SHIGERU TAKATO | OUR ELUSIVE COSMOS

Shigeru Takato

Work from Our Elusive Cosmos.

“These are photographs of landscapes on Earth relating to the exploration of space and our cosmos. These relations could be scientific, mythological, factual, or religious. We often analyse, philosophise and romanticise our cosmos. Our knowledge of it is limited and much remains unknown and a mystery. In the late 60’s and early 70’s we began to see images of the lunar landscape. NASA’s Martian rovers “Spirit” and “Opportunity” send images of the Martian landscape everyday. These landscapes we see of space are loaded with thoughts, beliefs, ambitions and imaginations, in which we search for more clues and knowledge. But are we seeing anything other than what we expect? Are these landscapes from outer space anything beyond our imagination? When we are faced with these images, what are we really seeing? Can we imagine any extraterrestrials that do not look like our typical aliens?” - Shigeru Takato

RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER | CARLSON

Artist: Richard Artschwager

Venue: Carlson, London

Exhibition Title: Richard Artschwager Curated by Rob Pruitt

Date: February 25 – March 31, 2011

Curated by: Rob Pruitt

Images courtesy of Carlson Gallery, London

Press Release:

When I was in my early 20s, after I graduated from art school, I worked at Sonnabend gallery. On the side, to supplement my income, I got a job working for Richard Artwschwager. At that time, in the late 80s, there was an explosion of interest in Artschwager’s work. I remember, in particular, a show at Leo Castelli gallery called “Artwschwager: Peers and Persuasions,” with artists like Ashley Bickerton, Meyer Vaisman, and Peter Halley. As a 23 year old, it was a tremendous privilege to get to know the man – I was in awe.

Artschwager’s studio was in a garage behind his house, and after a morning of work, we would all have lunch in the main house seated at a twelve foot long oak dining table. That table is depicted in the “Two Dinners” painting that is in this exhibition, and that painting was made in 1988, the year that I worked for Artschwager. So essentially, I have lived in that painting, and that’s my point of entry when I look at it. This seems appropriate, as so much of Artschwager’s work is about bridging the gap between the real, practical world, and the other, more mysterious worlds depicted in art.

In “Two Dinners,” there are a multitude of worlds depicted – the world atop the table, the world of the room that the table sits in, the world outside through the double doors, the world of the painting, cut off, which hangs next to the doors, and of course the world outside the Formica frame, of Carlson Gallery, in which “Two Dinners” now hangs. But this is really a painting about the two people you can’t see, and the spaces that their lives and conversations fill. Like with Artschwagers’ chair sculptures, the people are not depicted, but the human form is always a phantom presence.

When I look at “Two Dinners,” I can’t help but hear Artschwager’s voice. Part sage, part Nutty Professor, every word seemed considered and wise and I was always enthralled. Most of what I know about Artschwager, I learned in that dining room. I know that he was a Navy man who spent hours in front of a radar screen, where locations are signaled by electronic blips. I know that in the 1960s, he made chairs and tables for a store in NY called The Door Store, and that he was also commissioned to make functional objects for a church. The ‘dots’ that compose his iconic works — the recurring blips, sculptures of tables and chairs and pulpits and kneeling benches — were easy enough to connect. Like that twelve foot oak table I saw those works as locations for both everyday and transcendent experience, stations between physical and spiritual worlds.

I remember one day Artschwager talking about mouse holes, like in cartoons. He was obsessed, and went on and on. These little black arched portals – sometimes graffitied on walls, and of course familiar from children’s fairytales – are emergency exits for the little pretend mouse, another world, a safe place. This is how I feel when I look in to one of Artschwager’s non-mirror mirrors, like I’ve left the room and have entered a safe space inside my mind. When Artschwager takes the archetypes of our daily existence, a mirror, a door, a dining table he provides us with the space to consider the lives that we live. The objects become signifiers of our own existence, challenging us to consider what it is that we do, the relationships we have, including the relationship we forge with the spaces we create or enter into, they are frameworks for the time we spend, and reminders of our own profound physicality.

Rob Pruitt, Feb. 2011 – London

FAN MAIL | INTERVIEW WITH AMY REVIER

Each month, DailyServing selects two artists to be featured in our Fan Mail series.  If you would like to be considered, please submit to info@dailyserving.com a link to your website with ‘Fan Mail’ in the subject line.  Keep checking the site – you could be the next artist featured!

For this edition of Fan Mail, Austin, TX based artist Amy Revier has been chosen from a group of worthy submissions to discuss the process and ideas that fuel her art practice.  With an imminent move to London on the horizon, Revier also fills us in on what’s next.

Woolly Headed, image courtesy the artist.

Kelly Nosari: Textiles, significantly wools, and the process of weaving are important elements of your practice and have potential feminist implications.  In performance work such as Woolly Headed and Yolk Yoke, you wrap and confine your body in woven textile.  Your Woven Drawing series relieves woven textiles of their utilitarian nature, giving them new creative life as drawing comprised of texture and color.  Please talk about your work in this medium and the ideas that inform it.

Amy Revier: I became interested in textiles through weaving.  The practice of weaving has such a dense relationship with ritual and placing oneself into a kind of solitary, psychological space.  Wool is a reference to that density – and it became a tool for hibernation in my performance work. I was also using wool to reference something wild and very animal. The head-wrapping performances would often become stiflingly hot and disorienting. I wanted them to waiver at that point just before something loses control, blows apart, and becomes lost. Performance was a way to become more intimate with the material – to dig into its structure and, while doing so, work in a very concentrated, obsessive manner, as weaving often demands.

The most recent work in textiles step away from performance and sit closer to drawing and painting. While living in Iceland, one of the projects I started was making portable woven drawings on handmade looms. It was during the dark winter months and making those drawings were like little daily rituals. They accumulated time, and also acted as parallels to text I was reading on otherworldly places – Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Italo Calvino’sCosmicomics.

Woven Drawings, image courtesy the artist.

Textiles used in the recent sculptural, body-board work are rolled to resemble rescue blankets or camping equipment.  I was interested in taking what is usually a very durable, non-descript blanket and making it handwoven in the most meticulous way (hand spinning the yarn, using paper and thin steel as warp and weft). I’m also beginning to explore the idea of a body-board unit (such as Riding on the Back of Another) as an object for ceremony more than rescue – for navigating unknown or mythical territories.

KN: Looking at a work like Riding on the Back of Another or Blackfog one can’t help but recall The Pack(1969) by Joseph Beuys.  Is Beuys a source of inspiration?

AR: Beuys’ work has definitely been a reference for me – specifically in the way he weaves myth, ritual, performance, and repetitive action or objects together.  I would also say I had a strong reaction to how he places architecture and textile together.  When I first saw Beuys’ work I thought of tribal cradleboards, which was my direct reference for [my earliest board work] Blackfog.

Riding on the Back of Another, image courtesy the artist.

KN: Your series A Quiet Root May Know How to Holler depicts explosive clouds of smoke emanating from prams in otherwise quiet and empty urban settings.  Please tell us about this recent series.

AR: This series is a project that came together while in Iceland.  While on walks I quickly began to notice that prams are left outside with infants in them, while the parents go for coffee, groceries, shop, or socialize.  I found it linked to my research on the tribal cradleboards. Both cultures use an apparatus to keep the infant safe and secure while they gather food, or in the modernized Icelandic version, go for coffee and drinks. I made a daily habit of photographing these prams with infants in them, seemingly abandoned. The collaged image of the volcanic ash plumes came much later, after I had time to experience and understand the political, geological, and economic upheavals.  The ash cloud images are from Google, and are mostly of the Icelandic volcanoes that occurred in March-April 2010. But it was the apparatus that interested me most, and the fact that it became a metaphor for Iceland’s situation as a whole.  It contained something very alive and active, wild but slumbering – similar characteristics of volcanoes, and also of the unforeseen economic corruptions that caused Iceland’s devastating 2008 financial collapse.

KN: What are you working on at the moment?

AR: Currently I’m building a garment collection in collaboration with artist Natalie Northrup. Everything is built from the ground up – we’re weaving and quilting sculptural drawings, then slowly arranging the pieces together to form garments.  It’s a project that forms intersections between sculpture, drawing and painting, performance, and fashion. This first collection will be comprised of roughly fifteen pieces, installed in a space that allows them to waiver ambiguously between garment and sculpture.

I am also making woven drawings and new sculpture for an upcoming group show at Champion Contemporary in Austin, TX.

A Quiet Root May Know How to Holler, image courtesy the artist.

KN: Can you offer one piece of advice for emerging artists?

AR: I think about this when making work… a line from Eileen Myles in The Importance of Being Iceland:

One thing I was thinking about imperfection is that it’s exactly enough. It’s the beginning of something.

dailyserving.com



CRAFTING WASTE | BY CATHERINE WAGLEY

Chris Doyle, "Smokescreen," 2010, Duratrans on LED light box. Courtesy Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles.

The same E.B. White responsible for Charlotte’s Web—still, to my mind, one of the most stabbing child-geared depictions of the circle of life—was also the obsessive stylist behind Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, that little book that told America, “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words” (and still receives hate mail). But long before he did either of these things he wrote essays—swaths of them, and most of them crafted, endearingly, almost to a fault. He would later refer to one particular essay, written in 1939 and called “Here is New York,” as a “period piece.” But today it feels weirdly prescient. Especially when, after meandering through idol worship (White was staying just blocks from where Earnest Hemingway punched Max Eastman in the nose), neighborhood boundary lines, and the “cold guilt” of the Bowery, White winds down with this: the subtlest change New York has undergone of late, “one people don’t speak much about,” is that the “city, for the first time in its long history is destructible.”

A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges. . . . The intimation of death is part of New York now: in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

White’s fixation on jets overhead had to do with World War II era paranoia; the twin towers hadn’t even been built.

But his foresight, however uncanny, isn’t what makes White’s essay compelling; it’s his reliability as a craftsman. I trust White to understand destruction because he understands the preciousness of construction so well, building up sentences word by word, and paragraphs sentence by sentence.

Chris Doyle, "History of the 20th Century I," 2009, Duratrans on LED light-box. Courtesy Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles.

Artist Chris Doyle understands construction too, as his current exhibition at Sam Lee Gallery in Chinatown shows. The landscape Doyle depicts, often industrial but never really urban, is far less specific than the cityscape White wrote about. It’s a series of built-up vignettes, shown in lightboxes, small prints loosely based on the dimensions of dollar bills, and, most prominently, a 6 minute, 26 second video animation. Called Waste_Generation (also the name of the show) and informed by the romantic ruins of Hudson River Painter Thomas Cole’s Desolation, the video cycles through images of nature and the trappings of manufacturing as they collide and merge with each other. These 6 minutes took a year to compose, and all images were hand-drawn on a computer tablet and then animated using flash. I imagine it’s quiet soundtrack, composed by collaborator Joe Arcidiacono, took a comparably long time. As a result, each moment has an immense intentionality to it, and the video’s careful craftsmanship seems, potentially, like an antidote to the man-made devastation it depicts.

Chris Doyle, "Green/Green," 2010, Duratrans on LED light box. Courtesy Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles.

The press release specifies that Brooklyn-based Doyle’s reinterpretation of Cole is, in part, an attempt to react to 9/11. It’s hard to forget a fact like that, though it’s just as hard to know what that means, and knowing probably isn’t that important. That the currency, buildings, and waste heaps that cycle through are treated as tenderly as the foliage and blooms is what’s important.

E.B. White ends his essay on New York with a tribute to a tree, a willow, “long-suffering and much-climbed.” Says White, “whenever I look at it nowadays and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: ‘This must be saved.’” Of course, it’s the effort White puts into constructing a description of this tree, a “marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death,” that preserves it, or makes preservation in general seem like a worthy cause. The weird, embodied foliage that grows and wilts in Doyle’s animation has a similar effect: by taking the time to create, carefully, these images, Doyle suggests an understanding of destruction goes hand-in-hand with an understanding of what it takes to craft destructible things.

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