"Slow Glass" at Lisa Cooley Gallery

(originally published 7/28/08 on ArtSlant.com)

“You’ll never get it if you don’t slow down, my friend.” This sly warning, from Mario Garcia Torres’ "11 Years Later/11 Minutes Later (2006)", is one viewers of "Slow Glass", a group exhibition at Lisa Cooley, would do well to heed; though containing only a handful of works, this is a show to spend time with.

Heather Rowe’s "The Space Above the Ceiling" (2008) serves as a meandering guide down the length of the slender gallery. Hanging overhead, its elegant execution causes it to rise like a balloon even as its negative space bears down on you like a heavy conscience. It’s impossible to escape its presence for a second.

Lawrence Weiner’s "AT THE SAME MOMENT" (2000), perches just inside the storefront window, its content and placement immediately referencing the material for which the show is named: science fiction writer Bob Shaw’s magical glass that slows down light, thereby trapping scenes and allowing them to be transported and viewed from an entirely new setting.

Lizzie Hughes’ and Emma Kay’s works build on this by exploring themes of translation and de-contextualization, respectively. Hughes’ "Untitled (Translation Piece)" (2008) demonstrates how language can become garbled in a veritable game of Telephone. Kay’s works distill two influential narratives, The Bible and "The Interpretation of Dreams", down to the objects that appear in them. The objects become signifiers, talismans, keys to a set of beliefs. There are hundreds of articles listed; all of them will carry you off on a giant tangent.

Mario Garcia Torres’ slideshow "11 Years Later/11 Minutes Later" (2006), is the final piece in “Slow Glass”. Its subtitled dialogue (originally written by Paul Auster for the film Smoke) is shelled out slide by slide at a tantalizing pace, the methodic click of the carousel bouncing off the walls of the gallery. That sound, Rowe’s looming sculpture, and the rhythm of all those words on display eventually conjur a weird, lethargic suspense, leaving you feeling deliciously time-warped.

"I'll be your mirror... so you can break into endless shards" at Heist Gallery

(originally published 7/28/08 on ArtSlant.com)

"I’ll Be Your Mirror… So You Can Break Into Endless Shards", on view through August 10th at Heist Gallery, located on a busy stretch of Essex Street, is an uncanny reflection of the Lower East Side itself. The show is a cacophony of colors, textures, faces, youth, sex and religion. John Travolta makes an appearance in a cowboy hat, as does a lit-up bodega Virgin Mary, and there are plenty of empty pill bottles, wounds, and underwear to go around. All of this teeming life and raucous offering is crammed together tenement-style into one tiny room.

The exhibition as a whole, starting with the title, is achingly earnest, the combined output of approximately thirty churned-up artists, and has the feel of an end-of-semester art school crit. Some works, like Ryan Watkins-Hughes’ installation of prescription meds and blurry sickbed portraits, "Love is a losing game, but who gives a shit?" (2008), and Christopher Martino’s gouache and graphite rendering of a man surrounded by blacked-out windows, "Apex" (2008), aim for a world-weariness but still come off as vulnerable. Amongst these are wide-eyed photographs where you can feel the artist holding their breath: Jeanne Mischo’s quiet "Family Moments 1" (2008) and Jonathan Feinstein’s solemn "Portrait of Amani" (2007).

There are many works that turn said mirror onto the outside world, offering social commentary on the passing strange (fast food America gets a nod in Conrad Kofron’s "Untitled" (2007), and an over-the-top oligarch moll is haloed in Tatiana Kronberg’s "Mariya 3" (2006)) and the perversely fascinating (Marta Edmisten’s "Blind Dating" (2007), which places grainy surveillance shots of awkward suitors alongside their bravado-laden personal ads.

"I’ll Be Your Mirror" falters from the volume of work that curators Julie Fishkin and Matt Lucas included; there are endless shards indeed, some duller than others, most notably David Smith’s too literal bad joke "Velvet Polyester" (2008). But a solid group of these artists reveal messy, tremulous, and feverish interior lives, and they are compelling to watch.

Anne Daems' Parsley and Pearls

(originally published 6/30/08 on ArtSlant.com)

At first glance, Anne Daems’ exhibition at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery looks almost like a group show. Three grainy photographs are hung immediately to the left of the entrance; they each depict a single, young, attractive person on the streets of New York, from Daems’ series "72 girls (and some boys) that could be models". Then, rather abruptly, is a long stretch of works from "Scribbles for Drawings Make New Drawings". These look a lot like someone photographed the pen scratch pads at art supply stores, and in fact they are prints of Daems’ color-test doodles. Interspersed with "Scribbles" are more photographs from "72 girls"; four small graphite drawings with text; and finally a 35-minute video titled "My father’s garden".

Unfortunately, most of the show is dedicated to the "Scribbles" work. Daems is an artist interested small moments, often finding poetry in them. It’s understandable to extend this purview to her doodle pads, but ultimately it’s overly precious. Not every art mark is worth preserving.

Daems’ other drawings—"The woman had always some parsley in her bosom" (2006), "Kenneth’s beauty spots" (2007), "2 rubber bands to hold her stockings" (2005-6), and "A woman with high heels came back from the park" (2008)—however, are lovely; bemused studies rendered in simple lines with a smattering of color and typewritten text. They’re strange and infectious and I could look at a hundred of them.

"72 girls" (2007) doesn’t add anything to the catalogue of lonely moments captured by photographers on the streets of New York; instead they demonstrate an intense need on Daems’ part to crawl inside the minds of these beautiful creatures (it’s a much more subjective series than, say, Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s "Heads"). Daems exhibits the same inquisitiveness with extended close-ups of children’s faces in "My father’s garden" (2008). Because these lingering takes happen over a span of time, they are more successful than the still photographs in making us privy to her subjects’ inner dialogue.

"My father’s garden", shown in several parts, dovetails all of Daems’ interests: simple rituals (there are quiet sequences of a Japanese tea ceremony, a man patching holes in a tree, and a woman doing laundry), youth (the aforementioned meditations on children’s faces), and small absurdities (a balloon decorated with pigtails and a face slowly whirling in front of a window). "My father’s garden" yields what the disparate elements of the rest of the exhibition do not—inspired tropes that reflect back solidly on Daems’ position as fascinated observer.

File Under Philippe Gronon

(originally published 6/30/2008 on ArtSlant.com)

Philippe Gronon’s exhibition at Yossi Milo Gallery, comprised of highly rendered photographs of safes, elevators, and card catalogues, is a room of doors waiting to be opened. One’s fingers itch to spin the combination locks and tug the handles. Behind the wall, ropes would pulley and cylinders would tumble and then cavities would appear, holding passengers, jewels and cash, unfamiliar air.

The setup is deceptively simple—there are five photographs of safes hung in a row on the east wall of the gallery; across from them, three photographs of card catalogues, and on the north and south walls, single photographs of elevator doors. All are silver gelatin prints scaled to the actual size of the objects they depict. Whether or not Gronon’s aim is to create an illusion or simply represent the objects with absolute accuracy, there is a definite photography-as-sculpture aspect to his work. All of the photographs are printed full bleed and most of them are hung unframed, effectively repositioning them as 3D objects (one photograph, "Safe" (1991), has even been trimmed flush with the curved edges of the lockbox itself. Ceci n'est pas une pipe !). There is a great amount of detail; shooting with a studio camera, Gronon captures the cold texture of steel and the softness of worn wood, and chips and scratches in metal surfaces are indistinguishable from imperfections in the emulsion. The only thing working against a complete mirage is the lack of color.

The strongest piece in the exhibition—Gronon’s first in the US—is "Elevator, Lyceum Kennedy, New York" (2005). Standing in front of this life-sized photograph puts the viewer in the funny position of waiting for an elevator that will never arrive. There is a humid handprint the shiny door, and a smudged window just above eye level acts as a portal to another layer altogether. This piece especially evokes the vertiginous quality of a movie set—buildings and trees and fire hydrants that turn out to be flat when you peek behind them. Gronon’s show manages to possess both the dispassionate principles of New Objectivity and the whimsy of Alice In Wonderland, and for that reason alone it’s worth seeing.

Triptych: A Roundtable Discussion with Angela Choon, Bellatrix Hubert, and Hanna Schouwink of David Zwirner Gallery

(published Spring 2008 in Spread ArtCulture Magazine; photograph by Matthew Montieth)

The name on the door might be David Zwirner’s, but behind the man everyone in the art world is talking about are three savvy women so essential to the gallery’s soaring success that David Zwirner made them partners. Spread ArtCulture joined directors Angela Choon, Bellatrix Hubert, and Hanna Schouwink for an exclusive roundtable discussion.

Lauren Knighton: The gallery’s website states that the focus of the gallery is showing the work of emerging artists. Many of the latest additions to your roster—Chris Ofili, Lisa Yuskavage, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia—hardly fit that description. Is the focus of the gallery changing?

Angela Choon: We need to change the website! When we opened [in 1993], our artists were all emerging. Then the gallery and artists grew together.

Bellatrix Hubert: We have some artists that are more well-known in Europe than over here. But we’re not at all a young gallery.

LK: You have a reputation for being very hands-on with your artists.

AC: One of the gallery’s strong points is that it’s always been artist-centric. I’m always surprised to hear what other galleries don’t do for their artists.

BH: The key is to make sure our artists can work. We don’t bombard them with too much, and we act as a barrier between them and the world. We don’t want them to accept too many shows because then the work gets watered down. We want to make sure they have a good studio, the best possible environment to create work. And we don’t say yes to everything. Every time I get a request, I ask myself if it’s good for the artist’s career, and try not to just be flattered by another commission.

LK: What goes into preparing an artist for an exhibition?

BH: Generally, it’s a two-year process. We’ll go to their studio and start a dialogue, but the artists at this point really know what they’re doing.

AC: Often they have a theme or idea that they want to do. For Luc [Tuyman’s] last exhibition, he wanted to show work about Walt Disney and found utopias, so all the paintings related to that concept.

BH: We never really question the artists; they have total freedom over their shows. We’re not going to say, ‘Oh this painting isn’t good, you can’t show it’.

LK: You each have your own group of artists that you work with. How are artists “matched up” with each of you?

BH: When an artist joins the gallery, we’re all really fair; there’s never been a situation where we’ve fought over anyone. We see which of our personalities best fit with the artist’s.

LK: How does the gallery choose which artists to take on?

Hanna Schouwink: A lot of people, especially mid-career artists, come to us from other very established galleries. So many people want to work with us now; we have to be very critical.

AC: A lot more artists want to work here than we can take on. It’s a nice position to be in.

BH: We decide as a group, we vote. It’s a democracy.

HS: But we can’t veto, only David can veto.

BH: It’s really his decision, ultimately, but we participate.

LK: It’s been a little over a year since the gallery tripled its exhibition space; what has it been like?

BH: Triple work! Triple fun! Triple rich! [laughs] No, it’s been really important, because I believe we have to grow and be a step ahead of the artists. You don’t want these great artists to show in the same space over and over, you want them to be challenged by the environment. It’s great to tell Thomas Ruff that he has two times the space for his new show.

LK: There are endless articles that rank galleries and use competitive language to create a cutthroat portrait of the art world. Do you find it to be as bad as is reported?

HS: I think it’s much friendlier than people think.

BH: Generally, it’s very human—I think it’s the last non-corporate environment.

HS: I always find it really offensive when people say we steal artists [from other galleries].

BH: On the contrary, I feel like we are missing opportunities because we don’t have that kind of mentality. I just heard that Richard Tuttle went to Pace Wildenstein. He’s one of my favorite artists and I was thinking if I had known he was unhappy at Sperone Westwater, I would have loved to offer him a place here. So, like Hanna said, we really wait for the artists to come to us, we’re really respectful of our colleagues.

HS: If there is a rumor that an artist is courting other galleries, then we do something about it. But some people have pigeon-holed us, and it really disturbs me because we act quite ethically here.

LK: People enjoy the sensationalism.

HS: No press ever writes about how artists are kicked out by galleries. It happens all the time, if a certain success is missing… and we have never done that. We support our artists through difficult times.

BH: I think that makes a big difference to an artist who is considering our gallery.

LK: What are some beliefs you held about art that have changed since you entered the business of art?

AC: I never thought I’d work in a commercial gallery. But David’s is quite different from the typical model. Commercial galleries are always looked down upon as the “money-making” venture of the art world, a shop, as opposed to the museums, which are held in very high regard.
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BH: But we’re the ones taking the risks now. I mean, Jason Rhoades’ Black Pussy installation, no museum would take the risk of showing that. What I find very exciting is that we’re really a new part of the art world, in a way. Historically, if you think of Leo Castelli as the father of the contemporary gallery system, and after him Marian Goodman, and [Larry] Gagosian… [David Zwirner Gallery] has evolved from there; we’re re-defining the system. Galleries were never so involved before. We’re real facilitators.

AC: It’s sort of a “gallerist” versus “dealer” thing.

LK: Those seem to be very loaded words; people tend to be sensitive as to whether they are called a “gallerist” or a “dealer”.

BH: It’s really a problem if you get stuck on that kind of stuff, it limits you. I would hate to say I’m a dealer and not a gallerist, or I’m a gallerist and not a dealer.

HS: It’s hypocritical. If you’re just a gallerist, then there are certain things you cannot do for your artists. We’re expected to be active on the secondary market; if we’re not, we’re considered wimps. It’s important for the sake of your artists to support the market.

LK: So there are a lot of theoretical concerns about the gallery’s function, its legacy, and your roles within that. On top of that, you are part of an art market currently run amok. How do you keep the art itself your primary focus?

AC: The legacy of these artists is where they show and what private or public collections they end up in, after all of us are gone. We try to have the works go into a good institution or place.

BH: It’s the most important thing for the artist, to be in a public arena. When work is in a private collection, you can lose track of it.

HS: Of course there are also private collectors who have very public roles. Someone like Joel Wax, he has a rather small collection but a very good one, and he makes people enthusiastic about the art. People like him are very important, because they talk to the curators.

BH: They’re like diplomats.

LK: What shows were milestones for the gallery?

BH: I thought Neo Rauch’s last exhibition was really important, for him and for the gallery.

HS: I always think of the first Jason Rhoades show. That show was the reason I wanted to work here. The Chris Ofili show was so good and so different from what we expected. Lisa Yuskavage’s first show here was extremely exciting. There’s so many.

BH: The idea with every exhibition is to take the artist to the next level. Christopher Williams’ last show was so important for his career; within two weeks every institution had to own his work. And it’s not like he’s a new artist, he’s been doing very rigorous work since the late 80s.

HS: You start recognizing these moments and it’s very exciting that we can contribute to changes in an artists’ career.

LK: Are there any art movements emerging around the world that you believe in?

BH: Sure, there are, but I don’t know that they’re that interesting. It’s so market-driven right now, it’s really hard to find an authentic voice. There’s a lot of hipsters and—

AC: People getting out of school and trying to get their first show. You used to not be able to do your first New York show until you worked.

BH: Selling out your first solo show is the easiest thing. The problem is the second, third, fourth show. Are people going to continue collecting your work, are institutions going to start collecting your work: those are the challenges.

LK: Describe your personal collections.

HS: We get a lot from our artists—we don’t tell David how much, this is off the record! [laughs] They are incredibly generous, it’s amazing.

BH: It’s nice—after working with them for so long, you might own an early work that you’ve developed a history with.

LK: Where do you see the gallery in five years?

HS: Oh dear.

BH & HS: Not in China.

AC: I’m sure there will be expansion possibilities.

LK: Does that mean opening another location? Or expanding the space on 19th Street even further?

BH: Five years goes super fast. We are already working on shows that will take place five years from now, including retrospectives and big museum shows. There’ll be more exposure for the artists, whether or not the gallery space is bigger.

HS: When we expanded last year, it seemed completely crazy. It seemed like such a huge amount of space and now it’s so normal to me, I can’t even remember what it was like before. But then people who we haven’t seen in over a year come in and they can’t believe it. So in five years—who knows what will happen by then.

On The Double: Kate Atkin and Becky Beasley at Museum 52

(originally published 5/19/08 on ArtSlant.com)

W, Kate Atkin and Becky Beasley’s exhibition at Museum 52, is a dialogue between two very smart artists thoroughly savoring a collaboration that, like their exhibition’s theme, could double on forever. At first glance, the work appears formal, minimalist, and deeply enthralled to theory. All of those things are true, but happily, most of the work is also beautiful, rife with pensive literary references and whimsical details. Museum 52’s unique two-story space is the perfect playground for Atkin and Beasley, and viewers would be wise to traverse both levels a couple of times, to fully experience the effects of a cleverly-hung show.

In the upper gallery, each piece slowly reveals all of its tricks; no possible inversion has been left unturned. The Left Door (2004/2007), a dreamy, black and white photograph, is replicated twice over from the same (flipped) negative, and the two editions face each other across the long room. In between them lie Plank I and Plank II (both 2008), which, while not the most visually stimulating sculptures, engage the space like two ends of a magnet attracting metal filings. Both The Left Door and Plank I and II explore duplication and reproduction, almost entirely for the sake of demonstrating that no piece is ever really the same.

As proof, Atkin and Beasley pointedly show the artist’s hand, relishing the imperfections that make each work unique. This is most literal in Maw and Maw (Replica) (both 2008), two somewhat sinister drawings that bring to mind the yawning visages of Lee Bontecou’s sculptures. Atkin drew Maw, which is hung upstairs, and then made a drawing of it, Maw (Replica), on display downstairs. The concept is intellectual, but the execution is expressionistic—the surfaces of both drawings are riddled with Atkin’s heavy strokes and painstaking patterns.

More subtle is Beasley’s Green Ream (L.J.N.Y.) (2008), a small box fashioned out of the same American walnut veneer as Plank I and II and stuffed with 500 sheets of Prairie Green paper. It’s a rather blank construction, but the snug fit of the paper into the box provides a weirdly satisfying friction, that, over time, as the paper fades and decays, will evolve. Green Ream also provides the only shock of color in the whole show.

Many artists have long explored the themes that dominate W, and it’s obvious Atkin and Beasley are self-conscious about adding to the conversation in a serious way. Despite some of the old-fashioned concepts (and given the many cynical dalliances of their art world peers with said concepts), Atkin and Beasley’s youthful enthusiasm, thoughtfulness, and deft use of materials make W a breath of fresh air.

After Effects: Valeska Soares at Eleven Rivington Gallery

(originally published 5/19/08 on ArtSlant.com)


The effect of viewing Valeska Soares' exhibition After, currently in its last week at Eleven Rivington Gallery, is not unlike walking into a room that someone has just left and smelling their fragrance still hanging in the air. Soares’ works—Love Stories II, Afterimages, Duet, and For To (all 2008)— explore nostalgia, love, and longing by way of still-warm beds and yellowing pages, and she best achieves her themes with Duet, a simple but loaded sculpture which bears an obvious human trace. Soares has sculpted the impressions of two sleepers into pillows fashioned from marble and placed them side by side on the gallery’s floor. The voyeuristic birds-eye viewpoint and intense intimacy of the piece recall another artist’s disarming sculpture, Ron Mueck’s Spooning Couple, a miniature of a man and woman lying in bed. In Duet, all that remains are their ghosts.

The viewer then looks up, at Afterimages, an installation of twelve photographs hung high on the gallery’s far wall. Each photograph depicts the same patch of sky, seen from one angle down in Soares’ garden, and the way the series is displayed places the viewer squarely in her shoes. The press release will tell you that the number of photographs refers to the months in a calendar year, which is an unnecessary and slightly hokey detail. It’s better to simply regard the changing clouds and light flickering across this tiny landscape as a slow, romantic animation seen through Soares’ eyes. Artists try all sorts of tricks to portray their personal experience of something; here, Soares nails it simply and eloquently.

Afterimages is the only introverted piece in the show; Love Stories II and For To, like Duet, place the viewer back out in the realm of universal experience. Love Stories II expands on an ongoing project where Soares replicates books containing the word ‘love’ in the title. Each book contains the exact number of pages as its real world counterpart but the stories themselves have been erased. 250 of these books are arranged on two shelves with titles facing outward, bound in neatly cadenced colors of gray, gold, and blue. As a whole, the piece is clever but not as transcendent as Soares might wish it to be. For To, collages of dedication pages that Soares has excised from various books, feels the same way. It’s charming to read the long-lost dedications, but it doesn’t go much deeper than that.

This is Soares’ first solo gallery exhibition in New York, and it’s a brave one because of its unabashed embrace of sentimental, messy themes. Subsequently, the work fares better when it escapes the confines of Soares’ more cerebral, one-dimensional concepts.

Digital Disassociation

It’s inevitable that before reading the article “The Woman At Abu Ghraib” in the March 24, 2008 issue of The New Yorker, one flips ahead to look at the photographs accompanying it. There are five in all, one full page portrait of the woman in question, Specialist Sabrina Harman, shot especially for the magazine, and four smaller ones that run across the next two pages, from Harman’s personal photo album of her deployment in Iraq. The images’ origin as part of a “personal photo album” is a bit strange, given that they eventually saturated the global media, shocking documentation of one of the most derisive episodes in an extraordinarily unpopular war. But the photographs were initially meant for Harman’s private collection. The evidence of that can be seen in the difference between her pose in the photographs she owns and the portrait commissioned for the magazine. In the latter, she is not smiling from ear to ear and giving the thumbs-up sign; in the former, even in one where she leans over a dead body, with, as the article’s authors, Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, describe it, “her sun-flushed cheek inches from [a corpse’s] crusted eye socket”, she is. Her jarring joviality says it all—those photographs weren’t meant to be public.

More than anything, this article is a fascinating glimpse into the psyche of a young soldier who, like many of her generation, soldier or civilian, relies heavily on digital photographs to record her experiences, and also, more interestingly, to disassociate from them. Her story hints at the incredibly rich role digital photography plays in society and illustrates Abu Ghraib’s significance in the timeline of photographic history. It is photography’s first scandal that is a direct result, in many ways, of its digitalization.

This is the first American war where digital imagery and its venues (email, social networking sites, flickr, YouTube, etc) have played a dominant role. No longer are there one or two photographically-minded soldiers with cameras and a few rolls of hard-won film, now all of them, no matter how recreationally, can document their daily experience in the theatre of war. Many of the younger soldiers serving in Iraq came of age in a society where images have longed trumped words, and photography has a new, wonderfully fast turnaround. As one soldier put it, “Everyone…has a digital camera. Everyone was taking pictures of everything, from detainees to death.” Whereas photographs taken in past wars were kept in self-contained (and degradable) photo albums and only circulated by hand, the digital images taken in Iraq fly (so fast there might not be time to judge the implications of the subject matter) over the Internet, landing on blogs, on myspace, on photo-sharing sites. Even ones that are emailed privately to family members are vulnerable to public consumption because they are easily reproduced and exist in the public ether of the World Wide Web. Because shooting digital images is easy, there are thousands of them; because sharing them is easy, they can never be truly erased.

And because the ease and immediacy of digital photographs is so gratifying, how big of a role did that play in the torture of Abu Ghraib’s prisoners? If the soldiers hadn’t been able to instantly review their photographs, how many instances of this gruesome performance art would not have happened? Gourevitch and Morris describe the setup of the “shoot” that produced the iconic photographs of the hooded prisoner standing on a box with electrical wires attached to his fingers as nothing less than fully art-directed: “…the whole mock-electrocution business had not lasted more than ten or fifteen minutes—just long enough for a photo session...[the prisoner was instructed to] hold his arms straight out from the sides, like wings.” Harman was there, snapping pictures, and in one of them, “[Staff Sergeant Chip] Frederick appears in the foreground, studying on the display screen of his camera the picture he’s just taken.” Waiting to send a roll of film off to be developed is far more boring and would make for a sticky situation at the Wal-Mart photo lab. The soldiers, participants in an excruciating and lawless situation, were able to instantly disassociate themselves from it with this new technology, this hard entertainment. They could place a screen between themselves and their reality. Instead of looking directly at the torture in front of them, they could view it from a remove, on the backs of their cameras.

"To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up"

House party in Williamsburg, eight years ago: the entry way is clogged with piles of spilled magazines; they slip and slide underfoot as I walk towards the living room, where a pretty, twenty-something-year-old boy sporting self-conscious clothes and hair crouches over a keyboard, pressing out long, laborious notes. A mangy dog wanders past him, towards another boy seated in the corner. Having beckoned the dog over, the boy then leans into its face to shotgun the animal with a plume of marijuana smoke. In the kitchen, a third boy concocts something in a large blender. He’s pouring in every ingredient he can find from the cabinets and refrigerator—soy sauce, raw eggs, maple syrup—and once they’re blended, he gleefully drinks the murky liquid out of the side, proclaiming, “This is what I eat every day!” Over his shoulder, out in the backyard, the fourth inhabitant of the house is busy setting a mattress on fire.

Add a reporter from New York Magazine to this mix, or Patrick McMullan and his camera crew, and any of these guys might be the next Dash Snow. They have a lot in common with Snow, the heavily stylized “downtown” artist whose works (newspaper clippings sprayed with ejaculate) sell in various galleries around the world. Like Snow, they are upper middle class white guys who decamped to New York from various assorted suburbs to be artists. But they’ve skipped the actual art part in favor of developing a cult of personality. Any art they make is, at best, an accessory for their constructed persona. They live their lives with an eye to some grand, future memoir in the sky, one that will feature memorable lines like, “Those are spit circles. I was sick and I’d just wake up with a chest full of phlegm and spit all over the paper and make circles, you know?” or “I’m going to do a come-shot series on the faces of the skulls, but after I come on them, I’ll throw glitter on them to make it pretty.”

I first read about Snow in the article “Chasing Dash Snow” (from which the above quotes are taken) by Ariel Levy, which appeared in the January 7, 2007 issue of New York Magazine. Besides the lyrics to Pulp’s song 'Common People', two major essays came to mind when I read her piece: Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” and Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp”. The former essay because it was obvious Snow and his friends Ryan McGinley and Dan Colen were slumming it, adopting the trappings of the poor and downtrodden (shoplifting rap sheets, bum’s beards, and, most appallingly, proudly won bruises from police beatings—even though Mailer’s essay is a little dated, these guys were indeed “urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts”), and the latter essay because their lifestyle was unequivocally “life as theater”.

Plenty of other artists and aesthetes fancied themselves protagonists in their own little movies. The magazine’s cover proclaimed Snow, McGinley, and Colen “Warhol’s Children”, and Warhol was constantly mythologizing himself. But he was also devoting just as much time to the creation of sublime artwork that held equal importance to any of his happenings. To quote Sontag, “One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naïve. Camp which knows itself to be Camp is usually less satisfying”.

Okay, so maybe Warhol wasn’t exactly naïve. But he was marginally innocent to his own image in a way that Snow and his ilk never will be. If there is one reason to not completely detest Snow, it’s that our post-post-post-modernist world doesn’t allow for naïveté when it comes to representing yourself anymore. In a way, then, he can't help himself. McGinley gained fame by photographing his friends, including Snow, in the impressionistic, hedonistic tradition of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, but his portraits can never be as honest because his subjects are aware of the work of Goldin and Clark (even Goldin herself can’t take truly candid photographs of young people anymore). They are complicit in their own depiction, and it gives any cavorting for the camera an inescapable performative quality. Mailer wrote, “Hip is a special language that cannot really be taught.” That no longer holds true.

“Camp…incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content’, ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality’, of ‘irony’ over ‘tragedy’”, says Sontag, and this is in evidence with Snow. His cynical dalliance with art is unfortunately common in today’s art scene, enabled by the likes of Jeffrey Deitch, star-fucking curators and over-the-top art festivals. There is no craft, no heart, nothing but cold-eyed cynicism and empty signifiers. The art dealers who love Snow get a thrill rubbing up against him; he’s just the right mix of the Other (a petty criminal! a graffiti artist! maybe he’ll do a bump right here in my office!) and the safe (he is a De Menil, after all). They are desperate to find that “magic flash of insanity, framed and for sale”, and Snow knows just how to deliver it. His sexy beast persona is so calculated you can almost hear him mulling the semiotics over in his head: “Saddam Hussein tattoo, check. Crackpipe, check. Shoplifted birdhouse, check.” Snow embodies “...the oldest dream of power, the gold fountain of youth where the gold is in the orgasm” (in Snow’s case, literally). Even more prescient than Mailer, Sontag neatly sums up Snow's career and the landscape it romps in: “[Camp is] a feat goaded on by the threat of boredom. The relation between boredom and Camp taste cannot be overestimated. Camp taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence”.

Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art

The recent article “Picturing Auschwitz” (The New Yorker, March 17, 2008), came to mind during a visit to the International Center of Photography’s current show Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, an exhibition dedicated to the forms and interpretations of archives. The article described the chance discovery of two important photo albums containing pictures of Auschwitz. Each album is a time capsule of potent images that has hurtled through the ether of history: one was recently unearthed from a suburban basement in Virginia, over sixty years after the end of World War II; the other was discovered at Dora-Mittelbau by a prisoner named Lili Jacob on the day her camp was liberated. While each album brings to light a wealth of historical information about Auschwitz, their fortuitous emergence also tells an incredibly romantic tale worthy of any fiction.

Archive Fever inhabits those same two spheres—the hard world of information and the ephemeral realm of remembrance. In fact, archives themselves are a paradox—memories and transitory occurrences arranged into formal systems. Their quixotic nature is echoed in the physical layout of Archive Fever, which unfolds mysteriously while remaining unabashedly academic. The overall experience of the show is akin to exploring a dimly lit vault; every turn of a corner is a slow reveal. One of the strongest aspects of the show is how the curator, Okwui Enwezor, has utilized the relatively small space. He has arranged intelligent groupings that, with lesser pieces, or a different sequence, would swallow the individual works. That doesn’t happen here; each work fully envelops the viewer while maintaining its elegant alliances.

The beginning of the show is the most demanding, challenging the viewer to dedicate time to the exhibition right from the start with a myriad of videos and films dealing with socio-political themes (Communism, Soviet ideology, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Romanian Revolution all make an appearance). All of the works turn the preconception of the archive as a static form on its head, but Anria Sala’s Intervista (1998), does so the most gracefully. The film jumps back and forth between found 16mm footage of Sala’s mother from 1970s Communist Albania to a present-day videotaped conversation between him and his mother about the footage. This deceptively simple setup thus becomes “an archive existing alongside a running commentary on its status as an historical object” (very meta).

Nearby are dreamier works, like Vivan Sundaram’s Four black boxes for the family (1995-97), in which portraits recalling the aesthetic of Julia Margaret Cameron flicker to the surface of dark vitrines, and Floh (2000), Tacita Dean’s impressionistic collection of vernacular photographs. But it is in the final room that the head surrenders to the gut. One reason is the countless eyes that follow the viewer around this room, peering out from works that emphasize how people themselves can be reduced to archival data.

In Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Death by Gun) (1990), stacked lithographs act as a de facto “monument” to the gun-violence victims they depict. Gonzales-Torres has emphasized the dead as statistics by positioning their faces in rows. Their grainy visages echo those of the missing children in Ilan Lieberman’s Nino Perdido (2006-7), which hangs on a nearby wall. Lieberman meticulously reproduced newspaper portraits of each child, “enlist[ing] the archive as a form of commemoration”, while also “alert[ing] us to the wide-ranging deployment of the photographic portrait as an index of memory”. More identification-type pictures can be seen in The Victor Weeps: Afghanistan (1997), by Fazal Sheikh. But this time, the photographs are not arranged in rows; instead they appear carefully cupped in the hands of relatives. The portraits, while just as artless, have become talismans in this context. All of these pieces make the viewer zoom in and out; they can stand back and observe the archive as a whole, all the faces (data) bleeding together, or they can hone in on a specific person. This room further underlines how an archive is a collection of individual stories.

The piece in Archive Fever that most effectively illustrates the archive’s dual nature, however, is Hans-Peter Feldman’s 9/12 Front Page (2001), an installation that makes its debut here. It inhabits one of the first rooms of the show, but it’s best-viewed last, after circling around the space. In a brilliant display of less-is-more, Feldman has covered four walls with a collection of front pages from international newspapers dated September 12, 2001. At first, an anthropological impulse prevails—it’s endlessly fascinating to note which images of 9/11 editors from Chile, London, Berlin, China, Egypt, and so on chose to print, how the layouts were designed (some are very spare and graphic, others juxtapose images of the smoking towers with mundane advertisements or celebrity snaps), and the headlines penned by wildly different cultures all covering the same event. But the safety net of intellectual curiosity gives way to the cumulative effect of these repetitive images, evoking visceral memories of the attack. Newspapers are the most common, daily form an archive can take, and Feldman cleverly doubles that once over by taking a part of these self-contained systems and combining them into a whole new one, one which emphasizes the deceptive banality of information. 9/12 Front Page is therefore the quintessential piece in a show where every archive is a dam holding back an abyss.