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Karen Rifas’ “Just Geometry” installation |
Like
many other things in the universe, art tends to swing
between poles of opposing values. Just when the penchant for
beauty and visual harmony and heroic painters making
colossal paintings seems to be on the ascent, an equally
powerful wave of artistic production defined by the
anti-masterpiece or the “non-retinal” comes to the
forefront. “Non-retinal” is Marcel Duchamp’s term for art
that instigates a mental or intellectual response from the
beholder, rather than an appreciation for formal or visual
elements such as color, line, texture, etc. All visual art
contains mental and formal qualities to varying degrees.
Presently in Miami there
is a two-part exhibition that invites viewers to cultivate
their awareness for and appreciation of the mental in art.
Conditions of Display, curated by Miami artist and
writer Gean Moreno, is on view at The Moore Space through
July 14, and at Locust Projects through June 30. Borrowing
works from local collectors, and from gallerists in New York
and elsewhere, Moreno has assembled a collection of objects
that typifies strategies that, while reviving some 1970s
conceptual art tactics, are unique to the present moment in
history. The concise, brilliant essay provided by art
historian George Baker directs our attention to the fact
that “looking incessantly produces value in our spectacular
economies.” This is the sort of artwork that is really
enhanced by reading the catalog essay, and here, we are
rewarded. Baker goes on to describe artworks that are
“knowingly dysfunctional,” and that have a “perverse
ineffectiveness.” The scattered objects arranged in the
standard white box exhibition spaces of both galleries
really do resist our consumption, at least in the standard
way that many of us expect to consume art.
It is that consumption
that is being critiqued here, and the spectator is asked to
radically alter his/her art appreciation apparatus in order
to swallow. Most of these works defy being pictures or
paintings or sculptures in any standard nomenclature. Moreno
is helpful and provides a “not a press release” that
elucidates some of the means to understand the work
presented. Largely eschewing traditional artist materials,
along with the elegiac aspirations of the artist,
Conditions of Display presents didactic artifacts that
may, at first, inspire puzzlement. If the viewer is to be a
full participant — the participant is necessary to complete
the circle — he/she must conduct a forensic investigation to
ferret out the meaning in the works. If the works do not
satisfy on a sensual level, they do provide a pinch that
reminds us not to take anything for granted. Each work
refers outward from itself, deflects attention from its own
internal characteristics so successfully, that if one thinks
about each as a lesson or a demonstration, the subject —
which is the machinations of culture, art, politics and
economics — becomes clearer.
A criticism of every
aspect of art production and dissemination is contained in
each of the works. If art is the merchandise in the retail
space of the gallery, then we can learn a lot about
merchandising of the art product today. In this regard, the
works in this exhibition are consummately “visual” art, as
they reveal forces at work that are normally concealed from
view. Svetlana Heger offers a burlesque of branding, her
feminine figure costumed and mounted on a horse, à la Lady
Godiva, completely swathed in colorful silken corporate
logos. Her text panels with titles of “Future Works”
on view at Locust Projects inject a faint whiff of humor in
an otherwise fairly arid exhibition. Miami artist Adler
Guerrier’s work resembles items of evidence that might be
mounted on a wall in a police investigation, and even has a
CSI/film noir title, “The Fifth Victim.” Guerrier crops
vignettes from the cityscape of Miami, and then layers with
image, sound and text, creating a multimedia static of
indistinctness. Spam paintings by Johannes Wohnseifer
translate cyber-junk mail to the pictorial plane: painting
as visual noise. Eugenio Espinoza offers a redux of a former
Locust Projects installation of his bisected grid paintings
with quixotic text messages. Tobias Buche, an artist from
Berlin, builds a rough-hewn display structure, with collaged
photos and news clippings, depicting shadowy, ambiguous
events. Sean Paul self-reflexively documents the
installation of the Conditions of Display exhibition itself
— not a lot of action shots. These works collectively do
romanticize the current duality of the artist, who is both a
marginalized slacker and an ambitious culture industry
insider with an MFA degree who lunches with wealthy
collectors.
Now, even after we
dutifully follow the instructions, pick up on all the cues
and achieve contact with this work that obstinately resists
our connoisseurship, it is important to note that the stuff
is sold in galleries, vied for by collectors and thus
acquires exposure, market value and credibility in the
conventional manner. Equally, it may all be ultimately
dumped at auction at some future moment for obscene sums, or
not. This certainly can demonstrate the irrelevance of the
avant-garde, an outdated military obsession which provided
much of the engine for modernist development. Baker finds
the same: “The static of some over-sensitized Dictaphone
plugged to the necessarily haunted world (and bodies)
through which capital flows spectrally (as digital units,
future profits, attention spans), we pick up the signals of
the foreclosure on a cultural artifact’s potential to cut
that infamous and necessary hole in the symbolic order.”
More than anything, it feels like the artists in
Conditions of Display are attempting to squeeze into
preordained conditions that they find too constricting. What
may come of all of this is hard to say, but again Baker
projects: “To allegorize the current impossibility of
transforming reality through artistic means in the present
is to retain the future possibility that such transformation
can be accomplished.…”
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Just downstairs from the
Moore Space, sculptor Karen Rifas has drawn lines in the air
with colored twine in an inspired, site-specific
installation called “Just Geometry.” Rifas has collaborated
with New World School of the Arts college dance majors to
present a performance work. The dancers wend their way
through various spaces and the multiple threads, which
resemble the staff lines in musical notation. “Just
Geometry” presumes a light footprint and produces a
full-bodied experience. See it Saturday, June 9, from 7 to
10 p.m.
Conditions of Display,
curated by Gean Moreno, is on view through June 30 at Locust
Projects,
105 NW 23rd St. (305-576-8570)
and until July 14 at the Moore Space, 4040 NE Second Ave.,
second floor (305-438-1163), both in Miami.
Michelle Weinberg is an
artist and writer based in Miami Beach and New York. She is
online at
www.michelleweinberg.com.
