VIEW ALL WALTON'S BLOG ENTRIES
While the wonderful Andy Warhol show at the Gagosian Chelsea locations, John Currin show at Gagosian Madison Avenue, and Ellsworth Kelley show at all three Matthew Marks locations have deservedly won much critical acclaim, two other current shows merit some additional attention. Atelier van Lieshout's SlaveCity at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and Allan McCollum's The Shapes Project at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery both offer fascinating visions of the dystopian evolution of contemporary society.
But first: I was astounded to have 15 minutes of quiet solitude while re-examining the Warhol show on West 21st Street late last Friday afternoon; the gallery was eerily empty. Thus, it's worth visiting this show again in its final week, for these virtuoso late works of Warhol are seldom seen in New York, not even the Metropolitan Museum's stunning dark and polychromatic Mao series. The thick brush strokes, fascinating neon-esque colors, and breathtaking contrast of dark and vibrant pigments seem additionally striking when compared with the adjacent large square Mao painting. You might just have this excellent contemplative space to yourself for a time if you visit this week.
Across the street at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, SlaveCity presents a highly cynical view of IT society, featuring models, sculptures and drawings depicting life in the fictional SlaveCity, where residents "work within a highly organized and structured set of guidelines, creating a society that is extremely efficient but without freedoms; traditional values are shifted and inverted, challenging conventional notions of community." Their regimented schedule includes "work 7 hours each day at 'office jobs', which focus on the profitable field of technology, employing the slaves in telemarketing, and computer programming. Following their office work, they labor another 7 hours as farmers or in the city’s workshops, in order to ensure the subsistence of the community, and are later allowed 3 hours of relaxation and 7 hours of rest." Most curiously, although SlaveCity offers no freedoms it is completely self-sufficient by producing "its own food, and recycles its own waste." Even more cynically, "Through the highly structured, super-efficient labor of the 'participants', SlaveCity nets 8 billion dollars profit each year, elaborating on the existing capitalist culture and taking the notion of productivity and profit to a terrifying extreme." If you can accept this very Netherlandish premise, then you are in for a rather fascinating surprise when examining the models of other essential elements this community's infrastructure. Rather clever elements include the water tower, the hospital, and the male and female brothels, as well as drawings of scenes from SlaveCity. One canvas delineates budgetary items for everything from latrines to prostitutes. Moreover, the modest amount of space required to contain this SlaveCity suggests our human future might be not much more than that of cattle or chattel. Ultimately whether the installation is deviously or deceptively cynical depends on your view of the rear gallery, which features a room-sized installation, the “Midi-Disciplinator,” a space for 18 inhabitants. This space essentially "rotates crews of six people through different stations, the work area, where the residents toil at the useless job of producing sawdust by filing logs, the sleeping area, where six people at a time pile into bunk beds, and the simple table for eating." Doubtless you will be reminded of several seminal science fiction movies during your visit.
In contrast, while McCollum's "The Shapes Project" also envisages a burgeoning human population and what might be done for it, his playful use of information technology "allows me to make enough unique shapes for every person on the planet to have one of their own." That is, with 300 parts used to construct shapes of either 4 parts or 6 parts, he has created a system that can produce over 31 billion shapes. Rather charmingly, McCollum declares, "For the time being, around 214,000,000 of the shapes have been set aside for creative experimentation." His graciousness in bestowing these shapes on humanity strike me as rather uproarious, considering that Kalahari bushmen and Bhutanese herders likely have little use for being bestowed a shape. But in seriousness, here the incredible scale of McCollum's project is apparent: upon entry into the gallery, the visitor is confronted with dozens of binders filled with calculations pertaining to the project. The scholarly exactitude becomes even more apparent in viewing the thousands of framed shapes placed on vertical risers. The contrast could not be more stark, with black computer-generated images printed on white paper, framed in black frames, and placed carefully in this all-white space. The combinative features and permutations here seem mathematically fascinating as well as artistically compelling. The final gallery contains 25 mounted wooden sculptures, which further underscores the aesthetic quality of the shapes and potential uses for them. Indeed they do fill a room quite nicely. McCollum then delineates how his project is open-ended: "actually constructing all of them is much too large for me to finish by myself, or in my own lifetime." But is he joking, half-serious, or simply playful? He seems an adherent of open-source code: "I am also making my shapes available to others, with the hope that people will come up with many interesting ways to use them." Would we could only tattoo our own personal shape on our wrist and use it as a biometric for home banking. Or were Rorschach still alive, he could have an unlimited supply of digital-age inkblots. Consequently, McCollum turns in a virtuoso performance by seeming both slyly gracious and simultaneously rather sinister in attempting to give everyone a shape. Given that McCollum has spent more than 30 years examining how objects "achieve public and personal meaning in a world constituted in mass production," this exploration of computer-generated uniqueness investigating social and spatial relationships is most captivating.
Tags:
Andy Warhol, friedrich petzel, gagosian, john currin, slave city, tanya bonakdar
© All rights reserved.
Posted on 12/17/2006
(
Permanent Link
)
Send to Friend
