EUTOPIA

Tom Sachs

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Tom Sachs
Tea Ceremony
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas [link]

Sachs’ new focus, in coopting and hyperventilating the “religion” of the Japanese tea ceremony, manifests as highly American provisional approximations. Embodying the reductive apparatus of utilitarianism whereby traditional systems or concepts can become lightweight, cheap and nomadic embraces Eco’s “Travels in Hyperreality” or Venturi/Brown’s “Learning from Las Vegas” sign-as-system culture. Taken to insane levels of excess, one can track the adept’s passionate re-valuation through selective interpretation: a whisk becomes motorized = shortcut, while only one in one-hundred handmade bowls is acceptable.
This conversion to American systemic foibles dialogizes contradictory knowledge through subjective insight, allowing the possibility for rich, discursive reappraisal.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the Nasher Sculpture Center

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DPMT7

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DPMT7, Weston Art Gallery (by Tony Walsh)

 

DPMT7
Un Teatro del Nuovo
Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnatti, OH [link]

Elevating the ubiquitous structures of urban construction, the semi-temporary systems of renewal become the allegorical model for a new norm. An opera of the common displaced within the institution inverts and dissolves the typical, reversing context of exterior (mundane) to interior (sacred) and allowing the secular elevation to the epiphanistic.
With an elevated singing platform, 360-degree video montage, and craggy lumber stelae the intent unfolds as a more delicate archeology where one engages ghosts of primal ritualization: a brief poetic, insane glorification of the nomadic, ever-present ignored… the laborious modern religious sacrifice performed for the city.

~ Ryder Richards
photos courtesy of the Weston Art Gallery (by Tony Walsh) and the author

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Janet Cardiff

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Janet Cardiff
Forty Part Motet (2001) [link]
Tate Modern, London, U.K.

Sitting in a dimly-lit room with tears streaming down my face, I stand and walk around the circle of 40 speakers, pausing before each to listen to the Salisbury Cathedral Choir sing in Latin– Spem in Alium, (16th century music by composer Thomas Tallis). The chorus creates a cacophony of need, slowly dialing into individual yearning as one moves throughout the space. The sound shifts, reverberating throughout the cavernous architecture. Unlike a musical performance, Cardiff allows the viewer to choose the level of experiential engagement—whether to be passive or active. Similar to Cardiff’s well-known audio walks, this meditative sculptural soundscape transports to an interior world full of primal longing.

~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of the author

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Haris Epaminonda

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Installation view: Haris Epaminonda, Vol. XXII, Aspen Art Museum, 2017. Photo Credit: Tony Prikryl

Haris Epaminonda
Vol. XXII
Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado [link]
March 10 – May 28, 2017

Haris Epaminond’s Vol. XXII challenges classic Western logic, proffering a recontextualized, non-linear perspective towards overlapping histories of civilizations. Spanning centuries, the minimal elements become artifacts inextricably essential to a larger, contemporary ethos based in art and architecture. The physical objects manifest memories from expanses of various Mediterranean and Asian identities, simplified to dominant typologies like encyclopedic chapters. Truncated columns, fractured marble, frescoed walls, vases, and symbolism allude to specific cultures while remaining tacitly universal and innately human. These parallel spaces are strung together, reflecting onto each other by mirrors throughout the gallery in the construction of this newly discovered place.

~ Jake Weigel
Photos: courtesy of Aspen Art Museum, 2017. Photo Credit: Tony Prikryl

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Louise Lawler

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Louise Lawler
Why Pictures Now [link]  (through July 30th, 2017)
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Thirty years after her first show at MoMA, Louise Lawler continues to challenge the notions of authenticity, authorship and judgement by revealing the mechanics of art and its reception. The strategies of multiplication using mass culture, titling, cropping and reframing are still present, however in “Why Pictures Now” the show’s title not only serves as a supplemental mirror image of art in the age of digital production, in referencing an earlier work it acts as -or enacts- an inside out installation effectively producing a reversal where the viewer in her contingent role as co-author retraces and reframes the work.

~ Ali Soltani
images courtesy of MOMA and Soltani+LeClercq

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Henrik Vibskov

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Henrik Vibskov
“Performing Fashion”
fashion after Fashion [link]
Museum of Arts & Design, New York, NY [link]

In 2015, fashion forecaster Li Edelkoort pronounced that fashion was dead, “a ridiculous and pathetic parody of what it has been.” Exemplified in Vibskov’s technically wearable apparel, his unwieldy and constrictive cherry-bomb red sculptures resemble sexy alien blobs. The amorphous, testicular sculptures are suspended in cage-like structures: an external frame substituting for the absent, skeletal, human model. A monitor plays a performative video of actors wearing the garments while walking through a nighttime landscape, moving in and out of an illuminated, glowing structure. Seductive and absurdist, the sculptures satirize the heroin-chic body image with bulky, flopping, nodules of excess.

~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of the author

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