Colin Foord of Coral Morphologic receives his Knight Arts Challenge 2011 Award from Alberto Ibargüen.

“Give us your best idea!” Say’s the Knight Arts Challenge 2012 accepting submissions Feb. 21 – March 19.

Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Art in the Everglades. Opera in unexpected places. Big Night in Little Haiti. Borscht Film Festival. Drumming lessons for Broward county school students. Young at Art Museum for Children. Cultural Passport for Miami Dade County Public School students. South Florida Composers Alliance. Free concerts in Miami Dade Parks. Exhibitions by exiled Cuban artists. Sight and sound installations by New World Symphony. Sleepless Night on Miami Beach. Gospel Sundays. Broward County Film Society. Florida Memorial Steel Band. Site specific art at Vizcaya. Miami Writer’s Prize.

What these programs and many more have in common is that they all won KAC Miami (Knight Arts Challenge Miami), a community-wide contest to find the best ideas for the arts in South Florida is sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Knight Foundation created the five-year annual contest in 2008 to help bring the South Florida community together through the arts.

The contest is part of Knight Foundation’s five-year, $40 million Knight Arts initiative, conceived to add to the impact of the arts on South Florida’s community. Over the past four years, the Knight Foundation has invested almost $19 million. There are only three rules for applying: The idea is about the arts; the project takes place in or benefits South Florida; and applicants must find other funding to match the Knight Foundation grant.

Individuals, nonprofits and for profit organizations are eligible to apply. The Knight Arts Challenge will accept applications for the fifth round of it’s community grants contest between Feb. 21-March. 19, 2012.

Have an idea? Visit www.KnightArts.org. The two-question application is designed to be simple to attract applicants who aren’t traditional grant seekers.

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation advances journalism in the digital age and invests in the vitality of communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. Knight Foundation focuses on projects that promote informed and engaged communities and lead to transformational change. For more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.

C-Print from Investigations (2007 – 2011). 30 x 40 inches.

On Friday December 16th Miami was officially introduced to the work of emerging artist Dogan Arslanoglu when “Investigations”, a solo exhibition featuring a photographic series by the same name, opened at 6th Street Container Gallery in Little Havana. With 30” x 40” digital prints made by photographing a television monitor close-up with 6” x 7” color film over a four year period (2007 – 2011), Arslanoglu represents footage from American television broadcast archives.

C-Print from Investigations (2007 – 2011). 30 x 40 inches.

Stills rendered from various iconic clips including a 1940′s atomic bomb test over Bikini Atoll and the Max Headroom Broadcast Signal Intrusion of 1987 are paired with vintage commercials advertising Coca-Cola, cereal, dental hygiene and cosmetics. Cropped into abstraction, many images are difficult to identify without a hint. The eye instantly recognizes the classic Coca-Cola can, but the atomic blast, equally ingrained in the social conscious, reads more ambiguously despite being depicted more completely – a glowing muddy, yellow-orange hamburger illuminating a hierarchy of cultural association grossly out of whack. Similarly in the Max Headroom still, the eerie sheet of corrugated metal with which the notorious masked culprit anonymizes his surroundings becomes little more than an intense, composition in glorious RGB.

C-Print from Investigations (2007 – 2011). 30 x 40 inches.

“Film is considered to be an important art form, a source of popular entertainment and a powerful method for educating – or indoctrinating – citizens.” – Wikipedia.

In “Investigations” we are shown that film as an artifact, a man-made evidential whole, can be questioned and ultimately dissected. Rendered with photography, pixels – elemental particles of red, green, and blue – are examined as building blocks, individual parts of larger configurations and in turn, cultural history. That which is familiar appears less obvious and that which is more obvious is somehow less familiar.

C-Print from Investigations (2007 – 2011). 30 x 40 inches.

Synopsized and revisited, what was once shot in a certain light from a certain angle, utilized, archived for posterity – which for a society of passive viewers oblivious to everything left outside of the frame and so fundamentally shackled by the media is evocative of Stockholm Syndrome – and presumed to be final is in fact open to interpretation. By photographing within pre-existing frames, Arslanoglu looks beyond the original point of view, directing nostalgia towards a synopsis that is all his own. In this way, emphasis is placed on the importance of a pro-active viewer who is able to open a dialogue between audience and television producer, and the notion that although it may be impossible to know what happened outside of the frame, there is always room for editing (and interpretation) within.

C-Print from Investigations (2007 – 2011). 30 x 40 inches.

In spite of their eclectic, often puzzling nature, all images in the series share these commonalities. They are a reminder of the heavy weight we put on a secondary reality made of virtual pixels, and Arslanoglu disenchants our identification with our own history and consumerist behavior through a secondary life of awful tints and graceless gestures. As no titles are provided it may be difficult for the casual spectator to identify exactly what events or commercials are depicted in the images, but an abiding sense that these new images are no doubt cynical and reflective of the absurd idea that American culture depends so greatly on vapid configurations of light that can only be made physically tangible when printed as a photograph prevails regardless[.]

This post was contributed by Violet Forest.

Jerry Saltz. Image courtesy of Art and Culture Center of Hollywood.

Jerry Saltz: senior art critic for New York Magazine, judge of Bravo’s Work of Art, and compulsive facebook user. There is little introduction to made for one of the most magnetic personalities in the contemporary art world. In anticipation for his lecture just past at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Jane Hart, Curator of Exhibitions facilitated a little interview for me with Jerry. We spoke over the phone and discussed his take on everything from facebook to the meaning of honesty in art criticism and his daily ritual of sitting in front of the computer from 7:30 am to 1 am.

Art criticism is such a funny animal and with the supersonic spread of blogging, tweeting, facebook status updates, etc it’s become even more so. You use both shorthand and longer prose formats and I wonder if you have a preference for one or the other?

JS: I would like to collapse both formats. I don’t make a distinction between “serious” and “not serious” writing. I always write about serious stuff that I’m thinking about in either format. I write for the reader. Most things I read are too long and don’t get to the point. You can go through five paragraphs before you get to one critical adjective that maybe has a point. Density in all things is good.

An art critic has to make themselves as vulnerable as what you’re writing about. You have to get out there and make yourself as available as possible. I don’t like being the critic on top of the mountain, speaking down to the masses. I want the many to speak to one another… to create a horizontal conversation. Art criticism should be chaotic and should recreate the experience of looking at art. It should not be easy to process, because looking at art is not easy to process.

And besides, art criticism doesn’t pay anything. And in all likelihood in the future it will pay even less so. So what that means is that you have total freedom in what you write about. There is no writing for money. You’re writing for the reader and reading about art can be as exciting as looking and talking about art.

Going back to what you had mentioned about the vulnerability, which format to find to be most honest?

JS: Every format! Look, if you’re not honest, the reader will know it in two seconds. You fall into the Mitt Romney role. Artforum is pornography. I can’t understand what they’re saying and they’re not taking any kind of a risk.

And beyond that honesty is really only a lie. A critic is like an artist inventing their ideas, language, persona, syntax, etc. It’s a fabrication. It’s really the idea of Wallace Stevens’ “supreme fiction.”

The effects of the onslaught of Art Basel Miami Beach have been widely discussed among locals in the art community as both a blessing and a curse. Based on your previous discussion on art fairs in general and their relationship to artists and art-making what are some of the positive and negative/ social and economic ramifications of this kind of event on a relatively young art community?

JS: Ok, Art Basel Miami Beach: good for emerging artists, good for the blood, good for parties and touching antennae and having a good time. How can it be bad, if you have the entire volunteer army of the art world at your doorstep? To say it’s a bad thing is being ungenerous. Even as fucked up as things have gotten, as horrendous as the equation between capital and quality has become within this system.

And it has to die; in fact it’s dying as we speak. I just posted an article today in response to Adam Lindemann and Charles Saatchi already turning on the system they helped to create. But this doesn’t mean we have to throw out the baby with the bastards. In fact, the babies need the bastards and vice versa.

One of his recent posts in New York Magazine is a sharp lashing of  Adam Lindemann’s supposed moratorium on this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach (he did in fact attend), and Charles Saatchi’s harsh criticism of the current state of the art world and collecting.

After we spoke, Adam Lindemann posted this response in the NY Observer.

“More on Miami – I’ve heard complaints from a lot of local artists about the void in Miami after Art Basel. Is it a viable place for an artist to work and hope to enjoy some success beyond our swamps and beaches? Is New York still the Shangri-La of the art world?”

JS: In Miami you can have a life, a studio and afford to work. Wherever you are, an artist needs to test your ideas out on strangers on a regular basis.

If you move to New York you won’t die, you’ll live in a shit hole, and you will have an inner life, but your outer life will die. In Miami, you can have an outer life and an inner life. I have no outer life, which is why I look the way I do. But I wouldn’t change it for the world.

(Jerry’s concept of the inner life refers to artistic practices and time spent thinking, talking and working, while the outer life could possibly include everything else.)

So what’s better? Do you have to move to New York to get rich and famous? I don’t know… it helps.

I have two secrets. I am going to tell you the second one first. I have very thick skin. I never take criticism personally because I know that there is probably a grain of truth to it. Even though it hurts, I always address them back. If you’re writing to be loved, then you’ve got trouble. I’ve never been asked to write for Artforum and they would never ask me to either. My voice would make no sense there.

The first secret is energy. Put yourself out there and produce, produce, produce. I have no degree (except my three honorary PhDs), and started in my forties, I’m a late bloomer. But I just put myself out there every day.

Finally, who is your favorite comedian?

JS: Sarah Silverman, Larry David, and I’m old school so Chris Rock.

One could argue this point, but Jerry Saltz is one of the art world’s most distinct figures. He is known for his unabashed critical observations of the contemporary art world and of course his wit. People either love him or hate him… either way they find themselves reading what he has to say. Saltz’s approach to art criticism is considered brazenly honest and straightforward, and he is not one to squirrel away from voicing his opinion, a quality that has also gained him cult status among fans.  Jerry credits his self-proclaimed “privileged” role and unique approach to beginning his career late in life. If you can imagine it, he once drove semi trucks across country and did not begin writing about art until his forties. Even now, when asked about being an art critic and how he came to be, Jerry has this to say:

JS: I feel lucky to get whatever I get. I’m where I am partly out of desperation. I came into the game so late, and I had to admit how badly I wanted to be in the art world. And I don’t consider myself a critic. At best, I consider myself a folk critic.

Upon finishing up the interview, Jerry invited me to communicate on facebook and exchange ideas with him on his page. I may be taking liberties here, but I invite all you facebookers (even the ones with the secret accounts) to do the same. Even if you hate him, go ahead, he can take it[.]

This past Saturday Jerry Saltz gave a lecture as part of the Hot Topics Discussion Series at Art and Culture Center of Hollywood.  For more information about past and future lectures in this series please go to: http://artandculturecenter.org/hot-topics.

This post was contributed by Melissa Diaz.

Hennessy Youngman giving his “His History of Art” lecture at NADA Miami Beach.

This year’s installment of Art Basel Miami Beach mania brought the usual army of art world celebrities to Miami. Among the throngs of the who’s who was newcomer to Miami Basel, Hennessy Youngman who gave a lecture labeled “His History of Art” at NADA Miami Beach. In keeping with the popular ART THOUGHTZ series currently available on Hennessy’s Youtube channel, Youngman tells it like it is with help of a prepared slideshow and a glass of Hennessy to steer the course.

Audience at Hennessy Youngman’s “His History of Art” lecture at NADA Miami Beach.

Youngman has become a hit among art students who find the marriage of his humor and criticality refreshing in the sea of bloated art speak. This was made evident in the huge turnout that packed the lobby of the Deauville hotel for his performance. Much of his success comes from embracing the role of outsider with insider knowledge that makes him both approachable and intellectually stimulating. Recently, his popularity is also garnering him critical acclaim, named as one of the top ten highlights of 2011 by art critic Michael Ned Holte for Artforum’s annual “Best of” edition.

For the NADA performance, Youngman’s lecture, which in keeping with Miami time started behind schedule, began as teaser of slides and comments referring to the secret of success for artists. Youngman described a timeline dating back to everything and everyone from ancient cultures to conquistadors and scientists. Including all examples of human creativity and innovation. For all of this, Youngman said we can credit one thing… the ultimate secret to success and what he referred to as the “artist’s ally” in all things creative. This, Youngman finally reveals is one thing and one thing only… cocaine. And if you were paying close attention, and considering that this lecture was written for Youngman’s first Miami performance, you might have seen this one coming.

Hennessy Youngman’s “His History of Art” lecture at NADA Miami Beach.

Upon wrapping up his lecture with a barrage of slides that included everyone from Marcel Duchamp to Claes Oldenburg to Damian Hirst, Youngman took a scientific approach to proving the positive effects of cocaine on the practices of all successful artists. In the end, proclaiming, “cocaine is the eternal friend of people who need to do shit.” The crowd, filled with everyone from hipsters to an impressive turnout by local artists sipping on green Grolsch bottles were enthralled by Youngman’s energy. So much so, that Youngman headed into the crowd in a stand-up comedian style tête-à-tête with members of the audience. At one point singling out the only collector he could find to try to sell him some work. Wherever he went in the audience and whomever he chose to sit down with, everyone was wide-eyed and star struck and snapping pictures with smart phones. I can honestly say that the audience was in love with Hennessy Youngman.

Hennessy Youngman speaking with Peggy Nolan.

Hennessy Youngman is the creation of artist Jayson Musson, whose work has become synonymous with the characters he develops. However, Musson is no one trick pony. Other examples of work that represent more traditional art forms include a set of colorful abstract “paintings” made from woven Coogi sweaters currently on view at David Castillo Gallery in the group exhibition Don’t Get High On Your Own Supply. For these paintings, Musson borrows from the visual language of Abstract Expressionism and uses materials that reference pop culture icons like rapper Biggie Smalls (The Notorious B.I.G) and Bill Cosby, cleverly joining versions of “high” and “low” art forms. Also included in the exhibition are classic ART THOUGHTZ on Bruce Nauman and Post Structuralism.

Courtesy David Castillo Gallery, Photography by Alissa Christine.

Musson is also currently part of a two-person intervention exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Hennessy Youngman has created an audioguide to accompany visitors through the museum’s collection along with two videos in the ART THOUGHTZ vein that are also in dialogue with the museum’s collection. An intervention, that Musson notes, hasn’t been exactly welcomed by the museums more conservative docents[.]

This post was contributed by Melissa Diaz.

l’Encyclopédie De La Performa 2011. Courtesy if the author and Art in America Magazine.

On Nov 2, as part of the Performa 11 Biennal activities,’ L’Encyclopedie de la Parole’, a French performance group dedicated  to using speech as the central element in performance, produced a series of carefully chorused Speech Pieces based on familiar spoken texts taken from political rhetoric, YouTube’s  ‘most-watched’ videos and other pop American language sources.

Unlike spoken word performances, Slams and Rants, the work here is traditional-style rehearsed composition with a group of speaker/singers and a choral conductor. And the reference to older forms is an invitation to examine the appropriated content more closely: having been elevated here in a well-rehearsed aesthetic context that reinforces the sense of nuance and care that is central to this group’s exploration into linguistic constructs.

The French appreciation of language, the significance of words and their pronunciation, of complex verbal structures in that ‘diplomatic’ language alongside the more haphazard, innovative and free-style aspects of the American use of language is a striking mix that arguably brings out the qualities of both approaches; in this case American content presented into a French style structural form.

The group is composed of Francophone and Anglophone artists singing together; the words are carefully, maybe even over-pronounced so that we fully understand them, even though there are a number of different accents involved. The effect of American language constructs that went viral in one way or another, being turned into a kind of slo-mo, fastidious chant, is humorous and then revealing in the same way as other close-ups of pop phenomena.

On one hand, the greater significance of the content is in each case distilled down to it’s bottom line essence by virtue of being re-presented in this re-focused context; on the other the vapid superficiality of some of what goes viral is also laid bare. Not least here, the way language is used to express emotion becomes almost comic when elevated to song, then repeated in chorus structure.

In a sense, the emphasis on language, removed from its context and sung, can be considered analogous to the use of text in visual forms: Lawrence Weiner and Jean Michel Basquiat used words and phrases to add dimension and to express the back and forth of ambiguity and meaning that language is capable of; particularly when extracted from it’s original context.

In this case Presence, the primal, electro-magnetic even of Performance, and spoken word, replace text (and language) used in 2 and 3 dimensional traditional forms, but abstracted in a parallel way: Basquiat’s use of pop phrases clipped from common usage come more to mind here than, for example, Lawrence Weiner’s more heady single word byte constructions from a content angle are comparable in the way these demand that we focus on the actual non-contextural meaning. The polished  presentation is closer to Bruce Nauman. whose blinking neon phrases and video of a clown on a toilet agonizingly moaning out the letters of the alphabet come quickly to mind.

L’Encyclopedie has here blended 2 disparate cultural practices; the informal and formal, the structured and unstructured, in a way that reveals aspects of both; they’ve mined language in ways parallel to other contemporary forms; the focus on language is a striking reminder of the  complexity  power of word, and not least when the ever expanding theoretical language around art continues to become central to the actual content of art[.]

Link here to a video of L’Encyclopedie de la Parole.

This post was contributed by David Rohn.

Installation view, main floor, photo by Stephan Goettlicher.

Re-Framing the Feminine: Contemporary Photography by Women from the Collection of Francie Bishop Good + David Horvitz, the current exhibition on view at Girls’ Club, an alternative exhibition space in downtown Fort Lauderdale, explores the varying narratives and complex relationships between female photographers and their subjects. Curated by Dina Mitrani, whose Wynwood gallery specializes in contemporary photography. Mitrani’s background lends one of the strengths of the exhibition that demonstrates a careful consideration of the medium and it’s variances in deployment and development from the 1950s to the present.

Tina Barney, The Grandaughter, 2004, chromogenic print.

The exhibition seeks to explore a uniquely feminine approach to photography – that is capturing subjects both figural and psychological that reflect a woman’s view of the world and what matters most to us as women.  A view that is as subjective as it is generalized in the selection of the works in Re-Framing the Feminine. While feminism as a topic is not new nor cutting-edge in discussions in modern and contemporary art, what is intriguing about this small survey is the polemical underlying psychology interplay of feminine notions of narcissism and vanity. Even in the face of extreme poverty as in Maria Michelogianni’s  Barbie in Athens where even in the direst of states, a little girl still holds a Barbie up as an emblem; or the exuberant wealth of Tina Barney’s New York socialite world, the primal need to explore and represent women as both strong and now sexual is shuffling its way into debates on contemporary feminism. Whether subconsciously hinted at or boldly stated, these issues are at the core of neo-feminist discussions like Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, a controversial defense of a kind of reverse misogyny that seems to be taking hold of contemporary society and pop culture.

Isn’t Cindy Sherman exploiting the sexual nature of female archetypes in her Film Stills to the benefit of her artistic innovation? What of Kristine Potter whose The Gray Line series feminizes trainees at West Point Academy? It points to a trend of women artists using technology along with conceptions of beauty, vanity and hyper-self awareness to achieve a certain level of control over their subjects. In the case of Sherman, it can be viewed as an act of aggression against the preset notions of femininity and art, while in Potter it can be understood as a means of injecting a bit of feminine vulnerability to a world of typically staunch masculine stoicism. For Untitled #7, she masks the face of a male soldier with the floral pattern of a military camo net.

Gismo – Aye!, 2006, C-print.

One of my favorite works was Miami collaborative GisMO’s Aye!, primarily because it resonated with my own Miami upbringing. The image of an aging “chonga” applying mascara to the point of discomfort was a particularly poignant reflection of the feminine preoccupation with outward appearances. A reflection that is mirrored by Delia Brown’s Some of My Clothes, a series of 98 4×6 photographs that show the artist blankly modeling the contents of her closet.

Obsession with appearance and the self is not limited to adult womanhood. Many of the works in the exhibition explore of the controversial subject of the sexual disposition of young girls. Sally Mann’s photography has widely been mined for it’s ambiguous approach to her child subjects (her own children).  Virginia at 3 is a particularly complex example of Mann’s work that straddles the realms of sexuality and innocence, two concepts that are commonly associated within negative terms. The young Virginia leans against a bed where her sibling lies resting, her little hand on her hip and the other on her breast, suggests an early determination of the power of her femininity and her body. Through the lens of neo-feminist discourse, this kind of imagery empowers her young subject with the potential knowledge of her own future sexual prowess. It isn’t a bad thing, but the idea of children exploring their sexual identity, as innocently and naturally as it is, is not a topic that makes people comfortable.

Sally Mann - Virginia at 3, 1998, gelatin silver print.

In other works, youthful sexual exploration isn’t as benign. Colby Katz, whose work explores the raw artificiality of children’s beauty pageants is represented in the exhibition by Rayne-Lin, Little Miss Firecracker, LA. The photograph shows the tiny figure of a somber little girl dwarfed by the trophy she clutches and enormous crown on her head. Emotionally void, the little girl’s face falls downward, the opposite of the self-assured Virgina in Mann’s portrait.

Photography is the most deceptive medium in that it suggests realty in the way no other art form does. This deception is what good photographers have capitalized on for years to manipulate stories and raise issues through their work. For women, it has been an enormously popular outlet exploring notions of gender and identity. In a way, Re-Framing the Feminine suggests that female photographers seem to turn the camera on themselves even when they are not. Even the psychological spaces favored by artists like Ania Moussawel and Candida Höfer, reflect the stereotypical concepts of fragility, delicacy and beauty associated with femininity.

Installation view, mezzanine, photo by Stephan Goettlicher.

At its inception, photography was a product of male relationships with machinery. ‘The man and the machine’: a symbolical pairing long associated in Western societies with progress, power, and linked to colossally masculine concepts like Fordism. Yet, at some point, perhaps around the chronological starting point of this exhibition, female photographers began to rise to prominence. With leading figures like Diane Arbus, Sherman and Nan Goldin (who are all represented in the exhibition), photography seems to be  the medium in which women have managed to gain the boldest presence. It appears that the female relationship to the camera – the woman and the machine – deserves a little historical revision and scholarly attention in light of the shifting voices of feminism. Re-Framing the Feminine is a concise survey of such a dialogue that deserves further exploration.  It’s exemplary of the power of a simple survey exhibition to raise questions rather than offer watered down answers to monumental questions. However, instead of “re-framing,” it would be nice to see forthcoming explorations go beyond the frame, and back to the machine and how women command it both in front of and behind the lens[.]

Re-Framing the Feminine is currently on view through September 30, 2012 at The Girl’s Club. A catalogue for the exhibition is slated for release in the spring with an essay written by the prolific photography historian and critic, Vicki Goldberg. Re-Framing the Feminine will also the thematic backdrop for the upcoming installment of Artists in Action!,  a series of behind-the-scenes lectures and demonstrations by artists at the Girls’ Club.

This post was contributed by Melissa Diaz.

Two weeks ago Hugo Montoya, Meatball, Justin Long, and others including Alvaro Ilizarbe and Gavin Perry opened a very fun show called ‘Bros B4 HOES’ at the Little River Yacht Club. It’s closing is tomorrow, Saturday, November 4th from 1-6 and there’s still a lot of ‘boy butter’ (sex lubricant), ball-headed dildos, a big cock slide, a dildo-climbing wall with a brass dildo suspended like a trophy at the top, and a strap-on cock-connector’ for attaching 2 guys to each other by a pipe at their crotches (this broke at the opening when Meatball got a little carried away with his partner).

Alvaro Ilizarbe taking down Gavin Perry with a pizza box with slit and tub of ‘Boy Butter’.

The real ‘meat’ of the show would have to be Hugo’s photos of the boys wrestling with each other in their underpants; striking poses of feigned surprise, dominance, submission, or just plain old coyness, all set against tecnicolor-pastel backgrounds. The shows at LRYC are events really: People whooped as they slid down the cock slide, climbed the dildo wall, laughing and gulping beer. Montoya mentioned that the work wasn’t really for sale and in any event a lot of it had to be cleared out to make room for other day-to-day activities. Yeah art for art’s sake; and in this case a bit of vaguely naughty fun.

Center: The Dick Slide Left: A fragment of one of Hugo Montoya’s photographs.

Dildo-climbing wall with brass dildo ‘prize’ suspended at top

Ten years after the term ‘metrosexual’ was coined and men first felt that they maybe didn’t need to pretend to be a cyclist or s professional swimmer to justify shaving their arms, legs, chest and back, it’s finally come to this: erotic acting out among guys who’ve been told that ‘boys will be boys’ but that don’t you dare veer off the rigid path of manliness. As if all those cowboys and boy scouts didn’t share a moment or two themselves from time to time over years of ‘bonding’ in tents. What a relief to see that the freeing up that so often starts with artists, is finally about letting the cat out of the (sleeping) bag. It looked as though the gals were loving it too: with all those dicks around what’s not to like… And maybe, after all the criticism men have taken for finding two women ‘together’ highly erotic, it turns out that some women might think watching two men go at it is titillating too[.]

This post was contributed by David Rohn.

His Wife, Her Lover installation view. Photo by Peter Vahan.

There are two villains in movie history that have haunted my nightmares since I was a little girl: Baron Vladimir Harkonnen from David Lynch’s Dune (1984) and Albert Spica from Peter Greenaway’s x-rated cult classic The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989). Having first viewed both under the watchful eye of my parents, my repulsion and morbid fascination with these characters followed me into adulthood where I’ve since watched them over and over again, still as terrified. It was with this intrigue that I recently visited Primary Projects’ newest exhibition His Wife, Her Lover, a group show that, for the most part, maintains the textural decadence and upfront brutality its namesake film hauntingly portrays.

The premise of the show emerges from what Typoe, Director of Exhibitions at Primary Projects calls an aesthetic that explores the “dark and sexy undertones” of human nature. The show’s press release reveals that the exhibition was conceived as “a call-and-respond to destruction, secrecy, violence, social class, pride and desire.” A welcome opportunity no doubt, for these artists to explore the most depraved natures of our culture.

Emmet Moore. Cage. Photo by Peter Vahan.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is Emmet Moore’s Cage, which dangles from the center of the gallery like a sadomasochistic chandelier. Confined inside are three bold beams of clinically white fluorescent lights. A master of material deception, Moore masquerades painted wood to look like the kind of cold iron cage one would imagine in hanging in the cellar of Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado.

Onlookers and Emmet Moore. Photo by Peter Vahan.

Greenaway’s film, which marries the human fascination with gore, sex and gluttony with something that can only be understood in terms of a Baroque sensibility is dutifully manifested in His Wife, Her Lover. The heaving breasts of Rubenesque nymphs are updated with the gyrating pelvic thrusts and bouncing breasts of the professional stripper included in Jessy Nite’s tiny single room installation Hell Here (lap dances were offered on opening night for the going rate of $20). The intensity of canvases dripping with blood (think Caravaggio’s self portrait David with the Head of Goliath, 1605-06) are referenced in the dramatic splattering of melted red Crayola crayon in Scott Shannon’s medium specific I’m Not Like Other Girls. Andrew Nigon’s colorful totem Figurine of Stripy Posing as the Messiah recalls the highly manufactured and laughable theatrics of much of the religious art produced during this time.

Andrew Nigon. Figurine of Stripy Posing as the Messiah. Plaster, wood, acrylic and epoxy. 17 x 12 x 10 inches. Photo by Peter Vahan.

George Sanchez Calderon’s works fully embrace the artificiality of a neo-Baroque aesthetic. His Vacas Flacas recall the pregnant seascapes of Rubens and Géricault. However, underneath the surface of the romantic grand ship at sea is the palpable presence of insincere materials like glitter, that are manufactured to pretend to be valuable. In these seemingly traditional works, Calderon combines these less expensive materials like Xerox copies with pigment and crafts EPS foam frames made to mimic their gilded Baroque counterparts.

George Sanchez-Calderon. Crack Can Pipe. Aluminum can and spray paint. 4.8 x 1.5 inches. Photo by Peter Vahan.

An effect more obviously seen in Crack Can Pipe, an aluminum can fashioned to function as drug paraphernalia and sprayed in gold paint. It manifests the subtle conversion from garbage to functional object to finally object of value and all the varying ways we fetishize these things. The works become less about the objects themselves, and more about Calderon’s desire to make their artificiality transparent.

(Untitled) Remnants No. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Manny Prieres and Carlos Suarez De Jesus. Photo by Peter Vahan

One of the more successful surprises in the show is Manny Prieres’ Remnants series. The series of six black monochromatic ‘mourning cards’ hand copied from found nineteenth century mourning cards that were originally mass-produced and sold to commemorate the dead. The series marks a shift in Prieres’s artistic practice, whose work has been known for his carefully rendered drawings and visual language steeped in personal iconography.

Manny Prieres. From Remnants series. Graphite, gouache and enamel on board. 20 x 13.25 inches. Photo by Peter Vahan.

The singular use of black is not a new element in his work, but has played an integral role in recent work. Black is a color many artists avoid using so liberally because it absorbs everything and emits nothing. Prieres says he has “always been fascinated with the baggage of the color black.” By covering the areas of the cards where the deceased name should be with reflective black enamel, Prieres dramatically shifts the subject of this work from himself to the viewer.

In Remnants, Prieres is interested in juggling and comparing the complex associations with death and notions of legacy. For Prieres, these vary from Latin cultures where death is a very powerful presence in the make-up of family and social life to counter-culture youth subgroups like Goths and punks that identify with the concept death only as a signifier of rebellion.

Cleo Peterson. Daybreak 1. Acrylic on 12 piece wood panels. 66 x 88 inches overall.

There are other undertones in Peter Greenaway’s film and this exhibition that remain just below the surface of all the dramatics. And that includes the inevitable connection between wealth, excess and absolute corruption. Whether that be brute violence (as in Nardon’s Only the Strong, an archeological hanging of fabricated jailhouse shivs) or the racial and social class struggles that explode on the surface of Cleon Peterson’s apocalyptic Daybreak 1.  Johnny Robles’ Little Boy, a missile on top of a large coil meant to look like a children’s rocking playground toy reminds one of the propagandic objects used to indoctrinate children to the principles of war and hatred.

Scott Shannon. ­­­Don’t Even Care I’m Going to Prom. Crayola Crayon on Paper. 6 x 6 feet. Photo by Peter Vahan.

Scott Shannon’s ­­­Don’t Even Care I’m Going to Prom appropriates the symbol of a Swastika, delicately rendered from pink roses in Crayola crayon. The drawing is not offensive in content, but in the lack of consideration to its content. The Swastika is a symbol with such a rich history and significance that throwing it out there without much context in a group exhibition runs the risk of falling flat with a thud. Positioned in the back wall of the gallery, it careens forward like a visual blitzkrieg when you enter the space, and never delivers much beyond that initial shock-and-awe, which doesn’t leave much of an impression in light of the stronger works in the exhibition.

Shannon’s other contribution to the show holds a much different effect. It allows the tactility of his medium (crayons) to take center stage of this 2-panel drawing. The red Rorschach-like drawing explodes in the front area of the gallery like a bloody mess. Its rich redness, contrasted against the white of the paper makes the implied carnage of it all seem so attractive.

Scott Shannon. I’m Not Like Other Girls. Crayola Crayon on Paper. 6 x 12 feet. Photo by Peter Vahan.

Nick Klein’s Luvv Buzzed also felt a little overdone within the inner workings of the exhibition. The video installation is predominantly slow-motion images of what could be an under-age girl’s face looking emotionless into the camera while someone “off-stage” is hosing her down with water. It’s direct reference to sex and violence left little wiggle room for a viewer to reflect on their own sinful engagement with the piece – an attribute that made other works in the show so successful.

The drama of His Wife, Her Lover, comes not only from the works selected, but also in the theatrics of the show’s orchestration. The show is subtly divided into areas that support and enhance the show’s “dark and sexy undertones.” The strongest (and starkest) of these exists within the dialogue between Prieres’ Remnants, Moore’s Cage, Nite’s Hell Here, and Peterson’s Daybreak 1. The exhibition straddles the serious and the bizarre with just enough humor that it pacifies any discomfort one would feel with the subject matter at hand. It strikes the same careful balance between these elements that continues to make Greenaway’s film so irresistible[.]

This post was contributed by Melissa Diaz.

Any Ever (2011) installation view, courtesy MOCA, North Miami.

Any Ever has now been exhibited at MoMA PS1 (2011), MOCA, North Miami (2011), MOCA, Los Angeles (2010), and internationally at The Power Plant, Toronto (2010), and The Istanbul Modern (2011). Subsequently Any Ever is scheduled to be shown at Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris beginning October 18^th.

Ryan Trecartin’s videos are as chaotic, smarmy, and irreverent as anything that could be distilled from ‘Jersey Shore’ or ‘Real Housewives of (wherever).’ Teenage types, often in in multi-colored, smeared-on make-up, carry on in ‘Valley Girl’ banter about… ‘whatever.’ Their tempos are hyper-compressed, the action contained only quasi-sequential and plots are indecipherable and seemingly inconsequential. A bunch of artist-collaborateurs, cast child actors, and the artist himself cavort in front of video cameras, in some cases shooting the action with their own cameras in an engaging exercise of apparently careless, self absorbed chaos.

The MOCA North Miami installation, concurrent with a prior exhibition at PS1, features seven roughly 45 minute parallel videos shown in spaces, sometimes rooms, that are equipped with different furniture arrangements: beds, benches, stools, office chairs, a picnic table, large projection screens and headphones.  The spaces are defined in the video wall-menu as ‘section ish’, ‘section a’, ‘history enhancement’; the 7 videos are called: ‘Ready‘, ‘P.opular  S.ky‘, ‘Sibling Topics’, ‘K.Coreal.NC.K‘, ‘Temp Stop‘, ‘Roamie View‘, and ‘The Re’Search‘. These seven videos were shot during Trecartin’s 2009 artist residency at the Moore Space (now closed) in Miami’s Design District. Explanations for each video typically refer to other videos in the series; characters who ‘either reappear or are replicated as young girls’, characters who ‘roam backwards through time’, situations described as ‘real and not’, that ‘key the understanding of Trilogy Comp.’, as ‘simultaneously familial and corporate,’ and finally the statement that ‘transeumerism, or consumerism driven by experience, is also introduced as a central theme and also underlies the plight of  JJ..”(One of the characters).

Any Ever (2011) installation view, courtesy MOCA, North Miami.

Watching these comfortably presented videos then is an individual experience where the viewer zones into Trecartin’s mad world of artfully ambiguous language, complex structures and inexplicable contradictions. The non-stop barrage of dissociated sequencing, the harsh pitch of the endless dialogue, the machine gun editing, and the hyperactive antics of the cast all generate a kind of Attention- Deficit- Disorder-fiesta. It is so like the day-to-day TV and Internet, infomercial overload, that the sense of pathos and stress seems immediately as familiar as it is indecipherable.

What seems significant is the apparently careful structuring that goes into producing these hot messes: Trecartin scripts his videos, placing him up there with Frank Zappa, who’s scored Rock ‘n’ Roll compositions could scarcely sound more spontaneously improvised. The use of language, here in its most ruthless contemporary colloquial forms, is particularly striking. In a recent interview (LINK) the artist said “I try to explore language as something that extends into every aspect of a presentation. And so when a character has a sentence, the sentence has position, body language, a palette of accents and face all being used equally to read meaning. The clothing, hair and makeup are then extensions or additional words to the person’s form or attempt to originate a read. This happens again with the editing and final affects. The whole piece is language and so the presentation of the face is an aspect of that language expressed. I don’t see it as dramatic, but more as in pace with the speed of thought expression.”

Any Ever (2011) installation view, courtesy MOCA, North Miami.

The editing job here is the most artful mix of images, effects, sequences, tempo switches, etc., in memory; the stream of conscious barrage feels as righteously tight as any of the best jazz compositions or Blues riffs; or for that matter as any hyper compressed 30 second spot ad. Trecartin has said of his use of cinematic time that “Yes, time is altered to enhance and encourage felt experience. The timing is manipulated to take the viewer into the piece enhancing a more ride-like digestion of the story, making the act of viewing a part of the piece. The timing comments on the current theme being experienced and explored in the current scene. It all depends on what moment of the piece you happen to be watching. And maybe the timing is a character that evolves and has it’s own “plot personality.”

These videos are incredibly watchable, funny, tragic, idiotic and un-assimilatable as electronic digital life itself. Beyond their qualities of superb craftsmanship and accessibility, Trecartin’s videos stand out because they mirror aspects of contemporary life so successfully, and by exaggeration so vividly, that they enable us to step back and see clearly. The way these characters interact, constantly expressing and repeating their own thoughts and feelings, showing little to no interest in what the other characters have to say, seems on closer inspection, to reflect the way so many people now, massaged by the intoxicating pleasure of texting and tweeting their own communication, are less inclined to consider what others have to say in response, or about themselves.

Of course, this isn‘t exclusive to some younger digitized generation; the political classes in the US have been using the news media to talk at each other instead of with each other for some years. We see this on C-Span when we compare the activity at the British Parliament, where active debate in a packed house is the norm, to the US Congress where a single Legislator stands before a empty house, speaking fervently to a set of cameras on entering a position into the Congressional Record before returning to the fund-raising treadmill.

Any Ever (2011) installation view, courtesy MOCA, North Miami.

We also see a parallel form of self-absorption, one that easily goes to a level that is anti-social compared to past norms, in the reality TV shows:  Characters vie for center stage by out-doing each other in advancing their individual agenda at the expense of others’ ‘agendas’ to the end that a character whose social life, jewelry, nails, hair, or simply noise, triumphs over her competitors, wins. Has the culture of individuality, of self-aggrandizement, of capitalism itself, finally trumped the fundamental reasons people form societies in the first place: to advance collective gains more successfully and to protect the weak and vulnerable? It feels more like once you’ve had 15 minutes of fame, or made your first million, that the only thing worth doing is to start working on the next. Whatever the case, and whether or not TV and social media (or contemporary art for that matter) are accurate reflections of current social mores, Trecartin’s videos seem to have focused on a tendency to be self-absorbed and self-aggrandizing in a way that resonates.

Watching his hyper-energized players competing over cameras and microphones the realities of war for profit, mass unemployment and home foreclosures don’t come immediately to mind, but the bankruptcy of self-absorption is now central to so much of our culture that it seems only right that so much talent has gone into creating art that is so fundamentally about this contemporary trend[.]

The presentation of Any Ever at MOCA, North Miami was coordinated by MOCA’s Associate Curator, Ruba Katrib.

The seven videos in the exhibition Any Ever can be seen in their entireties on Vimeo.

This post was contributed by David Rohn

The Museum of Contemporary Art is located at 770 NE 125th Street, North Miami, Florida.  For information, please call 305.893.6211 or visit www.mocanomi.org.  Museum hours are:  Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday from 11 am to 5 pm; Wednesday from 1 pm to 9 pm; Sunday from noon to 5 pm.  MOCA is also open on the last Friday of each month from 7 – 10 pm.

Image courtesy of the author and Dorsch Gallery, Miami.

For the first time, a light feeling issues from the multi-artist framework of the Dorsch Gallery. It goes without saying that most of the shows from the Wynwood trailblazer leave viewers with an eerie, almost foreboding chill once outside the lime green door. Past shows such as Clifton Childree – Robert Thiele – Arnold Mesches, Noise Field (with Martin Murphy, Antonia Wright and Odalis Valdivieso among others), and Brandon Opalka – Felecia Chizuko Carlisle have emitted a haunted, almost troubling vibration in sound and sight combined, however, this latest offering – three solo shows from Cheryl Pope, Audrey Hasen Russell and Raymond Saá – initiates a feeling of humor, albeit laden with postmodern gravitas, that has been previously elusive if not well-concealed. That is not to say that this exhibition doesn’t carry the subjective turbulence of shows gone by, but somehow each artist approaches their media with a stroke of satire; an ability to see past the oppressive ideals which inform their works by adding elements of sparkles (Russell), tassels (Saà) and corny anniversary lettering (Pope) to balance the tension.

Image courtesy of the author and Dorsch Gallery, Miami.

Bone-crushing tension and domestic strife pervades Pope’s Matter of Fact, a litotic and definitively titled exhibition that seeks to illustrate the balances and struggles constantly at work inside conjugal homes. The emphasis on our masculine-feminine relationship in Pope’s active works involves countless sets of fine china and standard porcelain dishes; the ritualistic ‘serving’ gestures with dinner/flatware are implied specifically in a film that recalls the seemingly endless routines of wives serving husbands and children, husband-wife trade offs to cook and clean, and the unspoken words in between these mundane household routines. Pope alludes to a feminine sensibility in this series; highlighting the inherent delicacy of dishware by fashioning it into dangerous shapes. She underscores a frustration; a restlessness with the stereotypically ‘nuclear’ home and seems to disrupt that rhythm in the guise of heavy, screeching, often weaponized porcelain. Nevertheless, and no doubt intentionally evocative of the confusion inherent in quarreling, the searing noise of the plates against the wall that permeates the show make absorbing all of these complex processes difficult.

Image courtesy of the author and Dorsch Gallery, Miami.

Russell’s Gold Slaw focuses on natural textures and their interplay with man-made forms in a much more esoteric deployment. Drawing on her childhood impressions of rural Eastern Tennessee, Russell coats a web of tree branches in lime green felt, drapes gold ribbon on various twigs, and shows drips of honey-colored rhinestones running onto the bark then gathering onto plates seemingly pierced by the wood itself. This conversation continues with another structure of twigs issuing from two graffiti-streaked cinder blocks, echoing the honey drops of the ‘felt tree’. A digital print collage of the white painted ceiling of Russell’s studio is pinned on the wall, with glittery emerald plants seeming to grow from behind the roof itself (an irony of man and nature, since the pants look startlingly genuine. Not bad, coming from a craft store!).

Image courtesy of the author and Dorsch Gallery, Miami.

Nearby, blown glass orbs reveal mini ‘moonscapes’ at their juncture with the wall; the appearance of cottage-industry glass vessels and extra-terrestrial soil illuminate the obvious distance in understanding between human kind and the universe beyond. A similar feeling is evoked from a back-lit mountain scene crafted from yellow glass embellished with mounds of orange felt, with the sensation of a wheat field on the floor below made from hand-cut foam plastic.

Image courtesy of the author and Dorsch Gallery, Miami.

Saá’s sensitively executed, large-scale paintings borrow their collective title from a 1942 work from Duchamp created for Breton’s seminal First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in New York wherein the artist laced the space in a web of white thread making it near-impossible for patrons to effectively absorb works on view. Saá’s only literal reference to the title appears in the string-like swirls of purplish dark paint set against a silvery white background, but more accurately refers to his observations of natural environments in spreading out his compositions on overlapping leafs of paper. One work, in particular, shows a delicate row of painted tassels, somehow adding a touch of elegance (which tassels may well do in domestic environments) to the otherwise straightforward paintings. Saá seems determined to retain the simplicity of painting, but adds sculptural elements to demonstrate the complexities of negotiating two-dimensional space. His monochromatic exercises are laden with innocence, but informed with ably appointed expressionist techniques; the balance is ultimately struck between bold three-dimensional forms and subdued two-dimensional abstract imagery.

Image courtesy of the author and Dorsch Gallery, Miami.

On the whole, the Pope – Russell – Saá show at Dorsch leaves the viewer feeling invigorated and curious, wondering what the natural world is really trying to tell us. Our own domesticated environment often veils the view, but these three artists have decided to step past it, yielding a playful, often provocative perspective. If there is one slightly negative assessment of the lot, it is that Pope’s multimedia extravaganza seemingly overshadows the efforts of Russell and Saà, who both  possess no less intellectual strength in their installations than does Pope[.]

This post was contributed by Shana Beth Mason.