Bedtime Stories In A Mental Asylum: Get In Bed With Tobias Spichtig →


interview by Janna Shaw
photographs courtesy the artist

When was the last time you stood up on a mattress, off-kiltered, aware of your balance, or lack thereof?  When was the last time you jumped on a bed with friends? When was the last time you jumped on a bed with strangers?  When was the last time you played childhood games? Cuddled in a group clad in coats and cloaks? Watched a couple kissing horizontally? Were read a bedtime story late into the evening, with snow falling gently outside?  

The KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin is hosting Die Matratzen, a week-long exhibit by Tobias Spichtig, with a nightly changing cast of poets and text-based artists reading their works aloud to an audience perched upon mattresses and sheets, sourced from friends and various collaborators of the artist.

Over the course of Spichtig’s installation, the mattresses are lived in and take on new forms, shifting from their original placement, absorbing the shapes and sounds of their dwellers and run-uponers. In one corner of a mattress, a tiny faded blood stain. Next to it, a rip from a Balenciaga heel, courtesy of that evening’s impromptu game of Tag. The sheets themselves have a collective abstract quality to them, marred with scuffs, prints, and static marks of movement. On view from above, the blocks of foam and springs morph into a perfectly assembled jigsaw puzzle, spanning the full space in its entirety, corner to corner. From here, one can clearly see that the work does not consist of objects in a room, it is the presence and experience of the guests that are on top of them that complete the work. It is an interactive performance.

Janna Shaw spoke with Tobias Spichtig on his opening night of Die Matratzen after a kickoff reading with Karl Holmqvist. Read more.

Temporal Vertigo: Read Isabelle Albuquerque's Interview Of Nicolas G. Miller →

 

Everett Sloane in Yohji Yamamoto S/S 2000
photograph courtesy ofstudio photography

 

interview by Isabelle Albuquerque
photographs by ofstudio photography

If you look up close and if you have an exceptional memory for Old Hollywood character actors, you will clearly make out the distinctive face of Everett Sloane with his signature wide-set eyes and crooked nose. Known primarily for his roles in The Twilight Zone, The Andy Griffith Show, and Citizen Kane, the actor, songwriter, and theatre director took his life by way of barbiturate overdose in 1965 at the age of 55. Here, he is immortalized and miniaturized by artist Nicolas G. Miller in the form of a bronze statuette. He appears to move with a brisk, yet cool stride walking down an imaginary runway wearing Yohji Yamamoto S/S 2000. In the following interview, Isabelle Albuquerque sits down with Miller to discuss the temporality of fashion, the process of sculpting in bronze, and the act of breathing life into the deceased. Read more.

Wolfgang Tillmans "Concrete Column" @ Regen Projects In Los Angeles

Installation view of Wolfgang Tillmans Concrete Column at Regen Projects, Los Angeles November 6 – December 23, 2021. Photo: Evan Bedford, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

German artist Wolfgang Tillmans is arguably one of the most important photographers of the past thirty years. But what many people don’t know is that his musical ambitions are what led to his career as a fine art photographer who captured the ecstatic decadence of youth culture with a serious and discerning eye. On view now at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, an exhibition entitled Concrete Column focuses on some of Tillmans’ most recognized body of work, along with new photographs, and a dedicated listening room for his first full-length album Moon In Earth Light. The album, a collection of spoken word, field recordings, and pulsating electronic beats, is a culmination of a life long obsession with music and music making. Below is an excerpt from a conversation between writer and musician, Sasha Frere-Jones, and Wolfgang Tillmans on the occasion of his current exhibition in Los Angeles that will be published in full in an upcoming print issue of Autre. Concrete Column will be on view until December 23 at Regen Projects. 

SASHA FRERE-JONES How long did it take to make the new record? 

WOLFGANG TILLMANS Some of the first bits are four-years-old. The lockdown was kind of productive because the musician I work with, Tim Knapp, his studio is on the same street as mine. And we were able to use time very fruitfully. Otherwise it's been sort of a process over two, three years. But then in the last few months it came together within a couple of weeks—this composition of the eighteen elements that make up the album. It was a bit of a full circle moment from when I started to make music again around 2015. I had collected an archive of field recordings that I've been doing over the previous five years, which I had sort of just stocked up because I saw them as audio photographs, photographing sound. But I never really had time, or peace and quiet, to do something about it. And then I finally committed time to it, and put together these different sources, from spoken word to field recordings and jams and proper studio productions.

FRERE-JONES  Do you just open up a particular machine and start singing or how—what’s your way of composing? What's your way of putting this stuff down?

TILLMANS  It usually starts with a word or words, a line, and a melody that comes with it. For example, “Device Control,” the song that made it onto Frank ocean's Endless album, I recorded it in one take on an iPhone in one morning, slightly hungover. I had mused and thought about the new technology and sort of weird transfer—this shift from living life to broadcasting life for some time. But then one morning these words just came out and that happens sometimes with sentences that stayed with me over decades. For example, the line,  “We can't escape into space, we're in it." And the other line is, “He wants to change, but not be seen changing." That's something that sort of stayed with me all my life. It's about myself, but it's about seeing others as well. But I work with a sort of notes that in sessions become a particular melody. So it always usually starts with a melody, a vocal melody, and a line. I don’t always get the verse so often— more the hook only [laughs]. 

FRERE-JONES  You know, people don't have a lot of time now, the hook is all they want. I'm really curious about your whole journey. I’m somebody who does two things. I make music and I write. I’m not saying you only do two things, but I know you have a specific history of making music. You started pretty young if I'm not mistaken, is that correct?  

TILLMANS Yeah, there was a short year and a half, two years, when I was seventeen to nineteen, which is when I was very productive with some songs, which I actually then later put them out in 2016. But we never performed, we never did anything. And I stopped for 25 years. 

FRERE-JONES  What kind of stuff was it? 

TILLMANS  It was 1985, so various electronic, post punk, new wave, pre-house. This was right before house music hit. 

FRERE-JONES Was there somebody you wanted to emulate or you wanted to be, or you wanted to play like? Who were your heroes? 

TILLMANS  I mean, clearly, Soft Cell and New Order, and Pet Shop Boys and Psychedelic Furs.  I always had a strong affinity to two poles: the more serious electronic, industrial, stuff. And on the other hand, Italo Disco, which was a genre that is nowadays held in great esteem, and consider one of the coolest things, but not then.


FRERE-JONES I'm also curious about—where were you hearing this stuff? What was the mood where you grew up? Was that the popular music? Was it the unpopular music and all the kids were all listening to something else? 

TILLMANS  In the mid-80s, there was still a very large divide between serious guitar music made by hand and electronic music that was considered not so serious because it's easy to make. Currently, it's only pressing a few buttons. It seems ridiculous nowadays that there was such value value system applied. But I was from a medium, small industrial city in the larger area of the Ruhr in Germany, near Cologne and Düsseldorf, which is an area of rich culture and musical history. Kraftwerk are from Düsseldorf and Karlheinz Stockhausen is from  Cologne. And a lot of English bands would come through the area to play. So I feel really blessed by having grown up in, at that time in that neighborhood where Sigmar Polke, Joseph Beuys, and lots of great artists were just living and working. I was a little bit too young for that, but when I left the Rhineland and moved to Hamburg after school I found myself, for the first time, old enough and actually located near enough to a burgeoning scene, which was a house scene, acid house music. That was a tectonic shift, definitely in Europe music. To a lesser extent, all across America, but it also had a huge impact in the big cities.  

FRERE-JONES  Is that when you made those first recordings? 

TILLMANS  I did at them in my hometown, which was before Hamburg. 

FRERE-JONES  I think we all have our, we all have our ideal cities when we’re young. Wherever it is, it’s not where we are. 

TILLMANS  I once had an assistant in Berlin who was born on Tottenham Court in London, the street where I first saw Boy George and Culture Club play when I was 15. And I thought like, wow, it must have been so incredible to be born in the West End. Or I had an assistant who was born 200 meters from Alexanderplatz in Berlin. I mean, I find it glamorous in itself, but on the other hand, I don't, I don't envy them because they never had this sort of imaginary space, this place to project into, because they come from a place where other people project their dreams and ambitions to. 

FRERE-JONES  But you stopped for 20 years—why did you stop? 

TILLMANS  Because my musical partner, surprisingly, left literally overnight. There was some personal drama with his girlfriend and he literally just left. I didn't muster up the courage to find somebody else to work with. But then I was in Hamburg and wanted to capture the energy of this newfound solidarity and democracy on the dance floor. It had a very egalitarian spirit and that totally inspired me. I wanted to communicate that and communicating that meant preserving it in pictures. And that’s when I took my first editorial photographs. 

Francesco Clemente "Twenty Years of Painting: 2001-2021" Presented By Vito Schnabel At The Old Santa Monica Post Office

Twenty years of painting. Twenty years of ecstatic, radical sensuality. A romantic paroxysm of western and eastern imagination with a tinge of Italian anarchism. Francesco Clemente 20 Years of Paintings: 2001-2021, the artist’s first solo show in Los Angeles in nearly 20 years—presented by Vito Schnabel Gallery at the Old Santa Monica Post Office—is a love letter to the medium, to the brush stroke, to paint, to materiality, to size, scale, and beauty itself. In one large painting, easily the pièce de résistance, an ancient Grecian helmet is haloed by a bright red glow, a formidable metaphor for the psychosis of frantic empires, symbolized by a single, imposing hieroglyph of war, protection and survival. It connotes an impending sense of decline, but also hope in triumphant renewal. Painted during the pandemic, the work might also be something of a glorified self-portrait. The title, Our Backs to the Sea Far From Our Native Land 4-3-2021 is a reference to the Ilyad, but also to Homer’s Odyssey, the epic that depicts the hero Odysseus’ ten-year journey home from fighting the allegorical Trojan War, which lasted a preceding ten years. Twenty years of war and return, twenty years of painting. The painter as mythic hero, Clemente’s 20 Years of Paintings is more opus than oeuvre, that feeling of the quiet moment just after a symphonic crescendo, when the last note dies out and there is a pure kind of silence. Clemente proves that he is an artist of the body and the mind, a rare twin quality belonging to only a few painters before him. His paintings proof of the artists existential pain and exuberance and exhilaration. Francesco Clemente "Twenty Years of Painting: 2001-2021” will be on view until January 16 at Vito Schnabel Gallery at the Old Santa Monica Post Office, click here to make an appointment.

Wicker Man: Chris Wolston’s “Temperature’s Rising” At Casa Perfect in Los Angeles

 New York and Medellín-based artist and designer Chris Wolston’s new series of sculptural domestic objects are a high Fahrenheit, alchemical fever dream of organic forms, materiality and erotic cheekiness. Most known for his anatomically enhanced woven rattan chairs featuring their striking embonpoint and delectable gluteal rotundness, Temperature’s Rising brings a new breed of beasts to the bestiary. A standing mirror rests on its generous bondonkadonk, a cabinet is aortal and coral-like, a snaking sofa is upholstered with rich bouclé and upcycled animal hides, there are metallurgic vessels, and even a leafy fireplace screen. Wolston’s newest generation of Nalgona Chairs (nalgona is Spanish slang for someone with a great ass) has taken on a new dimension of celebratory gestures, colors and forms—a post-pandemic, post-apocalyptic tropical wedding of form and function where the punch has possibly been spiked with the hallucinogenic secretions of some shamanic monkey frog. Brightly colored red, blue and purple outdoor Nalgonas look like sex dolls for giant pool nymphs. A multi-limbed chandelier, with palms holding lightbulbs, is nucleic and yet at the time is reminiscent of hands peaking out above the fog on a dance floor at an Ibizan foam party. All in all, Temperature’s Rising is also an example of how to make furniture conscientiously: by using ethically sourced 100% Colombian mimbre (wicker) and weavers that are compensated using a profit sharing model. Make sure to bring a bucket and a mop—Wolston’s world is a wet dream during a nap under an ancient Incan temple. Temperature’s Rising will be on view at Casa Perfect through December 2021. Make an appointment here. Photos: William Jess Laird

Sterling Ruby And More Guest Artists Team Up With Prison Arts Collective

Huxley, the global talent agency announce their collaboration with the California-based organization Prison Arts Collective (PAC), a university-based, non-profit program offering a multidisciplinary arts curriculum in 12 California State prisons. PAC is headquartered at San Diego State University. Throughout 2021, Huxley has worked with PAC to design a guest artist program, made up of 15 individual lessons over 15 weeks. This fall, PAC will teach the new program in one prison, and eventually bring it to the 12 men’s and women’s California State Prisons where PAC holds programming. By providing multidisciplinary arts programming in correctional institutions, PAC supports the development of self-expression, reflection, communication, and empathy through collaboration and mutual learning. Guest artists include photographer Tyler Mitchell, creator of the Wim Hof Method Wim Hof, American artist Sterling Ruby, British fine artist Issy Wood, cartoonist David Ostow, creative and art directors Willo Perron and Brian Roettinger, and more as contributors. Guest artist lessons focus on a range of topics, including logo design and typography, scriptwriting and creative storytelling, cartooning and illustration, collage making, creative mindfulness, and more. Click here to learn more.

Her Data: Read Our Interview Of Maria Mavropoulou On Algorithmic Gender Bias →

Maria Mavropoulou installation image courtesy of the artist.

Maria Mavropoulou installation image courtesy of the artist.

“Have you ever wondered why Siri, Alexa and Cortana are given female voices and names? How do machines see women? Can machines perceive diversity?” 

Women currently occupy a minority of positions in the tech field. As a result of this, there is growing evidence that the gender imbalance affecting the tech sector extends to data science and AI. Gender and racial biases found in AI training data sets, algorithms, and devices have the tendency to reinforce harmful stereotypes that stigmatize and marginalize women on a global scale. With the increasing ubiquity of AI in our societies, such biases put women at risk of being left behind in all realms of economic, political and social life. Her Data is a group exhibition currently on view at Romantso, Athens that explores the role of data and algorithms in the current age of artificial intelligence through the female perspective, and focuses on how technologies used daily might affect our identities and ways of thinking. Curated by Katerina Gkoutziouli & Foteini Vergidou, the show includes the work of 4 female artists, Eli Cortiñas, Maria Mavropoulou, Mimi Ọnụọha, and Paola Palavidi. Each artist highlights the need for inclusive technologies due to the various ways that dominant technological narratives influence our experienced identities through social media, search engines and AI applications. Together these works raise questions about the tech industry and its collection and distribution of our data. They invite us to look deeper at the design of current technological systems, exposing how they work and the world views that they propagate. We spoke with Greek artist Maria Mavropoulou to learn more about her involvement in the show and how she investigates the algorithmic classifications of women according to race, gender, and age through the use of personalized ads. Read more.

After Touch: Portraits Of Caring Connection In The Face Of Global Fracture @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

 
 

How do you decolonize the art of portraiture? How do you strip away the traditional signifiers of status and hierarchy so that the essence of one’s character can properly supersede all notions of taxonomy? Marcel Pardo Ariza’s solo exhibition, After Touch, at Ochi Projects Los Angeles is one example of how this is accomplished. Born in Colombia and raised by theater artists, Ariza’s multidisciplinary practice challenges institutional pedagogies and opens the floodgates of perception regarding the constitutions of performance, portraiture, and installation. Portraiture’s customary status symbols, such as professional costume, Delsartean postures, and meticulously curated mises-en-scenes have been eschewed, leaving subjects nude in flat, empty spaces of warm, fleshy colors where they don sparing accessories and undergarments. These gloves, flogs, durags, masks and ropes play a much different role in describing their subjects. They texturize moments of intimacy, acting as signifiers of a hungry haptic drive, wholly bereft of social status. Digital watches provide chronological context for bodies that are in a constant state of transformation. Bodies emerging from a year in isolation. Bodies whose grooming and scarring are consequences of both biology and agency. Bodies that relate to one another based on personal histories, pheromones, and physical absence. They engage one another at times without acknowledging the camera, allowing for a moment of intimate connection that is unaffected by outside influence. At other times, they do engage the camera, affording the viewer a certain privilege in the process of perception. The caveat of these eye-contact-giving portraits is their adherence to the gallery walls—an act that irreversibly restricts their salability, thereby reifying the self-determination of their subjects. Bringing the role of mutual support sharply into focus, Ariza portrays the strength of their queer, Bay Area-based community of creators by describing the qualities of their connections, rather than that of their individual accomplishments. In this sense, After Touch, can be felt as a soothing balm for the isolated ego following a global catastrophe that left many of us wondering what lies behind our veils of desire.

After Touch is on view through October 23 @ Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Boulevard, Los Angeles.

Michael St. John’s "The Passions" Essay by Robert Hobbs

 

text by Robert Hobbs

Michael St. John’s series of twenty-four paintings entitled The Passions was inspired by Charles Le Brun’s engravings of expressive heads, which illuminate ideas articulated in his 1668 lecture “Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière.” The purpose of Le Brun’s physiognomic depictions of the passions—the seventeenth-century word for emotions—was didactic: as director of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, he aimed to teach aspiring artists how to represent human emotions nobly.

Key to St. John’s series is Le Brun’s linkage of “générale et particulière” to establish a continuum between the customary and the idiosyncratic—a variance reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s “The Third Meaning,” cited in Douglas Crimp’s 1979 October essay “Pictures,” [1] which brings together photo-based art by such Pictures Generation artists as Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Cindy Sherman. Barthes’s “The Third Meaning” focuses on the slippage that can occur between actors and their characters: this situation involves “an actor disguised twice over . . . without one disguise destroying the other; a multi-layering of meanings which always lets the previous meaning continue . . . [by] saying the opposite without giving up the contrary.” [2] Instead of subscribing to the Pictures Generation’s preference for types, as epitomized by Sherman’s masquerades and Longo’s dancing/dying yuppies, St. John confronts the subject of mass-media figures in his painted portraits in order to reveal breaks in their cinematic facades, thereby disclosing hints of a more profound reality. Moreover, his project is predicated on Barthes’s punctum, the Latin word employed in Camera Lucida to indicate an ever-so-slight prick or break in an otherwise seamless photograph, usually taking the form of an incidental detail or glitch that makes an image unique, personal, and affective. [3] Although Barthes’s punctum is often catalyzed by disparity in a photograph, this reaction depends on the viewer’s ability to identify it, making the process of identifying punctum both extrinsic and intrinsic—and this external/internal type of response occurs when looking at works in St. John’s Passions.

In this series, punctum shakes up the identities of selected filmic characters by setting the stage for interpretative shifts such that St. John’s paintings are far removed from fandom’s slavish idolization of fictionalized personalities. Instead, his work serves as the basis for layered meanings in which extrinsic facts either work in tandem with the fictive character he is portraying or challenge it. From a formal perspective, St. John’s decision to render all works in The Passions in grisaille, while relying on a number of painting styles—ranging from soft to sharp focus and blended to pronounced brushwork, sometimes in the same work—endows his series with an overarching abstractness, enabling his collection of portraits at the outset to differ significantly from their prototypes. This cohesiveness then works in partnership with decisions unique to each image to ensure its proximity to and distance from its cinematic source, and the resultant tension between this polarity affords viewers the opportunity to experience the work’s punctum.

From the vantage point of subject matter, St. John establishes circumstances for the small, yet pointed, pricks characterizing punctum that provide oblique hints of an authentically sensed world beyond or beneath his fictive subjects, and he does so in a number of ways. Sometimes, St. John selects films in which well-known actors are cast in atypical roles. Examples include Marilyn Monroe’s disenchanted Roslyn Taber in The Misfits and Brigitte Bardot’s defiant Camille Javal in Contempt. At other times, St. John chooses characters who metonymically segue with their off-the-film actors. A compelling example is Warren Beatty’s many love affairs, which complement the infidelities of his George Roundy character in Shampoo, so that St. John’s rearview portrayal of Roundy’s head at the film’s end becomes markedly poignant. Similarly, Mia Farrow’s newsworthy bonds with her adopted and biological children retroactively inflect the overwhelming maternal needs she expressed as Rosemary Woodhouse in Rosemary’s Baby. More straightforward metonyms include the business card of Patrick Bateman, the superficial rich yuppie investment banker in American Psycho. This trope can also be extended to Mr. McGuire’s prophetic statement in The Graduate about plastics, which continues to resonate, especially with the deluge of microplastics now invading the planet’s oceans, and this recent outcome becomes the occasion for yet another type of punctum.

St. John’s predilection for metonymic connections is playfully implemented in works that obliquely reference familiar art world tactics. Gloria Wandrous’s lipstick-written message “No Sale” in BUtterfield 8 can be construed ironically to refer to both this character, who ultimately sells herself, and St. John’s marketable painting. This work is sardonically countered by Paul Muni’s wrongfully accused character in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, James Allen, whose stealing is paralleled by many appropriation artists who take from others, albeit with different objectives in mind. St. John finds Gwyneth Paltrow’s Margot Tenenbaum (from The Royal Tenenbaums) particularly evocative because of her ability to switch roles from performer to observer. Thus, his portrait depicts a fictional character, who also serves as a surrogate viewer.

In The Passions, St. John has generated conditions for punctum by amplifying the number of roles some of his sitters have undertaken. These include the revealing masquerade assumed by the eight-year-old Jehovah’s Witnesses–raised character Phillip “Buzz” Perry, played by T. J. Lowther in A Perfect World, who transgressively wears a shoplifted Casper-the-Friendly-Ghost mask, and the haunting clown paint covering the visage of mentally ill Arthur Fleck, played by Joaquin Phoenix in Joker. St. John magnifies the mix-up between fiction and reality in his depiction of Gary Oldman, who plays the Sex Pistols’s bassist, Sid Vicious, as the portrait is a painting of an actor assuming the role of a character, who is intended to represent an actual person. And his portrait of Pris from Blade Runner centers on the involved simulation of depicting an actor (Daryl Hannah) who is in turn playing a science-fictional replicant, who hopes to pass as a human being, thereby embodying a layering of three constructed views.

In conclusion, rather than revealing his sitters’ emotions—a process that would reify and render them opaque—St. John’s works from the Passions series offer viewers different routes for participating in the deconstruction of their mass-media cinematic figures, thereby encouraging them to participate in the modest yet revelatory breaks Barthes associates with punctum. In his individualized portraits, St. John relies on representation while putting it on notice. With his admirable mixture of painterly styles, he characterizes mimeticism as a limited, yet useful, form of empiricism capable of catalyzing for viewers different small tears in the mass-media images he appropriates from twentieth- and twentieth-first-century films. Most notable among his mimetic strategies is metonymy, which is evident in the contingent, tangential, and contextual relations I’ve suggested, which depend on established conventions and readily available associations among actors, films, and real-life situations. While these metonymical contingencies extend the cinematic into daily life, they also constitute the ways reality and a range of emotions can infiltrate mass-media fictions. Although St. John’s approach might appear as an ingenious artistic ploy, its ramifications extend far beyond the art network since we all inhabit hyperreal worlds in which reality can easily be confused and even replaced with the models for producing it, thus making it incumbent on all of us to find ways to mine whatever sparks of genuine feeling we can discern in today’s vast stockpile of mass-media images.

[1] Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 83, n10.

[2] Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills” (1970), trans. Stephen Heath in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982, rpt. 1983), 323.

[3] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 26–27.

Michael St. Johns The Passions will be on view at De Boer Gallery until November 6.

Timo Fahler "Light, First and Foremost" @ Stanley's Gallery In Los Angeles

Stanley's Gallery In Los Angeles presents new work by Timo Fahler. In Light, First and Foremost, self portraits of the artist, alter egos, and other iconography in the form of stained glass are held up by model casts of the artist’s hands. Through this medium, Fahler explores his own psyche with ecclesiastical expressions that shape-shift like desert mirages that melt into the asphalt of psychological roads that always seem to lead back to the unconscious. Medusa, Aztec gods of fertility, a corpulent Venus, a Mexican cowboy—the three dimensional sculptural works are prismatic as they refract illuminated doubles, thus furthering deep Jungian symbological paradoxes of the anima and animus, good and evil, light and dark. In this solo exhibition, Fahler crashes into the iceberg of the self—the result: a beautiful shipwreck of new exalted idols. Light, First and Foremost is be on view through October 23 at Stanley’s Gallery in Los Angeles.

2021 Berlin Atonal Presents Metabolic Rift: An (Un)guided Exhibition-Tour @ Kraftwerk Berlin

Metabolic Rift (c) Frankie Casillo00016.jpg

Berlin Atonal presents Metabolic Rift: an (un)guided exhibition-tour through the entire Kraftwerk building from 25.09 – 30.10.2021. The exhibition operates as a sequenced series of site-specific interventions from leading international sound and visual artists, channeling an audience’s experience through organized time. Small groups enter previously unused spaces of the former powerplant to discover a choreographed succession of artistic assemblages. Borrowing the logic of a ‘ghost-train’, the principle is accumulation and the sequence of artwork-apparitions is set as if according to a musical score. The boundaries between things shift and reassemble. Seeing and hearing happens in a chain reaction, a circulation of kinetic energy. A full experience unfolds over approximately 2 hours. Tickets available now. Entries every 15 minutes. Click here to discover more.

"The Emerald Tablet" A Curatorial Project by Ariana Papademetropoulos Opening At Jeffrey Deitch

The Emerald Tablet is modeled on Dorothy’s quest to The Emerald City in Frank Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz” and invokes its iconography to ignite the dialogue between esotericism and popular culture. As a fervent Theosophist, a religious movement that flourished in Los Angeles at the turn of the century, Baum’s Emerald City is a reference to “The Emerald Tablet of Hermes,” an ancient text that formed the foundations of alchemy and all subsequent western occult traditions. On view until October 23 at Jeffrey Deitch. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Tomorrow's Anxieties: Read Our Interview of Multi-Hyphenate Artist Jillian Mayer →

 
jillian-mayer-lake-sculpture-IMG_0039.jpg
 

Jillian Mayer gets stuck in your head. I still find myself randomly humming the tune to her pop song, “Mega Mega Upload,” even though it’s been ten years since I first saw the video she made for it. Her short, catchy video “I am your Grandma” has a cult following  on YouTube and TikTok and is so delightfully bizarre that it’s bound to be discovered by youngsters for decades to come. Her Slumpies, sculptural furniture designed to help people use their smartphones, are found in airports by travelers who don’t know her, only that her art helps them maintain comfort while staring into Instagram. 

Her latest show, TIMESHARE, likewise wedges its way into your psyche. It leaves me feeling unsettled, yet inspired. It feels urgent but timeless as it examines the impending collapse of society while climate change throws our functional-enough world into chaos and turmoil. Her in-progress mobile bunker recalls the highbrow living spaces of Buckminster Fuller and Andrea Zittell, but also elicits the vibe of the RVs and trailer parks—the most economical but lowbrow living spaces of the American landscape. Read more.

Read Our Interview Of Zoe Chait And See Her Solo Exhibition Honoring The Late Sophie →

Zoe Chait projection reflected, 2017-2020 Projections on aluminum panels 9:18

Zoe Chait
projection reflected, 2017-2020
Projections on aluminum panels
9:18

Capturing Sophie, the late, hyperkinetic pop sensation whose tragic and untimely death shocked and saddened millions around the globe, is like photographing the flight of a butterfly. The prodigious and pioneering musician and producer of avant garde electronic music began her career anonymously making cosmic waves with singles like “Bigg” (2013) and “Lemonade” (2014), worked closely with a number of artists from the notorious PC Music label, and in 2017 came out as a trans woman. Developing an intimate connection with Sophie at such an inflection point was the genesis of Zoe Chait’s Noise, a solo exhibition of portraits that capture an individual who has just emerged from the cocoon with a new and fleeting lease on life. Here and gone in a flash, two artists forge a bond under painfully short exposure. A loving elegy, besotted with adoration. Chait bears witness to the weight of the sublime and the value of the present moment. Read more.

Rakeem Cunningham Presents Hero @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

 
 

In his first solo exhibition with Ochi Projects, Rakeem Cunningham plays and poses alone in his studio, exploring a multitude of selves informed and surrounded by a multiverse of niche subcultures. Each portrait is a declaration of subjectivity and existence—proof of self-validation and an ongoing healing journey that expands upon an outdated definition of hero.

Triggered by the designation of essential workers as heroes while being treated as disposable this past year, Cunningham paused to reflect upon his relationship to this loaded word. As a queer youth of color, he idolized heroes that didn’t look like him. Lazy metaphors—green or purple villains dressed in evil black—reinforced false dichotomies and ultimately white supremacy.

Hero is on view through June 26 through August 7 @ Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90019

A REAL FANTASY: New Exhibit Berl-Berl Opens in Berghain Halle In Berlin

AR artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen turns the Halle of Berghain
into the mythological swampland it sits upon

text by Janna Shaw 
photographs by Timo Ohler


It was five years ago when I first came to the fabled cathedral that is Berghain. The voyage of getting to the abandoned power depot-cum-dance Mecca from Warschauer Straße involved a journey, of course, as all worthy destinations must. First, back then, the ‘dancer’ is taken through an abandoned strip of supposed park, littered with broken glass, graffiti, and empty baggies. You will be approached by haggard creatures of Friedrichshain asking for tokens in the form of Pfand. You will be approached by many alchemists, offering you a variety of elixirs to accompany you on your trip. Do not take them.

By the time the behemoth structure appears in site, the final stretch (before the line and final boss, which many will find most daunting) is a large field of dirt. Depending on the season and the climate, that large field of dirt will be a large vat of mud. Depending on the shoes, some turn around. Dancer, tred lightly.

I have not retraced these steps in well over a year. In this timespan, the stretch of garden has regrown into a small urban farm, with mothers meeting for coffee, a group of green vests tending to bushes of herbs, no trash in site, all graffiti covered. People now feel comfortable letting their dogs explore the lush terrain off leash.

And that plot of mud? It has been blanketed with green grass. There are sidewalks. A man mowing. Staring up at Berghain, still draped with its ‘Morgen ist die Frage’ banner, I felt a sense of cognitive dissonance. Where am I? 

When first settled upon in the 13th century, Berlin and its surrounding area was a swamp. Some of it still is, especially the further up north you go. There is speculation that the very name ‘Berlin’ comes from the Slavic word for swamp: ‘Berl’ 

An entire language and religion was created around Berlin’s murky ecosystem. Its first settlers came to make sense of its magical decay and regrowth through myth and legend, passed down for generations. Sorbian folklore speaks of pagan deities appearing as great trees, of three-headed snakes representing the tri-fold existence of life. Folk songs were created to guide those that understood the language through the more treacherous zones, which would ultimately lead to areas of beauty and respite, to clean water and vegetation. If you did not know the melody, you were a foreigner, not to be trusted. Maps were not drawn, they were sung.

The Halle of Berghain has been turned into the swampland it sits upon. Artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen has re-created that which existed, using a gaming platform as his canvas, displayed on a multitude of LED screens. Black reflective flooring gives those who enter a sense of topsy-turvy pseudo-reality pooling around them. 

Steensen collaborated with the Natural History Museum of Berlin to make this endeavor a realistic experience, rather than a realm reinterpreted. The museum’s collection is one of the oldest in the world, and it includes more than 30 million objects and documentation originating from the Berlin area. For the exhibit, natural structures, such as mushrooms, minerals, and live life, were produced through Unreal Engine, a gaming software that allows high-def replications of objects. AI-assisted ray tracing, a technique which enables realistic lighting and reflection, is also used to make the shadows and glimmers of light all the more believable. 

There are a multitude of screens to watch, allowing different ways to see your environment. An extended cinematic screen stretches from one side of the Halle to the other, for viewers to sit and gaze upon as a movie. Square screens dot the center of the room, showing molecular close-ups that appear as abstract artwork. Flanked upon the outer wall are more screens. Two windows have been opened (a rarity at Berghain), to allow for natural lighting and a sense of grounding. 

The downstairs entry hall also includes screens, showing the depths of the underworld. As above, so below. 

Sitting there, watching what was, what is, I fell into a meditative state. The Halle is soaked in speakers playing field recordings from swamps, as well as droning by the sound composer Matt McCorkle, and interspersed whispers and sounds by the musician Arca, whose first performance was in Berghain. The sounds morph from the primal—a frog bellowing—into the sophisticated—“a singing ritual of past sensibilities.”

As soon as one may question if the piece they are watching is simply hi-def close up video footage of mushrooms and molds and water and trees, a slight tinge of fantasy flicks across the screen: a snake morphs into a root; a firefly erupts into a flash; the wind in the rustling leaves is for a moment made visible. And at some point, the images begin to disintegrate into their molecular structures, with no filters placed upon them. DNA sequencing is stripped and shown bare, giving a glimpse at the tech-organic, no filter. 

In a world where all has been taken, claimed, bent to our will, extorted, destroyed, capitalized upon, revamped, and arguably beautified, the Berl-Berl exhibit begs to question how in the future we will be able to experience the natural. It places importance on documentation. It reveals the dire need for us to honor from whence we came to better understand ourselves, and it shows the potential role of artists in the future. 

As I left the exhibit, and walked past the front of the empty queue of Berghain, past the green field that once was mud, back through the park with basil and elderflower, with manicured paths and park patrols, two young girls approached me, asking where they could find Berghain, asking if it still existed. 

In a way it did. In a way it didn’t. Mythologically speaking, it will exist forever. Instead of falling into derelict, the entirety of Berghain is currently composed of artists displaying their interpretation of the world around them. New methods of prayer, new approaches to figuring themselves out, questioning our placement. Its placement. A Cathedral repurposed once again, that has been many things for many people throughout the history of Berlin, which will continue to shift and creak, constrict and expand. Berghain, this time, a place of respite and exploration, resting solidly upon its swamp, allowing all to enter, if only you know how to find it. 

Berl-Berl by Jakob Kudsk Steensen is commissioned by the Berlin-based art foundation Light Art Space (LAS). The exhibition is curated by Emma Enderby, of New York’s The Shed, with sound composition by Matt McCorkle, featuring music by Arca. 

Berl-Berl is on view through September 26 @ Halle am Berghain, Am Wriezener Bahnhof 10243, Berlin

photograph by Timo Ohler

I Am Not This Body Group Show @ Tyler Park Presents In Los Angeles

I AM NOT THIS BODY. But I am. Aching and full of longing. Take a picture of this meat, this husk. You don't have me. I am something that cannot be photographed, cannot be named, defined, translated. There's experience and that's all there is .... But there's also all this stuff. It gets in the way. I've always had trouble with stuff. I've fought my whole life to have control over stuff, over the appearance of stuff: my chaotic hair, learning to play the accordion, getting dressed, being on time, electric bills, the five ballet positions, getting money, spending money, even just putting one foot in front of the other. Clear the table. A place for everything and everything in its place. A battle for order, a battle for space.

— Barbara Ess, excerpt from I Am Not This Body, Aperture, 2005

Co-curated by artists Juliana Paciulli and Evan Whale, I Am Not This Body reflects on the battle between the physical and indefinable; things that are at once us but aren’t. The bodies in the show have been collaged, painted, cast, printed, chemically altered, cut out, and dyed. Some cast shadows and some ripple in the wind. The works are rooted in reality, but they meander through beautiful, undulating reckonings with these realities. These figures emerge from their surroundings and reach into histories, presents, and futures revealing experiences that are exquisitely human.  

 
 

Exhibiting artists include: Andrea Chung, Vanessa Conte, Barbara Ess, Daniel Gordon, Tommy Kha, Young Joon Kwak, Juliana Paciulli, Kim Schoen, Evan Whale, and Jessica Wimbley. I Am Not This Body is on view through July 31 @ Tyler Park Presents 4043 West Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles