"NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED" at the Queens Museum of Art

Installation view of "NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED," curated by Jamillah James, at the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

When you next visit the Queens Museum of Art, head straight to the second floor. If you have some time to spare, take the ramp that steadily rises up and around the Panorama of the City of New York, as I did on Sunday afternoon, arriving to find a reception filled with artists and their supporters enjoying a majestic aerial view of "NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED," a 16-artist exhibition curated by QMA fellow Jamillah James on the first floor. Even without that crowd, it is a thrilling place to begin. You can spot one of Brendan Fowler's multi-frame works from up there, all fluorescent pink flowers and lush green leaves, and a shelf of Jean Shin's altered trophies. There are more mysterious works, too: an empty display case, a pedestal bearing a dirt–covered shirt, and a collage assembled with just a handful of clippings, all things you will immediately want to see up close.


Left to right: Jean Shin, Altered Trophies (Everyday Monuments), 2009. Altered trophies, painted and cast resin. Dave Murray, 85% of the Art I Made Turned into a Diamond. 0.29-carat diamond. Brendan Fowler, Fall 2009 (2 Screen Flower Print, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 1, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 2, Flowers in Terry/Cindy's Garden 1), 2009. Digital C-prints, silkscreen ink and enamel on paper, frames, and Plexiglas.


Brendan Fowler, Fall 2009 (2 Screen Flower Print, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 1, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 2, Flowers in Terry/Cindy's Garden 1), 2009. Digital C-prints, silkscreen ink and enamel on paper, frames, and Plexiglas.

A wall of photographs greets you down below, an installation of Jason Lazarus's Too Hard to Keep Archive (2010–), which consists of images that fit the work's title, donated by people in the process of purging. (This is an increasingly rare privilege, as whole lives are archived online, digital photos never quite going away.) There are photos of a woman with a black eye, people kissing, and landscapes. A whole wedding album sits high on a shelf. If, in Bas Jan Ader's I'm Too Sad to Tell You (1971), we watch the effects of private grief, we here see its myriad sources, though we're equally cut off from the details. Viewing these mute objects triggers our own associations, perhaps even our own pains, a process that recurs throughout the exhibition, which is filled with works that offer various glimpses of personal lives, though never complete confessions.


Installation view of Faten Kanaan, The Reader, 2011. Mixed media.


Detail view of Faten Kanaan, The Reader, 2011. Mixed media.


Zak Kitnick, The People Behind Our Products (Silver), 2009. Die-cut tin sheet, LDF, and other media.



That admixture of display and reticence is also present in Zak Kitnick's The People Behind Our Products (Silver), a row of three wall-hung white boxes, each fit with an aluminum radiator cover, which shields and obscures different types of product packaging, castoff material that takes on a sinister, eerie presence when blocked by the die-cut metal. Lauren Luloff's Striped also looks similarly uncomfortable and vaguely elegaic in this context. A red, white, and blue striped sheet wrapped messily around a green board, it is propped against a wall like an abject, abandoned record of a domestic dispute, some unknowable trauma. Luloff also has a piece on view at the Bronx River Art Center right now, a frame strung with wild bands of colored fabric: it is a raucous party, and this is the brutal morning after. Such fanciful readings aside, it is also a visual treat, a Buren come unhinged and folded in on itself. When I first read the checklist, I thought its title was Stripped. That would fit too.


Lauren Luloff, Striped, 2010. Bed sheet, acrylic, rabbit skin glue, and wood.


Bryan Zanisnik, video stills from Preserve, 2009. Two-channel video, 5 min., 15 sec.


Taylor Baldwin, Martyr Me a Little, 2008. Extinct heart pine¹, white high-density polyethylene², yellow HDPE³, black HDPE⁴, drywall screws⁵, fluorescent green acrylic⁶, fluorescent pink acrylic⁷, epoxy resin⁸, black resin dye⁹, aluminum¹⁰, brass screws¹¹, paint mixing stick¹², sticky wax¹³, graphite and colored pencil¹⁴ on newsprint¹⁵.


Wall label and footnotes for Taylor Baldwin, Martyr Me a Little, 2008.

Taylor Baldwin opts for extreme disclosure, or at least the appearance of it, in the wall placard that accompanies his intricate and finely polished assemblage Martyr Me a Little (2008). It lists, in a lengthy series of footnotes, the provenance for each of the materials he used to build the work. The black resin dye? "Bought from Woodcraft for too much money and felt guilty over." Those brass screws? " "Salvaged from the VDOT warehouse liquidation." The accumulated series becomes a kind of contemporary update of Richard Serra's Verb List Compilation (1967–68), with acquisition methods — given, retrieved, donated, traded, bought, found, bartered, swiped, salvaged, made from, stolen, borrowed — replacing actions. Of course, that surplus of information says nothing about the content of the skull–adorned monument. We are once again only given a sliver of a reveal.


Agathe Snow, Paper General, 2007. Mixed media assemblage.

The empty box you spotted from up above turns out to actually contain one tiny object when you inspect it more closely: a minute diamond forged from the cremated remains of Dave Murray's art. Its title is 85% of the Art I Made Turned into a Diamond, and it has the unique glory of twisting John Baldessari's famous cremation episode into something new, witty (it weighs in at a modest 0.29 carats), absurd (why only 85% of his work?), and laced with ambiguity (why do this at all?). Agathe Snow takes a more impersonal route, scavenging castoff materials from downtown Manhattan for her sculpture Paper General (2007), a slick black collared shirt and white paint mask caked with thick mud. Divorced from their original owners and combined in this new context, these objects become non-sites for Snow's neighborhood and free-floating signifiers for our own thoughts, our own memories.


Installation view of "NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED"

On first reading, the title "NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED" suggested to me the surprise one feels upon returning to a once-familiar place or being confronted by a once-familiar object: "That is not the way I remembered it being." But it could also denote a shift in the process of remembering, a rewiring of the way we process or access memory, a Barthesian prick, or even a loss of control: "I didn't want to remember that, I don't like to think about those things." There is that strange, spare collage still to see — a work by Amanda Ross-Ho, it turns out. She's affixed to a rectangle of Sheetrock a snapshot from Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, a photo of a wildly colored pillow, and a section of a page sliced from a party-supply catalogue. There is also a lone earring. What will you make of this?

Spaced Out / On Time at Canada [Photographs]

Katherine Bernhardt. Photos: 16 Miles [more]


Installation view.


Otis Houston, Jr., Obama Book. Obama Cat, 2009.


Otis Houston Jr.

"Space Out / On Time"
Featuring Joan Brown, Sadie Laska, Chris Martin, Katherine Berhhardt, Otis Houston Jr., Dona Nelson, and Agathe Snow
Canada
55 Chrystie Street
New York, New York
[more photographs]

Eduardo Sarabia's Bar Aleman at the Whitney Biennial

Photographs by Lauren K.

With Nicolas Bourriaud's notion of "relational aesthetics" now being embraced by curators at major museums thirteen years after its formulation, it was perhaps inevitable that visitors to the 2008 Whitney Biennial would be greeted with quite a few social events presented as art: among them, an interactive music performance (Lucky Dragons), an artist-curated dinner party (Rita Ackermann & Agathe Snow), a slumber party (DJ Olive), and a series of dance marathons (Agathe Snow, again).


Among these, though, none was probably more warmly received - and rightfully so - than Eduardo Sarabia's drinking establishment Bar Aleman. For a series of three nights Sarbaia served his homemade tequilas (available in three varieties) atop his ceramic and rosewood bar at the Park Avenue Armory. The night I was there (March 14, the final evening), my friends and I were served the delicious, smooth tequila by his friends, while he provided jams from a set of turntables. People were (pleasantly) packed into one of the main floor rooms, dancing as gigantic stuffed moose and oil portraits of long-passed general stared down on us.

There's not necessarily anything radically new here; contemporary artists have, of course, been playing the role of restauranteur and club promoter for some time now. Three examples: Gordon Matta-Clark running the pioneering SoHo establishment Food in the early 70's, Damien Hirst providing the decor and conceptual underpinnings for London's Pharmacy in the late 90's, Rirkrit Tiravanija opening a Thai food stand in New York's 303 Gallery in 1996. Matta-Clark and Hirst were establishing legitimate businesses (even if it's doubtful that Food ever pulled much of a profit), while Tiravanija was aiming for the opening of some sort of utopian framework for interaction within the gallery.


Sarabia's twist on the game is a lot more fun: three nights, some extra money via the Art Production Fund for full liquor licenses, and a massive sound system. It might be an allegory for the post-millennial art market (Though Sarabia claims his pure tequila leaves no hangover! No comment on that.) or a commentary on first-third world relations filtered through a meditation on agave production (as the Whitney's curators would somewhat bizarrely prefer you have it), but at its core it seems like an attempt to subvert the museum's standard operation, if only for a few moments. In place of the institution's bourgeois obsession with conservation, one experiences unrestrained expenditure, a give away (destruction) not unlike the potlatch ritual.

Art costs money, and Sarabia - to everyone's obvious delight - chooses to burn both in the service of a party. In one sense, it's an immense celebration of a change in status (a common occasion for the potlatch): he's made it into the Biennial. But Georges Bataille has noted that the potlatch is not purely celebratory: it also contains an inherent provocation, "... constituted by a considerable gift of riches, offered openly and with the goal of humiliating, defying, and obligating a rival." In other words, Bar Aleman, proffering endless glasses of tequila and blasting dance music, positions itself apart from Tiravanija's (and the Whitney's) purported desire for democratic discourse. In its place, it posits two things better-aligned with the moment: pure revelry and a bold challenge.