|
Sunday, April 08, 2007
Sam Durant: Scenes from the Pilgrim Story: Myths, Massacres and Monuments at Blum and Poe
I'm a big fan of Sam Durant, whose improbably poetic and pointed combinations of disparate references -- Noguchi and Southern rock, Eames chairs and pornography, Robert Smithson and Kurt Cobain -- have always struck me not only as politically astute, but funny, with a tinge of the absurd. His works are serious enough to make their point, but don't take themselves too seriously. Given the wide-ranging scope of his previous works, his latest installation at Blum and Poe is a little disappointing.
The project is a critical restaging of the Plymouth National Wax Museum, complete with dioramas (purchased from the now defunct museum), wall text, a reading table and a documentary-style video. Its intention -- to educate people (specifically, Americans of European descent) about the true history of the Pilgrims' arrival in Massachusetts (they were not, as is popularly imagined, peaceful settlers, but grave robbers, thieves and murderers) -- is earnest and worthy enough. But the copious wall text and didactically reconfigured dioramas are a bit heavy-handed.
In Pilgrims and Indians, Planting and Reaping, Learning and Teaching, Durant recreates two museum dioramas on either half of a circular rotating stage. One illustrates the classic tale of how the English-speaking Indian Squanto taught the pilgrims how to fertilize crops with fish. The other depicts Captain Miles Standish beating a Pequot Indian with a stick, an attack that led to the massacre of the Pequots and the real first Thanksgiving feast (which the Indians did not attend because they had all been killed). The dioramas are oddly engaging (as creepy, unblinking mannequins are wont to be), and their rotation, almost imperceptible at first, lends the work a Disney-esque showmanship. The two stories are opposite sides of the same coin, here made literal in the circular shape of the platform, but the bombastic physical presence of the piece feels like overkill for what is essentially a simple argument.
You can feel Durant's passion for the material, his desire to share what he has learned, and his insistence on uncovering every willful untruth. Unfortunately, the format and presentation of these stories mimics its source too closely. The lightning bolts of recognition or insight that made Durant's previous works so compelling are replaced by a plodding revelation of a power imbalance that most people (at least in the lefty art world) are already familiar with. Perhaps I spend too much time with folks like myself, but I take it for granted that people know that Native Americans were and continue to be exploited, massacred and dispossessed, and that Thanksgiving is really just an excuse to pig out.
The show also attempted to sever the tie between image and story, allowing us to peer between the cracks at the constructedness of history. In this regard, the video -- a sequence of Ken Burns-style shots of the original dioramas combined with the audio narratives from the museum -- was most successful. Even as the narrative and familiar format pull you into the story, every now and then one the diorama scenes sticks out and becomes truly macabre. The lifelessness of the mannequins and the artificiality of the story are only heightened by the voiceover's attempt to enlist our sympathies. It's too bad the rest of the show failed to create the same sense of uncanny discomfort, and relied too heavily on text.
Mitra Fabian and Robin McCauley at Bandini Art
For some reason, I seem to be drawn lately to highly aesthetic, obsessively repetitive, phenomenologically oriented works. Maybe I just want to look at something pretty. At any rate there seems to be no shortage of them. Robin McCauley's drawings are seductive, but only because they're made of hair. McCauley outlines reductive forms -- Greek temples, horses, birds -- and stitches them with long strands of black horse hair, which hang down shaggily over the front of the image, looking a bit like a balding muppet. The works possess a slightly unnerving physicality, and draw potentially fruitful parallels between hair and the drawn line, but otherwise don't offer much beyond the gimmick of their construction.
I found Mitra Fabian's work a bit more compelling, although hardly original. In the vein of Tara Donovan or Rosana Castrillo Diaz, Fabian uses everyday materials -- scotch tape, white glue, windowshades -- in obsessively repetitive patterns to create works that reference the body, geography and perception. Her floor pieces, small landmasses that coalesce out of snakey, pleated strips of windowshade, create engrossing textures that suggest fantastical miniature topographies. In a wall piece, small, regular strips of scotch tape mounted on plexi swirl and coalesce to form three disembodied breasts. Like Eva Hesse with office supplies, the work found an unexpected resonance between a mutant biomorphism and the milkiness of the layered tape. I only wish that Fabian would take it one step further and find some conceptual coherence between her materials and her forms so that her work would be more than just pretty shapes coaxed from unexpected sources.
Sean Higgins at sixspace
Sean Higgins creates eerie, isolated landscapes by mounting inkjet prints on plexi that has been abraded and dulled to create a milky translucency. The images of rock formations, islands or ocean swells, whether extending to fill the picture plane or floating in white space, are peaceful and ominous and strangely moving. There's something about their misty elusiveness that feels nostalgic and a bit melancholy, like an old photograph. The images of rock formations are especially intriguing, since the refraction of light through the plexiglass makes the images appear to be 3-d, creating an impression of mass that shifts ever so slightly as you walk by. At times, as in Magic Numbers -- a group of rocks floating on a white ground -- this effect feels a bit forced; it's a neat visual trick, but it draws too much attention to itself. One other quibble: some of the larger images are obviously pieced together from several smaller inkjet prints, and the edges of the paper where they have been seamed together are visible. I can't think what the conceptual or aesthetic reason might be for interrupting these otherwise engrossing images with the signs of their fabrication. Rather than be reminded of the limitations of the artist's printer, I would have preferred to imagine that these mysterious landscapes arrived fully formed, like memory or dreams.
Eric Freeman at Western Project
I don't have a whole lot to say about this show. It's basically four, large, expertly executed oil paintings that all depict the same square shape -- a blurry black frame against a creamy ground. Somewhere between Op Art and Color Field painting, Freeman is a master of the optical effect in paint -- I think each painting had a slightly different hue in the center area, but it's hard to know if that's the pigment or just an ocular after effect. I understand what I'm supposed to get out of work like this -- it's supposed to turn me back on myself, make me aware of my viewership and the contingency of vision. In short, it's supposed to be an experience. And it is, it's just a rather superficial one. To my mind, Freeman's paintings are trying too hard. It's not a fair comparison, but I kept thinking about Ad Reinhardt's black paintings and how fascinating they are to look at. There's a poignant searching involved that makes you not only aware of yourself as a viewer, but brings you into a narrative of perception: searching out the barely perceptible becomes is a spiritual experience, an analogue for the search for the numinous. Freeman's work seems interested in these same issues, but without the same depth of soul.
9:39 PM
Comments [ ]
December 2003
January 2004
February 2004
March 2004
April 2004
May 2004
June 2004
July 2004
August 2004
September 2004
October 2004
November 2004
April 2005
August 2005
December 2005
January 2006
October 2006
January 2007
April 2007
^ back to top
|
