent acquisition, and one of which the Getty is proud. As aloofly controlled as any of Penn’s projects, it shows a draftsman’s instruments: a triangle, pencil, ruler, two erasers, and pigment. Penn made Still Life with Triangle as an advertisement for Fugi camera lenses, using new technology to fetishize tried and true symbols of a more archaic craft. Crisp, exquisitely angular, and sleekly finished, the image feels as though it has locked its elements in place, in an unmoving state of geometric perfection.

Thirty-five years earlier, Penn explored tools and trade in an equally composed but far less finished way. His Small Trades series, the subject of a 2009 Getty exhibition, showed various specialized workers wearing the uniforms and carrying the instruments of their vocation. Penn, a modernist to the core, treated these workers like nearly extinct curiosities that he was immortalizing while the chance remained. In the notes he took during Small Trades, he occasionally sounds like he’s working hard to suspend disbelief. The word “apparently” appears often: “The CARVER is a kind of young waiter apparently” or “the BONER is apparently a man in the large markets who hacks away at full carcasses.”

The tools are the series’ most striking aspect. The people make sense, and look basically familiar; while draymen and trouncers may not exist anymore, rough-faced workers in worn aprons certainly do. But the objects they carry seem like relics of long-gone rituals—antiquated horse whips, narrow saws, hoses, tapered ladders. Years later, talking to Getty curators, Penn described the Small Trades photographs as “residual images of enchantment,” making what was functional just fifty years ago sound mystical.

Erika Vogt, "Armors for Chorus and Players", sticks: celastic, acrylic latex, oil enamel, and tempera on wood, objects: military trench shovel, scale part, hooks, chimes, weights, celastic, and acrylic latex, dimensions variable, installation view, 2010. Courtesy Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, CA.

I thought of Penn’s tools when I saw Erika Vogt’s installation at Overduin and Kite two weeks ago. Vogt makes functionality mystical too. Called Geometric Persecution, a title that hovers between severity and romance, the installation is quiet and open, but also rigorously controlled. Colored, rectangular rods that resemble yard sticks lean against the wall of the first exhibition space. Chimes, picks, weights, and hooks lay intentionally scattered on the floor nearby. These, like the sticks, have stiff celastic handles protruding from them.

Erica Vogt, "Geometric Persecution", 16mm film and digital video on digital video painted screen, oil enamel, wooden stand and acrylic latex 15 min, color, sound, installation view, 2010. Courtesy Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, CA.

The tools are props in the exhibition’s centerpiece, a video also called “Geometric Persecution.” Projected onto a gray “screen,” a square within a square that Vogt has painted onto the otherwise white wall,  the video shows a wanderer moving through various familiar but abstracted landscapes–green bluffs near water, fields, dirt roads. She occasionally walks backwards, or is projected upside down, and the colored yard sticks, picks, and chimes fleetingly appear, as does a compass and other geometric instruments that would be as familiar in the Renaissance as today. The objects become part of the wanderer’s almost spiritual movement, relics of what could be cultist rituals.

Visitors are welcome to handle the tools in Vogt’s show, though I didn’t realize this until the second time I visited, after I’d read Aram Moshayedi’s ArtForum pick. They looked so carefully placed; moving them hadn’t occurred to me. When I returned, I did pick up a stick and chime, but only quickly, and, since I had been told they would be returned to their original location the next morning anyway, I was careful to put them back more or less where I’d found them. Like Penn’s Still Life with Triangle, there’s a certain completeness to Vogt’s show, as if the tools have already lived the life they were meant to live, and have now reached the end of their narrative, settling into carefully scripted, honorary resting places. Disturbing them felt uncomfortable.