Matthew Barney: DJED

Matthew Barney, the ever-controversial art-world darling perhaps best known for his Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002), a collection of highly provocative performance-art films made over a period of eight years, presents his new solo exhibition,“DJED," at New York's Gladstone Gallery. In the exhibition, Barney reworks ancient tropes with a modern hand. The eponymous sculpture on the first floor of the gallery is a sprawling floor installation, much like a hardened black lake, crafted from poured molten cast iron and graphite and containing the actual remains of a 1967 Chrysler Imperial that Barney salvaged from a lake in his Detroit performance piece "KHU.” Secret Name, which resides upstairs in the gallery, includes a slab of rusted copper, a thick winding rope, and a seemingly calcified fragment of what appears to be a door that has been underwater for years, recalling in an eerie and nostalgic manner the remains of a shipwreck. Canopic Chest, a large-scale installation piece of weathered cast bronze that also contains actual automobile parts, mingles the visual elements of a car wreck and an industrial worksite. These relics of accidents, as they appear, are presented individually within a stark, sweeping white room—the silent, still and vaguely apocalyptic counterparts to Barney’s intensely visceral KHU. DJED is named after an ancient Egyptian symbol associated with the god Osiris, whose body was cut into pieces before it was retrieved and reassembled. If KHU parallels the cutting-up of Osiris’ body, DJED is the retrieving and reassembling of those parts—a ghostly panoply of mayhem and destruction. The pieces are primitive yet utterly modern, making the ancient Egyptian themes of the afterlife and mummification relevant within the landscape of an industrial wasteland. Below, a few pictures from the exhibition:

Canopic Chest

Secret Name

DJED is on view until October 22nd at Gladstone Gallery, 520 W. 21st St, New York.

A Taste of Open Space & Stars

Just a taste from the shoot I did of the amazing French dream-pop band Open Space & Stars this past May at MAD Agency (a French artists' collective founded by Paul Armand-Delille, Hugues Armand-Delille and Anatole Maggiar) headquarters just outside of Paris... stay tuned for the full article and interview, which will appear in Autre Quarterly, the print version of Pas Un Autre, later this month!

OSS' debut album, Pop Prophecy, came out in December and is available on iTunes. Take a listen here.

Paul Armand-Delille and Nina Lili J of Open Space & Stars on the rooftop of La SIRA in Asnières

Anatole Maggiar, president and co-founder of MAD Agency

skateboarding is the best way to get around at La SIRA...

look out for Nina's solo album, currently in the works

Nina and Anatole

Paul and Nina

MAD Agency

La SIRA- inspired artwork

Paul and Nina

Open Space & Stars

For a taste of the beginning stages of Nina's solo project, check out her original video and cover of 10cc's "I'm Not In Love":

...and one of the most unique takes on Timbaland/OneRepublic's "Apologize" I've ever seen:

Can't wait to see what each and every one of these fantastic, creative spirits have planned for the future!

All images shot by Annabel Graham on location in Asnières-sur-Seine, France.

Pioneer of Light and Space: James Turrell

^“My work is about space and the light that inhabits it. It is about how you confront that space and plumb it with vision. It is about your seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking into fire.”

In his often ethereal, atmospheric works, James Turrell explores the malleability of light and its infinite spectrum of effects as well as his own ability to accentuate and control the ever-elusive element. Carving a vast crater into the middle of the Arizona desert, trapping colored fluorescence into a prism, creating an entire exhibition space out of light that the viewer can physically interact with—Turrell toys with our perceptions of space, depth and light, challenging our habits of looking at and interacting with art.

Space that Sees, 2009, Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Alta, 1968

The Light Inside, 1999, MFA Houston

The Light Inside (second view)

Bridget's Bardo, 2009, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany

Spread, 2003, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle

The artist had an unlikely beginning—born into a Quaker family of doctors and engineers in Pasadena, California in 1943, Turrell studied mathematics, astronomy, geology and psychology—all principles that would later emerge in his artwork. He began to gain widespread notoriety for his art in the mid-1960’s, when he became associated with a group of Los Angeles artists (including Bruce Nauman and Robert Irwin) who pioneered what is now known as the Light and Space Movement. Turrell currently resides in Flagstaff, Arizona—at least until the completion of his most ambitious project to date (slated for 2012), Roden Crater, a dormant volcano that has been in the process of artistic transformation into a celestial observatory under Turrell’s hands for the past 32 years.

Interior view of Roden Crater, 1977-present, Flagstaff, Arizona

Exterior view of Roden Crater

John Coplans writes that Turrell’s work possesses “considerable iconic power… the compelling sensuousness of the light and its inexhaustible brilliance are almost hypnotic…[the unconcealed light source] does not rationalize the total effect but adds to its vividness and mysteriousness.”

Turrell himself articulates,

“I feel my work is made for one being, one individual. You could say that's me, but that's not really true. It's for an idealized viewer. Sometimes I'm kind of cranky coming to see something. I saw the Mona Lisa when it was in L.A., saw it for 13 seconds and had to move on. But, you know, there's this slow-food movement right now. Maybe we could also have a slow-art movement, and take an hour.”

Indeed, his artwork demands direct confrontation, creating an inescapable psychological and physical dialogue with its viewers. Turrell has created a form of art that is impossible to glance at for a mere 13 seconds—the viewer is forced to walk through his pieces, to confront his or her own perceptions of and reactions to the space and to experience the transcendent, ever-changing elements (both natural and manipulated) that affect it.

A snazzy photo of the artist in his younger years

Turrell is currently represented by Pace Gallery in New York. A selection of his works are currently on display at the 54^th Venice Biennale, which will run through June 2011, within the ILUMMInazioni pavilion curated by critic and art historian Bice Curger.

A New Feminism: Annette Messager, Artist/Messenger

"I asked myself, Who am I? I am nothing. So I asked what people said about women. I appropriated the identity of others.”

-Annette Messager

As promised, here's a follow-up on Annette Messager, one of my favorite contemporary artists, who I mentioned briefly in my last post. Messager is best known for her installation art, which incorporates an array of media from photography, prints and drawings to knitting, embroidery, found objects and even taxidermy. Stepping onto the Parisian art scene in the early 1970s, Messager has produced prolific amounts of installation art over the years, becoming, along with her partner, Christian Boltanski, a force to be reckoned with within the contemporary art sphere. Her oeuvre deals with the themes of corporeal fragmentation, sexuality, physicality, femininity, childhood, abuse, innocence and sin, utilizing the motifs of fragmentation and repetition to express her views on particular psychological, cultural and sociological phenomena. In her installation pieces, a distinct and sometimes macabre nostalgia meets a resolute sense of femininity and a questioning of roles within society.

From Ma Collection de Proverbes, 1974

Messager initially gained widespread recognition within the art world for her series Ma Collection de Proverbes (1974), a minimalistic sequence of misogynistic sentences which she hand-embroidered on white cotton handkerchiefs and individually framed. The most notorious of the Proverbes, reading “Je pense, donc je suce,” (I think, therefore I give head) garnered a great deal of critical attention, both negative and positive.

(Apologies for the terrible quality of the above photograph.. it was the only one I could find)

Much of her art adheres to a strong feminine identity, investigating in depth what it means to be a woman—and the myths and stigmas that surround that role. In Mes Jalousies (1972) for example, she presents a series of photographic portraits of young, beautiful women upon which she has scribbled in black ink—creating wrinkles, crows’ feet and blemishes on their faces, causing them to appear cross-eyed, blacking out individual teeth.

Mes Jalousies, 1972

Les enfants aux yeux rayés, 1972

In another highly controversial piece, Les enfants aux yeux rayés (1972), she comments on the constant pressure placed upon the modern woman by society to procreate, presenting a group of newspaper photographs of anonymous young children with their eyes scratched out in pen.

The way in which Messager utilizes the medium of photography throughout her oeuvre is incredibly unique—in most cases, she creates a dualism between the photographs themselves and the larger installation piece that often contains them. In Mes Voeux (1988-91), for example, she compiles hundreds of small close-up black-and-white photographs of different parts of the human body—ears, mouths, noses, breasts, genitals, feet, limbs and hands—to form a large circle. The photographs, each in separate frames, hang from individual pieces of thread, partially overlapping and obscuring one another in their construction of a large circle. The body parts in the photographs range from male to female, old to young, attractive to unsightly, ordinary to titillating.

Messager combines these disparate physiological identities to form a whole, placing them in arbitrary relation to one another and creating a variety of conceptual, psychological and sexual associations through their placement. She turns the viewer’s ordinary association with each body part on its head, questioning the connotations and stigmas we ordinarily draw from such images when we view them alone—and, above all, she fragments the human body, asking us to consider each fragment on its own—a theme which appears repeatedly throughout her work.

In the series My Trophies (1987), Messager combines photography with drawing and painting in a series of large-scale, black-and-white photographs of body parts over which she has sketched and painted whimsical symbols in pastel, acrylic paint and charcoal. According to Messager, the drawings were inspired by French author Madeleine de Scudéry’s “maps of tenderness,” a group of maps of imaginary cities bearing the names of Tenderness, Constant Friendship and Inequality. Messager scrawls delicate renderings of dreamlike landscapes across the enlarged photographs, indicating both cultural references and aspects of her own personal life while imbuing the body parts with symbolic meaning.

From My Trophies, 1987

In this diptych, part of the My Trophies series, Messager pays homage to Surrealism with the drawings on the left foot (a pair of scissors, a key, a clothespin, several unidentifiable animals and patterns, all of which appear to be melting at the edges and strung together by a fragile black line) while alluding to her own childhood with the drawings on the right (a cluster of rowboats and sailboats floating on a flat bay, seabirds in the foreground).

In many of her installation pieces, Messager uses the motif of the veil or net to soften or in some way obscure what may be viewed as cruel or harsh within her work—and this lends a certain eeriness and mystery to those pieces. In Untitled (1993), she presents a group of taxidermied animals arranged in a circle around another, smaller animal, as though closing in on it or attacking it. A soft, transparent mosquito net is draped over the scene, disguising in part its peculiar connotations and creating the false appearance of a sheltered space. Upon closer inspection, though, we are met with the uncanny undertones of the piece. The transparent veil becomes at once a shrouding and revealing intermediary that serves to both envelop and expose the scene within. The viewer is separated by it from the animals’ gathering—be it friendly or hostile— and confronted by the illusory quality of appearance.

Untitled, 1993

In Les Piques (1992-3), which was recently featured in this fall's exhibit “Elles” (2010) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (which I was lucky enough to attend several times), she uses women’s black stockings, stuffing them with unidentifiable soft objects, stretching them at odd angles over framed photographs and found objects, ripping them, and ultimately toying with their transparency, their sexual connotations and their function.

Les Piques, 1992-3

Of Les Piques, Messager relates, “I started using transparent things… I had bought fishnet stockings, but they had too much of a sexual connotation that I no longer desired. I wanted an opacity which conveyed terror, such as the masks that criminals pull over their faces, or policemen… It was at this point that I started looking for nets.” In this piece, we are forced to consider the stockings in a completely different environment than the one generally accept them in— they have been displaced from the comfortable space we generally associate them with—on women’s legs, or in department stores, and relocated within a confused, dreamlike and almost sinister venue. Here again, Messager questions the stereotypical “role” of the woman within society.

Messager's current work consists mainly of large-scale installation pieces, focusing on the theme of movement and expanding upon that of corporeal fragmentation. A few examples below, in which she tends towards the tactile with hints of the sinister.

From the series Articulés-Désarticulés, 2002

Her 2007 installation in the entranceway of the Pompidou, La Ballade de Pinocchio à Beaubourg, featured large body parts crafted from red and black leather, bundled in black nets and hung from the ceiling beams.

La Ballade de Pinocchio à Beaubourg, Centre Pompidou, 2007

Messager herself peering through one of her installation pieces at the Hayward Gallery in London

Using the simple materials and images of daily life steeped in a tongue-in-cheek satire, Messager attempts, through her art, to free women from the rigid roles assigned to them by a male-dominated society—and to free objects themselves from the roles assigned to them by human beings. She imbues her art with a heavy symbolism, using everyday objects to connote deeper psychological implications and affirming through each work that any item—be it a stuffed toy or a mere word—can be transformed through a new perspective or an innovative utilization into an object of powerful expression.

Can I Borrow Your Mixtape? #2

Monument Odessa, 1991

"We are all so complicated, and then we die. We are a subject one day, with our vanities, our loves, our worries, and then one day, abruptly, we become nothing but an object, an absolutely disgusting pile of shit. We pass very quickly from one stage to the next. It's very bizarre. It will happen to all of us, and fairly soon too. We become an object you can handle like a stone, but a stone that was someone."

-Christian Boltanski

New year, new mixtape-- plus one of French contemporary artist Christian Boltanski's haunting "missing children" photography installations. I was lucky enough to see Boltanski's installation pieces in the basement galleries of the Musée d'Art Moderne-- which included one room completely lined in slightly-blurred newspaper-quality photographs of anonymous missing children, one room nearly filled with stacked articles of clothing, and one filled with weathered phone books and Yellow Pages from each and every nation--during my stay in Paris. Boltanski handles the concepts of loss, death, memory and nostalgia with a eerily delicate transcendence. His work is definitely worth looking into-- as well as that of his partner, Annette Messager (more on her to come)!

Some of what I've been listening to lately:

Can I Borrow Your Mixtape? #2

Hungarian Artist- Roommates, Chez Serge & Murakami at Versailles

For the past month, I've been lucky enough to share a gorgeous apartment in the 7th arrondissement on Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue du Bac (belonging to an American businessman-turned-artist, Giorgio, whose lovely paintings, photographs and sketches adorn every wall) with Ariel, a friend from childhood also studying here in Paris at La Sorbonne, and a Hungarian painter/photographer, Lili Kisteleki. I thought I'd take a moment to appreciate the randomness of our colocation and also the beauty and depth of her artwork (not to mention her incredible cooking skills!!). Lili had two friends, also Hungarian artists, staying with us a few weeks, Babos Bertalan Szili and Lena Kùt. Szili creates incredibly detailed, colorful drawings and paintings, mainly of faces juxtaposed with other objects, while Lena's specialty is performance art (at their exhibition at Place des Vosges, which we attended a few weeks back, she unveiled a video piece of herself being splashed repeatedly with different colors of paint, in slow motion, against a bleak desert landscape). A few of Lili's pieces:

this piece, which is actually gigantic in real life, is ironically leaned against the wall across from me as I type:

And two pieces that Lili and Szili collaborated on, which currently live in the apartment as well:

It's been great getting to know Lili, Szili and Lena, and being in such close proximity with their artwork. Check out Szili's work on his website: http://zsili.tv/

I've also discovered that I'm living right around the corner from late Parisian musical genius Serge Gainsbourg's old house on the Rue de Verneuil. (Side note: literally every time I wear my lace-up patent leather Repetto jazz shoes, at least one French boy compliments me on them, then reminds me that Serge used to wear them). Much like Oscar Wilde's grave, the house is covered in graffiti of the most loving kind-- which changes daily-- sketches of Serge and Jane Birkin, lipstick marks, song lyrics, lovers' initials.

Lastly, yesterday I paid a visit to the Château de Versailles with a few friends to see the Takashi Murakami installation. I've always had slightly mixed feelings about Murakami's work-- his colorful plastic animé sculptures hinge on kitsch and, in my opinion, don't offer a great deal of originality-- but it was interesting to see such utterly contemporary works set against the sweeping bay windows, marble statues, ancient ceiling tableaus, chandeliers and gold filigree of the Galerie des Glaces. You can see what I mean in the following pictures:

though most of the pieces in the exhibit explored the bounds of irony and juxtaposition, this piece worked a little better in my opinion, as Murakami completely outfitted the entire room in his (slightly creepy) grinning-rainbow-flower motif (notice the carpet?)

closeup on the lantern from the last shot

Suffice it to say that even though the weather has been absolutely horrendous for the past two weeks (nonstop pouring rain and wind), having all of this incredible art at my fingertips has lessened that concern!