Author Archives: Linnea

Fire, Humor, and Water: Videos by FX Harsono and the Propeller Group at Asia Society

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Installation view with FX Harsono’s 1998 Burned Victims in foreground

Several provocative video works in After Darkness: Southeast Asian Art in the Wake of History, on view at Asia Society through January 31, caught my eye, notably ones by FX Harsono and the Propeller Group. The curators chose the works in the exhibition not as a survey of art from Southeast Asia–there are only 7 artists and 1 collective from 3 countries–but because they speak to the role contemporary art can have in countries struggling with reform, free speech, and democracy. FX Harsono uses blowtorches and chainsaws in aggressive performances that express rage at political events in his native Indonesia. Of a later generation, the Propeller Group, a collective of three artist connected to Vietnam, use humor in their polished video works to point to lingering dissonances in contemporary Vietnamese society.

FX Harsono. Detail, Burned Victims, 1998. Burned wood, metal, shoes.

Destruction and Burned Victims are literal titles for these late ’90s video performances. FX Harsono performed Destruction in 1997 as a response to concerns about voter fraud under president Suharto’s authoritarian New Order government. In it, he destroys theater masks resting on three chairs, which represent the three political parties then vying for power. Couched as a piece of public theater–with Harsono in traditional make up and the masks referring to puppet theater–it was also an act of civil disobedience. At that moment, assembly of more than five people was illegal in public space. Harsono attacks and destroys the wooden masks, first by chainsaw and then by blowtorch, in front of onlookers.

FX Harsono. Still, Burned Victims, 1998. Performance video with sound; 8 minutes, 41 seconds.

FX Harsono. Still, Burned Victims, 1998. Performance video with sound; 8 minutes, 41 seconds.

Burned Victims memorializes a protest in 1998 against Suharto that turned violent–rioters locked civilians inside a shopping mall in Jakarta and set the building on fire. The sculptural installation is equally grisly–a row of charred, torso shaped pieces of wood suspended on metal frames, each of which has a pair of burned shoes at the end. The different pairs of burned shoes turn what might be a more abstract sculpture into something much more stark and horrible, reminding of the individuality of the victims of the fire. In the video performance, Harsono douses the torsos with gasoline and lights them on fire. Signs with slogans of Riot burn, and Harsono places another sign in front of the audience: “Who is responsible?”

The Propeller Group. (Still) The Dream, 2012. Single-channel HD video; 4 minutes, 20 seconds.

The Propeller Group, who had an exhibition last year at James Cohen gallery, strike a different tone. Their two video works use humor to critique society in a more distant and subtle approach than Harsono’s outraged cry. One, called The Dream, shows a Honda Dream motorbike that, strategically placed overnight on a city street by the artists, is dismantled of its parts by various thieves as the night wears on. The skeleton of the bike is on view in the gallery in front of a time-lapse video of the night. It is quite humorous to watch this ubiquitous Vietnamese status symbol disappear over the course of the night. Behind the joke, the Propeller Group also comment on the corrosive elements of capitalist change that has swept the nominally Communist state.

Installation view of The Dream at Asia Society, featuring stripped down body of Honda Dream motorbike in foreground

The second work that they show, The Guerrillas of Cu Chi, consists of two facing monitors–one plays Viet Cong promotional footage from 19631 and the other shows present-day foreign tourists shooting old AK47s leftover from the Vietnam war. The tourists mug for the camera as they gleefully enacting war scenes. Both videos are about the Cu Chi Tunnels, underground passages used by the Viet Cong to combat the U.S. during the Vietnam war that are outside Ho Chi Minh City. The same soundtrack and captions overlays both, highlighting eerie parallels despite the disjunct in time and purpose. Both the old propaganda and the new tourist site are distant from the carnage and suffering that characterized the lived experience of the war, and indeed, instead seem designed to perpetuate such history as war games.

The Propeller Group. Still, The Guerrillas of Cu Chi, 2012. Two-channel synchronized video installation with sound; 20 minutes, 4 seconds.

The Propeller Group. Still, The Guerrillas of Cu Chi, 2012. Two-channel synchronized video installation with sound; 20 minutes, 4 seconds.

From the far end of the exhibition galleries comes the sound of rushing water. Already, in contrast to blowtorches and AK47s, the use of water rather than fire or guns strikes a less violent note. In this video performance, Harsono writes his name in Chinese characters over and over again. The artist is ethnically Chinese, a minority in Indonesia, and in the face of discrimination against the language and culture, he only learned the Chinese characters of his name as an adult. We watch from the other side of the glass panel as the strokes of black paint begin to overlap and take up more and more of the surface, growing into a black mass. Suddenly water pours down from above, washing away the ink even as the artist keeps making the motions with his hand. Rather than water as a cleansing agent, here water is a deluge sweeping away the artist’s Sisyphean efforts in a show of force and might.

FX Harsono. Writing in the Rain. 2011. Video performance

Belkis Ayón: Printing Oneself Into Power at El Museo del Barrio

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Belkis Ayon at the Havana Galerie, Zurich, Aug 23, 1999 (Fowler Museum at UCLA)

NKame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón is on view for another month, until November 5, 2017, at El Museo del Barrio. These wonderfully textured, large-scale prints centered on the mythology of a secretive male brotherhood in Havana are well worth seeing, remembering when you do how a young Afro-Cuban woman took up this obscure subject matter in the 1980s while pioneering techniques in a medium then considered passé. Belkis Ayón lived and worked in Havana, where she was born in 1967. Her retrospective, which comes to El Museo from the Fowler Museum in L.A., introduces a substantial body of work to audiences in the United States. However, during her own life, Ayón already enjoyed considerable success internationally. As an artist, she received special dispensation from the Cuban government to travel. She participated in the 16th Venice Biennial in 1993 and attended residencies in Europe, Japan, and North America. In 1999, at the age of 32, Ayón took her own life. Nkame, a word which means greeting or praise in the Abakuá language, is an homage to the artist as much as overview of her short career.

Belkis Ayón, La Cena (The Supper), 1991

Ayón was neither religious, nor a man, yet she took the Afro-Cuban religion of Abakuá as her subject matter. Abakuá, which has a strong community in Havana, only allows male participants and it secretive. Yet the bulk of Ayón’s work presents characters and scenes of Abakuá doctrine. The focus is often on the only female figure in the pantheon, Sikan, with whom the artist herself identified. In the image above of La Cena, the central figure is the white silhouette of Sikan. Recalling images of the Christian Last Supper, male initiates surround the seated lone female as they prepare a ritual. It is also an image of a powerful woman who is unlike those surrounding her; here Sikan is set off by the bright contrast in tone. Implicitly the image challenges a patriarchal culture, because the artist takes it upon herself to tell the stories of a religion she is excluded from and portrays herself in the center of the scene. Rather than positioning herself on the outside looking in, she is on the inside looking directly out at the viewer.

Belkis Ayón, La Cena (The Supper), 1988

La Cena, often considered Ayón’s masterpiece, was preceded by the work pictured above of the same title. This colorful antecedent was exhibited in 1988 at her first solo exhibition in Havana, Propuesta a los veinte años (Proposal at the Age of Twenty). After this point Ayón settled into a palette of grey, black, and white, but she continued to work with the subject matter of Abakuá. With it she created a powerful visual iconography that both fascinates me and remains resistant to straightforward interpretation. Taken at face value, these are literal depictions from stories, characters presented with symbolic attributes in full frontal depictions to maximize legibility, which Ayón presents seemingly without agenda. Yet her commitment to the subject and its obscure nature confound, and indeed perhaps that mystery is part of the appeal.

Belkis Ayón, To Make Me Love You Forever, 1991

Her work is also notable for its technical skill and innovation with form. To Make Me Love You Forever, her work for the 16th Venice Biennial, is created of 18 separate printed sheets joined together on a shaped support to create a structure that resembles an alter. Although the surface is delicate, the work becomes monumental. Ayón developed a collographic process that allowed her great and subtle textures, giving her blacks in particular a lush Baroque quality. Collography is a printing process that involves applying various materials to a cardboard matrix, and the collage, in turn, functions as a printing plate. Below you can see the collaged printing matrix on the left compared to a print, both on view at El Museo in the same room as the color La Cena of 1988 and the final version of 1991. The varying absorbency and texture of the materials used in the printing plate determines the final texture.

Details of printing plate and print studies for La Cena

The final room in show highlights some of the artist’s last prints. Smaller single sheets feature a central, circular compositions in dark tones. Although similar aesthetically, these works abandon the recognizable stories or characters of Abakuá in favor of faces or masks amidst abstract, densely worked backgrounds. In hindsight, it is hard not to read these compositions as uncomfortable, where hands seem to pull at the skin of the face—as those of a person whose world had come to feel smaller and more constrictive.

Installation view, NKame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón, El Museo del Barrio

NKame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón is on view until November 5, 2017 at El Museo del Barrio.

Phone Tag: Interview with Giselle Stanborough

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Giselle Stanborough, Giselle Dates, 2016, performance documentation, photo by Zan Wimberley

This August, I Skyped with Giselle Stanborough, an intermedia artist who lives and works in Sydney, Australia, having received her MFA in 2015 from the University Of New South Wales. Prior Phone Tag participant Marian Tubbs met Giselle through mutual friends in Sydney. Coincidentally Giselle recently moved into Marian’s former living space, a live-work space intended by the local government to foster artists through subsidized rent for a year. Giselle and Marian also share an interest in the permutations of identity on the internet. Currently Giselle is developing a series that relates online dating and the gallery experience, drawing parallels between the expectations people can bring to both.

 

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to a working artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

*****

LW: “What are you working now? Where are you focusing your energies?”

GS: “I have this ongoing project that uses internet dating services, like Tinder and OK Cupid as well as a site that I made, that organizes to go on dates in galleries and particular exhibitions. It will be having another iteration in a year in Melbourne. We rejig the content for whatever particular exhibition it will be a part of, whatever particular city. I just started looking at how to change the work for that context, which involves a lot of sitting at the computer. I’ll be doing a lot of that this week.”

LW: “To back up, could you describe this project? It’s connected to your website GiselleDates.com, right?”

GS: “That’s right. I guess the project is a way to look at those high lofty ideals about art—connecting consciousness, overcoming existential loneliness, creating deeper connections with another kind of experience of life in the world—and to look at how that exists outside of the gallery and in people’s daily life. So it is trying to create a kind of cohesion between the goals of art and dilemmas of isolation, of consciousness that is not in the silo of contemporary art but just part of life, like people trying to connect on social media and apps and stuff. It’s also to try and have conversations about art with people who don’t have a vested interest in art. Which I always find really interesting and refreshing.”

LW: “Absolutely. I think the most challenging thing is when somebody who’s not into art asks, ‘What is this? Why is this art?’”

GS: “That’s the best question. That’s the most important one. And you can forget to ask that.”

Giselle Stanborough, Giselle Dates, 2016, Installation documentation, photo by Zan Wimberley

LW: “So for this project, you are going on dates with people. Do they know it is an art project?”

GS: “Yeah. Just because it is an art project doesn’t mean I’m not dating them. I’ve had relationships that have come out this project.”

LW: “There we go! That’s an outcome you don’t always see.”

GS: “Art can be a conduit to connection or a conversation piece for a day, rather than—I don’t know if you’ve been on many dates with people that you met online: they tend to be quite rehearsed and really boring and really career-oriented. At least the appeal of going to an art gallery is that it gives us something else to talk about…that’s not a monologue. You can have conversations that you don’t anticipate.”

LW: “Do you think of it as performative?”

GS: “Yeah. But, I think of most things as performative.”

LW: “Well, maybe dating is already performative…”

GS: “Exactly. Yes, it’s performative, but what isn’t?”

LW: “Is there an exhibition display when you show this project?”

GS: “There has been, but I’m not sure if there will be for this upcoming show in Melbourne. I’m going to make a series of ads. I know that in America you have the Bachelor [TV show]…”

LW: “Yes.”

GS: “…and I’m interested in that performance of heterosexuality. I’m interested in the idea of bourgeois heterosexuality as performance. So, to make a series of ads that sort of position me as a bachelorette-style person, which internet dating profiles do anyway. Those will be on screens in the galleries, but I often use screen spaces that aren’t technically for exhibition—screens that are out by the front desk or near the elevators. Or they might have user feedback screens. I use those screens because they have a kind of anti-viewer, art/not art way of being experienced by people who walk into the gallery.”

Giselle Stanborough, The Lonely Tail, 2012, 4 channel digital video (still), 3 mins

LW: “One of the things that I think is interesting is how you’re inserting yourself—not a character, not some idea—but yourself into these digital spaces. Is it important that it be you?”

GS: “Yeah, it is. Questions of selfhood are really, really complicated.

I think in a time of user-generated mediums and pop culture, we’re used to having an abstracted sense of our own self. Like: ‘Yeah, it’s me but it’s not the whole of me. It’s a part of me.’ It is a way that we are accustomed to accepting our positionality in the world. We are too big to be in any one spot at once, on a Facebook profile or a Tinder profile or a performance art work or with our mom, but we can accept that part as very authentic. Does that make sense?”

LW: “It does. At the same time, I think people often have an idea of the internet as this space where you can create the perfect self.”

GS: “The interesting thing is, yes, you can create your perfect self, but you can also be your most loathsome, despicable self. People say our generation is narcissistic, and there is an awful horrible element as well. It isn’t an experience of yourself from behind your own eyebrows—you’re already abstracted from yourself. And it’s not just self-love online; there’s a lot of self-loathing as well.”

LW: “You describe a lot of screen time in your practice. How does that figure into an ideal day in the studio, and what does an ideal day in the studio look like for you?”

GS: “An ideal day… I also do installation elements or physical or performative component, so I would like to do screen stuff, do some animating, and then I would like to do stuff with my hands. Today, for example, I put on all these stupid little rhinestones with this glue stick for a work. It came in this stupid little rose box but the rose was crushed from being sent from China and I had to set the iron on the lowest temperature and iron out the little fake leaves. It was nice, doing stuff with my hands. I don’t know if it was an ideal day, but it was pretty good.”

Giselle Stanborough, Lozein True Love, 2016, digital composite

LW: “Who has influenced your practice?”

GS: “In terms of other artists—it’s not a very unique answer—but Mark Leckey has really had a profound impact on the way that I see art and objects intercepting, and an interest in the precedents of cyber space. Instead of saying ‘Oh, this is so new. There was nothing like it before,’ Leckey looks at other parallels, even heaven or the way that the internet carries a narrative about where to draw the line between what’s human and what’s not. Or what’s animal, what’s mechanical, what’s divine. Those sorts of things that have been going on for a long time, and that cyber space is the most recent type of.”

LW: “When did you first think of yourself as an artist?”

GS: “It fades in and out…I don’t really think of it as something that I am, but as something that I do. Every now and again, when I’m going overseas and I write my occupation down on the immigration paper, then I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s right. I’m an artist.’ I try and stay away from those identity things about being an artist. Because then I’m scared about the kinds of things that come along with it, like art being middle class or male. I just don’t even: I take little baby steps, so maybe I don’t think of myself that way even yet.

As well, I know a lot of people that work in the arts and are artists, all my neighbors here. When things are normalized, they sort of become invisible. It is just a part of our lives and we don’t think about what that means in relation to other careers. You don’t really know what other people do. What do stockbrokers do? Actually do? They feel that way about us. What do I actually do all day? ‘Oh, I iron out shitty little rose leaves from the internet.’”

LW: “You’re in Sydney. Do you like it?”

GS: “I think about this. Some people have a strong sense of place. For me, it is not that significant. Maybe because the internet has so much to do with my practice. Sydney is all right, so are other places.

[Laughs]

No, Sydney is awesome. Thank you, city of Sydney, for subsidizing my rent.”

Giselle Stanborough, Lozein Pride, 2016, digital composite

LW: “Do you think it is more important for an artist to be in a big city, a Sydney or a New York, with all that entails: expensive rent, opportunities to show work, to be in a cultural scene, or to be in a small place where you can focus on making and maybe not have all of the pressures of rent or making it?”

GS: “That’s an interesting question. In 2015, I moved back home for a while, which was really quite isolating but also kind of a cleansing experience, where you find your own values. When you’re in the big city, it is easy to get swept up. Things and cultural economy have their own kind of impacts. After that period at home, I didn’t give a shit. There’s all sort of weird things that are part of the industry, rather than art itself with a capital A. I find after that period it’s easier for me to be like, ‘Oh, this is about the manifestation of art and capitalism in Sydney’ or ‘Oh, that’s like capital A art.’ Leaving Sydney for a while for a quiet place was really good for me, but I don’t think it is sustainable. There’s not as much employment opportunity.

Also, Sydney is not a big city like New York. It’s a small city. New York is a big city. I think a lot of Australians have a reverence for centers of America and Europe, and I think now we are looking other spaces. Post-colonial narratives allow us to look to our closer neighbors for other ways that art impacts society.”

LW: “Are you thinking of anything in particular when you say that, a certain place?”

GS: “I’ve been interested in a post-colonial kind of queer identity politics, and looking particularly at a Southeast Asian context for that. A lot of that does come through Sydney because they are our neighbors and because of the diaspora. It’s something that I’ve really enjoyed watching come to the art scene here.”

LW: “Well, those are my questions. Thank you for participating in Phone Tag.”

GS: “Thanks so much!”