A Body Without Organs: Javier Téllez at Koenig & Clinton

Posted on April 5, 2016 by Linnea

Installation view of Javier Téllez: To Have Done with the Judgment of God, 2016

God and organs, screams and silent landscape, ritual and the medical gaze fill the current exhibition “To Have Done with the Judgement of God” at Koenig & Clinton. As evidenced by its title, which is borrowed from a play by Antonin Artaud, Javier Téllez is exploring the life and work of the French writer. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a film of the same name. Téllez’s film keys off of Artaud’s 1936 visit to northern Mexico. There Artaud sought out and lived with the indigenous Rarámuri people. For the film, Téllez creates another encounter between local residents and Artaud. He has Artaud’s 1947 censored radio play To Have Done with the Judgement of God translated into the Rarámuri language and then radio broadcast across the area. His film documents local reactions to this broadcast as residents go about their daily lives.

Artaud is best known for theorizing the Theater of Cruelty, and his radio play To Have Done With the Judgment of God was originally censored not just because of his expression of emotion as guttural sound, bestial cries, and alarming screams, but also for its scatological and anti-religious references. Téllez’s translation retains the alarming screams, which seem to echo off the bare, implacable rocks of northern Mexico in the beautiful footage of the film. Similarly, the people being filmed seem indifferent to the dissenting sentiments and non-linguistic noises interspersed with percussive elements.

Installation view of framed A. A. Postcards (2016), detail

Téllez also presents his collection of Artaud source material, such as personal postcards (pictured above) and a collection of first edition books and printed matter. The ephemera characterizes the writer’s engagement with the Rarámuri people, rooting it a 1930s traveler’s perspective. Artaud went to Mexico on a travel grant, but it almost functioned as a kind of pilgrimage. His writings about the experience highlight the supernatural, and his fascination with the local culture included participating in a peyote ceremony. The spirit of religious intensity echoes in unexpected ways throughout text and film. Caustic denouncements of religion from the play To Have Done With…. are overlaid with footage of the Rarámuri engaging in ceremonies that blend Catholic traditions with far older ritual.

“For you can tie me up if you wish

but there is nothing more useless than an organ.

When you will have made him a body without organs,

then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions

and restored him to his true freedom.”

–Final lines of To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947)

Artaud’s lines about organs and the body (to be picked up and theorized by Deleuze and Guittari) echo with footage of animal sacrifice. Rarámuri male residents are showing binding an animal, circling him several times, piercing his neck to let the blood drain, and then throwing unwanted pieces on the ground for the dog. Stressing the material reality of the organs as in the film evokes the bodily reality that Artaud intended. Here the body without organs returns to its original intended emphasis that includes a refusal of metaphor in favor of lived experience.

Javier Téllez, Artaud Le Momo, mixed media, 71 x 20 x 17 in (180.3 x 50.8 x 43.2 cm), 2016

Javier Téllez, Artaud Le Momo, mixed media, 71 x 20 x 17 in, 2016

Téllez also displays a vintage mannequin in the gallery, suited in a straitjacket from Artaud’s era. This work highlights another aspect of the writer–his madness and addiction. Artaud had been treated with opiates by medical professionals from his youth onward for his instability and melancholy. He suffered from a horrific withdrawal as he journeyed to the land of the Rarámuri. He describes becoming “a giant, inflamed gum.” In the mannequin, we see the valuation of health and sanity undercut by the barbaric measures of restraint. Overall, Téllez presents the materials of Artaud’s life clinically, in orderly arrangements under glass. This treatment mimics the medical gaze which dehumanizes the writer-as-mannequin. It also places Artaud under the same distanced, clinical judgement with which he himself viewed the Rarámuri on his travels.

Installation view of Javier Tellez, To Have Done With The Judgment Of God, 2016

In the film, a preoccupation with religion is expressed in two extremes: a current priesthood, and dated words declaring the end of such things in the modern world. These different valences suggest not so much some vast interpenetration of meanings, but rather a disconnect between cultures and meanings. The afterlife of Artaud’s play, the history of his own journey, and the contemporary lives of the Rarámuri people continue along parallel tracks. The viewer can pick up seeming commonalities only because the exhibition takes them out of time and preserves them in a perpetual mise en scène. These currents of cultural overlay without mutual understanding suggests an oblique criticism of Artaud’s original pilgrimage to explore the exotic.

Javier Téllez: To Have Done with the Judgment of God is up at Koenig & Clinton through April 14, 2016.

Bill Viola: Inverted Birth at James Cohan

Posted on January 17, 2016 by Linnea

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Installation view, Inverted Birth, 2014

Inverted Birth, the titular work of Bill Viola’s latest exhibition at James Cohan gallery, features a lone protagonist bathed in a torrent of dark fluid that changes to red, then milky white, then to a clear liquid that dispels into mist. There is gorgeous imagery as liquids stream upward and the vulnerable central figure is dramatic and affecting. The man, projected twice life-size and clad only in pants, takes in the deluge with minimal motion. He raises his head and lifts his hands out slowly, over a course of some ten or fifteen minutes. After the deluge ceases, he lowers his head to look directly out at the viewer. The action is slow, like everything else in the work, and his gaze is inscrutable.

Still, Inverted Birth

The journey from dark to light that the man goes through parallels birth into the world. To make this video, Viola filmed the man standing dry and looking at the camera and then doused him with a stream of liquids from on high, above the camera’s view. The projection plays this footage slowed down and backwards. (You can watch a video of Viola’s studio at work on Inverted Birth if you like). So, there is a literal inversion in the technique behind this piece. Without knowing that, however, the viewer can see the inversion of gravity in the liquid streaming upward. Given the adult male used in the center, Inverted Birth suggests concern not with literal birth as much with the cycles of life, perhaps a more spiritual sense of awakening, and a focus on humanity at its most essential, both typical concerns of the artist.

Installation view, Ancestors

The first work on view, the 2012 video Ancestors, depicts a man and woman walking across a hazy desert landscape. They move so slowly and from such a distance that it almost seems like a mirage. Eventually it becomes clear that they are approaching the viewer. This pair walk through the desert with the heat of the sun radiating up to obscure them, followed by waves of dust, and persist in a feat of endurance and implacability, like a march through time. Rather than narrative, this slow-paced experience suggests the artist’s desire to engage with the viewer on a more emotional level.

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Installation view, Wind Martyr (left) and Fire Martyr (right)

Finally, the last room holds four works from Viola’s 2014 “Martyrs” series. Based on a long-term installation in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, each “Martyr” video depicts a body being buffeted or otherwise relentlessly trounced by a natural force. For example, in Fire Martyr, above right, a man sits silently in a chair engulfed in flames; the main motion of the film is the constant churning of the fire. Appropriate to the context of the martyr in Catholicism, these images are intended to convey transcendence.

On view at James Cohan gallery in Chelsea through January 30.

Amerikka: Cildo Meireles at Galerie Lelong

Posted on June 19, 2015 by Linnea

Amerikkka, 1991/2013

Next week is your last chance to Cildo Meireles’s exhibition at Galerie Lelong in Chelsea. In it, the Brazilian artist’s show-stopping installation Amerikkka draws you into the main gallery space where a rectangle of poised gold bullets loom over a field of pristine white eggs. The eggs are plaster and intended to be walked on. Entering the space between these opposed forces, the threat of bullets overhead and the uncomfortable sensation of walking on eggshells below, puts the viewer in a fragile, vulnerable position. The viewer is a stand-in for society at large, as the title suggests by merging the words “America” and “KKK” (Klu Klux Klan).

The visual appeal of long, perfectly rows of small things draws one in. Given the solid plaster nature of the eggs, the sense of threat is somewhat stymied. The tilt of bullet-ridden ceiling could be opening up, or clamping down. Is the KKK a current or past threat, something beginning or ending, or per the title, embedded unavoidably in ideas of America? Recent events incline me to the latter interpretation.

The other works on view are more playful, even when they also reference social problems, such as the recent work Aquaurum. Encased in a vitrine are two tall identical glasses–one filled with water and one filled with gold. Meireles refers to water shortages in São Paulo inn this piece, but it could also be read in terms of duality and the philosophy of perception.

Pares impares, 2011/2013

Themes of duality and perception are evidenced in the two large rectangles of starkly different content in Amerikkka, but also in works like Pares ímpares(2011/13), where two sets of identical glasses lay in a vitrine, with cracked lens on one side lit from below like spiderwebs.

Cildo Meireles’s exhibition is up through June 27.

Linnea West

Tag Archives: Chelsea

A Body Without Organs: Javier Téllez at Koenig & Clinton

Bill Viola: Inverted Birth at James Cohan

Amerikka: Cildo Meireles at Galerie Lelong