Enrico David
Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel
Through May 3

By Quinn Latimer

Enrico David, How Do You Love Dzzzt by Mammy, 2009. Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln/Berlin and Cabinet Gallery London.

“I can only trade one opacity of experience with another,” Enrico David has written of his work with a kind of sly finality. Yet the Italian-born, London-based artist’s admission takes on a note of defensiveness in light of his current show at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel. How Do You Love Dzzzzt by Mammy? offered an experience so opaque that the galleries had the feeling of expertly rendered vacuums of meaning, in which a kind of blanket unintelligibility reigned. This is unexpected, since David has made his sizable reputation on deft drawings, embroideries, sculptures, and installations that mine a carousel of art, design, and literary influences: Arte Povera, Art Deco, Arts and Crafts, André Gide. Those references then build to ends that are insistently self-reflexive, with Davis’ works invariably exploring the self: its physicality, emotionality, and memory. And How Do You Love… does go there, delineating an autobiography out of nods to the Wiener Werkstätte, Dora Maar, and Gide, but what was made of those allusions seems random and, at times, uninspired.

Exceedingly modest in size, the show consists of just two installations. The first—a set of screens, black on one side, white on the other—zigzags across the gallery. Each of the surfaces are mounted with a large-format image, the most intriguing of which are staged color photos of small children playing a toy piano. Press materials told me that one of the children (the one in the bowl cut and a saffron-colored turtleneck, is my guess) was the artist himself, who appeared in advertisements for toys when he was three years old. The other images included a few culled from sex-toy catalogues, in which men exhibited enigmatic grimaces; an undated seal’s head delicately carved from driftwood by native Greenlanders; and a Dora Maar photo collage from 1935 called Vieille femme et enfant. In it, the artist, poet, and famous muse of Picasso depicts an otherwise empty baroque room, in which a boy rubs himself against an old woman in long skirts, her arms fallen open, her pose oddly Christ-like.

Bookending these screens are a pair of identical sculptures that look like Mr. Potatoheads on skis. Wrought from wood, wire and paper, the egg-shaped figures sit atop spindly wooden legs, their design cribbed from a toy made by Koloman Moser (for the aforementioned Werkstätte) in the early 20th century. But their pixilated faces come from the sex catalogue, and their hands cover genderless crotches like a soccer player awaiting a free kick. The wooden objects (toy or otherwise), coupled with the images of males at play (of both the child and adult variety), give off a distinctive whiff of boyish adolescent angst, but it is dampened by the innocuousness of the works themselves, whose craft and consequence seem debatable.

The second part of David’s show is the more successful. Previously shown at the ICA in London in 2007, the room-size environment, Ultra Paste, recreates Maar’s surreal collage of molestation, but sets it in David’s childhood bedroom. Its ’70s décor—the green grid of walls, lurid fluorescent light, and pale linoleum floor—replaces Maar’s original setting, and, in one corner, a photograph of the artist is rubbing up against a wooden doll, a brown stain spreading at their feet, replaces Maar’s figures. The weirdly alarming tableaux evinces wonder and eroticism mixed with menace and shame, functioning as an effective objective correlative for the memory of childhood. But in both galleries there is a familiar man-boy fantasia at work, one that seemed stalled in the very inarticulateness of adolescence. This lent the exhibition the quality of being underwater, with meaning never quite breaking the surface.

That David himself has challenged the necessities of such meaning does not in the end absolve the show’s shortcomings, though it might explain them. For although David has found refuge in the “opacity of experience,” that very “opacity” must be articulated in such a form that his viewers can gain access to it. In the past, the aesthetic pleasure of David’s work coupled with its ready emotional content has provided that access point; here, however, both craft and concept seem less willfully obscure than simply imprecise and not fully realized.

Quinn Latimer is a poet and art critic based in New York and Basel, Switzerland. Her poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Boston Review and Prairie Schooner, among other journals, and her art and literary reviews regularly appear in Modern Painters, where she is an associate editor.

Warhol and the Shared Subject
Fort Worth Contemporary Arts
Closed February 1

By Alison Hearst

Douglas Gordon, Self Portrait of You and Me (Warhols), 2007, Smoke and mirror, 37 ¼ x 37 ½ inches, (Tony Scherman, Lincoln as Himself, 2008 reflected in mirror). Photo David Wharton.

It’s true; we’ve seen a lot of Warhol lately. Trying to count the recent Warhol-centric exhibitions is a bit like counting sheep. The Andy Warhol Foundation’s recent unloading of Warhol’s Polaroids to various universities kicked off a plethora of show-and-tell exhibitions. Most of these shows simply slapped these polaroids of well-known luminaries on the walls, attracting the ever-curious masses by playing into our cultural obsession with Warhol and his celebrity entourage. A reprieve to this cult-of-the-celebrity mania, Warhol and the Shared Subject at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, curated by Gavin Morrison, takes a fresh, expansive approach to Warhol’s portraits. Presented here are several of Warhol’s Polaroids—mostly of unfamiliar patrons that were recently gifted to TCU—installed democratically to intermingle with portraits in a variety of mediums by contemporary artists Rineke Dijkstra, Douglas Gordon, CS Leigh and Tony Scherman. Here, the days assuming that a portrait can accurately represent a person’s true character are long gone. The works in the show bring into focus the various external influences at play in portraiture, such as the artist, the viewer and popular culture. Although diverse, the contemporary portraits build on Warhol’s approach to portraying his sitters—an approach steeped in ambiguity and artifice. By doing so, the works lay bare the contrivance inherent in portraiture—and our self-presentation more broadly—exposing the cracks in the time-honored genre’s ability to capture an authentic persona.

Stylized and iconic, we can practically recognize Warhol’s portraits with our eyes closed. More often than not, we also associate Warhol’s oeuvre with his superstar cohorts. The same goes for Warhol’s Polaroids, in which the sitters’ glamourized poses and cosmetics make them look like something they are not: celebrities. Untitled (Shaindy Fenton) (1980)—two Polaroids of the Fort Worth art dealer donning a Cleopatraesque wig—demonstrates this masquerade. In these photographs, Warhol captures Fenton as Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra. Clearly posing, Fenton emerges as slightly more than a charlatan, but, perhaps, the same could also be said for the photographs of the famed. We really know little more than the façade.

Rightfully installed next to Warhol’s Untitled (Shaindy Fenton) are two Polaroid self-portraits of the artist Douglas Gordon in drag, Staying Home and Going Out (2005). Directly quoting Warhol’s Self-Portrait (in Drag) series, Gordon adopts Warhol’s charades to mask his true identity; Gordon is himself, Warhol, man and woman, all conflated in one snapshot. Like Untitled (Shaindy Fenton), Gordon’s identity fluctuates based on our recognition of his references.

Hands down the most abstract portrait in the traditional sense, but perhaps the most illustrative of the exhibition’s overriding theme, is CS Leigh’s installation EXHIBITS A – K FROM THE DEBRAY FILES (2008). The piece offers tiny puzzle pieces regarding Andreas Baader’s hiding out in Regis Debray’s Parisian apartment while he awaited sentencing for a crime. An undeveloped historical footnote, as the artist describes it, Baader’s portrait leaves much room for abstraction—even his physical features are unknown. Like many of the other portraits, EXHIBITS A – K is wide open to the projections of the artist and viewer.

While portraiture carries a stick-in-the-mud stigma, the well-rounded works in Warhol and the Shared Subject enliven and challenge the genre by subverting conventional roles: the viewer as spectator, the artist as sole creator and the sitter as subject. The contemporary works successfully extend the artifice in Warhol’s portraits to suggest that self-representation is inauthentic and unstable, and also, in a constant state of revision.

Alison Hearst received her M.A. in Art History from Texas Christian University and is a freelance writer living in Fort Worth.

Imaginary Spaces
Menil Collection, Houston
Through March 1

By Alvaro Ibarra

Vija Celmins, Constellation-Uccello, 1982, printed 1983, Etching and aquatint (4 colors), 27-1/4 x 23-1/8 inches. The Menil Collection, Houston. © Vija Celmins.

Imaginary Spaces, currently at The Menil in Houston, consists of seventeen artworks selected from the museum’s permanent collection by assistant curator Michelle White. White’s curatorial statement reveals to visitors that Imaginary Spaces is a resurrected curatorial premise put forth by The Menil Foundation in 1968. That show was envisioned as a contemporary follow-up to an exhibition on 18th century maverick architects Étienne-Louis Boullée, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Jean-Jacques Lequeu. Regrettably, the 1968 show never came to fruition; Imaginary Spaces is an attempt to remedy that fact. White’s selections bring together a number of artists from the western canon alongside more recent masters. Each piece is a representation of subjects/objects that are impossible to create in the real world—images that defy both visual and conceptual traditions in nature and art. Nevertheless, for the most part the chosen artworks work independently of one another due to the superficial thematic pretext that supposedly functions as a curatorial premise.

Two prints from Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione series (1761) and an unattributed architectural model of a double staircase (late 18th-early 19th c.) are the oldest examples of imaginary spaces in the exhibition. Piranesi’s etchings of imaginary prisons were creative exercises that produced architectural pastiches (rather than functional buildings) and were never intended for actual construction. But this does not mean that they could not, hypothetically, be realized. The wooden model of a double staircase is part of their potential outside of the architect’s imagination. These representations are not impossible or belong strictly to the realm of the imaginary as much as they are simply impractical.

Given the subject matter, it is not surprising that the group features Surrealists René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico. In La courbure de l’universe (1950), Magritte paints an azure skyscape dotted with white clouds upon a common wine bottle. De Chirico’s Interno metafisico con biscotti (1916) conflates still-life and landscape genres into a single compostion. In the foreground, the artist’s naturalistically rendered biscotti evoke the sense of a classic still-life study, while his background features architectural elements often used to reinforce the illusion of space in landscapes. However, both works defy the viewer’s understanding of representation and the art object itself. Specifically, Magritte’s bottle forces us to consider an encapsulated sky, contrary to the common concept of an encapsulating sky. NASA photographs of Earth rendered in a single frame make this effect less striking to today’s audience. By comparison, de Chirico’s subversion of traditions in illusionistic painting still manages to frustrate viewers insistent upon seeing canvases as magic windows.

One particularly compelling juxtaposition is the placement of James Turrell’s six aquatints from his Deep Sky series (1984) beside Vija Celmins’s Constellation-Uccello (1982). Turrell’s prints are ambiguous in that they appear to be representations of celestial bodies and planetscapes, but they could just as easily be seen as exercises in volume and value. If the viewer sees the former, he/she must contend with the abstractions produced by the enormous scope and distance from the object. Such large-scale images look pristine from afar, but they transform into static (or illegible pixels in recent years) up close because the photo inevitably fails to render the infinite amount of information present. Turrell’s own representations of the sublime similarly break down upon close inspection, as smooth transitions from light to darkness transform into rough and inconsistent pockmarks upon the surface of the planet. In addition, one must consider whether Turrell’s sources for these images stem from science or science fiction.

Celmins’s Constellation-Uccello also addresses the data lost in translation—from the real to the perceived to the representation, in this case. The bifurcated print depicts a rectangular section of the night sky on the left and a reproduction of Italian Renaissance artist Paolo Uccello’s wire-frame sketch of a chalice (1450) on the right. According to Vasari, one of Uccello’s greatest contributions to painting was the mastery of perspective. Celmins uses the chalice to illustrate the illusion of the viewer’s belief in the vessel or in the night sky before their eyes. We point at the drawing and say, “that is a chalice and those are stars.” In reality, both are products of the artist’s perception, and no amount of detail or precision can alter their fundamental limitations. She reiterates this sense of lack through the fact that the stars in her print exist in the absence of the ink laid down, whereas real stars are the presence in the void.

Robert Smithson’s Mirror Strata (1969) is an off-centered pyramid of stacked squares of glass. This piece stands apart from the other artworks in the exhibition, literally and conceptually. Placed on a pedestal at waist-height in the middle of the gallery, the piece allows the viewer to experience the sculpture from numerous angles. Like much of Smithson’s body of work, Mirror Strata requires active participation from the viewer rather than passive absorption. Close scrutiny reveals optical illusions, likely missed by a casual visitor content to take its appearance at face value. The pyramid appears to jut out beyond its square footprint from certain perspectives. At other times, it can look squatter, taller, bigger or more centered than it really is. Additionally, the reflective surface multiplies the space Mirror Strata inhabits. These illusions can only be dispelled by a healthy sense of skepticism. Once identified, an equally healthy ability to suspend disbelief rewards the engaged, active viewer with opportunities to peer into, and even visit, the imaginary spaces produced by Smithson’s little pyramid.

The artists in Imaginary Spaces display wildly varied manifestations in their disparate musings on the topic, but the show is not comprehensive enough to make a new or significant statement about the subject. Additionally, the evocative title and heady retro theme merely panders to recent interest in the 1960s. It is not a re-visitation of 1960s art world simply because the idea originated in 1968. It is neither a reconstruction nor a simulacrum, since there was no original exhibition to imitate. It is also not a copy of what may have been, as the inclusion of post-1968 pieces subverts this particular scenario. The exhibition does allow The Menil to showcase the breadth of their collection, but little else.

Alvaro Ibarra is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at The University of Texas at Austin.