Proof of Concept

Artist Ross Racine discusses his unique hybrid digital drawings of constructed suburban landscapes with photographer Nora Herting. You can view Racine's work at this month's show at Williamsburg Gallery Like the Spice


Nora Herting: I am fascinated by your process and how you came to work this way. What attracted you to the computer?

Ross Racine: From 1985 to 1990 I had a day job in computers as a designer/programmer. I knew its possibilities for visual art. At that time, as a painter I had a longing to create images that were non-material, like dream images for example. A few years later, I bought Photoshop 3 and never looked back. I left a painting happily unfinished! With the computer, my subject matter was at first photography itself. I felt I had to work through the subject of photography, as photography was the precedent of 2 D images that were less material than painting. Initially I worked from Muybridge images because I had been working with the figure as a painter.

NH: Were you working in the same language as painting and drawing in Photoshop? Were you using the brush tools? Were you still drawing?

RR: My technique has hardly changed from that time. Most improvements in the software have been for photographers or designers. I work stroke by stroke. All of my shadows are drawn in. I try to avoid any streamlined effects. It is important to me to avoid the trap of homogenization. I know I am using the machine but I want to make something that doesn’t look like it comes from a machine.

RR:I have never had ideas for creating photographs.) I want my images to inhabit a place that is in between a drawing and a photograph.

NH: What place do you want them to reside in? Is it an interstitial space?

RR: I am happy if it is ambiguous, because there are references that the viewer brings to the work from a familiarity with the traditions of painting and other references that the viewer brings from the traditions of photography.

NH: Are you trying to ditch either media’s connotative baggage?

RR :No. You can’t ditch the baggage. Although it has been ten years, I haven’t found many artists working in this kind of space between photography and painting. It is still very early in the development of computer drawing, earlier than I thought.

NH: I agree that this is a very innovative, and still new application of computer imaging technology. The dialogue between the two mediums really interest me. The way photography impacted painting and vice versa. Now it seems that computer imagery has liberated photography from its bearings of veracity. Initially people working with the computer strived to make things look realistic, now people are beginning to make work that is beyond reality. Your work is interesting because it occupies this aesthetic space between photography and drawing, both speak very differently about veracity. The implication is different if you believe the communities in your images actually exist. How do you feel about the implicit veracity of a photograph?

RR: Many people do view my work as photographic, at least at first, because of the realism and the surface treatment. But I want my images to be fictions. There is some fictional element to all of the work. Also I think they look like models of potential places.

NH: The process seems to be inextricably linked to the subject matter. Like all very good work there is an interesting and specific marriage between process and subject matter. The veracity of a photograph informs the reading of these impossible landscapes).

RR: I am using the look of photography to compel people to suspend their disbelief. If I drew these directly on paper there would be traces of my hand. That is what I have strived to remove from my work, both in painting and in digital drawing.

NH: As a photographer, I always wanted to penetrate that surface. When your final work is a photo the surface is not something you have access too. It was exciting for me to be able to add texture and work on the surface of the photograph because as a photographer you can’t go back and rework the image.

NH: What is your relationship to suburbia? Have you lived in one of these places?

RR: I was born and raised in Montreal, in an older suburb near the city center, with streets with lots of trees. (took a few words out here) It was called Model City when it began. Later I have always lived in inner city areas. (took a sentence out here) But I spent a lot of time as a child riding my bike around in winding streets that seemed so full of possibility. The grid is conceptual. But once you break out of it, anything is possible. As a child I loved maps and would draw my own cities.

NH: It seems so optimistic.

RR: As a kid it did feel optimistic. Even if the suburbs are now my subject matter, as an adult I have always been an inner city person. I worked in the suburbs once. It was terrible just going there. What occurs in my pictures could be emblematic for society as a whole. We come in and clear the land and then plop down buildings and try to re-insert nature through a few planted trees. Nature is tamed in these images. But I want to avoid being more specific here because I want the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions. I prefer my image to work as a trigger, not a final statement.

NH: ..you were going to say, " as opposed to photography," weren't you? I would agree with you. Where organic development occurs is within the series, not the solitary image. I always felt that photographers had to meet the expectation of working in a series to prove that a successful image wasn’t an accident.

RR: As a photographer, you have a different relationship with your subject matter. You go out and confront your subject matter. Now I do work in a series, but I would like return to a more free way of working.

NH: These two images are so different that one speaks so much about isolation. I also get this sense of isolation through your god’s eye vantage. It makes me physically aware of how far away my body is to the subject. It makes me think of the literary term of dramatic irony where the reader is cognizant of the turn of events but the character is not. There is also something dream like about floating above these towns.

RR: I have had a lifelong attraction to maps. I have always wanted to work from this vantage point

NH: Do you have stories about them?

RR: For this particular one we are looking at now - yes. But I will not say anything about it because I want the viewer to invent a possible story.

Labels: Like the Spice, Ross Racine

This is the second in a three part response to

©Murakami the Brooklyn Museum.

After passing the sculpture S.M.P.ko² in the rotunda (see previous post) we are introduced to Mr. DOB, a character featured in Murakami's work as early as 1993. As the wall text explains DOB's name is a reflection of his form. "d" and "b" are inscribed in his ears, while his round head forms the "o". Arthur Ludbow in his 2005 New York Magazine article sights the success of fellow Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara's infantile characters and Japanese obsession with kawaii (a Hello Kitty flavor of cuteness) as the rational around Murakami's shift from the critical satire of utako, emblematic in Lonesome Cowboy, to the com modification of it. Mr. DOB is later joined by Mr. Pointy and Kaikai and Kiki, who become the stars of Murakami's animated shorts.

In Mr. DOB's early appearances he is surrounded by happy face flowers. He has an unctuous smile and the work he dominates is so disappointingly benign.

I find it refreshing to think that Murakami can't keep up his charade of Kawaii. The evidence of this is seen in the complex and terrifying transformations that effect our friend Mr. DOBs.
After a few appearances as a smiling, be-lashed ingenue, Mr. DOB's begins to bear rows of razor sharp teeth. Like a greek god, Mr. DOB possesses many manifestations, many on canvas, occasionally as three dimensions. He transmutates to have several "d" and "b" protrusions, multiple eyes, and many more teeth.

Murakami's PO + KU Surrealism phase is most injurious to Mr. DOBs who becomes stretched, distorted, and endlessly repeated as if he was the victim of some terrible teleportation experiment. Perhaps the impulse that birthed Mr. DOB becomes his undoing, as he is over mediated, reproduced, altered, until he becomes only a motif; a wallpaper of eyes, sharks teeth and colors.

In “Tan Tan Bo Puking” (2002), all the qualities of kawaii have disappeared from Mr. DOBs. In this enormous painting our friend is at death's door as he spews bile and breaths his last few breaths. Despite the overwhelming motifs of smiling flowers and the insufferable cuteness of KaiKai and Kiki, one no longer thinks of Hello Kitty, or Yoshitomo Nara's characters when standing in front of "Tan Tan Bo Puking." I like to imagine, that after several years of living with Mr. DOB's Murakami can help but abandon his "cuteness" charter, and the anxiety, violence, and refreshing criticality that helped him produce Hiropon has bubbled back up, much like the bile that spills from Mr. DOB's blackened, dying, mouth.

The much anticipated retrospective (if a 45 year old artist can have a retrospective) of Takashi Murakami occupies 18,500 square feet of gallery space at the Brooklyn Museum. It features 90 works, an operational Louis Vuitton Store, and an animation written and performed by Kanye West. I felt an exhibition this sweeping warrants more than one post. Below is the first segment in a 3 part review of the show that corresponds with the exhibit's layout


Although it was still only the sneak preview to the opening , I had already read two New York Times' articles about the Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum and felt like I had been aptly prepared for a world populated by commodified smiling flowers and cloying characters. What Roberta Smith's review had neglected to mention is the opening scene of this sweeping show, a the most critical and dark of all the featured work.

We enter the exhibition in the Brooklyn Museums rotunda surrounded by electric semen airborne in razor sharp arches. In the center is three stages of
Second Mission Project KO2. This is a life size anime girl, her miniature frame dominated by gravity defying petal pink breasts. In her second stage the girl begins her transformation into a jet plane, the girl's ass is split apart, her tiny torso flips forward her pubis, now the nose of the plane juts forward thrusting a hairless, but anatomically perfect pearly pink prepubescent vagina towards the viewer. In the third and final form , the transformation is complete, the girl's head and hair become the tail of the jet, guided by the vaginal nose of the plane, it hovers in the air.

Murakaimi has 3 dimensionally staged an internal rape of this hyper-sexualized girl who is internally dismembered by jet plane machinery. Rather than her genitals being penetrated they become appropriated and externalized as she morphs into her own aggressor, she becomes the (jet plane) phalis of her own violation.


KO2, like two other life-size figures, Lonesome Cowboy and Hirpon, is a satire of the sexualization in Otaku, the Japanese culture of anime (film) and manga (comics). The grotesque exaggeration of the Hirpon's lactating breasts and Cowboy's halo' of ejaculate offers an effective comment on the hyperbolic sex inherent in Otaku. However, on the opposing wall is a didactic the museum has produced for children asking them to identify "DOB" one of Murakami's reoccurring characters. Is the institution assuming that all the pastel colored eyes and smiling flowers has anesthetized the Hirpon's gargantuan milking tits, or KO2 pussy which is thrust forward at a 6 year old's eye level? Is this really a kid-friendly exhibit?

Murakami's smiling flower motif spill from circular canvases to populate ad nauseam the walls and sculpture in the third gallery and beyond to the gift-store trinkets and gift bags. How are we to read these sycophantic characters after the tone of the exhibit is initiated by KO2? Initially these flowers along with Murakami's other iconic figures of many-eyed mushrooms and the smiling DOB seem sinister and false like the cartoon characters printed on the panties of a sexually active teen, or worse....


Although KO2 and her friend the Lonesome Cowboy and Hirpon speak to a satire of Otaku culture, their deformities eventually cease to cast a critical shadow over the remaining cast of Murkami's cloying characters.

Labels: KO2, Murakami, Otaku

Bridge, an art fair that has taken place in Chicago, London, and Miami has joined the cadre of art fairs exhibiting this week in New York.

The old Tunnel Night club, once a railway tunnel located on 12th avenue, spans the entire block with 20-foot vaulted ceilings is an ideal venue for 65 international galleries.

Bridge has grown up in the last several years. In the early days of these "junior" art fairs that began to sprout around Art Chicago, Bridge and its predecessor ,The Stray Show, didn't distinguished themselves from the established fairs by simply featuring "emerging" galleries (read: less expensive). They served as iconoclastic versions of the blue-chip, conservative Art Chicago. The results were mixed. The 2001 opening of the Stray Show featured fractured performances, wall to wall crowds, start up galleries that were abundant in enthusiasm and entirely lacking in professionalism, and palpable sense of energy and excitement.



Bridge NewYork 08 reveals that this fair has matured beyond the adolescent rebellion. What it has become is professional, well attended, and sadly status quo. The little galleries, so poorly organized and funded that they actually leaned stacks of their inventory against the wall rather than be troubled to actually hang anything up, have been replaced with tastefully spaced booths filled with international galleries. The irreverent and frenetic social disruptions of Chicago's loosely organized performance artists have been replaced with more discreet and predictable DJ and a VIP booth.


Like the organizers, the art at Bridge has also become more polished and sedate. Quite, introspective, and carefully crafted work shines in this show. Terri Jones' installation Spin is carefully smudged texts that become soft, minimal works. Monika Lin's heavily epoxied paintings layer faceless children frolicking amongst decorative motifs. Lauren Fensterstock's monochrome gardens of carefully constructed from black paper epitomises the majority of the work at Bridge; carefully constructed, flawlessly executed, and understated.

Labels: Bridge 08, Lauren Fenterstock, Terri Jones

Rachel Beach crafts visual homonyms. Like a seasoned traveler whose wanderings can be revealed through careful listening of accent and expression her vocabulary subtly reflects paths of her history as a trained painter, a daughter of cellist and artisan of architectural flourishes.


What the work is, is wood veneered relief sculpture with trompe-l'œil effects. Beach's ambiguous visual utterances rest suspended between two and three dimensions, like words whose meanings are formed by context. These wall sculptures reference both a written and musical language by alluding to letters and notes.
The etymology of Beach's vocabulary is evident in her nod to decorative motifs like palmettes and Fleur-de-lis , and her materials of wood grain and velvety jeweled toned paints. Much like modern languages through appropriation still bare traces of the stories and cultures of earlier civilization



Like the Spice Gallery
Closing Reception Saturday March 29th 7:00 - 11:00

Labels: Rachel Beach

Since Cai Gua-Quaing's exhibition "I want to believe"opened last week at the Guggenheim I have learned that although no one in New York can pronounce his name everyone is anticipating going to "that Chinese artist-with-exploding-stuff's show."

While the rest of the Guggenheim features the theatricality and artifice of the Pirates of the Caribbean, “An Arbitrary History: River,” is Cai Gua-Quanig's version of Its a Small World in a yak skin boat. I mounted a wooden platform and was assisted by two docents into the one person vessel and instructed to propel the boat forward by using my arms to push off the side of the constructed river.

Initially I was surprised to find that Cai's boat ride to be the single thing in Manhattan that didn't have a line. It wasn't until I was in the boat that I discovered what all the rest of the observers, who were walking up to the items in the gallery in the normal art viewing fashion, had realized: that by entering the boat I now was part of the exhibition. As I gently glided down river, viewers regarded me in the same capacity as they did the cage of yellow canaries that was suspended above the river. I was now on display. This is the only place in the circular ascendancy of the Guggenheim were the viewer is a necessary, or even considered, party in the spectacle.


A random history is his self-staged mini-retrospective within the much larger spectacle of his vortex of stuffed animals, floating cars, and explosions. It is his own river through the Heart of Darkness. What is revealed is not Marlow's primal regression but a tranquil meditation a long a path of personal and cultural symbols. It is quaint and a bit pithy, but I was charmed by the slow rocking of my one person boat. It felt like a gift I was being granted by Cai Gua-Quanig as a respite, much like Its a Small World ride in it's comparative quietness to the phantasmagoria of the rest of Disneyland.

Labels: Cai Gua-Quaing

Unmonumental, the premier exhibition at the New- New Museum has been heavily reviewed. It is an evolving exhibition that began with Unmonumental: The Object, which is 100 objects by 30 international sculptors. A month later 2D collage was added to the exhibition as Unmonumental: The Image. The proceeding month sound installations were added, followed two days later by an online component of Internet based pieces hosted by Rhizome.

I entered the exhibition haunted by the Dionysus show at the Pompidou Center in 2005. That show also received much acclaim and featured Thomas Hirshorn's indiscriminate appropriation and proclivity for dildo's and Jason Rhodes-esque chaos and grime but left me feeling like I had wondered through a post apocalyptic garbage dump turned porn shop.

The aesthetics and materials of the Unmontemental show were as I expected; piles of garbage, cardboard, naked particle board. What I wasn't expecting was to find a harmony and cohesiveness that transcended any one piece but was achieved through a dialogue between collection of works that can predominately be described as unartfully arranged garbage. The tone of the exhibition echoed the efforts of the sculptures, works that incorporated very humble materials whose relationships create connections that extend far beyond the original raw materials. The curatorial premise and decisions create a context for each individual work that grants each piece a greater significance.

After viewing the 4 floors of the show, I felt that the New Museum’s curatorial team of Richard Flood, Laura Hoptman and Massimiliano Gioni are claiming that a despondence and hopelessness created by a surfeit of crap commodities is the 21st Century zeitgeist. According to the New Museum's literature:

"This millennium appears more concerned with iconoclasm than with creating new, empty and shiny icons."

And if the context is limited to the 4 stories of the New Museum then Flood, Hoptman and Gioni make a very compelling argument. But I have to wonder, were these three so busy moving to their new location and assembling the "100 objects" for the show that they didn't notice the sale of Jeff Koon's 23 million dollar Heart, or Damien Hirst 's School: The Archaeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge,” for $10 million for the Lever House Art Collection. (This was a show threw in every icon and artistic cliche along with the kitchen sink along with some skinned sheep carcasses and a dunce cap for good measure).



And what of the Guggenheim's recent shows? Richard Prince celebrated American male sexuality through the icons of hot rod car parts, the Marlboro man and sexy nurses? The current exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe is a show of mounted spectacle in a monumental scale. The prices of the aforementioned artists are so inflated, that by expense alone these works become instant monuments. The climate of the art scene in New York ,the home of the New Museum, presents the great evidence against the premise of Unmonumental.

Labels: Damien Hirst, New Museum, Richard Prince