Proof of Concept

Interview with Ross Racine

10N — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 03:13:00 +0000

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.

©Murakami: Mr. DOB's uncute fate

10N — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:41:00 +0000

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.

©Murakami

10N — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:08:00 +0000

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.

Bridge Art Fair

10N — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:47:00 +0000

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.

Flipping for Rachel Beach at Like the Spice

10N — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:44:00 +0000

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

Cai Gua-Quaing at the Guggenheim

10N — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:35:00 +0000

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.

Unmonumental at The New Museum

10N — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:34:00 +0000

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.

Erin Harper Vernon

10N — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 03:07:00 +0000

The second in a series on artists who explore the contemporary urban landscape Erin Harper Vernon discusses her austere photographs of the suburban Midwest.

10N: The series "Midnight Sun" seems very traditional in respect that light is the true subject of photography. In your statement you speak of "light pollution" but of course, this pollution is only made possible through the city. What is the subjects of this work?

Erin Harper Vernon: Certainly light plays an important role in these images, in someway it is the sole subject in this work, but secondary to the process of the long exposures. The warm glow of the horizon becomes a light that is perhaps as familiar as a sunset, however the light is not natural but a man-made perpetual twilight. I was very curious about this light at first and in part attempting to understand my own environment, or something I had ignored in my familiar night landscape.

The light that is in the photographic image translated by the lens is very different then human vision. Our eyes are perhaps even more sensitive then film, but we do not see the time or the compressed length of time the lens can record. This light reveals the landscape as familiar but also alien at the same time. In a small way I think of my camera similar to a lens of a satellite, and I want to map the landscape using light as a tool to draw an unseen line between the urban and the rural. This light then revealed a third landscape where this border was still expanding and the suburban land emerges in the foreground. For me the light pollution from the city becomes an axis or center point and the camera lens becomes a compass. I think of the stark horizon line the exposure makes similar to that of a line of a border in a map, a translation of the land that would in be otherwise unseen with the natural eye.

10N: Do you see then the subject of the work as that demarcation between developed and undeveloped land?

Erin Harper Vernon:I'm not sure I would say it is about developed and undeveloped land
because the farmland is tooled and developed for agriculture, rather I
think the demarcation is where the development is changing as the urban
pushes into the rural.

10N:In your images, it is not so much an urban environment, but a suburban environment. Is this conscious? How do you feel about suburban communities?

Erin Harper Vernon: I think suburbia replaces, or is deeply part of the American psyche to still live on the frontier. In someway it is a product of very bad urban planning and several issues that have shaped our land post WWII such as the automobile, baby boom, and fear of desegregation or white flight in the 1970's. Most importantly our love affair with the car is to blame, but our love for the road is I think part of our national identity - and in a small way - is part of a quest to still be a pioneer.

I just returned from Japan where I experienced perhaps the largest suburban communities I have ever seen in my life, but suburbia for the USA is very different because land is not a premium causing massive sprawl. I think suburbia in America is still part of the promise for free land or an attainable inexpensive quality of life. However I largely think that the way these communities are built can dilute the experience of what it is like to live in a community connected by sidewalks and not by driveways. But the promise of low property taxes, schools, and a garage big enough to fit an SUV is seductive to anyone who is working middle class. In someway I think it might even define what it means to be middle class in the States. I don't think this was the focus for this series unlike later projects such as NIMBY that have followed. My feelings of how I define suburbia have changed with travel over seas and a new project where I am interviewing and photographing families now facing foreclosure.

10N: Can you tell us a little bit about NIMBY? which i presume is an acronym for "Not In MY Back Yard". I have always heard that phrase in connection with something controversial or an referring to people or a lifestyle that is not homogeneous to that community. But your photographs seem so empty.

Erin Harper Vernon: NIMBY ("Not In MY Back Yard") is series started about
the same time, a daytime project of some of the neighborhoods in the
developments I was photographing at night for the light pollution images.
At the time I was making the work in a the county north of Columbus Ohio. It had one
of the highest rates for development in the country in the height of
the housing bubble a few years ago. Most of the images are of the
backyard or the land as it is being developed for new hosing tracks.

Interview with Lisa Dahl

10N — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:00:00 +0000

Lisa Dahl has used paint, real estate magazines, text and fabric to speak about home ownership and the myth of the American Dream, economics, nostalgia and dystopia.

10N: One of the interesting aspects about your work is the dialogue you create between photography and painting. You seem to be calling attention to the media of paint with your titles “Cadmium Red Light” and “Cerulean Blue”.

LD: Despite working representationally for a number of years, I often felt dissatisfied with the trick of manipulating paint so that it looked like something “real.” My earlier roots had been in abstraction and when I started painting on photographs, it felt honest to let the paint just be itself – a thick, gooey, opaque covering – and let the photograph do what it does best: 10 represent a visually familiar reality. When you choose to use one medium over another, that choice conveys a context. I view painting’s strong suit as being its ability to show overt intention: “I meant to do that. I did it on purpose with my own hand.”

I used to employ text in my paintings and I considered inserting text via the titles of these works, but opted for just naming them after the color I had chosen. I usually use very non-houselike colors, so the reiteration of this point adds a little fun into the work and often will reference something ridiculous (i.e. “Bubblegum”), comment on the toxic nature of the paint (“Pthalocyanine Blue”), or even make a pop culture reference. The painting included in the Lack of Desire show, “Robin’s Egg Blue,” is named after Tiffany’s branded color and the idea of those little blue boxes filled with some high-priced gift of the elite.

10N :In your statement about “There goes the neighborhood” you remark that altered structures in your images have no form of entry or sense a of comfort, but when I viewed “Robin’s Egg Blue” in “Lack of Desire” I found it a bit soothing, because of the color, it seemed like you were restoring the house site back to its natural state. Do you have feelings about suburban development and its impact on the environment?

LD:I do want my work to be accessible, and using beauty and humor is one of the easiest ways to achieve that. I once saw a grumpy 8-year old get dragged into an exhibition of mine by his mom, and when he finally got around to looking up from the floor, a huge smile spread across his face and he was immediately engaged. Witnessing that reaction was great positive feedback for me. Of course, there are more conceptual layers to my work, many of them much darker and cynical than the aesthetics alone belie. But if I can actually make someone happy with my painting, I feel like I have done something quite difficult, and they might then be open to considering the work more in-depth.

In some ways, I do feel like I am removing a blight from a landscape when I paint over a house, but in most instances I am also highlighting the house even more and making it an even larger and more artificial presence. Most of the “natural” landscaping that I leave intact is as equally unnatural as the house was, and it looks a little ridiculous when its context is removed. I have even been asked if there ever really was a house in the photo to begin with – so there’s an element of trust that comes up too.

I have read a number of books about the development of suburbia in this country, and find them interesting because it is a topic that touches so many facets of our daily lives and how planned development vs. unchecked sprawl has impacted us all. I think the book I recommend most, largely because of the unbridled energy of the author James Howard Kunstler, is The Geography of Nowhere. Even though it is from 1993, it is still very relevant today and helps get you properly angry at issues you may have not considered before.

10N:How do you feel your work relates to Christo and Jeanne Claude’s building wrappings? Certainly there is a visual continuity between your works. Do you feel that they are coming from a similar place conceptually?

LD:Emerging artists are sometimes advised to have an “elevator pitch” honed just in case someone of art world import asks them the dreaded question: “So what kind of work do you make?” I could always feel my ears burning red in embarrassment as I tried to answer that question, so instead I came up with the idea of describing my work Hollywood-pitch style: i.e. only use big, established names that everyone already knows. I like that you bring up Christo because the Hollywood sell I came up with is: “Rachel Whiteread meets John Baldessari with a nod to Christo and an indebtedness to Gordon Matta-Clark.”

The impulse to cover something over, reduce it down to an elemental state, or even destroy it is a very basic one that a lot of artists, myself included, find very intriguing and cathartic. Methods of destruction paradoxically turn into acts of creation, and always include a great element of surprise.

10N:You deny entry to these homes with your barricade of paint, in effect you are obliterating the access to that American Dream, do you feel like it is a fallacious, unobtainable state, or is it simply becoming economically unfeasible to so many Americans?

LD:I recently discovered the new blog Sellout by artist Deborah Fisher and she has made a couple postings about this house ownership conundrum, especially as it relates to artists in NYC. Many people know that home ownership, beyond signifying attainment of the American Dream, is one of the most basic and elemental steps toward financial security. But the hurdle of a 20% down payment, the recent mortgage crisis, and ever increasing property taxes prove to be insurmountable barriers to many hard working and educated people. And of course for me personally, living as an artist in one of the most expensive cities in the country, I feel tremendous real estate envy in regards to the sense of stability it represents. Part of me hates the over-simplified naiveté of the American Dream, but another part desperately wants to achieve it for myself, at least on my own terms. My internal battle of desires gets thrown into my artwork and hopefully makes for an interesting combat to dissect.

10N:After growing up in the great Midwest, how do you imagine that this work strikes your fellow New Yorkers? With the astronomical prices of condos in New York, people in the U.S. as a whole own their own homes at more than twice the rate of New Yorkers. (According to a Columbia University Study). Do you believe the ideals and associations around home ownership translate to New Yorkers?

LD:Considering the high cost of living in the city, I think New Yorkers are actually some of the most real estate obsessed people in the nation. The fact that they’re focused on high-rise apartments instead of single-family suburban homes makes little difference. I remember going to an intimate salon evening for an arts organization where wealthy art patrons were invited to a discussion with three established, interesting artists and the talk was moderated by a very revered curator-critic. The whole evening quickly devolved into an hour-long discussion of real estate, neighborhoods, prices per square foot, utilities, etc. It made no matter that the attendees lived in Park Avenue penthouses and the artists were in commercially zoned Brooklyn warehouses. Actual dollar amounts were getting bandied about. I don’t think any art was actually discussed the entire evening, but no one else seemed to be upset about the course of the evening’s discussions – they loved it!

10N:The Dahl House series, is obviously very personal. If the paintings are any indication, you also seemed to have lived in architecturally very distinct places. What impressions did this give you? Your other series seem to function as a social critique, but after considering the “Dahl Houses” if there is not also a bit of nostalgia in the later works, too.

LD:Although I only moved a few times growing up, the places I lived were so different that I spent most of my childhood very much being a fish out of water, and as an adult I don’t consider a single building from my past to be “home.” I was born in Minnesota – a state that felt and still feels a natural fit to describe me as a person. But then my family moved to the deep South for a significant chunk of my formative years and then on to a small town in Indiana for my final three years of high school. I had good friends in both places, but it was always understood that I didn’t belong. In the South I was probably called a Yankee weekly for all six years I was there, and in Indiana the newspaper actually insisted on calling me the “Move-In from Tennessee.”

The Dahl House series – portraits of the houses I grew up in – were what started me on the whole house theme. I worked on them all at the same time and they actually took almost a year to paint because of the arduous nature of tackling their autobiographical aspects. It was easy enough to paint the house structures, working from memory and old snapshots, but incorporating all the other elements took a lot of trial and error. I wanted to capture my own biased recollections of those places as a whole. As a relief to their intensity, I started to make the Home Sweet Home series of works concurrently.

During the years I worked on these earlier series, I accumulated real estate magazines to use for references and I found myself both intrigued and disgusted at their pornographic nature. They were filled with half-truths and euphemisms, and photos that pretended each house was idyllic and didn’t have neighbors. Finally, in a fit of mild aggression I just started painting right on the magazines and attempted to cover over the houses with paint. And several years later, it still feels good with each painting I make, so I haven’t been compelled to stop or switch courses yet. In the end, I guess I’m the kid who prefers the part where the sand castle gets destroyed.

Young Artists: Jeff Koons is in the trenches and he is rooting for you

10N — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 04:14:00 +0000

Jeff Koon's interviewer at the 92nd Street Y was ,unfortunately for the audience, Kelly Siegel who has a relationship with Koons. Siegel is writing the main essay to Koon's new monograph, and made it apparent that she has a very cozy relationship with the artist.

Listening to Koon's talk, I had to speculate that perhaps it wasn't his irreverent and humorous appropriations, or his self-reliance that made Koons such a mega art star, but his clean cut Wall Street looks and his even news announcer voice. I found myself soothed by his slow, confident talk.

Siegel came to a slide of a photorealistic painting of a close-up of Koons penetrating his ex-wife and ex-porn star, Ilona Staller. Koons spoke of it in the same even manner as he had of an earlier slide of a Corbet painting. "It is about self acceptance and the essence of life. This is how we survive as a species. It takes confidence to show the world your asshole and I love Ilona 's asshole."

When the formal interview ended the audience got a chance to ask the questions that Siegel had avoided. The first question's bluntness made me squirm in my seat. "Do you think you art is worth the prices that it commands and if so, why?"
This is where Koons finally got to play the part that his looks suggest, as the politician. He answered that he doesn't consider art in an economic sense. He stammered and repeated himself. He may be sincere, but it is inescapable that the rest of the world _does_consider his art in an economic sense. Even his sympathetic interviewer began the evening by mentioning Blue Diamond's extraordinary purchase price of $23M.

Finally, someone asked the question that is inevitable in New York: "What young artists' work do you admire and what advice do you have for young artists today?"

Not the comments about economic class that revealed his privilege, or his sexualizing of all of his ready-mades, or the explicit work with his porn-star wife, it is in his answer to this question that Koons disappointed me. "Um, I am so busy I don't have time to see a lot of new art, but I like all young artists. As a young artist, if you want to join the conversation there are so many opportunities. We are all rooting for you. So many people are excited and support you. We want to see what you have to bring to the table."

Although he had spoke about creating dialogue and being in 'the conversation' with other artists this answer condemned Koons as someone so insulated by the comforts and the responsibility of his own grandiose success that he has become detached -not only from the conversations and developments in art- but also in culture, which is his subject.

Vacant Beauty

10N — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 16:51:00 +0000

Lisa M Robinson at Klompching Gallery

Dave Hickey sited September 11th as the official death of post-modernism. For several years there has been speculation in academic circles on the nature and name of our currently cultural zeitgeist.

Anyone walking into Klompching Gallery this month with this question would conclude that we have entered a hybrid of minimalism and sublime romanticism. Lisa M Robinson's finest snowscapes present a placid, breathtaking flatness. Robinson's camera compresses the austere beauty of the winter with the traces of suburbia left to weather the elements. The resulting beauty of vast impenetrable fields of white also courts a comparable vacancy of content, that left me cold. Snowbound presents the aesthetics of minimalism, but in this new century, it is a style that has lost the original political and aesthetic context.

On view at Klompching Gallery
111 Front St Suite 206
DUMBO Brooklyn, NY

The Lack of Desire at Brooklyn Arts Council

10N — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 05:37:00 +0000

70% of the United States GDP is spent on personal consumption. In our society the notion of "desire" seems to have roots in our countries cultural history of exploration, of conquest and manifest destiny. With the continent conquered and imperialism reaching its denouement, that desire seems to be sublimated into consumerism and into a commodified sexuality.

At the Brooklyn Art Council this month Scott Henstrand has curated as show the looks past all this to the catalyst for desire. If you agree with French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan desire stems from a fundamental lack and an attempt to attain wholeness. For Lacan, this a pre-lingual, pre-ego stage of bliss. Henstrand has my respect for refraining from literal interpretations, rather he assembled works of all media that speak of a viseral notion of lack.

Lisa Dahl's contribution is wicked through a combination of being understated and clever. The appropriated real estate image over sized suburban housing is obliterated with sky blue paint . In this instance, what is desired is the lack of the subject. By applying paint to the surface of the found real estate magazine, Dahl is obliterating these McMansion lots and restoring nature.

Heather Willems fills the void of a notebooks worth of blank pages with the phrase "I love you" written ceaselessly in tiny perfect script. The lack of the empty page is filled with another permutation of desire; an effort to communicate and an implied reader, both made implicit with the written word.

In Willems' second work, "Cover" the same text forms a reverse horizon and landscape. In this Henstrand's contribution as curator shines, with such an academic topic he remains sensitive to simple aesthetics. "Cover" enters a conversation with two nearby pieces, HyoJeong Nam's ceaseless and perfect loops server as counter point to Willems diaristic recordings. Miya Ando Stanoff echo's the horizons of Cover in an implacably perfect metal surface.

Lack of Desire is at the Brooklyn Arts Council Gallery DUMBO. 111 Front Street, 718-625-0080 January 17 - April 11, 2008

Down Stream in January

10N — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 07:58:00 +0000

Thursday's spate of openings in proved better people watching than art viewing. While some openings were sparse, like
Bill Armstrong's show at ClampArt, throngs of people crowded into Moti Hasson and Pace Wildenstein. I suspect that the Grolsch at these two locations had more influence than the art.

ALEXIS LEYVA MACHADO (KCHO) work at Marlborough sent my companion into a diatribe about the exhausted use of boats as psychological motif. While I can't attest to any particular work that features rowboats, it was curious that Robert Rauchenberg's work across the street at Pace Wildenstein also featured some photosilk screens of boats.

A requisite activity, and arguably the highlight to a good run of gallery hopping, is the discussion that occurs over drinks. Later over some Glühwein at Loreley, recalling my friend's agitation about rowboats, we devised the following list.

Items that could be retired from visual art:

Crows
Dead Animals (of any kind)Tape Cassettes
Empty Row Boats
Doll parts/ Barbie Dolls
Red Wagons
Guns
Faceless Men or Women Masturbating
Night Gowns

Gerhart Richter at Köln Dom

10N — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 01:14:00 +0000

The efforts of flipping through 90 pages of glossy gallery and art fair ads in Art Forum's Best of 2007 Edition is rewarded with an article possessing all the right components. It is both a compelling review written by Benjamin Buchloh about an equivalently complex work by Gerhart Richter in the unlikely place of the largest gothic cathedral in Northern Europe.

It was of special interest to me as I visited the Köln Dom, the requisite tourist destination, in November . While there I marveled at Germany's largest Cathedral, started in 1248 and finished 632 years later. When I craned my neck to take in the 34 stained glass windows, I was not aware that I was also seeing the newest work by Köln's most famous living artist, Gerhart Richter. This is a succinct illustration of the importance of context.

Richter's work is the 20 meter high stained glass window in the South Transept, Domfestner made to replace the original which was destroyed during WWII. Richter's design is based on his 1970's abstract work titled "4096 Farben (4096 Colors)" which features, squares of colors rendered from the color palette of a printing ink manufacturer. Despite Richter's historical experimentation with the language and property of painting, the contemporary translation of 4096 Farben is not significant because it conveys the deconstruction of a paint, rather it speaks of a contemporary deconstruction of image and, given the location, the deconstruction of iconography.

Buchloch reads the significance of Domfestner from a material standpoint as he ponders the symbolism of colored glass through centuries of art as both a multi-cultural spiritual signifier and material of mysticism positioned against the opacity of paint, the chosen material of the Enlightenment.

"Thus one would have to to contemplate whetehr Richter's window declares in fact a deciseve end tif not a manifest opposition, to the enlightenment culuture of modernist painting aaand its historical project of secularization" ( Buchloh, Art Forum XLVI, No. 4 Pg 308)

I have to wonder why Buchloch is compelled to rummage through several centuries of western development before he attaches a signifier to Domfestner when the 11,263 squares of glass have more immediate references to viewers in 2007. In context with the other 35 stain glass windows featuring narrative figuration, Richter's colored squares don't read as an attack on the fallacy of abstract expressionism, as Richter once imagined.

They read as pixels. A deconstruction not of abstract painting but of coherent representation all together. Domfestner posits that in todays electronic information and media saturated environment once all of the myth, narrative and figuration is stripped from Catholic imagery what remains is a primal experience. Just as mythic icons serving as communication devices were surpassed by printing press technology and literacy, literacy is quickly fading with the emergence of electronic information. We have arrived at reduced unit of communication, the pixel; the most distilled manifestation of a visual image. Ones and zeros forming finite blocks of 256 colors.

This visual reductionism when placed in a house of worship, can be considered encouragingly universal: regardless of the iconography of any religion, the fundamental basis of imagery is the same. Apparently, this reductionism can also be perceived as a challenge to Catholic authority. Cardinal Meisner, archbishop of Köln refused to attend the window's inauguration ceremony. He articulated his objection with an official statement that " it could have well been placed in a mosque or a synagogue."

Beyond the implications of iconographic universality, Domfenster introduces something more polemic into the insular authority of the church, the reference of technology and her constant companion science.

In his review, Buchloh questions how we are to regard Richter's window. Is it site specific: in which case, where do we draw the perimeter demarcating his work from the arcane orchestrations and accouterments of the Catholic worship that occurs below? If so, then Domfenster raises some very large questions about the future of contemporary patronage and institution . Or are we to consider only the 11,263 handmade colored glass squares and regard the majesty of the DOM as simply an alternative venue for Richter?

Making for unlikely bedfellows, the Museum Ludwig, Köln 's contemporary art museum that directly neighbors the cathedral was exhibiting 4900 Farben, a 22' x 22' version of Domfenster executed in paint and a series of poorly printed digital sketches of the window. While the audience and dialogue surrounding these two manifestations of Richter's theme are divergent, they converge, so appropriately and significantly, in the capitalistic space of the tourist gift shop. In the modern sparseness of the Ludwig's book store,and the dampness of the makeshift ticket window to the Dom spire, pilgrims of both sorts can purchase a commemorative poster of Domfestner.

Further info
Goethe Institute
Koln Dom

Torsten Solin at Komet Gallery, Berlin

10N — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:23:00 +0000

I spent some time in Germany last month. Excited to visit the country that produced the most interesting photographers of the last two decades, I was anxious to catch of glimpse of a new generation of photographers that tailed talent like Candida Hofer, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Demand.

A day of running about the Mitte, I discovered most galleries were, in fact, featuring photography. But what Berlin offered in quantity it lacked in quality. Most exhibitions struck me as incredibly derivative , or otherwise hollow.

The notable exception was Torste Solin's show at KOMET This image, featured in Photography Now, caught my attention. The predictable sexual formula of cartoonish eyes and large, milky breast was neutralized by this grotesque hairless mammal draped around the model's neck. Even though I was braced for some type of horrible Heavy Metal>esque soft-core porn shots, I had to check it out.

Entering Komet, I was surrounded by Solin's "Dolls" heavily distorted and airbrushed babes, like the Strawberry Short Cake Dolls of my childhood: each woman was paired up with her own pet.

Solin's aesthetic resides neatly in the center of the content of his work, that is the hyperbole of sexual signifiers. Solin's does sexy so well, in his images it morphs into comic and grotesque and then does a juicy hip swivel to land back where they started.

I was reminded of one of my current favorite photographers, Lorreta Lux. Lux transforms benign portraits of children into uncanny perfectness that manages to reference both advertising photography and classic portrait painting, without being either. Like Solin, she does not aim for transparency, but has begun to articulate a vocabulary for digital manipulation that is no longer mimetic of reality. Lux and Solin's work mark the transition into a new maturity for digitally manipulated imagery. Breaking with the unimaginative mimetic of nascent technology, these artists are no longer concerned about simply mastering photoshop to emulate the natural world. They are evolving their skills to create works that reveal the language of the media in which they are working. Historically, this proves to mark a productive and aesthetically sophisticated movement. Like the Abstract Expressionists, or Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secessionist , both groups of artists departed from the previous pursuit of make their respective mediums transparent in pursuit of the ideal of creating a seamless window to reality and began to explore the idiosyncratic properties of their chosen medium. It is encouraging to see media artists step into a new confidence and awareness of the aesthetic language of their chosen tools.

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Yasumas Morimura at Luhring Augustine

10N — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 16:56:00 +0000

Morimura has always managed to make the best kind of art: art that can find the intersection of humor, critically and truth. He was a favorite of mine as a student for this reason, later as an instructor of photography I loved to scandalize and delight my class by showing a smart Japanese cross dresser.

In his show at Lurhing Augustine Morimura has redirected his witty criticism from the Imperialist export of Western Art and comments on the western world's ideals of feminine beauty to focus ideologues of the 20th century. The back part of the gallery features Morimura's foray into video. It is an effective medium as you see Morimura strain to continue posing as Einstein in his iconic photo with his tongue sticking out. We see Morimura vacillate from a convincing living meme of Einstein, to some bizarre version of Gene Simmons, to something far more obscene, when for a moment, face remaining still he lightly wiggles the tip of his distended tongue.

Also feature is Requiem: Mishima 2007. Morimura reenacts Yukio Mishima's speech from 1970 addressed to a group of young soldiers. Morimura modifies the speech to young Japanese artist. In his impassioned speech he says he no longer has faith in art, and accuses the audience of spiritual bankruptcy. The focus on dictators such as Hitler and Stalin is an obvious criticism of the culture of fear and misinformation happening in present day America, but Morimura brings it back home to us in the arts in his version of Mishima's speech. We are all aware of how complacency led the German's imperceptibly into Hitler's Nazi's, and the Russian people into a fascism twisted by fear from the lofty principles of socialism. But are we in the arts allowing capitalism to first lull us into vapid producers and then twist us into commodities of status, void of innovation and substance?

Bitmap at Vertex: Saving the Best for First

10N — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 16:38:00 +0000

After a long day taking visiting Chicago artist Basia Toczydlowska around Chelsea all day, it was a bit hard to make the trek to Marcin Ramocki's VertexList in Williamsburg. It was well worth the trip. The show proved to have more content, diversity, fun and energy than any of the shows we had seen in Chelsea.

Some of the gallery's usual suspects were featured, but I was also impressed to see some more notable artist working with and about digital media like Edo Stern and even a take on Felix Gonzales Torres by Corey Archangel.

The show was an apt reflection of the chaos, energy, and expirementation that has marked artist's exploration into consumer technology.