Forest/Trees

Dystopian Glamour

October 02, 2018

Diamonds are a girl’s best friend. Diamonds never fade. Diamonds are forever.

Or are they? The new project by Steven and Dorota Coy (aka Hygienec Dress League) in Detroit strikes doubt in the hearts of those who worship at the altar of bling. Their gigantic diamond-shaped light sculpture, "Diamond II" is placed on a waterfront in Detroit to drive home the point that water is, in fact, more valuable than diamonds (one would think).

Questions of value echo throughout—a 600-pound elephant sculpture covered in aurora borealis rhinestones continues the artists’ ongoing aesthetic negotiation with the animal world, as well as their immersive installation of deer-headed people, "Spirit of the Forest." Though their work is full of whimsy, it's also backed by startling notions of what, exactly, corporations are up to.

office had a tete-a-tete with the duo to get to the bottom of it.

Interview by John Martin Tilley

Tell me about your work.

Steve: Dorota and I met in Kaui in 2004 when I was going to grad school out there. We started collaborating on all these art projects and decided Hawaii wasn’t going to give us the platform or backdrop for the type of work that we wanted to do. So, we decided we wanted to move to one of the post-industrial cities—Baltimore, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, even Buffalo was on the list—but Detroit was where I grew up. So, in 2007, we got a place that was really cheap—it was $250 a month for this big warehouse space in Eastern Market. We then started a corporation that same year—we legally registered the corporation as a new and original form of art. We wanted to use it as a platform for critiquing corporatism, advertising influence, value and identity, and branding. It’s a conceptual art project and we wanted to create art under this label. We thought it would be funny if the corporation created nothing, had no profit, and created these ‘interventions’ under this name.

Does the corporation still exist?

Steve: Yeah, it’s a legal entity. We aired a TV commercial once. It’s like aesthetic relationalism—you’re sitting there, you’re watching TV, and all of the sudden, we appropriate your TV and you become a part of this performance, a part of this moment. It was funny because we were appropriating these moments that corporations try to use to influence you. We went in and basically—I don’t know how to put it.

You stole time, in a way.

Dorota: Right, we just used the TV as our medium. We were trying to do what corporations do, and how they influence people, and how they push their agenda on people, and we kind of appropriated that space. We used street art to do the same thing.

Steve: We saw it as performative, where you become a part of the moment—and it’s not that much different from our unsuspecting public work where, suddenly, you’re a part of it. The reason we love street art and public art is that moment when you’re walking down the street and you see something you didn’t expect, and it kind of changes your way a little bit. That’s the kind of work we’re really into. Through the corporation we see each project as building upon this narrative—one piece might be about one thing, another piece about something slightly different, but as a whole, they connect through this conceptual narrative that is our brand.

Above: Steve and Dorota Coy at DTE Decommissioned Power Plant and 'Diamond II.'

Do you feel like this project was a departure for you?

Steve: Maybe only in medium—otherwise, not really. It’s still in a post-industrial context, things that have been left behind, forgotten. We did this farm piece in rural Michigan and it was a departure from our traditional context, but the meaning was still there. We like to appropriate all that environment to contextualize our work.

It’s interesting too, to think about a corporation as an entity. I love the idea of a corporation as a person, but it’s not a real person. Do you feel like you play into that?

Steve: We love the anonymity that rides behind that. It’s one of those places where art and law coexist in a weird way, as well as commercialism and branding. You can look it up in the state of Michigan, it’s there legally registered. We have shares allocated for our corporation, we have bylaws written up and articles for the corporation. We’re eventually going to sell shares of this corporation as another public performance art piece.

So is the product the performance itself?

Steve: Exactly. It’s performative. People can own the share of nothing, but the reality is that it starts to play into questions of what value even is. Is there value in these cultural artifacts that we’re creating?

So, it’s kind of like the diamond piece you did for the city, where it seems valuable, but we can’t really take part in it other than looking at it.

Steve: Yeah, we play into those tensions. This piece does that more than anything—riding those lines between really crazy aesthetic beauty, on an art level there’s potential value there, like a cultural value, challenging society, but the diamond as a symbol is exactly what you said: is there any real value or is it perceived value that’s been ingrained into society? Is it merely something people believe is valuable because a corporation told you that because they want to sell it to you?

Especially now that they can make diamonds, so it’s almost like a corporate object in and of itself.

Steve: Yeah and I think it’s naturally embedded into us, too—when you get engaged you get a diamond, right?

Dorota: It’s the idea of corporations using branding to sell more—so we’re using the same kind of ideas.

Steve: They’re completely manipulating society. It’s no different than the way magazines might treat the way women are supposed to look.

When you hear people say, ‘We need to save the planet,’ I think what they’re really talking about is saving ourselves.

So, how do you feel like you are manipulating society?

Dorota: I don’t think we’re trying to manipulate society, I think we’re bringing things to attention—that you can look at things differently than what you’ve been told.

Steve: I think we’re calling out the absurdities. We’re being subversive. We’re being playful—there’s a lot of fun in this. There are these very serious undertones, and we talk about that with the elephant, but there’s also this absurdness and playfulness—like our pigeons. We find them to be these beautiful animals who have adapted to city life, but so many people view them as an ugly, filthy, stupid animal.

It seems like you have a really interesting connection to nature. I looked at your Tumblr, and most of your work uses animals in some way.

Steve: There’s a tension, I think, between profit and sustainability and the planet, and also, I think on a broader note, we’re starting to question what does it mean to be a human, what do we need, what are we doing and why are we doing it? The weird thing is, when you hear people say, ‘We need to save the planet,’ I think what they’re really talking about is saving ourselves—the planet is going to survive. Humans can die off and the planet will rebound and regrow without us. So, we need to find a balance with nature, somehow. If we use all of our resources, there will be nothing left.

Dorota: In Detroit, and post-industrial cities all over the US, they’re faced with infrastructure issues, like water, for example. Detroit public schools this year shut off all the water in all the schools because there was too much lead and other things in it. And Flint, as you know, was faced with the same issue. So, all those things are something we’re inadvertently pointing t—owe don’t directly call it out, but we’re thinking about these things. What is real value? All those things corporations are selling to us in front of children, in front of people, to get more and more things that we don’t really need in society.

Steve: And it feels too much like profit-over-people. Is there a way we can reposition everything where value is more human, instead of a form of money to corporations?

Dorota: And humans overall—we all want to live a very good, healthy life, and maybe there’s a better balance to all of that. So, I think in a playful way, maybe that’s what we’re trying to say.

Steve: Those are the undertones, those are what are embedded. People can look at it and say, 'Oh that’s a pretty object,' or they can think about the deeper hidden meanings behind it. So, for this new project we really moved into sculptural installation and we love it, and I’ve been starting to think about it, and I feel like there’s a bit of surrealism in the work, as well. Somebody was asking what our style is, and the only thing we could really come up with was ‘dystopian glamor.’ There’s this bit of futurism that’s in the work, but it’s more of like a dystopian society.

It’s almost sci-fi.

Steve: Exactly. There’s a bit of sci-fi in there—these animal people walking around. We were thinking about augmentations of reality a bit. You stumble upon the sculptures and you feel like you could be in this alternate reality. You build the tension between that glamor and this dystopia—it’s this weird thing, the layers of meaning. It’s something so beautiful, but it’s beautiful because it’s sparkly. Why do we find sparkly things beautiful? Is that an inherently human thing? Or is that something that’s been programmed by society?

Above: 'Spirit of the Forest' and 'Limited Edition,' all photos by Jon Deboer.

'Value Proposition' by Hygienic Dress League will be open to the public from October 18 through October 21, 2018, from 6PM to 10PM in Detroit. Register here.

Art

Full Steam Ahead

Indeed, this is the point. After I made my quick circle around the environment, Arlene explained that it was meant to be thought of as just that: an environment, not merely a collection of objects.

Most artists, when commissioned by Madison Square Park, use the lawn to display their work—not Arlene. She told me she she didn’t care for this tactic, that planting an artwork on the lawn was just mimicking the experience of a gallery or museum, in that it removes the work from the viewers, making it faraway and precious. She wanted to push against this preciousness—in the more urban, paved center of the park you can touch the sculptures, whose materiality is a large part of what defines them, and something the artist emphasized heavily: real wood, real iron, real porcelain. These sculptures ask you to interact with them, to become a part of their world by lending your body’s shape to the overall composition.

Above: 'Low Hanging Cloud (Lion),' 'Kandler to Kohler' and 'Channel Liberty (with Fallen Arm).'

One compelling element of the installation is the removal of not only the water from the central circular pool, but the removal of the tiles therein. The artist explained to me that, over several months, she had photographed where water tended to puddle up in the drained circle, then placed reflective tiles in these places where the water would naturally pool. She calls it the "Shadow of Water"—an homage both to the water that would otherwise be there, and to her artist’s hand in mimicking it. Water was the original mirror, Arlene mused to me, and New York is hollow, carved out by tunnels underneath our feet—when you look down into the reflective world of the tiles, it's as if you look both at yourself and down inside the city upon which you stand. Again, you inadvertantly become a part of the piece, in the same way you are a part of the city.

At one point, she led me over to one of the central pieces: a huge fluted white porcelain flourish, the base of which can function as a bench. The porcelain pieces are record-breaking—she worked with the manufacturer Kohler to produce them, and the lion’s head alone is 34 separate pieces that had to be fused together. Jeff Koons’ sculpture of Micheal Jackson and Bubbles was the world’s previous record-holder for largest porcelain sculpture, but here Arlene has beat him—and at the risk of their destruction (their exposure to the public and the elements makes them challenge the idea of preciousness on a scale that would make most artists squirm).

Above: 'Forward' and 'Full Steam Ahead.'

On the ground where we sat was another circle, which I thought looked like a planet—in fact, it was a blown up glaze from another one of her works (more mimicry!). When I told her it looked almost accidental, she nodded emphatically—a glaze is a natural process, after all, and its reference to something both planetary and accidental is a connection she can personally appreciate. What is nature but a planetary accident, anyway?

The sculptures themselves are strange, organic and jocular—I was particularly drawn to the removal of the bench slats and their replacement with black and white planks. The color scheme, I said, reminded me of Alice in Wonderland. Arlene smiled, telling me that the benches were in fact the through-line of the installation. She then said something I won’t soon forget: that she didn’t see why humor and joy couldn’t coincide with intellectual rigor. I couldn’t agree more.

Photos of the artist by Yasunori Matsui; installation photos by Rashmi Gill; all courtesy of Madison Square Park Conservancy.

'Full Steam Ahead' will be on view in Madison Square Park through April 28, 2019.

Art

Bushwick Open Studios

October 01, 2018

Late-September brings artists and viewers from across the city to Brooklyn for the annual Bushwick Open Studios community event. Celebrating it’s twelfth year, Bushwick Open Studios sees creatives from a range of mediums taking over the streets between Wyckoff and Cypress Avenues by opening their studios to the public.

Weaving our way through giant Brooklyn lofts, unfinished basements and makeshift sculpture gardens, we found works that address contemporary concerns and modern culture, from the art-as-refuge debate, to the representation of unheralded figures from world history. Like all good art experiences—and experiences, in general—the studio visits left us feeling less depressed about the current political climate—and a little less alone.

Text by Charles Caesar
Photos by Nicolò Bernardi

The event runs for three days and office hit the scene on Saturday to get an inside look at the work and workspaces of Bushwick’s brightest new talent.

Here’s a rundown of the artists who caught our eye:

Insil Jang

Artist Insil Jang works with photography sourced from government archives and historic records, silkscreening the imagery onto gleaming mirrored surfaces that give viewers a look at themselves, as well as the faces of those who history often forgets. Standout subjects include The Kim Sisters, a Korean-American music trio who performed on national television more than 20 times in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Another is Wong Ark Kim, the San Francisco-born Chinese-American whose Supreme Court case led the American government to begin issuing green cards to people whose parents are not U.S. citizens. Jang’s work with Ark’s image brings an important yet overlooked piece of American history into the modern world. The artist has recently evolved her practice to include personal photographs of Asian-American men in vulnerable states.

Julia Sinelnikova

With a day job in set design, Julia Sinelnikova’s personal practice involves site-specific installations called Fairy Organs and Reveals & Sprites. Sinelnikova finds inspiration in the female-centric Eastern European folktales of her childhood which focus on the duality of beauty and nature. Stepping into her studio is like stepping into a high-fantasy realm populated by floating organic forms—modular designs with hand-cut details that Sinelnikova says can take up to a year to create.

Michael Stefanovich

Sculptor Michael Stefanovich has been working since 1996, using stone to express his inner emotions and ideas. With sculptures made of marble and rare alabaster, Stefanovich’s finished works include an incredibly timely large-scale marble form called No Water Without Waves, that combines hard and soft edges to represent the ways in which society can function when people with opposing opinions cooperate with one another. Showing us a number of his completed projects, Michael expressed that he approaches his work the same way he approaches life: with a sense of engagement, immersion and respect for the experience.

Bobby Hill

Working with screenprinting and collage, artist Bobby Hill’s studio is a paint-splattered gallery of pop-culture icons and history makers from the worlds of music, film, fashion and politics. Bobby chooses established subjects, like James Baldwin and Alek Wek, based on the significant impacts they’ve made on modern culture, as well as newcomers like Lil Yachty, who he believes will expand their influence as time continues. Bobby has also been working on an untitled series of figurative collages that are evocative of ‘80s hip-hop meets ‘60s psych.

Greg Allen-Müller

With elements of the readymade and formalism at the forefront of his practice, Greg Allen-Müller is an artist of few words who prefers to let his conspicuous yet enigmatic work speak for itself. Many of his sculptures resemble large medicine cabinets with color-tinted mirrors and compartments that open automatically courtesy of hydraulics. While not speaking much about his work, Greg did express the necessity of art in his life as a means of escape from the stresses of everyday reality.

Camila Cañeque

Staging her installation in the basement space of 17-17 Troutman Ave’s artist studios, Barcelona-born Camila Ca ñeque’s Summer Painting is composed of 50 gallons of melting ice cream, spread out into a swirling, marble-esque designs that evolve and change throughout the course of the day. Having done the installation twice before, Cañeque’s work demands patience and the contemplation of passive movement across the 10 hours it typically takes to fully form. The process is one the artist admires as it makes the piece “like a blooming flower—you never know when the drama will unfold.”

Vaidehi Kinkhabwala

Dividing time between New York City and her home country of India, Vaidehi Kinkhabwala addresses masculinity in its range of forms with Rooster Series, a collection of rooster paintings wherein the namesake animals each represent a man from her own life. Many of the works are meant to critique the toxic traits of the subjects, as is the case with The Traitor —a depiction of a duplicitous-looking male chicken representing a friend who espoused feminist views to the artist’s face while contradicting those statements with their behavior. On the other side of the spectrum is a subject representing the artist's father, whom she credits with using his privilege to actively combat misogyny and elevate the platform for women in his community.

Taha Clayton

Kinship between subject and artist radiates from Taha Clayton’s oil-on-panel portraits of effortlessly stylish men and women from across the globe. Often styling his subjects in select pieces from their personal wardrobe, Clayton’s works are imbued with dignity and an understated reverence. A particularly striking work titled Angel of the Sunlight depicts a farmer that the artist met while traveling in Nairobi—the subject’s vibrant clothing and shadow-obscured face are rendered with such photorealistic detail, while still retaining the appeal of seeing the artist’s hand in his work.