Picking up from where the phenomenal Mother + Son left off, Candice Breitz has returned to the same method of found footage. The exhibition features two seven-channel installations; Him (1968-2008) expertly montages together a conversation between 23 Jack Nicholsons
extracted from films made over a period of 40 years, while Her (1978-2008) places 28 Meryl Streeps from a career spanning 30 years, having a conversation with each other.
Breitz is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary video artists working today, her video installations question the powerful relationship of mainstream culture to global culture. By using well known films, and A-list celebrity actors, the work manages to compose dense meanings and psychological vignettes. The works are identically displayed, and as numerous images of the two actors appear and begin to jostle for attention, a schizophrenic
dialogue takes place between the screens. Repeated, patterned imagery is formed through the reflected faces and characters, and the conversations that they seem to have with, essentially, themselves displays some all too common cliches about gender, and psychology.
Also displayed in the exhibition were the artists names, as they appear in the title sequences of the films they were in. Sometimes each character would appear in the others title sequence, as they have appeared in films together. This creates a funny parallel within the work, which
breaks the focused monotony of the text.
Thomas Hirschhorn - Universal Gym @ Gladstone Gallery
Well known to me, and the rest of the art world for highly politically charged transformations of white cube gallery spaces into engaging environments, Thomas Hirschhorn combines found imagery, and text with a low-fi, DIY fashion that is designed to simulate our own process of grappling with the excess of information in daily life.
At Gladstone Gallery he has made a Universal Gym, fit with all the accessories, posters, mirrors, and sports paraphernalia you would expect to see. The installation is totally open, you can walk, sit (or run) throughout and within it. This gym becomes Hirschhorn's social critique. The gymnasium, despite it's classical roots, has become a space for modern man, a key place for interaction with future partners, and a narcissistic pleasure dome. If one is physically fit, they will be desired more, live longer, and live happier - or so we are made to believe.
Hirschhorn writes of the work; Universal Gym is a space for exhaustion, for hanging on, for staying upright, and staying in shape while the world falls apart. In this age of financial uncertainty, this gym acts as a ship that would sail, with it's followers, blindly into the wind.
Paul Sharits @ Greene Naftali
As soon as you enter this gallery, which you do from a lift with an incredibly moody man, you enter a black dark space, with a simple, colour projection from one end which instantly draws your attention. It's noisy, dark and unpleasant as you stare at the 4 projectors, projecting colour but on top of each other so forming new colours.
Also displayed were a number of his works on paper, his 'workings out' for a number of his works. Visually they were intruiging and beautiful to look at but I felt like I was missing out on some vital piece of information that I just didn't get. I couldn't grasp what these works were meant to be about and a lack of information, text and although it looked good, I really felt I needed more.
I do really like this photograph of him though, it wasn't in the show (but I wish it had of been) it might've added a layer of humour, and fun to what was a bit of dry work.
Group Show: The Glamour Project @ Lehmann Maupin
I should have guessed this show would've been terrible when I read on the press released it was co-run by Glamour magazine, in celebration of it's 70th anniversary. The word glamour was derived from a word meaning 'occult knowledge' and has been bastardized by this celebrity, fake, commercial world that Glamour Magazine is a part of. The word glamour has now come to signify desirability, with overtones of consumption and indulgence.
Putting together 10 prominent female artists; Nina Chanel Abney, Rita Ackermann, Sarah Charlesworth, Tracey Emin, Rachel Feinstein, Marilyn Minter, Laurie Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas and Kara Walker, the exhibition was bound to look like a mish-mash of ideas and concepts of what women are, and what glamour is to them.
Or maybe it was just a big corporate show to make some money?
I have to say I was surprised that many of these artists would allow their work to be in the show, but perhaps they too wanted to make some money, or didn't have a choice.
Emily Prince - The Way It Used To Be @ Kent
I first heard of Emily Prince at (what was her) international debut in Venice last year. Her piece; American Servicemen and Women who have die in Iraq and Afghanistan (but not including the wounded, nor the Iraqis, nor the Afghans) was a key work in the Arsenale, and is one of her still on-going works. This current body of work on display @ Kent Gallery is a continuation of this inquiry into loss, grief, and how people deal with it. By investigating the vulnerability and the resilience of remembrance as a coping mechanism, Prince has made some thoughtful work that attempts to realise these thoughts.
One could claim that she was romanticising within her work, as it is all very pretty, neat, and careful. It also looks good, which perhaps doesn't really display what she intended it to. A series of photo montages, with elements from the photograph missed out, backed onto coloured card is clever, but after a number of them, they become over-done and over-used.
A set of three beautiful handmade zoopraxiscopes are displayed in a separate room, and are really worth a mention. Really nicely crafted, and simply put together, the viewer is invited to switch them on, and turn the dial to see, projected onto the wall-various photographs. Some are dated, some are from family times, but the work keeps you guessing, and wondering whether this work is personal to the artist, or she is using found material, and making a comment about memories being lost and found by another.
Colin Firth recently said of his new film Genova, that's major issue is grief, and of loss that those subjects are one of the only taboos we have left in the world. Sex, drugs, violence have all been forced down our throats but people are still wary of tackling the subject of losing someone. I think this show could've done a lot more to highlight these issues, the work seems a bit tender and kind, whereas the subjects she don't seem to be.
Tony Oursler - Cell Phones Diagrams Cigarettes Searches and Scratch Cards @ Metro Pictures
From the title of this exhibition you would believe that the work would be concerned about global issues of consumerism, globalisation and of technology. Unfortunately, none of these issues were apparent in the show and I saw it as a useful example of how well projectors can be used as the art, rather than a useful tool for projecting art.
The installation view above, for example, was projected using only 2 projectors (onto various tubes dotted around the gallery space). Apparently he was making a comment on social acceptable addition with this piece but as I walked around it I felt a strange sense of calm.
I felt most of the other work was gimmicky, lacked conceptual backing and was too concerned with the way looked, rather than what it would mean to an audience.
