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Wednesday, January 24, 2007
This is the first in what I hope will become a semi-regular series of posts on shows of note I've seen recently.
Harrell Fletcher: The American War
LAXART
Fletcher visited Ho Chi Minh City in 2005 and photographed every image and text description in The War Remnants Museum, a memorial to what the Vietnamese call "The American War" ("The Vietnam War" to us, of course). Displayed in plain wooden frames around the gallery -- with walls painted a pale shade of blue -- the photographs basically re-create the museum, or at least the museum's contents. Heart-rending pictures of massacred mothers and babies, American soldiers torturing Vietnamese and/or exulting over their mangled bodies, children born with horrible deformities due to their parents' exposure to Agent Orange, atrocities the shock of which even the distance of several generations of photographs -- many of the museum's images look as if they are already several steps removed from their source -- cannot soften. It's an opportunity to see the war and its aftermath from the other side -- through the eyes of the Vietnamese, although not surprisingly, many of the images are taken from Western books and magazines like Life. The paucity of the museum's budget -- evident in the low and inconsistent quality of the photographs and captions -- and its didactic rather then elegiac intent is a stark contrast to our elegant, minimalist, well-maintained Vietnam memorial. Fletcher's lightly mediated presentation of the museum's contents is a deeply moving, disturbing, powerful work of art.
But is it art, or documentary, or merely overblown tourist snaps? It hardly matters. If Fletcher is able to use the system of galleries, the pretense of "art" to distribute these photographs, then so much the better. If nothing else, it's a potent, visceral reminder that comparable atrocities are happening on the ground, right now, in Iraq. It's also a testimony to the importance of the archive, of collections, of research and study. Outside the gallery, Fletcher has designed a billboard in conjunction with the exhibit, an image of two stacks of books about the war. It's a visual catalog of a wealth of knowledge and experience that should carry the historical weight of its billboard size, but which we've obviously forgotten, enmeshed as we are in another quagmire.
In a project of this nature, it's easy to retreat into discussions of representation and ownership: Fletcher's photographs are hopelessly inflected with his point of view; it's impossible to faithfully recreate the experience of visiting the museum; there is an appalling voyeurism in consuming such shocking imagery. Still, the work feels entirely earnest and not so much side-steps as bulldozes these issues with the heartfelt urgency of its appeal to our humanity. Fletcher asks us not only to remember, but to feel, as we imagine he did, that day in the museum.
Soo Kim
Sandroni.Rey
Soo Kim's large scale photo collages are intensely layered urban landscapes. Printed on clear film and mounted on clear plexiglass, the three images in the series They Stop Looking at the Sky feature the same Istanbul street scene, but in each image, cutout portions let a variety of other images and textures peek through -- other landscapes both urban and pastoral, Islamic graphic patterning, curvilinear organic blooms, the white gallery wall. With their amateurish edges, the cutouts feel provisional, the images, haphazardly pasted together suggest complexity run amok -- urbanism out of control, cancerous. But the cut out areas also suggest bombed out buildings, especially where the stark white of the wall shows through -- as if something has been violently, quickly removed from the scene. I suppose the works' charm is their ability to turn these erasures into windows onto other worlds, some entirely fantastical. Especially in They Stop Looking at the Sky 1, in which the whited-out areas are covered with Islamic patterns in clean black lines, there is a cohesion to the image, an all over energy that knits it together despite being so roughly cut apart.
Sarah Cromarty
sixspace
I wouldn't even mention this show except that it resonates formally with Kim's above. While I found Cromarty's extruded album covers -- amateurishly (but not in a good way) "extended" with cardboard into three-dimensions (a bit like pop-up books) -- distasteful in a visceral way -- can't even quite put it into words -- perhaps it's a combination of their cheesy 70s iconography (Neil Diamond, the Allman Brothers, the Carpenters) and the grodiness of glued cardboard and glitter. Perhaps grodiness is the point, but frankly, I don't understand why. Anyway, Cromarty also exhibited a selection of "vintage books" (might have been good to know their titles, then again, if it didn't matter to her...) that she opened to a photograph of a particularly iconic retro-detailed interior and then "carved" chunks out of along the lines of the interior's windows or doors or floor tiles so that other pages showed through. A similar tactic to, although less sophisticated than Kim's, letting us see the layers of time or experience compressed in a book. I like the violence of the work -- short circuiting the books' narrative sequences to emphasize their physicality -- the depth and texture of the pages becomes palpable in this excavated form -- but wished that the cutouts revealed more than just the sunset that serendipitously aligned with the window, or the suggestion of stars scratched out of a black endpaper.
Mario Ybarra, Jr.: "Bring me the Head of..."
Anna Helwing
I've recently become a fan of Ybarra's. He strikes me as just the kind of artist I most appreciate: subtly, yet incisively political, conceptually grounded, sincere, and yet, irreverent. This latest show doesn't disappoint. Ybarra gets right to it with Where My Dogs At? a pair of "his and hers" spiked leather dog collars on (very short) leashes embossed with "Ybarra" and "Helwing" respectively. Although a bit of a one-liner, it introduces a note of levity and parity into the artist/gallery relationship while acknowledging its undertones of ownership and control. Similarly, in Protest Flag, the finial on the pole of an American flag is a golden Mexican emblem instead of the usual eagle, a detail that would have gone unnoticed were it not for the exhibition list. This subtle blending of quintessentially American and Mexican tropes is Ybarra's hallmark, and a more accurate depiction of cultural collision and fusion than the usual "culture clash." In this vein, the most satisfying work in the show is a series of 20 drawings titled The Ballad of Chalino Sanchez, which tells the fragmented story of a Mexican American cowboy/gangster figure. Although rendered in a sketchy hand, the style of the drawings is reminiscent of racy Mexican comic books, and Sanchez is shown with gun in hand perpetrating a variety of outrageous crimes -- murders, drug deals, rape. But he's a singer, too -- we see him on stage (gun in pants), and on a (imagined?) record cover -- and also works as a dishwasher. Ybarra here blends stereotypes associated with Mexican Americans -- gangsters, entertainers, laborers -- into one grotesquely comic figure. Trading in the language of over-the-top caricature, the drawings deconstruct themselves, showing the stereotypes to be just as fictional, and comical (though hardly harmless) as Chalino Sanchez himself.
On the radar: Strange New World: Art and Design from Tijuana at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Sasha Bezzubov at Taylor De Cordoba, Matthew Pillsbury at M+B (look for my review in WiredNews next week).
2:39 PM
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Friday, January 12, 2007
Over my holiday vacation I ended up seeing both Mike Judge's Idiocracy, (the latest comedy from the maker of Office Space, Beavis and Butthead, and King of the Hill that was unceremoniously released in only a handful of cities without any promotion whatsoever) and Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, a big-budget Oscar contender from the director of Y Tu Mama Tambien and the third Harry Potter. I say coincidentally, because although both films present dystopic, cautionary visions of the future, I didn't expect them to have anything in common, let alone much to say to one another, or rather, against one another.
COM is a serious film. It artfully and self-consciously deals with weighty issues -- reproduction (in the year 2027, no children have been born for 20 years), immigration, oppression, resistance, alterity, the future of humankind itself. On the surface, nothing could be further from Idiocracy, a broad farce by a master of lowbrow humor. But Idiocracy is also a very serious film. An average GI named (what else?) Joe and an unlucky hooker get cryogenically frozen in an army experiment only to wake up 500 years in the future to find that human intelligence has devolved so egregiously that they are now the two smartest people in the world. Mayhem and hilarity ensue, but not without a savagely funny depiction of an over-sexed, hyper-violent society where corporate domination is so complete, they water the crops with Gatorade.
Philosopher & cultural critic Slavoj Zizek (!) on COM's image of the future:
A good portrayal is more you than you are yourself. And I think this is what the film does with our reality. The changes that the film introduces do not point toward alternate reality, they simply make reality more what it already is. I think this is the true vocation of science fiction. Science fiction realism introduces a change that makes us see better. The nightmare that we are expecting is here.
[Read the full text.]
The same could be said about Idiocracy. In its vision of the future, the world is drowning in garbage, Starbucks lattes come with hand jobs, healthcare is dispensed like fast food, and everyone wears shiny, skintight clothing covered with corporate logos. Sound familiar? The nightmare is here.
Even more disturbing is the way in which the film portrays this dumbed down society. Everyone speaks a patois of ebonics, Valley Girl, and slacker-speak. The president of the U.S. is a large black man who dresses and acts like a professional wrestler -- James Brown on steroids with an AK-47. I can't think of a snootier vision: the devolved future belongs to subcultures, and boy are they dumb. While the film is undeniably funny -- perhaps it's just the uncomfortable laughter of recognition -- it also dismisses the radical potential of subcultures to resist or challenge the status quo. By suggesting that they are merely a symptom of the decline of American society, the film denies the hopeful (albeit sometimes kooky or downright destructive) options alternative cultures have always provided. Although Judge also lampoons childless yuppies in the film's opening sequence (their unwillingness or inability to reproduce are the reason that stupid folk have overrun the planet), he implies that traditional, mainstream forms of culture are the true and only form of American intelligence. While the dumbing down of American culture is irrefutable, and Idiocracy makes this point abundantly clear, it does so at the expense of many of the people who have elevated Judge's prior projects to cult status -- slackers and white trash and working stiffs. I couldn't help feeling that perhaps it wasn't only the heavy-handed portrayal of corporate evil-doing that prompted Fox to stifle the film's release, but the Cro-magnon portrayals of people who think, act, and talk like...well, like people we know, or have at least seen on reality TV. Perhaps its vision of "Uhhmerica" hits a little too close to home.
By contrast, in COM, subcultures are sites of resistance and the only hope for the future. In a UK obsessed with rooting out and deporting immigrants, a repressive, paranoid police state has arisen, resulting in huge, squalid refugee camps and an underground movement of activists and terrorists. (Sound familiar?) Among the latter, (warning: plot spoiler) a woman -- young and black, no less -- discovers she is pregnant, the first pregnancy in 20 years. The metaphor is obvious -- from the loins of the oppressed comes hope for the future. It's a very 60's-ish conceit, which Cuaron wisely references in his portrayal of the main character's father, a pot-growing hippie recluse living off the grid in a secret, sylvan hideaway. Yet rather then a retread of outdated politics, COM is, as Zizek suggests, extremely contemporary, a revitalization of 60s-style hope and humanism in the face of an even more hermetically sealed militarism and intolerance.
It's not surprising that such a vision -- through the smallest crack in the facade of global capital walks the least of us, humanity's savior -- should come from a Mexican director, whose previous tale of sex and death (Y Tu Mama) was also a quiet portrait of inequality and endemic poverty. And it's unfortunate, though not surprising either that Judge, a quintessentially American talent, should despair as he pokes fun. From his perspective, Cuaron looks naive -- the world's going to hell in a handbasket, so why not drink some more Gatorade? Why not? Because from the point of view of the underdog, there's still too much at stake.
3:22 PM
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