Tag Archives: James Cohan gallery

Music & Mourning: The Propeller Group at James Cohen Gallery

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propeller-groupThe film The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music, currently on view at James Cohan’s Grand Street location, takes the colorful funerary traditions of south Vietnam as a means to meditate on loss and mourning. Yet the emphasis is very much on life–on the people performing the rituals of mourning rather than the absent dead. To create the 21-minute work, first shown at Prospect in New Orleans in 2014, The Propeller Group attended and recorded the funeral ceremonies of several people. In doing so, they found not just ritual practices–extreme demonstrations such as balancing motorcycles on one’s head or sword swallowing–but a cast of charismatic characters, such as the leader of the brass band that processes through the film in white.

The film is full of dances with fire and snakes, feats of skill, flowers and processions, and, paramount to all, music. Music permeates the film. It is not just the auditory soundtrack we hear, although that is compelling in itself. The Propeller Group portrays musicians alone with visual references to karaoke and music videos. The pace of jump cuts matches the rhythm of the different Vietnamese songs, whose sad and trite lyrics are shared on screen in English captions. The lip syncing of featured individuals registers as slightly out of time with the soundtrack.

IMG_9291Swirling camera shots develop a sense of intoxication while the music acts upon the emotions of the viewer. The music’s emotive register reminds me of the sentimental pathos of Ragnar Kjartansson‘s work rather than tragedy, perhaps because the film uses signifiers of the dead without the dead being present. No bodies are shown. The viewer only sees coffins or, at most, pictures. The focus is on rituals that stress aliveness, as if the passage from death to life should be celebrated. And, in fact, the Propeller Group borrowed the tittle of the film from a Vietnamese Buddhist proverb, which calls for the playing of celebratory music for the dead.

timthumbThe Propeller Group shot everything in ultra-high definition video, creating a lush and convincing dreamworld for the viewer. Using both documentary footage and staged reenactment, the  film moves seamlessly between real and unreal space and time. Thus while the film is specific to local particularities, it becomes a poetic rumination on life, death, and the stages in-between. The Propeller Group has seamlessly worked in artificial effects, like the silhouette of a person being filled with CGI red fire (pictured in the image below). It works because the real footage is as fantastical and evocative as the artificial scenes that it blends with, and it is partly the lyrical movement between documentary footage, staged reenactments, music video style scenes, and computer effects that makes this film such compelling viewing. IMG_9284

Up through May 15 at James Cohan Gallery at 291 Grand Street.

 

Bill Viola: Inverted Birth at James Cohan

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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.

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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.

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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.

Yinka Shinobare MBE at James Cohan Gallery

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Yinka Shonibare MBE’s has some new works up at James Cohen Gallery in Chelsea through March 24th, although what you see in the photos above are rather like the sides to the main dish hidden in the back. In the interior room, the video Addio del Passato is screened on the wall and the great soundtrack to it drifts back into the outer rooms.

The video features a black woman in African-print but traditional European-style clothes in some Roccoco European palace singing the opera Traviata. The storyline is that the character of Frances Nisbet, Lord Nelson’s estranged wife, sings an aria from the last act of Verdi’s Traviata, which dovetails into some of Shonibare’s previous work in London about Lord Nelson. What Shinobare is interested in is the distance and irony between imperial Britain’s history and the present as well as emotions like longing and passion. Honestly there is a lot going on in the video and his work in general, and I had do some more research. The short video below is some great background from Art 21.

 

Also on view in the gallery are his suicide portraits, reworkings of famous death portraits with the subjects wearing the African print cloth and the sex/fetish objects, with their historically accurate attributes also somewhat reworked by the artist. Shinobare uses the same fabric in all of these work because although we think of it as African, it is actually a Dutch reworking of Indonesian batiks.