Author Archives: Linnea

Art Fair Weekend Plans: Two Highlights

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The art fairs are upon us here in New York this week. Rows upon rows of flimsy booth walls display miles of art. Check out a concise guide to all 14 of them here. I’m taking a minimalist approach this year: I’ll be returning to the Armory to check out the African Perspectives Focus, and heading to Pulse on Saturday for a panel on Art & Revolution.

View of Young's work at the Armory, past of the focus "African Perspectives"

View of Ed Young’s work All So Fucking African at the Armory, past of the focus “African Perspectives”

  • Focus: African Perspectives – Spotlighting Artistic Practices of Global Contemporaries is curated by Julia Grosse and Yvette Mutumba, founders of Contemporary And, an online platform for international art from African perspectives.  Moving beyond conventional ideas of the African continent and its “counterpart,” “the Western hemisphere,” this year’s Focus will provide a glimpse of international artistic production from contemporary African viewpoints: emerging curators, artists, galleries and art spaces that connect scenes and markets through global networks. From Lagos to London to Luanda – and presented together for the first time in one location – this year’s Focus will examine the artistic developments and manifold narratives arising from African and African Diasporic artists, emphasizing geographic fluidity and global connections.

At the Armory Art Fair – Pier 42 on Twelfth Avenue at 55th Street open now through Sunday, March 6, 12 pm to 7 pm.

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  • Panel on “Art and Revolution”– What role does art play in these times of political upheaval, has it changed the nature of the protest and art work? And, most importantly, what should our role as cultural producers be? Moderated by Hyperallergic’s editor-in-chief Hrag Vartanian, in conversation with writer and curator Ryan Wong, artist, writer, and teacher Chloe Bass, artist and activist Noah Fischer. Free with fair admission.

At Pulse Art Fair -PERSPECTIVES Lounge at 125 West 18th Street on Saturday, March 5 at 1pm.

 

 

“No Money No Honey” at 33 Orchard

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Installation view featuring poem by Vincent Katz.

Installation view featuring poem by Vincent Katz

“No Money No Honey”–truth, right? This exhibition at 33 Orchard, a collective art space on the Lower East Side, makes the case for this idiom. Director Jane Kim explains how “honey … denotes the pleasures, both material and metaphysical, that are inherently associated with wealth.”

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Installation view, Mercury Rising

Cue the balloons. In the claymation music video Mercury Rising (2015, 4.31 min.), Colm Dillane & theMIND visualize this theme through a loose, fantastical narrative of two kids ascending out of their ordinary Chicago neighborhoods on a bicycle and balloon-covered wagon to fly among the stars. It is really enjoyable. In addition to the video, the claymation sets that Dillane used to make the animation are on view, originally the only works in the space.

IMG_8426Colm Dillane, Jupiter, 2015 (Clay, fabric, plastic, weave, balloons)

Rather than cynical, as the aphorism “No Money No Honey” might suggest, the show comes across as energetic, not least because the exhibition’s second iteration features additional works of painting, photomontage, drawing, and black-and-white photography on a banana-yellow wall. Works by this diverse group of artists (Peggy Preheim, Sally Webster, Sue Kwon, Vincent Katz, Martha Rosler) come together to form a show is not easily reducible to a single theme. However, broadly speaking, individual works address gender, capitalism, and urban life.

Installation view featuring Peggy Preheim’s three works on paper from her French franc note series created in 2001, a year before the Euro currency was introduced.

Installation view featuring Peggy Preheim’s three works on paper from her French franc note series created in 2001, a year before the Euro currency was introduced.

While the LES often offers a fresher take than Chelsea these days, too often work can feel like the carefully packaged product of an MFA program. That is not the case here, and the different aesthetic feels stimulating and deliberately gritty as it cheerfully raises a host of tricky issues.  No Money No Honey is up through March 13, in case your winter could use a jolt of exuberance.

Madness & Restraint: Eva Kotátková at ISCP

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Eva Koťátková Error 2015-2016 Collage on paper

Installation view from Eva Kotátková: Error, 2015-2016, collage on paper

I was intrigued by the work of Czech artist Eva Kotátková when I saw her small objects and collages arranged across a broad horizontal pedestal in the central pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. More recently, the artist was represented in the New Museum’s Triennial exhibition through an installation of metal restraints, furniture, and collage across a yellow wall. The artist materializes how we are socially and psychically bound, and this remains true of her new work on view in the solo exhibition Error at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn. The archives of an asylum inspired Kotátková in collages, metal sculptures resembling medical apparatus, and performative objects meant to be worn on the body, all of which display the artist’s recurring concern with constraint and institutional systems.

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Installation view of Eva Kotátková, Anna (from Theatre of Speaking Objects), 2016

Of the works on view, Anna (pictured above) was one of my favorites. This surreal and unwieldy marionette visualizes the psychological barriers that can separate us from others–that muffled sense of isolation that Sylvia Plath referred to as the descent of the bell jar–and is based on a record of the asylum. A psychiatric patient had drawn herself wrapped in a rug, believing that no one could see her inside. Kotátková reinvigorates the pathetic fallacy with new life, as Anna becomes a vehicle for communication rather than isolation. Anna is part of Kotátková’s Theatre of Speaking Objects, a series in which she tries to make objects function as vehicles for communication. Detailed wall text and titles clue the viewer into the historical inspiration. This familiarity is useful when encountering the video on view in the other room, which deals most elaborately with the records left by a past patient.

Eva Koťátková The Judicial Murder of Jakob Mohr 2015-2016 Theater performance and video based on the drawing Justiz Mord (1909-1910) by Jakob Mohr

Installation shot of Eva Kotátková, The Judicial Murder of Jakob Mohr, 2015-2016. Theater performance and video based on the drawing Justiz Mord (1909-1910) by Jakob Mohr.

The artist also used records from the asylum to create The Judicial Murder of Jakob Mohr, a new video work that features an inmate defending himself in a patently artificial setting of cardboard and paper crowns. Filmed at the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital in Prague, the video presents a staged trial performed in the hospital’s theater with professional actors, staff, and patients. The artist was inspired by a drawing in which a patient had depicted himself as a defendant on trial in a courtroom of masked doctors or fellow patients who are conspiring to betray him. Does such a drawing or video represent the patient’s perception of real events in his life, or does it suggest a personification of his mental struggles?  An alternative is to ask whether such paranoia forms an apt, if Kafakesque, lens for human experience.

Eva Koťátková, The Judicial Murder of Jakob Mohr, 2015-2016

Installation shot of Eva Kotátková, The Judicial Murder of Jakob Mohr, 2015-2016. Theater performance and video based on the drawing Justiz Mord (1909-1910) by Jakob Mohr.

Kotátková creates so many objects that imply the body that it is especially rewarding to see her imagination come to life through the performances in The Judicial Murder of Jakob Mohr. In the video, like all of the works on view, her focus on the relationship between human bodies and the oppressive institutional structures that surround and regulate them is both playful and disconcerting, theatrical and earnest.

Eva Kotátková: Error is on view at ISCP until April 8.