Faces + Traces

May 16, 2018

What’s in a face — what is it, really? Some holes, some circles, a bit of hair, a sprinkling of lines, some skin, some bone, some muscle.

What’s in a painting — what is it, really? Some globs, some slashes, a sprinkling of lines, some canvas, some color, some texture.

Trude Viken’s mesmerizing new works at Fortnight Institute effortlessly beg these questions with a combination of humor and horror. Her anonymous portraits are both clownish and skeletal, depicted as they are in textural whimsies of thickly applied pigment.

It’s as if she is pulling the abstract into the figurative, or vice versa, ever aware of the physical reality of the paint and its capabilities of rendering illusion — and, as a result, has created a ghostly limbo from which her characters grin out at us. They seem to laugh, or plea — their skin is made of pockmarked paint, but their emotions still resonate across the distance of Viken’s veil.

Text by John Martin Tilley
Images coutesty of Fortnight Institute

Faces and Traces will be on view through June 17th at Fortnight Institute.

Art

The Labyrinth is Alive

September 26, 2019

When I told a friend of mine that Marta Minujín‘s immersive multidisciplinary maze at the New Museum was a piece originally debuted in the 60s, he was shocked; it feels distinctly fresh, an arty funhouse labyrinth replete with live performers, one performer offers 'beauty treatments' in a room covered in sponges, bottles of nailpolish, and a hodge-podge of other beauty products embedded into the walls, and, in another space, a couple that lounges in a 1960s bedroom, reading and listening to the radio, ignoring the viewers as they walk by, like a breathing Edward Hopper painting with a far more palpable element of voyeuristic relish.

Walking into and wandering through the piece feels like entering the jaws of an enormous living creature, an organism whose veins we move through in order to keep it alive—a lot like a city, actually, an ecosystem that thrives and evolves based on the movement of human bodies within it, full of sudden twists and turns that assault or beguile the senses. This was the artist’s intentions—but don’t take my word for it, see what she had to say herself, below.

Text by John Martin Tilley
Photos courtesy of the New Museum

Tell me about how the project came about.

The idea, you see, in the beginning, in 1965 — it started in the 60s, I started art in school and then I dropped out, then went to Paris where I was working with real mattresses from hospitals. And then I started doing like this work, that’s like an environment. What interested me was that people participate in the art, people that live art. So I created in 1963 a piece called The Love Room, that the people had to go inside and had a bed. Then I did another one, because I lived in a big place without bathroom with nothing, and so I thought of a big house with mattresses. Already I was interested in making people enter the piece of art. When I came back to Argentina after spending 3 or 4 years in Paris, a friend of mine was working on something similar that wasn’t necessarily a sculpture. So we were given a big space and we wanted to represent the city of Buenos Aires, that’s why you have the neon representing the movies, the telephone booth was an important element as well — back then we had phone booths. Everything was inspired by the city of Buenos Aires. What I wanted to do was represent the big city.

Is Buenos Aires kind of like a labyrinth?

Not really, no, but I love to make people participate, that they have to select something — they have to think, what do I do, go to the left or go to the right? Because this makes people grow. You are surprised by something that’s around you, and you react.

It is kind of like a little city, in a way, because when you wander through a city you get a little lost.

In the beginning in Argentina, the show only lasted 15 days. They closed it and said that we were crazy, but then it was so successful that people who didn’t even know about art would line up for hours just to go in. That’s why in all my work I think about the spectator. When I did the books in the Parthenon (?), it took me three years to collect the books, and then in three days people took all the books. So that’s the idea, to make people work in the art. Everybody is a creator, everybody is an artist. The most creative thing is language, because people talk without thinking. This is the whole idea of what I do — I make a work of art and people react, and they finish my work.

You said that language is the most expressive?

It’s the most creative, because it’s immediate, you don’t have to think about it. It’s the way people express themselves most of the time. When something happens to you, a car accident or something, you don’t know how you’re going to react. So that’s what I’m looking for.

Installations like this remind me of childhood, like a playground or being kind of small.

It’s crazy because originally we had to admit only one person at a time, but now we’re able to admit a lot more.

Do you think a lot of this was happening in the 60s, this kind of artwork?

I believe the 60s was the richest decade in the 20th century, there was conceptual art, pop art, revolutionary movies, the mini skirt, the music — it was such a creative decade. I was twenty years old in the 60s, the energy was just so creative, it changed art history.

Yeah I loved the part where you go through someone’s bedroom, it was so clear that it was the 60s. Do you use performers a lot? I thought that was a really interesting aspect.

Yes. I always use performers — as much as I can. Really, though, the performers are the public. I’ll do a work of art and the public becomes the performers, that is the whole idea.

I actually left without seeing the whole thing because there was a different path that I didn’t take.Is that intentional?

Yes, I love getting lost. There was actually a piece I did in 1995 that was much larger, and people went crazy. It was an actual labyrinth. It was in Buenos Aires for three weeks and then disassembled.

I love the idea of a labyrinth. Have you ever been inside a real labyrinth? Does that even exist?

No, I haven’t, but I like it. I like the idea that people have to choose one way. I love to invent a labyrinth, but I’ve never been to a labyrinth.

Do you have any good stories of being lost?

When I was a young girl, I lived in the mountains in the south of Argentina. I loved the mountains and the forest. I would take a horse and the horse would go his own way and I didn’t know how to get back because there were so many trees and I would get lost.

Were you scared?

Yeah. I didn’t like it.

Do you think that you’re influenced by that?

Maybe. All my life I’ve been inspired by nature, the mountains inspire me, the forest inspires me, the snow. That’s why there’s a refrigerator inside the piece—suddenly you get cold and you are trapped inside a refrigerator, you have all kinds of sensations.

'Marta Minujín: Menesunda Reloaded' is on view through September 29th, 2019 at The New Musuem. Images, all from 1965, are courtesy of the museum.

Art

Now at the Dawn of his Life

John Giorno is on view until October 26th.

Art

Vulvatious

September 25, 2019

What secret knowledge lies within the rhythmic, voluptuous crinkles of Mrinalini Mukherjee’s hanging woven sculptures at the Met Brueur? They beckon with a kind of gravity akin to a black hole—able to bend the fabric of space and time to project the viewer to another realm entirely, perhaps one where the godlike creatures that have shed these massive skins roam and romp without the confines of a physical body, mutating and combining with one another in eternal sumptuous cosmic foreplay.

The ur-organic forms, in their achievement of undulating, unfolding symmetry, lean towards the resemblance of the ur-organ—the origin of all human life is, in Mukherjee’s world, the source of a cast of characters that pull the viewer into their gravitational pull with a palpable kind of mystic energy. They speak in the language of clothing, of coats hung by towering creatures out of a Jim Henson fever dream. The impulse to somehow try them on is strong, the gift of wearing one of these impossible suits of organic armor seems to be the gift of any remarkable regalia: that of power.