Out of Place
Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin
Through March 5

By Ali Fitzgerald

Oded Hirsch, Halfman, 2009, Pigment photograph, 17 x 23-3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Lora Reynolds Gallery.

The videos included in Out of Place at Lora Reynolds Gallery seem more cinematic than D.I.Y., with sweeping panoramas and slick accompanying stills. Curator Noah Simblist told me later that "none of the artists wanted their art reduced down to a blanket political statement,” but rather sought to dodge political cliché through attention to the works’ physicality, a strategy repeated throughout the exhibition’s works in various mediums.

Yael Bartana's work Mur i Wieza (Wall and Tower) (2009), constructs a revisionist narrative in which a group of Israelis return to and reclaim their Polish homeland by erecting a small settlement in Warsaw. In Wall and Tower, Bartana crafts a seductive homage to Zionist propaganda films and the mechanics of nationalism. The actors, mostly strapping young Israelis, build wooden structures using the same wall and tower method employed in some concentration camps. Bartana's camera sweeps across the expressions of vacant idealism on their faces with loaded glee, reminding me of the 1960 movie Exodus starring Paul Newman as an embattled Israeli fighter, imploring his brothers and the audience to cheer for a new Jewish homeland. Bartana borrows from this sexy Hollywood vocabulary to great effect, even stamping the entrance to the black-box video space with a personally derived icon: a powerful merger of the red Polish national crest (which is eerily similar to the Nazi eagle) and the Star of David.

Where Bartana repurposes symbols of might, Jan Tichy presents paper monuments that are striking in their frailty. With Dahania (2006), Tichy memorializes the short-lived Palestinian airport with two black and white models, easily collapsible and sad, perched on a small bank of sand in the middle of the gallery. In describing this work, Simblist notes an "efficiency" of gesture. Tichy's small melancholic moment is echoed by Tom Molloy's hanging cut paper recreation of U.N. Security Council's Treaty 242, which is nearly impossible to read thanks to the machinations of a nearby fan. As I attempted in vain to read the text, I had to laugh at such a perfect little metaphor for the obliqueness of legal language and the slippery nature of multi-state solutions.

The fan was actually intended for Nida Sinnokrot's West Bank Butterfly – Kite Project (2009) across the room, which billows in reference to the shifting topography of modern Palestine. The kite is shaped from the contours of dueling West Banks, and, when presented alongside Sinnokrot's endangered butterfly native to the region and a small Gaza-shaped paper butterfly pinned to the wall, it exudes an ephemeral preciousness, clear and plaintive.

Possibly the most compelling piece in Out of Place is Oded Hirsch's absurdist epic Halfman (2009), in which he pushes his wheelchair-bound father through the muddy flats of North Israel. After a Sisyphus-style journey through the muck, a group of faceless workers hoist his father onto a wooden platform perched above the ocean in an act that seems equally perilous and pointless. Hirsch's imagery is haunting and primordial: swollen feet, mud, rippling endless waves and a solitary wooden fortress. Referencing Hirsch's clear admiration of absurdist theatre, Simblist informed me that contemporary Israeli fiction is characterized by an interest in the absurd and surreal (see the short stories of fiction writer Etgar Keret).

Out of Place focuses on the Israel-Palestine conflict, but speaks more generally to ideas of displacement and physical otherness. I found a particular resonance in this, as I feel somewhat distant both from my American and quasi-German identities (although my waistline is repatriating quickly).

When I met with Simblist for coffee, we spoke of his interest in artist-led political projects because they aren't "beholden to facts" the way journalists or historians are. We also talked about Egypt, Joe Sacco's Notes on Gaza and the visual hallmarks of Simblist's own work, which investigates the aesthetics of signage and propaganda. In discussing the panic-inducing mainstream news machine, Simblist stated that his show "should be displaced from the language of mainstream media." And thankfully it is.

Ali Fitzgerald is an artist and comics writer living in Berlin. She contributes regularly to the PBS blog Art:21 and recently started a visual travelogue for The Huffington Post.

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SUBstainability
Texas State University Galleries, San Marcos
Through March 1

By Chelsea Weathers

SUBstainability (Exhibition view).

Sustainability, the current Common Experience Theme at Texas State University, is a concept meant to inspire action in the present to work toward a better future. The exhibition SUBstainability grapples with the idea that such concern for the future is inextricable from an imperative to make the most of the present moment. In the show, underlying urges that often spur humans to action, like grief, laziness, erotic pleasure or calculated manipulation––impulses which usually take a back seat to more overtly utilitarian incarnations of sustainability such as architectural projects or ecological concerns––become the subjects of artworks that seek to subvert the idea that a sustainable future is one in which we have purged all of our vices.

Curators Andy Campbell and Mary Mikel Stump chose two large artworks to anchor each of the exhibition’s spacious galleries. One room showcases Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Placebo) (1991), a pile of about 700 pounds of silver-wrapped pineapple candies. As prescribed by the artist, viewers are meant to take the sweets away with them; the artwork is not supposed to sustain, but to wither and die, an elegant echo of the death of Gonzalez-Torres and his lover from AIDS. Other references to death crop up in this room. Eve Andrée Laramée’s Tincture of Smithson (1998–2000) features a solution containing pulverized rock from Robert Smithson’s Amarillo Ramp, the work whose site Smithson was surveying when his plane crashed, killing him and the pilot. The Tincture and “Untitled” (Placebo), though precious and romantic, provide a cool contrast to Dario Robleto’s Victorian sentimentality. Four works by Robleto, hermetically sealed in glass frames or vitrines, occupy a corner of the gallery. Intricate shrine-like assemblages containing photographs, ribbons, dried flowers and human hair hearken back to 18th- and 19th-century European mourning practices. Though less overtly personal than Gonzalez-Torres’ work, Robleto’s tableaux exemplify the delicate beauty that can result from an obsessive engagement with the concept of loss.

If the first gallery contains somber artworks that carry the weight of loss like a cross to bear, then the second half of SUBstainability treats loss or longing more playfully. Many of the works in this half of the show take as their subjects actions and feelings that qualify as neurotic, or at least unproductive. Where Gonzalez-Torres’ candies entreaty viewers to kneel benevolently before them, and to empathize with the artist’s and countless others’ grief, Jeanne Quinn’s A Thousand Tiny Deaths (2009) invites viewers to anticipate, even to relish, ruination. Black porcelain vessels hang precariously from partially deflated balloons suspended from the ceiling. As a balloon loses air, a vessel crashes to the floor. This act of destruction is an apt counterpart to “Untitled” (Placebo), but Quinn’s title, though ostensibly about death, brings us closer to the idea of the breaking porcelain as la petite morte. Each crashing vessel depends on the delicate, softening balloon—one orgasm after another. Ian Bogost’s Guru Meditation (2010) transforms the act of sitting stationary in front of the television into a yogic, meditative video game using the outmoded but charming vintage Atari system. Unlike Nam June Paik’s formally similar TV Buddha (1974), Bogost’s piece integrates the participation of the viewer, forcing her to make a game of being aware of her body as it resists the will to move or to relax. Sarah Sudhoff, in her stark photographs detailing the procedures that manufacture friendships in college sororities (signs that instruct sisters on how to gain a pledge’s trust and to discern the desirables from the dead weight), takes a seemingly cynical approach to her subject. Sudhoff’s images catalog a world that is antithetical to ideologies of creative freedom or social rebellion, though it also ostensibly takes on an agenda of philanthropy and humanitarianism. It was unclear to me whether Sudhoff meant to pass judgment on the facile methods the sororities used to indoctrinate its sisters. This line of questioning eventually reminded of a line from British television’s inimitable glamour-lush, Patsy Stone of Absolutely Fabulous: “What the hell is the difference between a painting done by a person who wishes to paint like a child, and a child’s painting?”

To attempt to answer such a question in this review would be akin to tilting at windmills––but in a way this is what SUBstainability encourages its viewers to do. At the heart of this exhibition is the therapeutic paradox that as long as the present feels worthwhile and valuable to the person who is living in it––even if he or she chooses to spend that time mourning, in front of the television, compulsively chasing multiple orgasms, or following a regimented path to sorority sisterhood––the higher the chances for a productive future.

Chelsea Weathers is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at The University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation is a history of the exhibition and distribution of Andy Warhol's films in the 1960s.

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Zine Library
Unit B Gallery, San Antonio
Through March 5

By Wendy Atwell

Zine Library (Installation view), 2011, Collection of 50 zines from Austin, San Antonio, New Orleans and Mexico City. Courtesy of Unit B and Emily Morrison/Trouser House, New Orleans.

National magazines and zines are as different as Twinkies and raw food bars: flipping through Vogue, it’s hard to find anything of substance within the glossy photos and airbrushed ads, while zines contain nothing but. Curated by Emily Morrison, the Zine Library at Unit B contains over fifty contemporary zines from New Orleans, Austin and Mexico City. Two hours provided only enough time to skim the surface of the flurry of zines exhibited. They are folded over white wire hangers, like pairs of pants, and hung at eye level throughout the gallery’s two rooms.

Zine material ranges from shocking and awkward to poetic and funny, but there’s nothing predictable, watered-down or politically correct within their varied pages of cartoons, essays, drawings, prints and photographs. Self-published, handmade and often community-based, zines come in a variety of sizes and formats, from photocopied paper double-sided and folded four ways, to the meticulously screen printed or origami folded.

Morrison is Executive Director at Trouser House, a non-profit contemporary art and urban farming initiative in New Orleans. In her curatorial statement, she mentions anarchists and pseudo-anarchists, how she had been living out of her car, punk rockers, lesbians and freeganism. The content within several of the zines reflects these fringes of mainstream American life; they’re not represented in InStyle, and only in W if appropriated by fashion. Mass media’s continued promotion of stereotypes stirred the Riot Grrrls, a generation of feminists who emerged in the 1990s and fought against these images. Like other ‘90s subcultures, they used zines to express their punk aesthetic and alternative female identities.

The title of Enola D’s zine of personal essays and observations, No Gods No Mattress, plays on No Gods No Masters, an anthology of anarchism by the French political and gay activist Daniel Guérin (1904-1988). In one essay, she describes getting out of her sleeping bag on a particularly cold morning and going to a coffee shop for a cup of hot water to put her teabag into. On her way she finds a cell phone in the streets of New Orleans, and is accused of stealing it when she tries to return it to the tourist who owns it. Their suspicion that she stole the phone in order to get a reward exposes an ugly side of class differences, between the people she calls yuppies and “entitled tourists” and her own vagabond life. Like many zine producers, Enola D’s resistance to mainstream modes of consumption extends to her the way her zines are distributed: they circulate only physically, not virtually.

Haley McMichael folds a long strip of screen-printed paper into beautiful three-by-five-inch books titled Observations and Daily Life. Funny and poignant observations accompany her illustrations, such as “Today I saw a vulture. Vultures don’t hurt anyone, but nobody likes them, maybe because they smell.”

There are multiple print issues of Pazmaker, a zine published by Perros Negros, “a production office of artistic projects” in Mexico City. Pazmaker #7, an audiozine, plays in the background. The forty-two tracks range from Joan Jonas reading The Anchor Stone (1988) to Marcel Broodthaers’ Interview with a Cat (1970).

This anthology of voices and sounds aurally illustrates the cacophony of voices speaking out in its printed counterparts. Because of their DIY ethics and self-distribution, zines are inherently political, though many possess particular sociopolitical agendas. The seductively illustrated a red rimmed star, published anonymously, tells a nightmarish and gory tale about a fated hunter who meets the hunting goddess.

While the printed word may fall flat on the pages of mainstream magazines, with their blanket generalizations catering to high circulation and demographic targets, the text in zines tends to pop out at the reader in three dimensions. Zines allow access and affordability, and many utilize every blank space and face of the paper, creating a kind of Cubist deconstruction of mass media that allows empowerment and individualized representation. Morrison’s Zine Library provides a fascinating peek into these uncensored channels that illustrate highly subjective perspectives, as well as poetry and art. Many zines reflect on how the mainstream version of the American dream may be a nightmare for some; as agents for transformation, zines illustrate how this dark side dawns into a dream.

Wendy Atwell received her M.A. in Art History and Criticism from The University of Texas at San Antonio.

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An Exchange with Sol LeWitt
Cabinet (Brooklyn) and MASS MoCA (North Adams)
Through March 5 and 31

By Veronica Roberts

An Exchange with Sol LeWitt offers an idiosyncratic tribute to LeWitt’s work, a wonderful, intimate complement to the expansive three-floor survey of the artist’s wall drawings on view at MASS MoCA through 2033. Conceived by independent curator Regine Basha, and installed in collaboration with Denise Markonish at MASS MoCA and Sina Najafi at Cabinet Magazine headquarters in Brooklyn, the show was organized around an open call to artists to make work they thought Sol might like. The only restriction was size: the submissions could be no larger than a sheet of binder paper or a 12-inch cube.

Together, the two venues present a mini-retrospective of LeWittian themes, as artists have paid homage to virtually every body of work the artist made. Not surprisingly, dozens of beautiful drawings involving repeated lines and cubes (LeWitt’s artistic bread and butter) are in abundance. A standout is 7-year-old Lucia Harrison’s hot pink wavy line drawing at MASS MoCA. Numerous text-based works additionally pay tribute to LeWitt’s writing. Luis Camnitzer, a friend of LeWitt’s, rewrote the artist’s 1969 “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” adding his own updates. And Tom Melick concocted a “recipe for Sol LeWitt” involving water and a bouillon cube in which “the recipe becomes the machine that makes the meals,” a witty nod to LeWitt’s famed declaration in his 1967 “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” that “the idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”

There were also riffs on specific iconic works. A photograph by Hope Sandrow of her chickens and roosters cavorting around a chicken coop designed to resemble one of LeWitt’s isometric cubes instantly captured my attention. Another highlight was Joe Johnson’s beautiful diagram, Variations of Complete Open Paper Clips, a spin on the paper clips Sol used and meticulously documented when trying to come up with every possible variation of an open cube. Nina Servizzi created a colorful strip resembling Eadweard Muybridge’s photograph of humans in motion, which sparked LeWitt’s interest in seriality. Also among the many sub-genres in the show is work made about LeWitt’s friendship with Eva Hesse. At Cabinet, you can hear the very talented Canadian Cedar Tavern Singers sing the words of Sol’s extraordinary 1965 letter to Hesse, and at MASS MoCA an excerpt from the same letter forms part of Kate Davis’ collage.

At MASS MoCA in particular there are numerous works based on rules and instructions, the generative force behind LeWitt’s wall drawings. Two RISD art students, Corydon Cowansage and Adam Lucas, jointly came up with five rules for making a work of art (limiting themselves to three colors, creating a work in under 30 minutes, etc.) The duo then made very different works using these shared parameters. Lorrie Fredette decided to make a work based on 25 different rules she asked friends and family to invent. Teresita Fernandez created an installation of seven exquisite, irregularly faceted knobs of charcoal with that are attached to a wall, assembled according to her instructions.

Although each venue possesses an eclectic mix of submissions (in terms of off-beat offerings, Cabinet’s stuffed monkey was matched by MASS MoCA’s wisdom tooth), the presentations are quite different. At Cabinet, work is displayed on the walls and ensconced inside stacked cardboard boxes reminiscent of the magazine’s namesake cabinet of curiosities. The larger installation at MASS MoCA is a more customary museum display, with a linear wall hanging, vitrines and work placed atop a continuous shelf. The MASS MoCA experience is enhanced by the conversation between the works in the show and LeWitt’s wall drawings on view upstairs. As if to draw viewers’ attention to these works, Max Goldfarb and Allyson Strafella have bottled the remnants of a brightly colored acrylic wall drawing in a small jar placed outside the group exhibition’s entrance. Inspired by seeing the crew of drafters sharpen thousands of pencils to make the wall drawings at the museum, Hope Ginsburg submitted a felt-covered metal pencil sharpener—a loving overture to their tremendous labor.

As a show, An Exchange with Sol LeWitt is creative, generous, humorous and modest, all qualities Sol possessed. Between his longstanding practice of exchanging work with others, hiring drafters to execute his pieces, loyal commitment to friends and younger artists, and enthusiasm for the less expensive mediums of printmaking and artist’s books (he helped found the artist-run bookstore Printed Matter), LeWitt’s work and his life subverted countless artistic norms, forging community in the process.

This two-part exhibition both embodies and extends the communal character we associate with LeWitt. As I wandered through MASS MoCA, I overheard people finding their own work in the show, looking for the work of friends, and enjoying work by people they didn’t know. There is something particularly thrilling about a museum participating in this project. While open calls are not exceptional in alternative art spaces, it’s a brave move for a museum like MASS MoCA to agree to mount a show where they have no control over the amount or quality of works on view. That ethos of risk-taking and generous spirit couldn’t be a more fitting way to honor Sol LeWitt and his art.

Veronica Roberts worked closely with Sol LeWitt when she coordinated his retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 2000. She is currently the Director of Research for the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Catalogue Raisonné, to be published digitally by Artifex Press.

Andy Warhol's Kiss
The Museum of Modern Art
Through March 21

By Mary Walling Blackburn

Andy Warhol, Kiss (1963-64), 16mm film (black and white, silent), 54 min. at 16fps. @ 2010 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

In Andy Warhol’s Kiss (1963-64) couples neck until the light flares and dies out and the next couple begins.

It is strung together on 16mm film, shot at 24 frames per second and projected at 16 frames per second. Originally, singular make-out sessions were screened before feature-length films in 1963 at the Gramercy Arts Theater on East 27th Street in Manhattan. But eventually Warhol began to align the previews in a manner that was in accord with Structuralist cinema, with duration and his own desire to capitalize on others’ limits, both audience and actor.

The mechanics of the kiss are such that the kisser is suspended in a threshold state: in between the act of eating and being eaten, pivoting between bite and smile. Chronological time can’t cope with the kiss because it performs our longing for something infinite. In this case, the infinite is without language or currency, both time-dependent mediums. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’ theorizing around the kiss postulates that it is “eating without nourishment.” But the kiss is also touching without reproduction, sexual or mechanical. Here, a series of kisses performs a syncopation untouched by Taylorism, a 20th century method of regulating and repeating each worker’s gesture towards maximum production.

Kiss’s languid and repetitive tempo is meditative to some (behind me, a boy sleeps through) but others manhandle it; they refuse it by walking out or speaking through it. In total, the film clocks in at 54 minutes. No one seated starts to kiss. We occupy our mouths in any other way.

Collectively, we’re a vulnerable audience. We might be suffused with longing; our emotions might be organized by a sense of alienation, unable to identify with disembodied (primarily) white celebrity heads cum death masks. The only black subject in the film, Rufus Collins slowly grazes the mouth of the woman beneath him, Naomi Levine. Later, Collins will be cast as a vampire in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but in this moment, there’s nothing camp, just the slowness of an open-mouthed kiss that never ceases nor escalates. Naomi Levine is paired in succession with multiple men. Gerard Malanga is also paired with multiple men. Is this acting? Is this love? Warhol directs the kiss as social transaction. Its mouth and tongue as time and motion are tethered to a script.

The phalanx of kissers in Warhol’s Kiss are heir to the Japanese Awaji puppeteers who manipulate life-size dolls with their hands and bodies. A real person pretends to be an automoton pretending to be real. Think mise-en-abyme. The kiss is artifice: a Make Out Factory, manufacturing the rip-off. But I resist this reduction: in these serial kisses, there’s real sunlight on real skin, worn bedclothes and a pedestrian sofa. I want this gesture, regardless of Warhol’s attention to the capital of the body, to be the exception. I want this mouth against another mouth to have no utility but the kiss alone.

The world’s record for the longest kiss (2010) is 33 hours. The contest regulations demand: “The kiss must be continuous and the lips must be touching at all times. The couple must be awake at all times.” They cannot defecate or urinate. The abject is the sleeping lover, soiled. In a late capitalist life, the kiss is political capital. The 2010 celebrants of the world’s longest kiss are two men who are not in love; they are activists, participating in the self-described “LBGT uprising”. This makes sense as a stratagem. But its sentimentality and normativity make it decidedly undifferentiated from ordinary expressions of heterosexual affection. What of long kisses in wet pants? Kissers that bite one another awake? The ear purposefully swapped for the mouth? And even, perhaps to extend the argument posed in The Screwball Asses by Guy Hocquenghem, the next record for longest kiss (this time around with bathroom breaks and moments of rest and instances where the mouth has strayed from the lips to the hair) will be celebrated by a gay man and a lesbian woman, as record of a more complicated liberation. Maybe it will be a year-long film projected at 16 frames per second. It projects in your hallway; each time you leave your bedroom to get a glass of water, the lesbian and the gay man are kissing, flickering, laughing. In this fantasy, we witness the kissers’ failure to beat the record in the spirit of carnival, with all its joyous subversions.

In real life, to make record, the kiss has become an ordeal. (Exhausted by replication and rule.) But the image is not guilty, it is the path thrashed to it.

Kiss is on view in Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art through March 21.

Thanks to Pascale Gatzen for our conversation and the observation that “the image is not guilty.”

Mary Walling Blackburn, artist and writer, presented "Accidental Pornographies: Lesson Plans 1-9: " at testsite in September. Recently a Visiting Artist at Cooper-Union School for the Arts, she lives in Brooklyn. Her work can be found at welcomedoubleagent.com and anhoekschool.org.

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