Pour Your Body Out (7534 Cubic Meters)

Pipilotti Rist at the Museum of Modern Art
November 19, 2008 - February 2, 2009


Pour Your Body Out (7534 Cubic Meters) installation shot. 200' x 25'

Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist manufactures what she refers to as "spiritual vitamins". Except in her world of immersive projected landscapes--most recently the MoMA's four-story-high Marron Atrium, where she was commissioned to create the monumental, site-specific installation, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)--this pretty little pill swallows you. And so it goes--if one pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small, Pipi's ambrosial lozenge is apparently the latter, and its hallucinatory effects are instantaneous.

Though the actual narrative of the ten-minute, looped video is both visually and psychologically fractured--as Carroll's proverbial rabbit hole odyssey--the most palpable theme can be described as that of ostentatious femininity, engendered by the saccharinely licentious escapades of a naked redhead and a pot belly pig, scored with both an ambient, experimental melody and ambiguous 'body' noises, and featuring cameo appearances by a few wayward earthworms and snails. Pour Your Body Out transports us to the rapturous Shangri-La of plump pink tulips and forbidden fruits, where its colossal starlets engage in grubby mastication, flowers-up-noses, and blithe puddle-splashing. Along the way there is no shortage of vital fluids- lubricious exploits culminate with a quite literal coming of age that soaks the space--and our protagonist's white bathing suit--in heavy crimson.

Perhaps it's just a fad, but in the face of this decidedly feminine overhaul, one is quick to note other Manhattan museums that have recently made available their prodigious interiors for enveloping installations, to quite different ends. Take for instance Cai Guo-Qiang’s red-blooded cock assault to the Guggenheim last February. While Rist's installation of only three walls and a plush settee provides a philanthropic thinkspace--the artist says it's meant to relax and prepare patrons for their forthcoming excursion through MoMA's other galleries--Cai brashly infiltrates every cubic meter of the Guggenheim's atrium, ramps, and galleries, confronting patrons with rabid wolves, airborne sedans, poached tigers and flashy laser beams, scarcely leaving room to breathe, let alone think idyllic thoughts.

The overall effects of Rist's deluge are quite a pleasure ride for those who wish to pour out and be poured onto. However, the eye-couch-of-Providence beckoning repose in the center of the space borders on kitsch. What's more, with such a vast expanse of absorbent surfaces--surrealistic pillows, the all-seeing sofa, wall-to-wall carpeting (dyed to match the drapes)--the hordes of entranced visitors (encouraged by foregoing wall text to remove their shoes before) padding and tumbling around Rist's conceptually moist milieu may easily morph the strange Relational aesthetic into a bad trip for any mysophobe.

Collective hygiene aside, Pour Your Body Out (7354 cubic meters) presents a welcome digression--a breath of fragrant air--from the hitherto indelible canonical reticence of such an institution. If the contemporary art world is her garden, Pipilotti Rist has officially painted the roses red. Here's to hoping other art establishments follow suit.

Shots and sequences from the installation form part of a narrative feature film that Rist plans to release later this year.

KUSHO

Shinichi Maruyamo at Bruce Silverstein Gallery
January 15, 2009 - March 7, 2009


Kusho #9 (2006) Archival pigment print, 27" x 36"

If the recipe gets out, Shinichi Maruyamo's KUSHO (Japanese for 'writing in the sky') at Bruce Silverstein Gallery may very well spark a new wave of techno-harnessing Action Painters. His ingredients are simple: India ink, water, a strobe light, and a high-speed camera. For preparation Maruyamo combines his liquid media using everything from droppers to jets, buckets to balloons, reveling in the unexpected effects of gravity, surface tension, and centrifugal force to momentarily merge Yin and Yang in the air above his head.

While the Abstract Expressionists, according to Harold Rosenberger, saw the canvas as "an arena in which to act", the spotlight of Maruyamo's modern technique falls not so much in the gesture, but in the spiritual gravity of the polished image. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the physical event captured by his strobe light camera at 1/7500 of a second is literally imperceptible to the naked eye. His enthusiasts liken Maruyamo's practices to Buddhist wabi-sabi, or the beauty of impermance. While his photographs--like the historical practice of shodo, Japanese calligraphy--do call to mind the fleeting beauty of daily life, the exploitation of high-speed photography to immortalize an evanescent gesture seems somewhat antithetical, if not outright anachronistic. Just the fact that these photographs hang in a Chelsea gallery where they will be sold in editions to the wealthy upper crust may bear testament to a spiritual conflict of interest.

At any rate, Maruyamo's photographs successfully harness the illusionistic and abstract, exuding a deeply captivating poeticism and transcendental vibe in their arrest of space and time. Whether or not it's Buddhist to capture and covet impossibly transient moments with techno-assisted methods, Maruyamo's photographs are undoubtedly visionary and sublime. One magnified glance at the metaphorical nuances will leave you feeling a little more aware of the invisible forces that suffuse each living moment and remind in many cases, that "art" is what you make of it.

BildRaum

Walter Niedermayr at Robert Miller Gallery
February 12, 2009 - March 14, 2009

Neuseeland V (2004) 2 C-Prints, edition of 6

Consisting of fifteen photographic polyptychs of stark, vast panoramic vistas primarily centered on the tourist industry, BildRaum, Walter Niedermayr's current exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery in Chelsea, offer viewers a captivating visual transliteration of modern man's evolving place among the sublime. Reduced to the correspondence between two characters--man and nature--the photographs, taken from 2003 to the present, draw contrast between the abiding grandeur of the natural world and cursory mortal disorder. Other works in the exhibition including Niedermayr's newest BildRaum series, incorporate internal and external views of the New Museum, Manhattan--designed by Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, whose work Niedermayr has been chronicling for years.

Picayune human forms trudge in pairs up a prodigious, sandy slope devoid of context in Dune du Pyla 1, 2007. Sky and ground are blanched. Meditating on any of the nuanced interpersonal relationships captured here, one immediately dispenses with humanistic projection. Beings are diminished to colored pixels of red, black, and blue. The mammoth presence of idyllic nature suggests undertones of Romanticism, but disengagement of minuscule subjects ultimately yields a dearth of emotional attachment--both to the frontier and its settlers.

Sable cows speckling the pale green pasture in Neuseeland V (2004) appear as though they could be lifted from the picture plane with one fell swoop of a strong magnet. Across the way, Kitzstzeinhorn 31 (2007), could use a good dust-busting. Niedermayr says he assembles his compositions to "constantly undermine the automatic tendency to identify image and reality." Through his perspective and far range, the artist greatly succeeds at divesting his beings of psyche, thus inhibiting translation of any subjective reality therein.

The dignity of Niedermayr's images may lie in their faculty to induce--merely through passive portrayal--a search for significance in terrestrial worlds characterized exclusively by entropic minutiae. Les Deux Alpes XX, 2008, depicts skiers standing in line for a t-lift to carry them up a snowy mountain. From such a removed distance, the ski lift's wiry framework assumes tenuous proportions more synonymous to croquet hoops. Indistinct skiers converge in a dominant line through the second and third panels, adopting an ostensible purpose through their self-organization. In the first and second panel, figurative whisps descend arbitrarily on their skis from the snowcapped crest--a form of organized recreation that Niedermayr deems an unnatural "management system of pleasure".

Niedermayr's photographs convey that our wont to supersede nature with organized leisure is ultimately fallible. The tourist infrastructure is both an expression of and a catalyst for modern man's waning symbiotic relationship with the wild. Niedermayr furthers this theme through his fancy for desolate locales, many enveloped in blinding white light and characterized by sand, snow, and immovable mountains. The abstract rendering of his settings and characters in a pictorially reductive manner aesthetically inclines what may have once served as a ready segue into the realm of metaphysical, interpretation. But the palpable distance--both physical and emotional--of his images ultimately prevails in rendering speculation futile.


1. Dune Du Pyla I, 2007. 4 C-prints (81.9" x 103.1")
2. Kitzstzeinhorn 31, 2007. 2 C-prints (41" x 104.8")
3. Les Deux Alpes XX, 2008. 3 C-prints (41" x 154.75")

James Nares

James Nares at Paul Kasmin Gallery
January 15 2009 - Feburary 21, 2009


Survival of the Luckiest, 2008. Oil and wax on linen, 96" x 60"

In the early eighties, James Nares reinvented the brush, the surface, and paint. He also reduced his artistic practice solely to exploration of these three elements' expressive potential. For more than twenty years since, Nares has actively investigated the nature of the brushstroke--its size, proportion, materiality, shape, and movement--with invention of his own brushes and stroke-making methods. "Brushes are like characters in a way." Nares says. "Each one does a different dance."

If Nares' brushstrokes can dance, they do so with seductive luminescence under the lights of Paul Kasmin Gallery. Each work therein serves solely to animate and glorify the mark as it squirms and writhes, lurching itself across painted surface with vitality and stamina. Untitled (2007), a royal blue gesture in oil on paper, immediately brings to mind Yves Klein's Anthropométries, wherein the enigmatic Nouveau Réaliste experimented in mark-making with his own "living brushes"--nude women drenched in fresh blue paint. While the proportions and gestural nuances of Nares' paintings draw strong anthropomorphic connections, the prominent anatomy of the painted stroke ultimately calls for a purely formal analysis.

Each of Nares' strokes is a living entity that has made it past the hit-or-miss selection of his critical eye. On some occasions, Nares strokes out hundreds of times--a horizontal tango over a single canvas--while a vigilant, squeegee-wielding assistant waits in the wings, successively wiping the surface clean of each repudiated attempt. Nares says about ninety percent of his brushstrokes are unsuccessful. Those that are allowed to dry and consequentially to be hung upright, serve as formidably candid emblems of abstract activism and the staying power of art as art.

1. Untitled, 2007. Oil on paper.

Everything Imagined is Real (After Dante)

Robert Taplin at Winston Wächter Fine Art
January 7-February 9, 2009


Across the Dark Waters (The River Acheron) (2007) 84" x 94" x 50"

Upon encountering Robert Taplin's Everything Imagined is Real (After Dante) at Winston Wächter Fine Arts, one is made to feel quite self-consciously large. Nine dramatic tableaux vivants fill the space, each occupied by pallid, resin-cast figures in miniature environments. Seven of these vignettes take the shape of large, black wooden cabinets, which house interior scenes reminiscent of Italian presepe. Two others engage in table-top theatrics-- in Thus My Soul which Was Still In Flight (The Dark Wood) (2008), a middle-aged man rises from his bed, presumably after a nocturnal disturbance; a brawl erupts as a muscular figure struggles to mount the bow of small wooden boat in Get Back! (The River Styx) (2008). Foregoing the wall text, it is apparent that some somber, grand narrative is transpiring in our midst.

As show's title suggests, this nine-part series is Taplin's semi-autobiographical descent into Hell, and we, the viewers, are given an elevated seat. One recurring figure, assumed to be Taplin himself--the only actor rendered in full color--navigates contemporary settings of still despondence--a dining room, a den--that evoke a Hopper-esque vernacular of desolate realism.

O, you who are led through this hell, recognize me if you can.
You were made before I was made.
(The Inferno, v. 40-42)

Direct quotations from Dante's Inferno, like the one above from Recognize Me If You Can (The Third Circle) (2008), append each work, enhancing Taplin's compositional poetics and reiterating the only vaguely-accessible inner turmoil of the statuesque artist as he makes his descent. As the narrative progresses, color drains, and the viewer assumes an increasingly voyeuristic role. Scenes become epic in scope and cataclysmic in magnitude. Perspective shifts, supporting figures fluctuate in size and number, premonitions are sensed, cities are burned and razed to the ground.

Versed in medieval studies and theatre design, Taplin employs innovative use of materials in his sculptural works, which thoroughly heighten their visual tenor as engaging objects of spectacle. Across the Dark Waters (The River Acheron) transpires on the electric blue banks of a harrowingly tenebrous river that, upon closer inspection, reveals itself as no more than a literally gaping chasm that cuts through the dioramic scenery. In We Went In Without a Fight (Through the Gates of Dis), Taplin constructs a deep view down the street of a devastated city, shrouding buildings in gossamer screens to create a hazy atmospheric perspective.

Throughout his work, Taplin continually explores the idea that "the real real world is the one that goes on in your head." Interpreting Dante's Inferno through diorama constructions of his own intimate visions, Robert Taplin successfully crafts a distinctive, coeval narrative that, if not personally relatable, is at least compelling for its technical intrigue.

Everything Imagined is Real (After Dante) is on view at Winston Wächter Fine Arts , 530 W. 25th St., New York City, from January 7 - February 9, 2009. Further information is available at www.winstonwachter.com.

1. Thus My Soul Which Was Still in Flight (The Dark Wood), 2008.
2. Get Back! (The River Styx), 2008.
3. Recognize Me If You Can (The Third Circle), (2008).
4. We Went In Without a Fight (Through the Gates of Dis), 2008.