Partners in Time

by Drew Martin
I recently watched Cinévardaphoto. The Netflix blurb for this film is, "How potent is the power of a picture? Filmmaker Agnès Varda asks this question and attempts to answer it in three separate vignettes. In the first, a female artist, Ydessa, collects photographs of teddy bears. But why? Next, the director examines her snapshots from the 1950s, taking a step back in time. The final short captures Cuba after the revolution, full of possibilities and on the brink of otherness."

Cinévardaphoto is narrated in French and has interviews in various languages. Netflix categorizes the film as "cerebral" and "understated." I found the first section most intriguing. "Ydessa" is Ydessa Hendeles and her collection of teddy bear images displayed in the film is from her show at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany in 2003. There are two-story rooms filled form floor to ceiling with first-half-of-the-twentieth-century photographs of children, adults, families, sports teams and soldiers. Each picture is nicely matted and framed, and has the unifying element of a teddy bear, who appears as a companion of little kids, a playful element in racy pictures of naked women, a humorous prop in staged photographs of men playing cards and even as a hunted animal. There are teddy bears at family gatherings, trips to the beach and even going off to war. Ydessa explains that the exhibit deludes the viewer into thinking that there is an abundance of such photographs when in fact, they are quite rare. She also downplays the obvious teddy bear theme. She says, the teddy bear show is not a theme show.

"It takes the notion of theme, turns it upside down and inside out. It says, you look superficially at an installation shot and you will think it is a theme, you will think it is a traditional show of typologies and taxonomies but once you get close you will see that it is much more complicated than that and much more challenging than that and much more rigorous in terms of what is being presented. It is not a theme show. It is a narrative that explores world memory."

The show was called Partners. From the pictures, you would assume that the partnership is between the little stuffed bears and their human friends but the show has a twist to it. A stark backroom displays Maurizio Cattelan's statue of a of kneeling Hitler looking heavenward for forgiveness. After seeing the sculpture, the photographic memories that the old picures offer and the crammed display seemed steeped in the Holocaust. Ydessa says, "There was a German trauma there was a Jewish trauma. We are partners in this trauma." The show was in Munich, the capital of the Nazi movement, in the Haus der Kunst, an exhibition hall that once celebrated German and Nazi art. There are teddy bears with nazi embellishments, pictures of Nazis with teddy bears and one mat that was debossed with a swastika. Visitors to the exhibit describe a feeling of claustrophobia in another person's obsession and an extreme emotional shift once they notice Cattelan's Hitler. The collection alone at first seemed odd to me but in light of the Holocaust, I understand and I am impressed by Ydessa's project. The display is not just a gallery hung with images. It works as installation art. The labor and costs of neatly framing the hundreds of images must have been astronomical and although there is nothing monumental in the show, it leaves (even from seeing a film about it) an impression of a massive whole work of art, like a Richard Serra or Anish Kapoor oversized sculpture. A key element to the exhibit is that Ydessa is the child of two survivors of Auschwitz and has very few images and heirlooms of her ancestors.

The bottom picture of the triptych here is of the installation but the other two images here are not from Ydessa's show. The top one is of my father's teddy bear, Hermie, taken on Christmas day in 1940, his second Christmas. There is a picture of him on the desk. The other image is one I took of my four-year-old son a few months ago with my old Ricoh camera, with black and white film. It is a nice image of boyhood. He was attacking me with a bat in one hand, while clutching to his teddy bear in his other hand.

Ancient Chinese Costumes

by Drew Martin

I saw a picture today in the May/June 2012 issue of Sierra magazine of a cute panda cub being cuddled by humans wearing panda costumes. The panda humans are disguised employees of the mountainous Wolong Nature Reserve in Southwest China's Sichuan province. They dress up to minimize the impact of their intervention with the cubs, who are born in captivity. Even so, I would think any cub with such parents is going to have some social issues when he is introduced back to the wild. Previous attempts have had fatal consequences when the newcomer is rejected by dominant males. My heart goes out to these cubs but at the same time I can appreciate the pure performance value of these biologists who look more like Teletubbies than pandas. If I combine two of my past odd jobs, I totally qualify for this job: I worked in a zoo in Europe for half a year where I fed and cleaned up after animals from all over the world and I also once dressed up as a Pound Puppy for the opening of a warehouse-style home improvement store during a summer in New Jersey. The former employment was the most interesting work I have ever had, the latter, not so much. I stumbled around in the summer sun tripping over little kids. I could barely see through the little screen eyes in the front of my big, furry head and the temperature inside the costume was unbearable.

The Language of Rain

by Drew Martin
Rain is a very interesting medium. It is an amazing delivery method for water and as a visual system it makes surfaces shiny and reflective. It deepens colors and changes withered browns into lush greens. Rain also has its own language. It shares the dynamics of music such as pianissimo and fortissimo as well as the changes of these dynamics such as crescendo and calmando. It comes dal niente (from nothing) and leaves morendo (dying away).

Last night I listened to the rain falling on the roof. Separating the sound from what I knew it to be, it reminded me of the chewing noises a mouse that lives above the ceiling makes every night. It also sounded like dry corn kernels popping. Rain's Morse-code-like rhythms send notices of relief to drought-stricken areas. There are also more ominous messages about ruined plans and cancellations. I get stressed when it heavily rains in my area because it tells me my basement will flood.

Pictured here, Rue de Paris, temps de pluie (Paris street, rainy day) by Gustave Caillebotte, 1877, at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Holy Shit Tasmania!

by Drew Martin
In 1999, then-mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani stepped into a big pile of pachydermal poop when he threatened to cut off city funding to the Brooklyn Museum because it displayed Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary made with elephant dung.

So where does art that even New Yorkers are not ready for end up? Ofili's Madonna is now at MONA (the Museum of the Old and New Art) in Hobart, Tasmania. I had my peripheral experience of the museum this afternoon when I awoke from a siesta with the May 2012 copy of Smithsonian on the bedstand, waiting to be read. I became thoroughly immersed in Tony Perrottet's article Tasmania's New Devil. The online version is titled Nudity, Art, Sex and Death – Tasmania Awaits You with the subheading: With one big bet, an art-loving professional gambler has made the Australian island into the world’s most surprising new cultural destination.

Perrottet strips down and takes the after-hours naturist tour, which he was encouraged to do by a museum attendant because "if you're going to confront sex and death - or even just the art world's latest depictions of them - you might as well do it naked."

David Walsh is the millionaire funding his creation to house his passion for art. At the age of 12, Walsh dodged church on Sunday mornings and spent the time this freed up at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Their mash-up collection of art, history and natural science, combined with his interest in Wunderkammer, the eclectic "Cabinets of Wonder" kept by Renaissance aristocrats that predated the orderly national museums of later eras, were his inspiration for non-chronological displays of art. Walsh understands art to be created by base, primitive drives that span all time.

Walsh's first art purchase came by accident in South Africa because he could not bring $18,000 of gambling earnings out of the country as cash. He purchased an elaborate Nigerian door with it. Walsh opened a small museum of antiquities, where MONA now stands, but fell into the white cube design trap so he reinvented the museum with a $75 million building that has "labyrinthine passageways and Escher-like stairways." Walsh estimates that MONA, with its own "Bilbao Effect" brought an additional $120 million to Hobart's economy in its first year.

The best video I found about the museum is on YouTube: ArtBreak MONA, which is narrated by Nicole Durling, the senior curator, and Adrian Spinks, the exhibition designer and head of operations.

Daisies

by Drew Martin
I just watched Daisies (Sedmikrásky) for the first time, which is hard to believe since I lived in the Czech Republic for five years and watched movies there all the time. I had a cinephile friend at college in the late 1980s who loved this 1966 film, which was landmark for the new wave movement and modern surrealist cinema. Daisies follows two young women who decide that since the world has become a bad place, they will turn bad. These wanton teenagers spoil themselves wining and dining with a string of sugar daddies, steal from a bathroom valet, trash their apartment, and in a grand finale, devour and wreck a catered banquet hall where they are ultimately crushed by a falling chandelier after trying to undo their damage when they decide to reform. Daisies was written and directed by Věra Chytilová but the brilliance of the movie is how it was filmed by Jaroslav Kučera, edited by Miroslav Hájek and creatively scored by Jiří Šlitr and Jiří Šust.

Click here for an uninterrupted cut of Daisies on YouTube

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

by Drew Martin
Cave of Forgotten Dreams has been lingering in my mind for the past week. Werner Herzog’s documentary spelunks Chauvet Cave, which was first explored by modern humans in 1994. A rock slide sealed the entrance tens of thousands of years ago. Cavernous chambers extend a mile underground and contain drawings and paintings that have existed for 32,000 years, twice as old as any cave art that was discovered before this collection. 

One of the personal delights of the film was that many of the images were made by one prehistoric man, identified by his tell-tale crooked pinky finger. My grandfather and mother have this same hook, so I entertained the idea that it was a distant relative whose descendants walked to England, which was possible to do at that time from this site in France.

The documentary hits a somber, if not sobering, note. You feel privileged to enter the cave but you also feel restricted in the same way the skeleton crew must keep to the two-foot-wide protective walkway. The limit complements the medium. You are given a taste of the discovery but you also want to continue the narrative on your own and explore the cave. This feeling is strongest when one of the specialists stops out of reach from the only detailed human figure, a naked woman.  You can only glimpse her left side; the rest of it is blocked by the suspended rock formation where it is drawn.

Aside from this Venus and hand prints, the majority of the images are of the animals that roamed that land at that time: horses, bears, woolly mammoths, cave lions (and other large cats) and rhinoceroses. Some of the depicted creatures have eight legs and multiplications of their heads to suggest movement. This work was created in a time when the area was also occupied by Neanderthal, but these fellow bipeds are not depicted and they themselves never created any kind of art work.

Sight Adjustments

by Drew Martin
Visual art is the manifestation of how artists see the world. An artist's imagination, insight and conceptualization combined with a material technique yield paintings, drawings, sculptures, movies and performances. It is remarkable that we have the ability to share a unique perspective with everyone on Earth. Most art is media because it is a mediated form of communication, and artists often use methods and devices to supplement their own sight to attain their product. The most commonly used apparatus by artists is the camera, which allows anyone to freeze a frame in a point in time. As photography slips into the world of digitization, I am always excited when I see the creative hand at work. Last week I bumped into Shawn Lux, an illustrator from California. We were waiting in a long, slow-moving line at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Lux was holding (pictured here) a digital Nikon camera mounted to a device he made from wood and mirrors in order to create three dimensional images. The trick of three-dimensional photography is to simulate our natural binocular vision. Lux's setup captures almost identical images, at slightly different angles. Most three dimensional cameras use two lenses, set apart or manipulate one image digitally in-camera or in post-production with software but Lux captures the illusion with one frame. Lux uses a Loreo Lite cardboard 3D stereo viewer to look at his diptychs. Click here to see Lux's photos from this trip on Flickr.

Starting Out in the Evening

by Drew Martin
I recently watched Starting Out in the Evening (click left to see the trailer). Movies about authors and books can be hit-or-miss but I like the pace of this movie, and the casting of the handful of actors is good. Frank Langella plays Leonard Schiller, an author who has outlived his audience's interest except for that of a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed graduate student, Heather Wolfe (played by Lauren Ambrose) who is writing her masters thesis about him. Schiller and Wolfe’s characters develop as she slips into his personal life and draws comparisons between Schiller’s work and his own experiences. She accuses him of taking his characters with him into a sheltered space after the death of his wife, who had left him for another man. While Wolfe is a constant pursuer, working her way into Schiller's world, his apartment and eventually his bed, Schiller flops between cautious rejection and a lustful embrace. What I like about the structure of this film is how these two characters are drawn out on a long, thin line of crafted words while Schiller’s daughter, Ariel (played by Lili Taylor) is completely cinematic and raw. To Ariel, Schiller's literary feats are tangents from the real world. She is a former dancer who teaches yoga and Pilates, and goes to performances and movies, and struggles with the relationship of her boyfriend, Casey (played by Adrian Lester).

Itsa Small, Small Video

by Drew Martin
I went to the opening of Hennessey Youngman's (Jayson Musson) show Itsa Small, Small World last night but the art-crammed space in Maurizio Cattelan's tiny gallery, Family Business was packed with people and was a bit disorienting. So I returned today to see it in a more sobering light without the throng, topless body-painted model and buzz of the evening. It is still disorienting because the art is everywhere; hanging from the high ceiling, trampled on underfoot and layered on the walls. You could spend an hour in any one spot of the space if you simply slowly turned on your heel.

I took a short video in the gallery to try to help explain it better than I could with my pictures from the opening.

>>> Click here for a short video tour

Itsa Small, Small World Opening

Hennessey Youngman's (Jayson Musson) show Itsa Small, Small World openend tonight with a small crowd that inched through the tiny space packed with hundreds of contributed artworks. Maurizio Cattelan was there at the beginning and then rode away from his gallery, Family Business, on a folding bike. Here are some pictures from the event:



Itsa Small, Small World

by Drew Martin
I finally finished my dog sculpture this morning and then decided to drop it off at Family Business, which is Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni's tiny contemporary art space in Chelsea. It is part of Hennessey Youngman's (Jayson Musson) show Itsa Small, Small World.

I turned over the creature in a bit of a rush. Musson was there with a young lady. She looked at my sculpture and said to him "We'll take this, right?" (I heard them discussing they were not going to take any more pieces). Musson nodded and then said, "Wait a minute. What does it smell like?" My dog sculpture is made with metal coat hangers, air-drying clay, layers of papier-mâché and cotton. I dusted it with curry powder to dirty the white coat, so it has a strong odor. I explained, "It's a New York City dog!" and Musson complained a bit, "I know but it is a small space." I quickly filled out the paper work and left it in their hands. The working title for the sculpture was Howl but in a hurried moment, I wrote NY Shitty. The inspiration for this work was reiterated while approaching the gallery: numerous little dogs squatting and pooping on the sidewalks. Howl is the perpetually shitting dog. My walk to work every morning involves dodging these little K-9s. Their business is often just smeared into the concrete. I created Howl as a way to come to terms with this part of my city environment and crack-of-dawn experience. I had not intended him to be pungent but now that I think about it, it really adds to the piece. That is what dogs do...they stink up places. I also like that it is a sculpture with something that affects the olfactory sense. Most works of art have a default smell of the materials that comprise them, i.e. oil paint. I used a process that has been with me since my childhood: papier-mâché from all the piñatas we made for our parties, and cotton, which was used as my fur for my werewolf costume that was the theme for a few of my most memorable Halloweens. The starting point was the miserable little dog in Albert Camus' The Stranger.

Opening Reception: Tuesday, April 3rd at 6pm (I hope to see you there!)

Itsa Small, Small World

@ Family Business

520 W. 21st St.
NY, NY

Winnebago Man

by Drew Martin
I just watched Winnebago Man, (click left to see the trailer) a documentary about Jack Rebney, who is also known as "the angriest man in the world."

Rebney was a CBS newsman for part of his career. In 1989 he represented Winnebago for television advertisements. During a blistering summertime filming in the woods of Iowa, Rebney cursed at everything that moved. The handful of young men on the crew decided to keep the camera rolling to capture his raw exclamations. These outtakes were then compiled onto a VHS tape that was sent to the senior management of Winnebago, who promptly fired Rebney and spurred him to retreat to a cabin in northern California. Rebney was separated from his cult fame and lived like a recluse for two decades until he was tracked down by the filmmaker, Ben Steinbauer. 

The original tape of Rebney was copied and circulated around the States (and abroad) and spread like wildfire. Once YouTube was developed, it was posted there and went viral with millions of hits.  As the documentary unfolds, the rediscovered Rebney agrees to meet with Steinbauer but what we find is a calm and reflective old man at peace with himself. The moment is anticlimactic but also promising. Steinbauer returns home somewhat empty handed but is soon contacted by Rebney who claims he sugarcoated his interview and presented a "Mary Poppins" version of himself.  The cantankerous old man is alive and well and ready to speak up. So Steinbaurer returns to Rebney’s cabin and continues the film, which peaks with him making an appearance at a small theater where videos such as Rebney’s outtakes are shown.

Winnebago Man is an interesting film about media. It speaks to the transition of film/video to the immediacy of the Internet, cyber-bullying, a community based on a shared, mediated experience and the lives of people behind the sound bytes and captured glimpses. Rebney insists that only complete losers would be interested in his outtakes and is surprised to find quick-witted die-hard fans who explain that his video is what they turn to when they are down.

The introduction credit sequence is nicely done. It is a montage of classic Winnebago shots and footage spliced with the credits using the Winnebago stripe motif, such as the still pictured above (which has been altered to fit in the image square) and is charged with the song Winnebago Warrior by the Dead Kennedys.

His Heart is in the Hair

by Drew Martin

I just watched Vidal Sassoon: The Movie, (click left to watch a trailer) about the rags to riches life of Sassoon. It is an amazing story. His father left his family when he was a little boy. He spent part of his childhood in an orphanage and worked as a bicycle messenger in bombed-out London for the military during WWII. He took voice lessons to jettison his Cockney accent when he was turned back at prospective jobs and told to learn English. At 14, his mother had an epiphany that he would be a hair dresser and brought him to a professional who waived his apprentice fee because he liked his good manners. He went from dreading the idea to revolutionizing the hair industry. His hairstyles were influenced by Bauhaus architecture and, in turn, influenced fashion. He is said to have put the top on the miniskirt. His salon team was greeted like the Beatles when they came to America. Pictured here is Nancy Kwan who decided to play chess with her manager during her appointment with Sassoon because she could not witness him cutting off feet of her hair. The result was this timeless bob, which was immediately photographed for Vogue. In 1965, Roman Polanski filmed Repulsion in Sassoon's London salon and then asked Sassoon to cut Mia Farrow's hair for Rosemary's Baby. Sassoon was the first stylist to create a line of hair products, have celebrity endorsements and to promote a lifestyle. The documentary is of course about hair and fashion but most importantly it is about making a statement in any field through ambition and hard work.

Picasso and Braque go to the Movies

by Drew Martin
I just watched an excellent documentary called Picasso And Braque Go To The Movies (click left to see the trailer). It is about the influence of movies on cubism and how cinema and cubism took over and restructured vision to modern principles.

The documentary explains that photography started as a still art (because of the long exposures that were required) but once it became instant, the ability to analyze motion was quickly met with the ability to synthesize movement through film. While cubism is most often thought of a still art governed by geometry, this documentary frames cubism as a complement to cinema that should be viewed more akin to the splicing, editing, and fragmentation of the human form and environment with a temporal experience that we find in film.

Pictured here is Loie Fuller whose serpentine dance was a popular film subject and who moved Max Jacob to exclaim "Rodin is Nothing." This documentary is loaded with clips of the movies, which would have been watched by the cubists at a time when the movie projectors would have been present in the same space as the audience, clicking away as animated machines, spinning reels of film.