Artist Mariko Mori’sJourney to Seven Light Bay is a digital project that transports visitors to Miyako Island in Okinawa, Japan, where Mori has installed the first part of her monumental earthwork ‘Primal Rhythm’. The installation consists of a sun pillar and the egg-shaped ‘Tida Dome’ that changes colour with tidal movements.
Inspired by the caves of Okinawa in Japan, the digitally rendered ‘Tida Dome’ is a hollow shell through which light enters as it floats in the bay, shifting colour from red at low tide to blue at high tide, with many gradations in between. Mori has chosen exact coordinates such that at the moment of winter solstice, the lengthening shadow of the ‘sun pillar’ will penetrate the actual moonstone, once it is physically installed in the bay, uniting the celestial with the terrestrial, the masculine with the feminine.
Karen Knorr uses photography to explore the cultural traditions and power implied by the richness of palace architecture, the ornate interiors of English gentlemen’s clubs, of old mansions and grand museums. Sometimes animals are displayed in these settings in the manner of traditional portraiture of pets or domesticated animals, while in others their wildness is tamed or made exotic by bringing them into the context of elaborate human habitats.
In her first solo show in the US, “India Song” on view at Danziger gallery in New York, Knorr inserts animals digitally into the interiors of Indian Rajput and Mughal palaces and mausoleums in Rajasthani heritage sites, celebrating the myths and fables of Indian folklore from pre-photographic traditions such as the ancient Sanskrit book of the Pancha Tantra. In the exhibition she explores the role of animals and their representation in exotic, orientalist art and ancient bestiaries.
In her other series Fables (2004-2008) Knorr was inspired by tales from Ovid, Aesop La Fontaine and popular culture, Disney and Attenborough, placing the animals in heritage sites such as the Carnavalet Museum, the Museum of Hunt and Nature in Paris, Chambord Castle and the Conde Museum in Chantilly Castle. (more…)
Nick Cave Soundsuits, Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery
Artist Nick Cave has been using his wearable Soundsuits in performances, collaborating with locals to create dynamic visual and aural sequences that are unlikely to be confused with the output of the other musician with the same name.
Nick Cave Soundsuits: Untitled, 2009 Digital c, print, Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery
Marilyn Minter, Cheshire (Wangechi) - 2011 enamel on metal - 60 x 96 inches (152.4 x 243.8 cm) , Courtesy of Salon 94 gallery
Sublime soapy bubbles of goo slide down baby, frolicking in a playpen of silver slime. The slow-motion video, shot with a Fantom, plays at Salon 94’s exhibition of Marilyn Minter’s latest works, coming at the ‘heels’ of her last series of slippery stilettos and video project Green Pink Caviar. The baby’s atavistic slide into pleasure is impulsive and contagious, and implicates our adult world of sophistication and restraint.
In Cheshire Minter does an extreme close-up of grinning teeth that would delight any dentist with a desire for detail. I asked Minter about her use of close-ups, which left no narrative clues as to gender, and she said she liked the implied mystery and the multi-readings this made possible.
A show of self-portraits curated by Shirin Neshat is on exhibit at the Leila Heller Gallery. Neshat began posing for her own camera in 1993 and this led to her series of photographs Women of Allah. Rather than a projection of her own persona, she styled herself after warrior women, drawing on the role Muslim women played in the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution.
Neshat says that her exploration into self-depiction was inspired by Frida Kahlo. “As a young art student in the mid 1980s, I remember developing an obsession with the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and her self-portraits. I was astonished by how her powerful paintings pulled the viewer in to her private world to witness the beauty and the horror she experienced in her personal life. Through the depiction of her own body and the use of visual metaphors, Frida Kahlo let loose her emotional and psychological anguish, her spiritual and moral orientation, and most importantly she revealed that art operates somewhere between the artist’s conscious and subconscious.”
Shirin Neshat Photographed by Stephan Würth for SPREAD 2010
Maurizio Cattelan, Guggenheim Museum New York, 2011
Tragicomic poet-prankster, Maurizio Cattelan, has turned the Guggenheim’s rotunda into a hanging carousel of colorful characters, effigies, surrogates and stuffed dead things that dangle from their gallows in chaotic companionship. Cattelan has also announced his retirement and, in this final exhibition, his magnum opus, he unites ‘All’ his lively, eccentric offspring, staging the ultimate mass execution.
Nancy Spector, the chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, worked with Cattelan in putting the show together. I asked Spector if the artist’s use of taxidermy was to inspire empathy in his audience. “Absolutely, the animals are anthropomorphic and they are self-portraits and surrogates of him, they have a humanizing quality, if you think of Aesop’s fables – where there is usually a moral to the story – it is very much on that level.”
“Where does he get the animals from?” I asked, imagining him picking through the dead pigeons piling up in Venice’s Piazza San Marco.
Installation View - Maurizio Cattelan, Guggenheim Museum New York, 2011
Coming up post-Halloween is Erik Sanko’s pagan puppet premiere at BAM for Phantom Limb’s performance of 69°S.
The production dramatizes the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s harrowing 1914 trans-Antarctic expedition in which his vessel, the Endurance, was stranded amid freezing ice-floes for an entire winter only a few miles from the South Pole. 69°S is the latitude at which the intrepid arctic pioneers struck peril. The ensemble, led by Erik Sanko and Jessica Grindstaff, brings to life Shackleton’s adventure with elaborate hand carved marionettes in a series of tableaux vivants using music, film and photography to create a fantasy Antarctica.
In his first solo show in New York entitled The PassionsMartin Wittfooth’s explores martyrdom and sainthood using animals as subjects to symbolically represent acts of violent self-sacrifice and destruction practiced on the basis of ideological or institutionalized beliefs.
The series also obliquely references the suicide bombings, acts of self-immolation, blind devotion and religious fervor prevalent even in modern societies – as exemplified by Islamic jihad and followers of biblical Rapture – practices which appear absurdly arcane, parochial and even ridiculous when distanced and abstracted through the satirical lens of an anthropomorphized species.
Jake and Dinos Chapman - Detail from - One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved
Jake and Dinos Chapman recently showed at White Cube in London in their first ‘non-collaborative’ show, where each worked separately on works isolated in their studios bringing their art together in the final stage of the exhibition: much like the working method of ‘exquisite corpse’ – the Surrealist game where each contributor adds his part to a drawing without revealing his artistic input to the other.
Their interest in shocking their audiences with puerile and playful provocations against bourgeois culture is evident in their sticking genitals on childrens’ and adults’ bodies in inappropriate places: In an interview with curator Norman Rosenthal at 92Y, Jake Chapman said, “Victoria Miro [their gallerist at the time] was a lovely demure bourgeois woman… Our interest was stimulation…we learned that if we called a sculpture ‘fuckface,’ it attained value – you could hear Victoria on the phone talking to some collector saying, “Yes, I can do you a fuckface, or a two-faced cunt.” We were interested in how far we could affect, invade bourgeois language…”
The muse of many artists, including Warhol, the late actress Elizabeth Taylor reveals a more candid side in an exhibit of photographs by Firooz Zahedi, in which she returns to the glamorous age of Cleopatra. A show with over 40 photographs from the actress’s travels to Iran in 1976, is on loan from LACMA, and can be seen at Leila Heller’s new downtown gallery till October 29th.
Firooz Zahedi had left Iran as a child, but together with Taylor, he returned to his country to photograph the culture made exotic once more through the lens of a visitor. Together they traveled to Persepolis, the once destroyed ancient Persian capital, to Shiraz, and to the tile-decked town of Isfahan, where Taylor, after visits to the bazaars, purchased the costumes for her transformation to an oriental odalisque.
