Art FEATURE:
Includes cover and photography series by Tom Wood, with an
essay by curator Jane Fletcher and Interview by Jan-Willem
Dikkers
Aleksandra Mir & Polly Staple
—Thinking (Camouflage) Pink
The New York–based artist Aleksandra
Mir’s ability to bring together diverse groups of
artists, writers, curators,
scientists, astronauts, secretaries,
engineers, doctors, and others under the guise of art is more
than remarkable—it is her true art form. The stories
behind how her ever-growing daisy chain of photographs,
entitled “HELLO,” actually came together are just
as interesting and integral to the final installations as the often
bizarre and intriguing images themselves. Made on location and
exhibited in Edinburgh, London, Trapholt, Bern, Sydney, San
Francisco, and New York, the photographs link together everyone
from the Pope to porn stars in a six-degrees-of-separation-like
game. For it is the strange twists of fate and fascinating
people that Mir meets during the exhaustive research that goes
into her projects—which have included building a
dirigible that will travel the world or creating a video epic
in which the first woman lands on the moon—that make her
not just a one-woman show like the majority of contemporary
artists, but rather a collaborator par excellence.
One of her key comrades is
the British curator Polly Staple. While Staple was the director
of Cubitt, an artist-run space in London, the two produced
their first project, Living and Loving No. 1: The Biography of Donald
Cappy, a publication that was a “Hello within a
Hello.” The newspaper-sized color publication traced, in
the same daisy-chain fashion as the bigger “Hello”
pieces, the life of an ex-marine living in San Francisco, from
his punk rock, mohawk-wearing days to his clean-shaven,
military-style hairdo and all of the characters and situations
in between.
Staple, who is now curator
of artists’ projects, events, and talks for the
London-based Frieze Art Fair, has an amazing talent for
facilitating artists’ ideas. One such project was the
construction of Paola Pivi’s huge, interactive, indoor
grass slope sculpture at the Frieze fair and the staging of
Johanna Billing’s live music event “You Don’t
Love Me Yet!” Only 30 years old, Staple understands the
notion of the world being a gallery for artists to produce
public works, perform, protest, and party, if they like. And,
in fact, her second collaboration with Mir did all four. Pink Tank is a
project for which they painted an abandoned WWII tank parked in
South London a camouflage pink. The comrades then struck a
proud pose in front of the “sculpture,” declaring
it a piece of collaborative “summer art,” a gesture
defeating the academic pressures and political tensions of the
art world proper. Nevertheless, the project brought an
onslaught of commentary from passersby, ranging from cheery
local support to angry claims that they had ripped off David
Cerny’s gesture Pink Prague tank of 1991. Their war continues on all
fronts. Stay tuned.
music Overview: Essay
by Alan Licht comparing and contrasting the evolution of the
music scenes in Manchester and Cleveland
film FEATURE: Ken
Jacobs’ epic collage film Star
Spangled to Death starring Jack
Smith and Jerry Sims by Kristin M. Jones
the wrong gallery
In today’s super-commercial art
world, where the market seems to dictate everything—including
what is supposed to be the right kind of criticism, the right
kind of painting, the right art school, the right gallery—it
is refreshing to know that The Wrong Gallery exists. In October
2002, the artist Maurizio Cattelan, the critic and curator
Massimiliano Gioni, and the editor and curator Ali Subotnick
opened a sliver of a space (it is literally a glass door
with an about 2-square-foot cube behind it) in Chelsea, New
York. Located at 516 West 20th Street (attached to Andrew Kreps
Gallery), The Wrong Gallery is self-funded (the founders call
it a “no-profit” space), which keeps the projects
untainted by market influences and allows artists the freedom
to experiment and play without having to worry about sales. But
despite their limited resources, The Wrong Gallery has managed
to exhibit projects by some of the best artists working today,
such as Martin Creed, Phil Collins, Lawrence Weiner, Sam
Durant, Pawel Althamer, Isa Genzken, Adam McEwen, Paola Pivi,
and Tomma Abts. In addition, in 2003 the Wrong Gallery
collaborated with the Public Art Fund to present a public art
project with the Danish curator Jacob Fabricius. For this
piece, entitled Sandwiched (in New York), for three hours each day for ten
days. Fabricius walked around Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall
wearing a sandwich board designed by one of ten different
artists. Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick also make up the
editorial team that produces the somewhat obtuse yet powerfully
image-driven magazine Charley, an editorial and collaborative exquisite
corpse. In the tradition of Dada publications, various
contributors are asked to select artists to submit original
artwork, which is then, without apparent rhyme or reason,
reproduced at random; entire pages of Artforum from the seventies
and eighties are sometimes also reprinted. The result is a
brilliantly esoteric tome that approaches the weight and page
count of a September issue of Vogue.
In early 2004 The Wrong
Gallery expanded to a second, neighboring door. This cheeky,
super-smart, and subversive project recalls a 1974 work by
Gordon Matta-Clark entitled Reality Properties: Fake Estates,
Little Alley Block 2497, Lot 42, for which the artist looked
around SoHo for commercially undesirable slivers of property
between buildings, and then purchased the plots in the name of
Conceptual art. Some thirty years later, both New York property
values and the climate of the art world are dramatically
different. Yet, thanks to the commitment and DIY spirit of
artists, writers, and curators who make fake estates and wrong
galleries, such as the divine trinity of Cattelan, Gioni, and
Subotnik, we are left with more than just real estate and right
galleries.
Wade Guyton
Although his work may at first appear to
have been made during the age of Modernist manifestoes, the
Tennessee-born, New York–based artist Wade Guyton lives
very much in the here and now. His Minimalism-inspired
sculptures that suggest shining steel Marcel Breuer chair legs
uncoiled into a snake mid-slither recall the formal beauty of
Brancusi’s Bird in Flight, yet Guyton’s DIY down-home-style is more
early-21st-century Knoxville than early-20th-century Paris.
Guyton takes such influences as Gordon Matta-Clark’s
splittings and architectural interventions, or a curve from a
Lázló Moholy-Nagy sculpture, and adds his own
specific twist (literally) and imbues his objects with pop
culture references. His letter X “interventions”
collaged onto found images of chic modern interiors to disrupt
and distort perspective, or onto landscapes to cross them out,
are as much pure punk rock as analytic critique. Guyton has
received rave reviews from some of New York’s toughest
critics, and has exhibited in the best of the newer galleries
(Andrew Kreps and John Connelly Presents) as well as
non-commercial spaces such as Artists Space in New York and
Power House in Memphis; his work was also included in the 2004
Whitney Biennial and will be featured in upcoming exhibitions
at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, and Midway Contemporary
in St. Paul, Minnesota. We can expect to see more of this
post-post-modern artist, whose work has a rare and subtle
beauty that stems less from nostalgia than from a completely
fresh notion of form, color, line and composition.
social commentary: Extensive excerpt of Dis Voir book School Spirit by
Douglas Coupland and Pierre Hughes
fashion: Series
by Toby Kaufmann, Styled by John Vertin
pass the buck: Exclusive
collaborative portfolio created for Issue by Pipilotti Rist and
Marijke Van Warmerdam
