olympia, concubine muse, live!

paul mccarthy life cast

at hauser & wirth 

32 east 69th street

may 10, 2013 - july 26, 2013

the sight of an objectified female body has never really been strange to the art histories of civilizations. for my purposes i am generalizing to refer to "the east" (japan, etc) and to "the west" (from ancient greeks to the northern american locale in which i reside). classical statues of the female nude and old japanese prints of shy, white-faced virgins are images of female objectification that we take for granted. heaps of sprawled and sexualized bodies in our advertisements and television may trigger disgust for some, but rarely much surprise--their history is too long.

viewed from that context, paul mccarthy's life-sized silicone women (or multiples of the same woman) would not shock--especially in relation to the artist's past works, which rarely allowed the viewer to remain in passive comfort. but when i saw these synthetic women (ah, so many walk about us nowadays), i felt extreme discomfort. i had goosebumps running up and down my body as i walked by each one. i have terrible eye sight (yes, i wear up-to-date prescription contacts and glasses but i still can't see clearly) so i usually have to get very close to the work to see what others could probably see without putting their face so close. i drew near the first sleeping figure--t.g. asleep, 2012-2013--and quickly pulled back. i saw small hairs on her arms, the thin strands around her forehead wavering slightly under the gallery's a/c. my fear was that she would wake up any moment--and when she did, i would be the creep who had been watching her sleep, counting the number of moles on her neck, examining the folds around her vagina.

an observation: americans (or other "westerners") who are immune to sexualized images tend to cringe when they first hear about (and see) life-sized silicone sex dolls popular in japan. this is because they look too "real." from convincing hair fibers and twinkling eyes to detailed renderings of vaginas made for optimal pleasure, the experience with these figures blurs the line between wishful fantasy and realistic engagement with a passive victim. if the internet explicitly manifests the realization of what lacan once wrote--"there is no such thing as a sexual relationship"--interactions in the "physical" world, too, display themselves as perverse realizations of the fantastical projections of our narcissistic desires. we live through the camera, the image, the screen--every sensory experience mediated, fantasies achieve physical form. 

despite the possibilities of blurring, some people still seem to prefer the presence of some indication that a fantasy is a fantasy, an image is an image--a reminder that they may break free from the dream at any point, and remove it from their "real " experience. but mccarthy's naked women are "too real," more real than many sex dolls. i felt embarrassment and shame while looking at her body, her legs spread at various angles. she may blink at any moment, and accuse me of looking upon her as an aesthetic object.

  

life cast's eroticism refers a great deal to art history (in my opinion) and the role of the male artist, the male gaze, in relation to the female body as object, muse, and artistic/sexual/life drive. horizontal, 2012, a likewise life-like replica of mccarthy himself, accentuates the sexualized role of female bodies in the history of art and representation: his looks like it belongs more in a morgue than in an art gallery, whereas the side-turned head of the sleeping woman secretes the concupiscence of the male hands that made her. in the four-channel video installation around the drawing table, the female hand (and body) is a passive and aesthetic object in striking contrast to the male hand, a dominant creator and lustful agent. as a hairy male hand (with grimy fingernails) traces with graphite the outlines of a cleanly manicured, white female hand on the table, the former momentary pauses and rubs against the latter. i have never seen so much lust drip from a frame with two hands and a writing utensil (i haven't watched much fetishistic porn). 

a four-channel installation in another room shows the process of making the casts: photographing the model holding skin, eye, and tooth samples next to her face, heaping the rubber mold on her body, her emerging from the hardened shell. in between the "documentary" cuts, the videos also show the model just sprawled or leaning back on the work table in various poses--something like live nude paintings. the same poses and compositions in oil paintings could pass as "artistic studies" of the body, but in mccarthy's work, they become voyeuristic, intrusive, perverse, and of course, erotic. 

this is the process of making art. eros is the life and artistic drive. as i watched her lay still, heaving occasional sighs and blinking her long lashes, i was reminded of a scene in the french film, renoir, 2012. sick and aging renoir finally finds his muse and inspiration to paint nudes again when a young woman suddenly appears at his door one day. at one point, he says to his son something like, "doesn't she have the most luscious ass?" old pervs make great artists, and vice versa, maybe.

mccarthy also has a large-scale video and set installation at hauser & wirth's chelsea location titled rebel dabble babble. the same female model also appears there, which made the already disturbing work more disturbing. this show is concerned more with pop psychology, the spectacle of reality television, stages, obsession with oedipal household drama, in a strange blur of 50s film, 90s tv series, and of course porn. i will probably elaborate on this show in a later post.

politics of psychogeography

as i have been jotting down notes for my biennale article for a publication (and a travel grant application to go back to venice), i have been thinking a good deal about politics of navigating space, perhaps better put as a foucaultian/neo-marxist approach to psychogeography, a term i learned last year at the conflux festival. urban dictionary.com defines "psychogeography" as:

1. the practice of exploring the urban environment while being led by curiosity and a paused sense of time and place. While it is important to let your senses absorb the spaces around you, it is equally, if not more important to find yourself in new spaces, spaces stumbled upon by chance; paying attention to the smaller details, the lost objects, the signage, the fragments that make walking a reward in itself, with a slower pace and an increased opportunity to revel in the simple pleasures of things. A sense of wander/wonder is essential to find the simplicity in urban living.

2. the study of the effects of geographical settings, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behaviour of the individual.

now, my assertion is that there is no such thing as "pure chance." while we navigate a city or any given space, we make subconscious decisions to turn here or go there, determined by 1. our conditions (upbringing, culture, lifestyle, etc.) and 2. layout of the physical space.

over the past decade or so, i have noticed certain patterns in the difficulty and ease of getting to certain places. i have also noticed that money unfortunately plays a great role.

for example, i used to commute everyday to my high school via the 1 train. i took the train from the 86th street stop all the way to the very last, 242nd street. from chambers street to 96th street (central manhattan areas with a lot of people traffic) the 1, 2, and 3 trains follow the same route, but 2 and 3 are express, the 1 local. above 96th street, they all branch off to different routes and make "local" stops (a stop every 7 blocks or so).

at least, they are supposed to.

particularly during morning commute times, it is relatively difficult to see the 1 train make all the stops above 125th street, the last "major" traffic point. sometimes, the train is basically "express," only making about three to four stops (usually unpredictable) before the last one.

this was generally ok with me, especially when i was running late. but sometimes, when it was cold out, i preferred to get off at 231st street instead to take a bus that stopped right by the school. at 242nd street, i would have to walk up a big hill. so taking the 1 train was always a gamble. will it stop at 231st today? should i walk?

for people who commute to areas between 125th and 242nd, this means extreme inconvenience. they may have to spend an extra 20 minutes of their time to get off at a stop, then take a downtown train back (given that the downtown, too, doesn't skip that stop). 

i understand that "manhattan" is generally considered more of a "central" commuting location, but i also can't help but notice that there probably aren't that many wealthy people commuting there who would complain about their stops being skipped on work days. mta does suck in general, and the trains skip important stops on weekends for construction, but as far as i know, the 1 train skips on weekdays when many people work, and not because of construction. (sometimes they cite the reason as the "train is running behind schedule." as if the mta stuck to any schedule at all).

my impression was that inconveniencing the people frequenting harlem and bronx were of little importance than those moving around manhattan, which certainly has higher rent and real estate costs.

i also perceive and FEEL this relationship between power/money and accessibility/location when viewing art as well.

the museum is very straight forward: you pay a fee to enter a space in which you understand you are supposed to look at things. (the question of whether you can afford to pay $24 to look at indecipherable objects, or worse, sit in an empty room listening to incomprehensible "sound art" is a related but kind of separate issue).

the gallery experience differs by neighborhood. viewing art in galleries is "free." but some places come with a price of "insider" knowledge, a bit more than others.

for example, the chelsea gallery layout is more like an open-air museum--you make your way to the general area, then walk through each street between 10th and 11th/12th avenues. other than being stared at (not always) by guards at certain mega galleries (like gagosian), it is pretty close to a museum experience where no one really bothers you so you can just enter, look, and leave.

the upper east side, i feel, is more of an insider, upscale boutique kind of deal. either some have signs and storefronts like jewelry stores (matisse, picasso, renoirs!) or little indication of their existence at all, so that you really have to know where they are. the finding the townhouse and buzzing the door to be let in can be intimidating. as if by pressing that buzzer, you are really letting them know, "I AM ENTERING NOW," and also bothering them, since they have to individually respond to every buzz to open the door. this could just be me, but i feel more like i am accessing something more exclusive, and potentially having to make up my presence there by being a collector or "serious" art person.

the lower east side is generally more overtly commercial (i have seen more price tags next to work than other neighborhoods) but a little more down to earth than the upper east. they feel kind of like stores, too, but less exclusive. there are many galleries hiding in odd floors inside random office buildings next to chinatown markets, but it feels "cool" to know they're there, rather than let's say, taking the sleek elevator up to the gagosian galleries on the upper east. it still feels very insider, though, like only "art people" are allowed. 

as a rule, the more established the neighborhood is as a "gallery" area, the easier it is to find the galleries. pretty obvious observation, but i feel as though when it gets to more contemporary, cool, "less known" art galleries (i.e. not chelsea) you really have to know where things are, and in places like brooklyn, they are fairly scattered so you can't really get a "gallery tour" done in a fairly short amount of time in comparison to other neighborhoods. if you're short on time, sometimes this means visiting only a few galleries or not bothering to commit to a trip at all. you get "more bang for your buck (time)" when you go to the expensive areas. (or more expensive in comparison to….)

i have made some hasty jumps from navigation/access to money, but i know the connection is there. just have to develop a better argument linking the two.

leisurely disappointment

maybe the new york city art world has a weakness for work that utilizes the latest technology. you know, those cool installations that everyone talks about and wait in line for hours to see because only a few people are allowed at a time. the media and general word of mouth tend to fuel the hype. for example, doug wheeler's "immersive light environment" at david zwirner last year was given to me as an option for a review assignment. i already knew there would be a long wait, but i went anyway. seeing the line for myself, i said fuck it, i won't buy into this hype. when christian marclay's the clock premiered in chelsea for the first time, i went on one of the first few days of its opening, and there was little hype and no line. i enjoyed a few hours in a relatively empty room. i actually thought the work sort of interesting. then i heard about the long lines later, about its return to moma and the ridiculous wait there, and started to not like it so much.

but maybe by placing judgment on the work purely based on the hype and limited capacity, i miss out on some good ones.

so i decided to go see the rain room at moma by random international. i had a strong feeling this was going to be the kind of hype that i hate: all "cool" but little else. luckily for me, i had member privileges so i did not have to wait in line for very long, considering it was also a monday afternoon. very lucky, because i hated it.

i understand why people would find it worth their time to visit the room. the technology, at least theoretically, is very cool. heavy rain drops fall from a large square close to the ceiling but the water makes way for you when you enter. like moses.

don't we all imagine that happening? as a joke we might say, i wish that rain would not fall on me during a heavy storm. kind of like that cloud in a cartoon perpetually hovering over a depressed person, except an umbrella version of it.

how fitting for a narcissitic generation. the inconvenience of natural discomforts will not effect ME. 

how fitting for a generation obsessed with new technologies to enhance the comfort of our lifestyle so that we can focus on more important things. automatically flushing toilets, for example, spare us the trouble of having to push down on a lever, which may make our hands even more disgusting. voice commands on our mobile phones spare us the trouble of having to use our hands to write with a pen on paper. automatic doors spare us excessive physical exertion. you get the idea.

now rain that parts without our telling it to do so? how satisfying. probably even more so because the drops are so heavy.

it also helps that it's summer in nyc, when the heat can get suffocating just from the concrete. it also helps that, to help visitors shield themselves from the sun while waiting in line outside, they offer very black moma umbrellas to absorb even more heat. once you get into the room, of course it's refreshing. it's even better that the technology actually DOESN'T work very well so you do get rained on. hard.

i wore shitty sneakers, just in case i got wet, but wore a watch that may or may not be waterproof and a dryclean-only dress. well, i was very annoyed when i got poured on. it was safest to go where others were already standing, but the sensors are not sensitive or fast enough to keep you completely dry. to experience the "cool" effects, you have to get wet first, wait, then walk very very slowly. otherwise, good luck with your watch and cellphone.

aside from the refreshing and "cool" technological aspect of the room, the installation looks cool. there is an oppressively bright light at the back of the room, aiming straight toward the entrance where visitors must still wait their turns and watch others "have fun." the backlight effect makes those "experiencing" the work look holy, in a sense. you can only see silhouettes moving through the space with very long shadows stretching toward those watching in line. the splatter from the water hitting the ground also creates a mysterious mist / fog with the light, so the whole scene appears dream-like or otherworldly.

once inside the rain, the sight is infinitely disappointing and even vulgar. standing close to and facing away from the bright light, you get to see everything: the lame rain fall ("why the hell would i pay to stand in rain??") and a clear view of every visage in the room. the experience is kind of like conjuring fantasies of a handsome man you meet in a darkly lit bar, then seeing a very plain or ugly face outside under a streetlamp. or better yet, meeting him for an actual date next day when it's bright out, and you can't even recognize him.

maybe that is the point? the antithetical nature of such "new technology" installations and the hype that surrounds them. but i have the feeling that the work is not intentionally self-reflexive. the writing surrounding it seems to emphasize "experience" and the only experience i had was a feeling of annoyance from the "cool" technology not working properly.

moma seemed to have been experiencing problems with people staying way over their desginated limit of 10 minutes. i gladly gathered my things after 10. eager to leave the wet room, i approached the exit. when the guard opened the door for me, it was pouring outside too.

the weather forecast did not warn me about rain, so i had no umbrella. even more annoyed by my visit, for a second, i was convinced that the rain room brought actual rain. 

oh well. this might prevent me from going to another "cool" and limited capacity "immersive environment" for a long time.

but if anyone is still interested in visiting after reading this, the work is on view until july 28th at the museum of modern art.

venice biennale and icp triennial

the last post did not do justice to the impressiveness of the venice biennale. the scale and organization of the main show for one, but the "narrative," as i called it before, is not as bland as i made it out to be. the shared experience, archival tendencies of human beings are placed in an interesting dialogue across time. the show presents a sort of naive "primordial" shared unconscious in conjunction with a more bleak one of the contemporary era. 

if the giardini show presents more of this collective unconscious through images and dreams that surface across people and times, the arsenale introduces a more explicit relationship between the observation of our natural surroundings and science / technology.

auriti's "absurd" dream of an encyclopedic palace of the world becomes a nightmare, a source of our own fall from paradise. the limits of science and rationality emerge more prominently here. our desire to know reveals itself as detrimental to us and nature, to which we have long ceased to belong. 

camille henrot's film, grosse fatigue (2013) tells the story of our "beginning," where yahweh decided to rest when he saw the human race had brought sufficient amount of violence and moral pestilence into the world. the narrator lists the animals and lives there were in the beginning while the film shows images of dead birds (all carefully labeled) pulled out from drawers and he speaks of the creation of earth and mountains while a map identifies percentages of people with bipolar disorders and schizophrenia around the world. 

at a few galleries farther down, millet mounds (2012), a video installation by xuan kan exhibits the futility of our attempts to collect, classify, and salvage history, despite our technological advancements and number of record-keeping devices at our disposal. a long stretch of small monitors flicker through thousands of images like a choppy film, yet they cannot retrieve the aura or meaning of these historic locations. 

harun farocki's video ubertranung [transmission] (2007) shows the ways in which people interact with the historic monuments that do remain--a strong tendency for touch, a desperate desire to shorten the irreparable gap between the holy past and decrepit present.

later on, one passes through the ryan trecartin "hell" room, as holland cotter put it in his new york times review. the "human circumstance" is rendered more depressing as the issue of human agency (in collective memory, identity, etc.) seems an irrelevant question. passing by wade guyton's printer-made paintings and albert oehlin's collages from pages of magazines, books, and supermarket ads, i wondered what this may really mean for art. a complete destruction of the romantic notion of artistic genius? or an extreme exaggeration of it?

the ominous but fascinating film, da vinci (2012) by yuri ancarani warns us about the machines threatening to take over and eliminate us from the world of our own construction. in the second to last room, there is dieter roth's solo szenen [solo scenes] (1997-1998), a video installation of 131 monitors displaying cctv footage of men in their offices. watching the men file papers at their desks, drinking coffee, and pacing around the rooms, i was left without a doubt that i was to regret (on the behalf of humanity) indulging in the obsession to know everything.

but is there some sort of hope? walter de maria's golden rods at the end of this journey seemed to lead somewhere less bleak. i walked out to the open air, toward the boat docks of the arsenale. smelling the salty sea, i felt relieved that it was over.

it's already been 11 days since i returned from venice, and today i decided to pay a second visit to a show i did not have time to see in its entirety the first time. the international center of photography contributes to the discussion (lesson?) raised by the later part of the venice biennale's arsenale show. the title of the icp's triennial, a different order of things, suggests a convergence in their subjects of interest, on the role of art, images, and photography now. 

some works included take similar positions as the venice biennale. roy arden's the world as will and representation--archive 2007 (2007) is a 96-minute rapid slideshow of 28,144 images of "things." it evokes the flashing speed of xuan kan's installation, but arden's gives the impression of going through "everything." i did not stand to watch for the whole duration of the piece, but when i paused to watch multiple times, it went through images of guitars, portraits of families, dildos, boats, you name it.

this archival tendency appears more humorously absurd in another work, michael schmelling's images of hoarder's dens. they are a part of his series the plan (2005-2009), in which he documented raids into homes of people who cannot throw anything out. collecting as societal disease. i could not help but smile in remembrance of the "cosmic" section of the venice biennale when seeing one photo which showed a box of books titled numbers: rational and irrational, the telescope, and earth, moon, and planets.

much of the work are concerned specifically with the role of the camera in documentation, memory, and cultural production. jim goldberg's small portraits and sometimes written stories of migrants fill one wall. titled proof (2013), they testify to the artist's encounter with his subjects. markings on each (a check mark, an x, question mark, outlines and borders) by his hand attempt to recreate the contact he had with them--human gestures of intimacy through the alterations of the documenting medium. 

like goldberg, others display a consideration of their own presence (intrusion?) during the process of photographing or filming. gideon mendel's portraits of flood victims around the world are not simply ethnographic documentations; the eyes and expressions on the faces betray a well of feelings (some accusatory, others more resigned but still resentful) toward the photographer and, by extension, the viewer as their bodies stand half submerged in water. the title of each portrait begins with the name(s) of each subject, sparing them from becoming another number in statistical data. 

the formally abstract work, such as trevor paglen's drone images, takeda shimpei's nuclear imprints, and lisa oppenheim's smoke prints, have elaborately political back stories that implicate the viewer in the consequences of their viewing. the impeccably manicured hand in thomas hirschhorn's video, touching reality (2012), nonchalantly flips through gruesome war photographs on an ipad, occasionally zooming in to take a closer look at spilled guts or a cellphone still clutched by stiff fingers of corpses,

oliver laric's video installation of two works, versions (2010) and versions (2012), presents example after example of appropriation (deliberate or not) and recurring images throughout visual mediums in history. there exists no such thing as originality and we always take from history, laric seems to say. the "archive" is made of the same repeating images. is there such a thing as discovery and human agency?

i like the show at icp for its complexity, and perhaps, greater optimism than the biennale's take on some of the issues. human beings, art, images, have more power. photography and seeing are actions which have consequences in the real world. sometimes they do violence and destruction, sometimes they bestow power and create potential for changing the world.

this post may be very scattered and grammatically incorrect. but i wanted to get some notes down before my desire to write about this show went away completely.

back from dreams to nyc

i just returned from a ten-day dream trip from italy. it took me more than a month of laborious planning. i went through three cities: rome, florence, and venice. with approximately three days in each, i had to set up the most perfect itinerary to take advantage of my brief stay. venice, however, i did not plan as thoroughly as the other cities. i imagined i will probably bust my ass trying to see as much biennial related art as possible.

which is what happened. during the full days i had, i arrived earlier than the 10am opening time to wait in line at the arsenale and giardini. i spent the whole day there until closing time at 6pm, only occasionally leaving for food, gelato, a sit near the canal, or a visit to a satellite event close by. after the main venues closed, i hurried to see other events that stayed open for a little bit longer. i spent the other two half days getting lost and searching for national pavilions and satellite events not included at the central biennale locations. thankfully, some were clustered around the same areas, but others were more difficult to find. this difficulty heightened my annoyance when i finally found them and i did not like what i took the trouble to see. 

i truly felt the politics of spatial distribution in venice. to get my money's worth on the hefty entrance fee to the arsenale and giardini, i visited every pavilion there. but the pavilions around other parts of town did not require a ticket, nor were they conveniently located at single, easy accessible destinations as the main exhibits. given these difficulties and time restraints, i could not see as many national pavilions or collateral events as i would have liked. if this happened despite the immense effort i made to squeeze in as much as possible, i imagine it may have been even more so for those who were not there to write about it. seeking out the pavilions of iraq or thailand become very conscious choices, whereas one can do quick glances at spain or japan since they are right inside the arsenale or giardini.

this must be the case every year--how can one include "everything" and "everyone" "equally"?--but it appears sillier in relation to this year's theme: the shamelessly utopian dream of marino auriti's encyclopedic palace. its curator, massimiliano gioni, admits to the absurdity of such an idea--the existence of a space containing all human knowledge. the exhibit seems more of a meta-approach to investigate and complicate the reasons why and what we collect, classify, keep tabs on. but the central pavilion at the giardini location especially suggests the existence of a universal, collective knowledge--a jungian shared unconscious existing across borders and times. a good portion of the show there arranges the work formally: the gaping ellipses of anonymous tantric paintings in one room echo forms created by the circling gestures of the blind painters in artur zmijewski's film, blindly (2010) and even the globe and mandalas in camille henrot's video installation, grosse fatigue (2013) at the arsenale venue. but seeing the same recurring forms and subjects under the same curatorial argument of the archival, encyclopedic tendencies of our "human condition" can be exhausting. what of the show's including the "severely autistic" sawada shinichi's sculptures, for example, as evocative of "the arts of tribal societies in africa"? or lynette yiadom-boakye's imaginary portraits of dark skinned people?

extremely exhausted from my journey from florence and getting lost, i trudged back toward my hotel on the first day of my arrival in venice. it had begun to rain, and as i approached the san marco piazza i decided to duck into an exhibit, this is not a taiwan pavilion, which happened to be there at the right time. it was like taking a long gulp from a cold pint of dark ale after an entire afternoon of flowery tea. the show was directly concerned with relative nature of subjectivity, notions of "national representation" and identity, more explicit consideration of who the audience was. also by chance, i was on time for the last of four performances, a live bianshi narration of artist bernd behr's film, chronotopia by huang ying-hsuing. bianshi narrators are silent film narrators from back in the day--a perpetual reminder that one is seeing a film, and that the images are being interpreted by one as well as the person speaking for (with?) it. the guy spoke entirely in taiwanese without subtitles during the 16:38-minute projection which already had an english narration. most people present did not seem to speak taiwanese and appeared bored after the first few minutes. i, too, found myself straining at first to hear the muted english from the film and looking for subtitles. failing at both, i became fascinated by the whole act: for those 16 plus minutes, english was NOT the assumed language of the audience. huang's enthusiastic speech was not only lost on most of the audience members, but also became a noisy obstruction for those trying to hear a language they understood. when the performance ended and the projection resumed its english narration, i listened, wondering what the correlations were between huang's words and the english narration of the film. i will never know, but after standing near the speakers for a while, i realized that the center speakers also had been playing a taiwanese narration in a very low volume the entire time, barely audible under the booming english.

relevant to this show is also the history of the "taiwan" pavilion at the biennale. sort of there at some point, then gone in 2001, not granted an official "national" pavilion but listed as a collateral event. i know very little about international political drama, and i may be reading what i would like (from an ignorant american perspective) from behr's film as well as the work of other artists, hsu chia-wei and katerina seda + batezo mikilu. the show at least appeared to be adding a different and important perspective to the one(s?) given by the main biennale show, which, overall, i thought relatively safe and too neat.

i will probably write more about the main exhibit and some other shows. i saw a lot and it's been difficult to sort through and process all of them. 

more to come.