Duncan Anderson, David Shannon Harrison, Jared Sheldon, Marshall Preheim

Mad Bad and Street Legal
Fall, 2006

The current office of Bridge magazine opened its space this spring to a small group show tagged Mad Bad and Street Legal. There is no real basis for the title -- presumably it continues a Chicago gallery tradition of juxtaposing two ideas or statements to simply see what happens. Four artists are shown, and all run the gamut in their approaches to painting and drawing, sometimes navigating erudite literary references while at other times presenting quirky pop-culture references. The resulting show had a collaged, all over the place feel, but not one without many moments of delight.

For instance, David Shannon Harrison makes careful drawings full of literary and personal references. Using cross hatching and repetitive pencil marks, Harrison seemingly builds the drawings up into something, either making muddy compositions or fascinating, fully realized, images. Dr. Faustus and . . . er . . . friend is particularly striking, depicting two figures, one of the famously troubled intellectual and the other presumably either of Mephastophilis or some other hellish beast. The monster is a misty character, maybe an apparition or a loosely manicured bush, but is provocative just the same. Jared Sheldon’s work might be a counterpoint to Harrison’s, presenting a whimsical collection of small to medium sized drawings using collage as well as acrylic and pencil. Loosely structured surrealist visions, they present a sort of Disneyland in spin cycle series of cartoonish motifs. Done mostly in light aqua blues and greens, the works remind one of Matta’s dancing blobs or maybe an unusually upbeat Gorky.

While Harrison and Sheldon present discrete objects, Marshall Preheim installs a meditation on weight, not physical weight but visual and literary weight, through a series of photographs, a wall drawing out of rope, and a lightly stenciled poem. Unfortunately, the poem was rather difficult to read, but two words of great importance do emerge from the wall -- “what weight.” This thought is an axis for the piece. The wall drawing presents a type of weight through a figure recalling Rodin’s brooding Balzac, seemingly crushed under the weight of not only his thoughts but the bulk of his carriage. The photos show extreme close ups of a person holding grapes and a mayfly.

Perhaps the largest delight of the show, however, is being able to take time with a large number of drawings and a few sculptures by Duncan Anderson. I hope to write a longer piece on Anderson’s work, but at the moment, I just want to highly recommend it. The drawings take us through a landscape of emotional states, transporting us not only through popular culture but also down the corridors of history. It is difficult to describe the poetry that plays out in these works. Sometimes, the work is simple and exuberant, a text graphic of the tobacco label “Skoal” with “fuck yeah” next to it. Other times, the work is dazzling and touching. There is always, however, a sense of forbidding comedy to the work. My favorite is a drawing that is just gold glitter and a few lightly traced lines. This is Swarm Reenacting in Homage and Fear the Creation of the Universe, a title loaded with so much at once, a sweeping metaphor of our place in the universe while an expression of childlike wonderment. Yet “fear” lingers over the proceeding. You don’t know why the intimation of “fear” has power, but it changes everything and fits perfectly. Take a close look at Anderson’s despondent Darth Vader, without his helmet and defeated. The title says it all, Lord Vader and His World Falling Apart.

Yutaka Sone and Timothy O’Sullivan

Yutaka Sone, Renaissance Society, and Timothy O’Sullivan, Smart Museum University of Chicago, Winter, 2006

Last winter, the University of Chicago was being landscaped, not physically but through the work of Yutaka Sone at the Renaissance Society and Timothy O’Sullivan at the Smart Museum. The two artists both deal in issues pertinent to their times -- O’Sullivan with presenting the western territory of the United States to a new nineteenth century audience that needed evidence of its existence, and Sone with presenting a landscape to a public oversaturated with it, seemingly no longer inspired to either wonderment or horror, in need of imaginative transportation somewhere else.

Sone and O’Sullivan could not be more different. O’Sullivan was a virtually self-taught Irish immigrant, employed by the government to survey the western territory with the help of his associate William Bell. He was pragmatic, straightforward, and was noted for his painstaking, chiseled images of the American landscape. O’Sullivan’s photos are not charming, they are brutal. Simply laying a scene in front of us without guile, his landscapes don’t glorify or deify the land or its people. Sone, on the other hand, is noted for his quirky imagination and constructed scenarios: he had friends record scenes from buses in foreign cities in an exasperated attempt to live their experiences, he made futile bikes that can never be ridden, and he positioned ficus trees in sand with marble copies of the display in close proximity. Sone’s worlds rely heavily on the postmodern reflexivity principle, the need for an artist to self-consciously expose their created worlds as myths rather than reality.

So what could Sone say to O’Sullivan and vise versa, more than a century apart? There seems to be a strange connection for it hardly felt jarring to walk from the Smart Museum to the Renaissance Society. In fact, one does not even want to do the obvious -- to move Sone’s work into the white, modernist spaces of the Smart, and in turn, take O’Sullivan into the cramped confines of the Renaissance Society’s revivalist classroom building. The artists seem at home where they are presented and also communicate with each other.

The answer lies in landscape, in what landscape means and how it functions, the critique of both landscape as a picture to be composed and as a space to be navigated. In both exhibitions, in different cultural contexts and for different reasons, the idea of the picturesque is played down and abandoned in favor of something else. For O’Sullivan, the end of the picturesque comes by simply presenting the facts. For Sone, the picturesque is opened up into a livable environment and then critiqued by the very materials that are used in its construction.

When O’Sullivan made most of his photographs, roughly 1863 to 1885, little was known about the western territory of the United States. When he was asked by the U.S. government to do a geographic survey of the fortieth parallel, O’Sullivan had little need for his imagination – the scenes in front of him were grand enough, rough enough, and spectacular enough to be interesting. O’Sullivan did not need to make a painting or to compose spiritually weighted scenes like Ansel Adams would later do of the west. O’Sullivan simply needed to record. Furthermore, that was the constraints of the U.S. survey; it was what O’Sullivan was being paid to do.
For this reason, the work most cited in discussions of O’Sullivan is the Inscription Rock, 1873 which was in the Smart show. The photo shows an old Spanish inscription, but more importantly shows a ruler, a measure that could be recognized, nature and the west was brought down to a recognizable size.

It was true that O’Sullivan was looking for pictures, looking for scenes to present, but what separates him from photographers like Adams and Eadward Muybridge is that his scenes do not register like paintings, they are not composed to have symbolic and cultural weight. One needs only look to Adams’ highly aestheticized and polished Inscription Rock, 1948, a reprise of O’Sullivan’s photo, to see how truly different O’Sullivan’s work can be. The notion of culture controlling and dominating a landscape is met with disbelief by O’Sullivan. Instead he espouses another nineteenth century approach to landscape, the idea of keeping nature wild.

There are reasons why this nineteenth century duality between the control of a culture over landscape and nature’s inherent wildness is downplayed in the work of contemporary art. One reason is simple: every moment, more and more of the globe is apparently conquered -- in a world of strip farming and growing tourism, the earth does not stand a chance. The other reason is offered in theory: in our increasing control, we use nature, not according to its inherent moral structure and essence, but according to the pre-established social mechanisms that guide how we use it. These two facts pervade Sone’s exhibition. After all, this man once proposed to wrap the surface of the moon in Astroturf.

Sone’s idea of landscape aims at showing that landscape is no longer something given but something we create for ourselves. Sone, unlike O’Sullivan, does not have the benefit of wonder to enhance the reception of his work. We’ve seen snow before, we’ve been skiing. There is no way his installation could strike us like O’Sullivan’s west must of struck someone living in cramped late nineteenth century New York. The whole project rightly has a store window feel. Expect to find such an installation in Macys littered with toys and punctuated with electric buzzing. We look at Sone’s landscapes and know it is created. Sone takes over the Renaissance Society’s space with snow and pine trees. The trees are real. The snow is made of plastic shavings and Styrofoam. Laid out in a meandering fashion, the gallery goer simply wanders around the forest, occasionally running into a badly made painting, an expertly carved block of marble, a bunched up pile of paper, or a gaudy snowman. The result is spectacle. Inside the installation, one forgets that one is in a university, that you climbed stairs to get a space inside a classroom building, that Renaissance Society could ever be hot in the summertime.

Just like O’Sullivan presents the brutal truth of landscape to escape asethetisized, apparently spiritual sense of landscapes presented by the romantics, Sone seems to take our current received symbols of a spiritual landscape and thwart its power through exaggeration. Sone knows that landscapes can have a powerful effect, and it does not escape him that a snow covered hill or meadow can carry a sort of sublime rejuvenation for people, that snow can become a sort of spiritual site. The spiritual comes with all of the symbols and icons that are typically taken as spiritual around the world – the short exhibition essay talks about the cultural significance of the snowflake, its boundless variation suggesting an intelligent design. Sone presents this snowflake while at the same time enhancing of the Renaissance Society’s space as is the fashion in Japanese gardens or in Shinto Shrines, where the nuance of nature is meant to be constantly promoted by the constructions of man, latching a person in with the rhythms of life.

However, Sone’s spirituality is purposely flimsy and transparent. In a world driven by the desire of the dollar and mired in a pervading cynicism over the power of symbols in the arts, the snow and the snowflake quickly become weak, easily commodified institutions. The multiplication and marketable quality of the snowflake and the winter landscape suggest kitschy or low brow attempts at spirituality. Sone’s glass snowflakes register like enlarged versions of grandmother’s dated paperweights. The landscape becomes one for skiing and resorts. The beautiful and the sublime become simply “pretty.”

All of this is presented through reflections on the self-critical nature of postmodern thinking. We are not allowed to simply exist in Sone’s landscape, being shaped by it or allowed to be present in its confines. The landscape is never at any moment something other than contrived. Sone’s installation is a sculpture in the expanded field; we walk around in it, we are part of a situation and environment instead of being placed before it like in a photograph or a in a painting. We are constantly confronted with sculptures, drawings, and paintings of vastly ranging quality that give the installation a hand worked, constructed nature. In this respect, it takes on the feel of being temporary. Nature, to Sone, is a world shaped, enhanced, and twisted according how society has designed itself to view it.

So the University of Chicago presents us with two great landscape artists, both equally against any notion of the picturesque, both grounded in separate systems of critique. Both subvert romantic notions of landscape but do so in different ways. O’Sullivan’s critique is less conscious. He is the documenter, the surveyor. He shows us the brutal nature of the west and asks us to look, not to be inspired but to simply know it. Sone’s critique is pointed and cynical. He presents an initially beautiful world that we can walk around in wonder, and slowly over the course of the installation, we start to notice that the world is more and more constructed.

Jacob Hashimoto: Skip Skitter Trip Vault Bounce and Other Attempts at Flight
Rhona Hoffman Gallery
November 18 to December 23, 2005

Kites carry great metaphoric potential. In many ways, they are free -- they can flip and skip in the whimsy of the breeze. Yet at the same time, they remain restricted, held firm by the person holding the string. This quality of a kite, being an entity that is both free and restricted, makes them potent vehicles for ideas ranging from art’s once pointed ambition of transcendence to kite flying’s ability to serve as a form collective social release in some cultures. The tension lying between restriction and flight seemed to be the dominate message of Jacob Hashimoto’s exhibition last fall at Rhona Hoffman.

Hashimoto’s kites try, often extravagantly, to break free, but never truly fly. Hence Hasimoto’s title for the show: Skip Skitter Trip Vault Bounce and Other Attempts at Flight. This expression of futility owes quite a bit to Icarus. The sculptural installations start out as hopeful attempts at flight, hundreds of light wood frames covered in semitranslucent Japanese paper hint that if outdoors, they may transported skyward with the lightest breeze. One is reminded of Has Haake’s Blue Sail, 1964, a floating sculpture which came at a time when art making was moving away from the goal of leaving the earth for higher planes of experience to merely leaving the gallery in search of actual experience itself. Hashimoto’s kites, like Haake’s work, congeal into hovering wonderlands of landscape, somewhere between two dimensions and three, leaving the ground yet ultimately unable to make it out of the systems which contain them.

Hashimoto’s work, despite its illusions of levity and release, is held tight between metal support systems and fastened by fishing wire. But even though critics use phrases like buoyant and weightless to describe Hashimoto’s work, I would garner together a different group of adjectives: tied down, controlled, bound, claustrophobic. Even flight at its most triumphant, such as displayed in the large gallery filling piece Super Abundant Atmosphere, 2005, must come down on top of the viewer like a tight cave. Other of Hashimoto’s installations read like hives or lily pad clusters rather than fluting skyward and threatening to break out of the gallery.

The restricted activities of Hashimoto’s work, when taken with his use of solid colorful shapes on his kites, force the metaphor of the installation into the social realm, the world of kite flying as leisure during political and religious holidays in countries like Japan. Often his kites carry the colors and shape of flags as kites often do in the festivals of Asia. Hashimoto wants to extend the metaphor of his work to include the symbolic reasons why we fly kites in general, our ambitions to fly and the strings that won’t allow us to do so.

In the United States, perhaps we have difficulty understanding kites as a potential social metaphor. In this country, kite flying is restricted to the diversions of children. We have kite flying societies, but generally one regards such groups in much the same way one thinks about electronic car societies or science fiction conventions, they are youthful but only in a nostalgic, creepy adult sort of way. Americans have little respect for transformative potential of kites. We tend to tell people to “Go fly a kite” when we are upset and want them to leave. Therefore we might be tempted to think that Hashimoto’s work exists in a temporary, childish way.

Kites have a different status, however, in other nations, and it is in this sensibility that Hashimoto finds deeper meaning for his work. For example, in Pakistan kites have a celebratory or pageant effect; they are taken out for a variety of occasions from religious to political holidays. The hobby bridges across age barriers, kite designs become willfully elaborate, and often you often see photographs of adults handling many strings at once watching their kites dip and dive, jump and spring across the sky. Kites are a form of collective release in these countries, they allow one to fuse with natural currents and come to a sort of playful, nonthreatening equilibrium.

Hashimoto notices in his work that any cultural bearing that kites have also carry a cultural and political dimension. As the delicate rice paper frames stand suspended or hang out from the wall, the solid graphic symbols, not quite recognizable, bring the viewer quietly into a world where kites can serve as release from political tyranny or the day to day rigor of life. Hashimoto tries to weave his formal concerns with the visual social reality around him. In this pursuit, he is successful. While the sculptures serve as a quite brilliant reflection of sculpture and painting, they also present a festive quality of a pageant. When the kites form a cave, somewhere between flight and enclosure, they call attention to the limits of the room, serving as passages out of the room and as chains to stay in the room. Such limits are constantly imposed by society as well and the Hashimoto teaches us this beautiful lesson.


Images Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

Mike Peter Smith

Mike Peter Smith
And other stories . . .
Bodybuilder Sportsman Gallery
September 9 through October 22, 2005

Often artists are a bit decadent with their narratives and too forthcoming with information. Exhibits often say too much, leaving little to the imagination or intelligence of the viewer. Mike Peter Smith’s sculptures, however, are not a glut of arching mythologies and grand schemas of existence. I am pleased to say that Smith’s show at Body Builder Sportsman is delightfully ambiguous.

We know a few things about the Smith’s sculptures. For instance, we meet John, a lonely rock hound roaming the universe in Geologist John, 2005. Wearing flannel and equipped with a rock hammer, John has presumably left the earth to live and work in the crevices and craters of the stellar entities he studies. His workshop, bedroom, and bathroom are carved in asteroids. He commutes from home to other planets facing the wrong way on a pterodactyl. His discoveries on these planets are laden with fanciful terrains and unexplained archeological sites: an unearthed skeleton who died while mowing the lawn, a truck crash landed onto some sort of craggy precipice, and a delightful depiction of a motor-home, split through the middle by the growth of a strange tree. These little curios are set in landscapes that are not overly bizarre. The settings look much like some parts of Australia or other remotes places on earth but are definitely meant to be slightly off kilter, slightly unlike our homes on earth.

This off kilter quality establishes many levels of separation between John’s nature as a solitary and the viewers walking around the gallery. While on one hand, John can be seen as a lonely traveler, the other finds viewers strangely indicted in their curiosity about this far away drama. John is not alone, our eyes pour over him. The scale of the sculptures finds us peering into the holes, looking for any information we can find. Thankfully, we provide most of the information ourselves, leading the stories with our own thoughts and desires.

Furthermore, we are characters in a story of our own creation. Even though we assume John is alone, we guarantee that he isn’t. Even in deep space, Smith postulates, there is an aspect of the human psyche that does not allow freedom. We always live like we are watched. The proof of this is John in Hole, 2004, a particularly engaging sculpture of John busy at work in a crater. The height of the pedestal and the small enclosure make us work to find out what John is doing. In the end, we find him masturbating, making the ultimate narcissistic gesture in the loneliness.

There something astonishingly sad about both the futility of John’s actions and about our voyeuristic posturings to see them. For instance, why do we go through such lengths to know John and why does John, alone in the deep space, have to hide in crater? What makes this sculpture such a delight is that these questions are not answered through narrative -- instead the formal elements allow us to feel the interaction between the art and ourselves, to feel our direct relationship with the work.

Tara Donovan

Tara Donovan
Ace Gallery, Los Angeles
Through May 2005

Tara Donovan’s installations are of this world, but are far from ordinary. Most of her assemblages are made from the fringes of cubical desk organizers or Chevy toolboxes: pencils, styrofoam coffee cups, stick pins, toothpicks, fishing wire, shattered glass, roofing felt, and electrical wire. The materials are set, known, and recognizable, but the result is Costeau’s camera on the ocean floor, a National geographic image of a remote part of Australia; in other words, Donovan’s world is a bizarre one that we want to visit and she has no trouble taking us there with brilliant artifice.

Inside the tall, austere spaces of Los Angeles’ Ace Gallery, Donovan arranges a series of sets in which we act, playing our fancies in dream terrarium. Using thousands of multicolor buttons, she creates a floor size ocean reef, multicolor sponges seemingly sifting the gallery air for enrichment. The next gallery uses fishing wire to conjure a blanket of sea urchins, like hundreds of shimmering ladies’ powder puffs. In her largest installation, Untitled, 2003, Styrofoam cups make up dozens of lit bulges, recalling the underside of sack of spider eggs.

Organic forms and landscapes are a dominant, yet not entirely encompassing motif in the work. As Michael Knight recently observed, there are minimalist undercurrents, the desire to “eliminate composition and focus on the singular object.” However, if Donovan is a minimalist, it is of a sort that does not mind illusion and poetics. Even Donovan’s large cubes, toothpicks, pins, and glass held together by gravity and friction, are strange surfaces, masses that romantically linger rather than assert themselves in Ace’s large corridors. Donovan seems to be imaginative through and through.

With the fundamental differences of materials creating quite different landscapes, each piece can have a sort of a one hit wonder appeal, and at times, especially in her works on paper, intricate material play becomes obsessive and tedious. The overall appeal of the show, however, much outshines its weaknesses and if nothing else, Donovan’s installations are memorable and consistently a delight.

Robert Ryman

Robert Ryman’s Work's on Paper
Arts Club, Chicago
March - April, 2005

Robert Ryman’s mature works are achievements of endurance. Since the mid-fifties, he has slowly experimented with painting directed outside the bounds of illusionistic depiction, countering Ab Ex tenets of push-pull composition, atmospheric effect, and virtual space. Ryman’s more literal practice of stressing materials as materials has continued to the present. This fall, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Rhona Hoffman gallery offered a look at classic Ryman works which emphasize the painting’s support, the canvas or “stage” on which things happen rather than the place which depicted events appear to be happening. Ryman did not just magically conjure such achievements, however, and his current Arts Club exhibition takes us through his journey to maturity through 28 works on paper from 1957 to 1966.

If a painter like Cy Twombly worked to achieve personal expression without image, then Ryman works to paint something with neither image nor expression. Actually what is left are paint, paper, and pencil lead, the sparse starting points for Ryman’s impending forty year virtuoso performance. In this Arts Club show, you feel Ryman struggling to use an Ab Ex painting vocabulary to erase illusionism, moving the materials of painting to the forefront. Ryman takes up the grid, the idea of layering color, and the painterly brush stroke, making them vehicles for painting without illusion.

For example, one small drawing, an untitled work from 1958, no. 8 on the exhibition list, consists simply of a few blocks of cream colored oil paint. The paint bleeds into the paper, leaving a pale brown film around the edges of the paint. Ryman seemingly did not like the atmospheric quality of the oily film for in the next work, no. 9, you see his solution to the problem. Instead of using regular paper, he makes the same blocks of paint on a piece of Mylar. This time, the paint does not bleed and the paint just seems to sit there on the paper, a symbol for nothing other than itself.

Ryman’s ability to fluidly work out self-proposed problems is apparent at many points during the exhibition. In certain works, Ryman layers color without allowing the struggle between figure and ground that occurs in gestural abstraction. Wedding Picture August 19, 1961 features multiple layers of dingy greens, light blues, and creamy whites, but the layers stay independent from each other; the colors do not struggle for dominance; there simply are where they are.
Ryman, along with Frank Stella, is often seen as forerunners to Minimalism and the debate over aesthetics and truth in painting which has ensued ever since. Whatever side one takes in such a debate, Ryman’s work continues to dazzle in terms of making a viewer look closely at how a painting works, how an image can be dismantled, and how paint can to certain degree be itself again.

Inigo Manglano Ovalle

Inigo Manglano Ovalle
Focus: The Art Institute of Chicago
February 17, 2005 to May 14, 2005

A new Inigo Manglano Ovalle sculpture is buoyantly suspended in space at the Art Institute, circumscribed by the spiral staircase of the museum’s contemporary wing. Taking the form of the famously capricious icebergs of the North Sea, this computer modeled lattice of tent-poles and plastic joints sends an oxymoronic message on one hand, creating a formal disjoint between random nature and artifice; on the other hand, the lattice, supported by black aluminum rods in its center, becomes a sort of floating membrane which easily dissolves in the metal glass world of the room’s modernist interior. Literally, the iceberg presents a world of joints, transparent solidity, and the idea of sculpture permeating space.

The work is a sculptural hodgepodge constructed with spaceage materials. If one takes the advice of critics like Hal Foster or Rosalind Krauss, Ovalle’s iceberg seems to combine the entire history of sculpture from the imposing quality of the monument, to the transparent, visible armature of constructivism, to the site specific quality of the earthworks and minimalism. Adding to this formalist progression, however, Ovalle’s hopes to present a more globally conscious metaphor, rendering a story conjuring water crises, melting borders, and global warming. The iceberg is to become a wide open symbol which Ovalle hopes to reign in through the economical vocabulary of minimalism.

However, the sculpture, as Ovalle’s has us believe from his artist statement, does not speak in very coherent fashion of social or political boundaries, its strength lies in the literal boundaries of form and surface dissolving into landscape. The jump between Ovalle’s formal conjectures and the metaphoric quality that he seeks is impossible without supporting material, a disease of contemporary art that is not easily remedied. Emily Jacir’s work on the Palestinian situation or James Luna’s installations addressing racial, ethnic identity seem to offer better examples of artists dealing with social and political issues while formally articulating borders. Ovalle is formally very proficient and confident, and he needs to continue in these areas rather than venturing into a kind of idealism which seems to lie outside of his own boundaries.

Fiona Tan

Fiona Tan
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Correction and Correctional Institutions
October 2, 2004 to January 23, 2005

Fiona Tan’s current project on view at the MCA consists of six double sided projection screens arranged in a circle around a group of benches. Entering the space, you encounter these screens projecting video portraits of prison guards and inmates both outwards into the gallery and into the inner circle. The portraits are shot from the knees up, a pose typically found in cinema, and the approximately three hundred images loop in a montage, not connected by any narrative.

The portraits are silent, and Tan leaves the idea of prison to sound and signs. Only the various symbols arranged by the prison institution separate the inmates from their guards. Clothes, badges, security wrist bands, and an assortment of guard weaponry demarcate the kept from the keepers. Other than these signs of power and control or submission and passivity, the images are equivalent, and all difference is erased by the reduction of humans to one dimensional flat screens. The idea is for the viewer of these images to accept the equality and recognize the humanity of the unknown, unseen people behind the walls, those shut, for whatever reason, from society. Tan is “not interested,” according to the Curator Julie Rodigues Widholm, “in making political proclamations or judgments with this work.”

We are asked simply to dwell on people in an institution, people who are arranged and coded by an institution. This is confirmed by the layout of the exhibition, recalling Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptican and the rhetoric of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The Panoptican was the prototype for societal control and became a symbol for the inescapable fact that humans are bound and subjected to power. Tan, in using this allusion along with intentionally supplanting narrative, places her work in a postmodern context which places humans in a discourse of power relations.

Of course, postmodernism and institutional critique is at its best when it simply looks at structures and describes the relations of power. However, the idea of “human beings,” which Tan is trying to expose, becomes defined only in relation to power, and in retreating into the realm of “not making political proclamations or judgments,” the human is powerless and without any intrinsic dignity. The concept of dignity, according to the highly politicized means of display Tan chooses, is socially constructed, and Tan’s reliance on montage and video to equalize the images of humans simply shows humans as empty husks ready for their next institutional command. This prohibits a viewer from showing any empathy or concern for these inmates and guards.

It is true that these inmates and guards are part of a system. It did not take postmodernism to tell us that. So what is Fiona Tan really trying to do? I think that what Tan is trying to do is allow a viewer access to human beings which are usually forgotten once they are locked away or humans that are often viewed as brutal parts of institutional discipline, i.e. the guards. If this is the case, why does Tan use an eclectic postmodern presentation that does not allow such sentimentality and love of humanity?

A little narrative would go a long way. Tan would accomplish her objective in a proper way if we were allowed to know these prisoners and guards, allowed to take a stand for or against them according to real evidence and stories by which people of reason could make, heaven help us, judgments. I do not think that Tan denies the necessity of prisons or of correction, but she does suggest that these institutions are constructed and are open to injustice. If this were not the case, then why would we need to “confront our own prejudices and assumptions?” Tan is being political but does not take a stand or offer solutions. For this reason, this exhibition is not provocative, and I tend to think that many people will just pass through it, paying little heed to prisons or even human beings.

Instead of entities bound by a system, couldn’t these flat, one dimensional “cinematic” images be humans with names and stories? I waited a long time in the gallery, but eventually, one fellow, a prisoner, smiled and seemed to restrain his laughter. This was a human moment, the best moment of the entire display. Just knowing that this prisoner was tempted to laugh or acknowledge the absurdity of the project in which he was involved led me to see myself in him. This is of course heresy to a postmodernist, but if one wants to know power or oppose power, one has to at least acknowledge that power contains people of resistance or subjection, action or passivity. Only a system controlled by people, real subjects with real dignity, is subject to change.

Daniel Roth

Daniel Roth
Donald Young Gallery, Chicago
May, 2004

In Daniel Roth’s current project on view at Donald Young Gallery, the story of the Cabrini Green Forest comes into being through multiple forms of documentation. According to Roth, the mythical forest exists in a tunnel which connects the Metropolitan Correctional Facility in downtown Chicago to the Cabrini Green Housing projects. In the exhibition, the dark undercurrents of societal relations become caught up in a literal architectural schema, a literary technique made famous by Franz Kafka. Roth presents his fantastic story in a rather straightforward manner. As the modern precision of the correctional facility is reduced to crumbling bricks by the toils of age, an opening in the basement reveals a well kept secret, a system of criminal exchange planned long ago and carried into the present, a tunnel.

Nothing creates fascination than the eerie spaces of underground tunnels. Take the debate over whether or not Mole People make their home in the abandoned subway tunnels of New York. However, speculation must eventually give way to proof, and Roth, in the case of Cabrini Green Forest, is there to provide such proof, at least in the ways proof is typically presented.

Roth’s documents the tunnel and the forest. He has an architectural blueprint of the tunnel. He has a photograph of a mining car which could possible serve as a vehicle in the tunnel. He offers elaborate drawings of the forest. Finally, Roth provides two concrete documentation elements: an opening to the tunnel, and an electrical box, which has, over time been invaded by the roots of a tree growing in its proximity. These last two items were presumably taken directly from the depths underneath Chicago.

In the context of a gallery, Roth’s evidence does not add up; seemingly, the gallery walls themselves prohibit the possibility that this tunnel could indeed exist; Art, of course, is just the mirror of life. However, if one would imagine the same items tagged and bagged in a court room, a jury perhaps would be convinced. Which leads the viewer to consider how myths are constructed, and whether or not any of these myths, could possibility have a ground in the real world.

The exhibition presents a variety of myths focused on the controversies surrounding urban life: the implied connection between abject poverty and criminal behavior, an implicit cynicism over the effectiveness of rehabilitation, and the questioning of the dynamic between law and crime. Rather boldly, Roth actually takes a stand on these urban questions and the installation seems to give a series of answers to these questions.

His initial move in the exhibition is a dark opening, a door into the tunnel, set on the floor as it does in the blueprint of the Metropolitan’s basement. The square portal recalls the washing pool of a Roman atrium, a place for purification before entering the domestic house, the place where proper society interacts. However, Roth’s cleansing pool is green and the water inside is brackish and turbid, indicating that the purification of society is just another myth constructed for our benefit. The tunnel is surprisingly ambiguous. Whether the passage was used for escape or internment is unknown, and but one certainty is presented by Roth, the sinuous existence of trees roots, which take over and fortify the tunnel against any further use. This suggests that the relation between the Cabrini Green Projects and the Metropolitan Correction facility is a strained relationship, even the trees rise in revolt of such a connection.

Rob Davis, Mike Langlois

Rob Davis Mike Langlois
Monique Meloche Gallery
September 10 – October 23, 2004


Monique Meloche Gallery recently opened a new space in Chicago and presents the work of painting duo Rob Davis and Mike Langlois. In I against I, Paintings and Drawings of the New Spirituality, Davis and Langlois present a selection of disparate, lavishly painted images ranging from photorealist takes on their mothers to the cannibalism of a cobra devouring his mate.

The idea driving the show is common, Davis and Langois simply take images open to various projections of meaning and place them on the wall. However, I see no attempt to empty meaning from these works by leaving their interpretations loose; content leaks in from all sides.

This is representation speaking in the tradition of Ben Shahn and Norman Rockwell. The overt content is a certain view of America and the result of the presentation is slightly disturbing. It is almost as though Richard Prince decided to stop appropriating and simply claimed upstate New York as his own, as his home with all its flaws and joys.

Right through the front door of the gallery is the large, horizontal Space (2004). The suggestive title of the show, “New Spirituality,” places this field of gaudy stars somewhere between the contemplation of mystics and the iconographic tradition of black light posters. The work’s perfect surface and slick finish lends comfort to the idea of it being on a gallery wall, but this painting is in fact the perfect stoner basement accessory. Davis and Langlois of course like it that way, and the work points to the spiritual reality of certain Americans as being akin to the hallucinations of drugs or the errant misreading of people eager for signs.

In Moms (2004), the duo paints reproductions of what looks like low-end yearbook photos or Wal-mart studio shots. It is easy to see through their tender, soft rendering that Davis and Langlois love their mothers, but what makes the portraits more charming is that their love is slightly delinquent. Moving from Moms to Pyre (2004), a large painting of a fuzzy blaze recalling Gerhard Ritcher, I imagine Davis and Langlois mischievously acquiescing to take out the trash only to later spray it with accelerant, setting a pagan bonfire in their front yard. Pyre is a mysterious fire, and taken out of the fabric of the show as a whole, could easily recall the burning bush. This, however, is definitely an American flame, akin to Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires (1964), full of colloquial mayhem worthy of the film Gumo.

Less ambiguous is Halle Sellassie (2004), a parody of Ingres’ portrait Emperor Napoleon 1 on his Imperial Throne. Some know Sellassie as the departed ruler of Ethiopia, but in the world of Davis and Langlois, the image exudes hemp paraphernalia, conjuring the mystique of Bob Marley and the Wailers. The “Lion of Judah” becomes a soft, fussy rich kid. Sellassie carries his girth like a pillow and his legs do not appear to have any real connection to his body; they hang limp in front of the throne.

Halle Sellassie is just another take on the theme of false symbols and decadent belief. From there, the painters seem to want to take the viewer literally to the Edge of Oblivion (2004), an oil on view at the end of the show and at the top of the gallery’s staircase. The work is Davis and Langlois’ “rock and roll painting,” and it is an image of a cobra seemingly eating its cousin. This recalls primal, cultish myths of Saturn, Ouroboros, and savage primitivism. The black outlines of the serpent carve into the surface of the painting giving it the gritty look of a tattoo. In terms of spirituality, the image comes across as slightly crass and almost as a rude joke. It is as though the zenith of myth functions in America as the perfect iron-on patch for a biker jacket. Ozzy would approve.