Thursday Outing #3: Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing IX

Nikhil Chopra combines approaches associated with theater, portraiture, landscape drawing, photography, art actions, and installation to chronicle the world through live performance. As the Victorian draughtsman Yog Raj Chitrakar, Chopra haunts bustling market squares, forgotten old buildings, city streets, and museum galleries to make large-scale drawings. Within the performances, daily actions—washing, eating, drinking, sleeping, dressing, shaving, and observing—are transformed into ritualistic spectacle. While an ambiguous past collides with an unstable present, Yog Raj Chitrakar reveals the process of documenting what he sees while exploring self-portraiture, autobiography, history, fantasy, and sexuality.

“Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing IX” is inspired by the 1920s and New York City’s role in that defining moment in the history of the world – a time of deep physical, imagined, and sociological changes impacted by immigration, architecture, and labor, caught between two world wars. As the character Yog Raj Chitrakar, the artist activates the gallery, transformed into a turn-of the-century tableau vivant, for five days (November 4–8). Searching at the edge of the Atlantic, the wanderer/draughtsman/mapmaker also travels through Chinatown and Lower Manhattan, imagining America, and eventually chronicling New York City from the vantage point of Ellis Island. During the performance at the New Museum, the exhibition is in perpetual transformation. At its conclusion, remnants of Chopra’s occupation of the space remain on display as an installation. Documentation from three previous performances also on view in this exhibition—Memory Drawing II (Mumbai, 2007), Yog Raj Chitrakar visits Lal Chowk (Srinagar, 2007), and Memory Drawing VI (London, 2008)—suggests the many ways in which the history and reality of a location impact the artist’s execution of characters though costuming, gesture, and action.

Outing #3 at the New Museum

For his first large-scale solo presentation in an American museum, Urs Fischer has taken over all three of the New Museum’s gallery floors to create a series of immersive installations and hallucinatory environments.

The exhibition “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty” is the culmination of four years of work. Neither a traditional survey nor a retrospective, the exhibition features new productions and iconic works combined to compose a series of gigantic still lifes and walk-in tableaux. Choreographed entirely by the artist, the exhibition is a descent into Fischer’s universe, revealing the world of an artist who has emerged as one of the most exceptional talents working today.

On the second floor, illusion and reality trade place in a game of multiple reflections. The installation Service à la française (2009)—Fischer’s most ambitious work to date—is a technical tour de force that required more than 25,000 photographs and over twelve tons of steel. More than fifty chrome boxes occupy the gallery, composing a grid of monoliths—a cityscape of mirrored cubes onto which the artist has silkscreened a dizzying array of images. Like a collage unraveling before the viewer’s eyes, the surfaces of the boxes create an optical maze that renders everything simultaneously immaterial and hyperreal.

On the third floor, Fischer presents an installation that turns the Museum’s architecture into an image of itself—a site-specific trompe l’oeil environment. Each square inch of the Museum architecture has been photographed and reprinted as a wallpaper that covers the very same walls and ceiling, in a maddening exercise in simulation. A piano occupies the space, appearing to melt under the pressure of some invisible force. Simultaneously solid and soft, like a Salvador Dalí painting in three dimensions, this sculpture, like many other works by Fischer, seems to succumb to a dramatic process of metamorphosis.

On the fourth floor, Fischer presents five new aluminum sculptures cast from small clays, hand-molded by the artist. Hanging from the ceiling or balancing awkwardly in space, these massive abstractions resemble strange cocoons or a gathering of enigmatic monuments.

An engineer of imaginary worlds, in the past Fischer has created sculptures in a rich variety of materials including unstable substances such as melting wax and rotting vegetables. In a continuous search for new plastic solutions, Fischer has built houses out of bread and given life to animated puppets; he has dissected objects or blown them out of proportion in order to reinvent our relationship to them. In 2007, in a now-legendary exhibition, he excavated the floor of his New York gallery, digging a crater within the exhibition space. Throughout his work, with ambitious gestures and irreverent panache, Fischer explores the secret mechanisms of perception, combining a Pop immediacy with a neo-Baroque taste for the absurd.

Recommended Reading, Photos from Outing #2

Pablo Picasso famously said "If there's something to steal, I steal it." And while shoplifting and out-and-out plagiarism are obviously not permissible, you may get an idea or two for your reviews of "Looking at Music: Side 2" by reading this review from yesterday's New York Times, of another exhibition of art about music—"Who Shot Rock and Roll" at the Brooklyn Museum: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/arts/design/30rock.html?_r=1

And while you're at it, check out the New York Times review of an exhibition we'll be seeing next week, "Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty": http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/arts/design/30urs.html

Get to writing as soon as possible, while what we've seen is fresh in your minds. See you all Thursday afternoon at the New Museum!

Friday October 30 MoMA Outing

Rock and roll photography and more! For this Friday's outing, we'll see "Looking at Music: Side 2" and explore the Museum of Modern Art's legendary contemporary art collection. Meet in the MoMA lobby, on the 53rd St side.

Looking at Music: Side 2

In the mid-1970s, right on the heels of Conceptual art and Minimalism, many visual artists turned to making raw, hard-edged work that addressed urban blight and bad economies. With an ear set to punk, these artists worked in the netherworld between music and media, often forming their own short-lived bands. Their rough, do-it-yourself projects pushed the envelope of interdisciplinary experimentation, which soon spread to underground venues from New York to London, Düsseldorf, and Krakow. This exhibition features music videos, super-8 films, drawings, photographs, and zines from MoMA's collection that explore the melding of music, media, and visual art in the final decades leading up to the twenty-first century.

SLASH

This Friday, you get your first glimpse of the MAD Museum's latest show.  The incredibly named.....

Slash: Paper Under the Knife 

Slash: Paper Under the Knife takes the pulse of the international art world's renewed interest in paper as a creative medium and source of artistic inspiration, examining the remarkably diverse use of paper in a range of art forms. Slash is the third exhibition in MAD's Materials and Process series, which examines the renaissance of traditional handcraft materials and techniques in contemporary art and design. The exhibition surveys unusual paper treatments, including works that are burned, torn, cut by lasers, and shredded. A section of the exhibition will focus on artists who modify books to transform them into sculpture, while another will highlight the use of cut paper for film and video animations.

Visual Arts TRaC begins!

Get ready for the ultimate insider's look at the museum world with your instructor Sarah Valdez!  You are in good hands. 

You'll be starting by exploring your homebase for the next 8 weeks.  High 5's partner in the Visual Arts TRaC venture is the Museum of Arts and Design.....

the MAD Museum:


Prepare to have the best view from your classroom of all the TRaC classes.  You look out over Central Park.  (Music TRaC, which is in a mirrored room, has only view of themselves.)  For more info about the building itself, click here.

Meet Sarah in the lobby on Fridays at 4:30. 
MAD is located at 2 Columbus Circle, easily accessible by both subway and bus.

By train:
A, B, C, D or No. 1 to Columbus Circle at 59th Street;
N, R, Q or W to 57th Street and 7th Avenue
F to 57th Street and 6th Avenue
By bus:
M5, M7, M10, M20, M30 and M104 to Columbus Circle
at 59th Street or 57th Street and 8th Avenue

Enjoy!

Artist & Critic Talk on Saturday at 1:30 at Schroeder Romero Gallery

On Saturday 25, we will meet at 1:30 at Schroeder Romero Gallery (637 West 27th Street) for William Powhida's exhibition: The Writing is On The Wall. Bill is an artist, teacher and art critic for The Brooklyn Rail. William will introduce us to the show and talk about his experiences with writing art criticism.

Paddy Johnson (of art blog, Art Fag City) writes:

A testament to the migration of cliche online behavioral norms to the offline world, William Powhida presents an uncensored portrait of the art world from a fictious Thai jail cell, circa September - December 2009 at Schroeder Romero. If you’re part of this community, the show is literally like staring into the sun: you can’t turn away. Hand drawn notebook pages with text on the art world fill the gallery, many of which contain jewels of insider knowledge and reflections on the art world. I spent a good half hour looking at Powida’s, Relational Wall, an annotated watercolor painting depicting virtually every art celebrity in town. “I like to party”, reads the text under Alexis Hubshman of the Scope fair, while dealer Jeffery Deitch sits at the center of the piece. As those in the scene already know, this version of the future isn’t all that different than it is today, but then social economies rarely transform themselves so completely over the course of six months.

On a related note, the exhibition’s press release necessarily references art scholar Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Art, a term identifying works based upon the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt. While appropriate, my hope is that an academic with a better understanding of online culture updates these theories for the fine art world. Powhida’s work may reflect the development of complex social networks lessening our interest in privacy but his mirror is hardly unique. It’s simply one more product in the giant Facebook economy. And even within said marketplace, the idea that this kind of personal information has any lasting or substantive value has been questioned.

William Powhida responds:

1. Hey Paddy,

   The journal pages in the show come from a possible future for William Powhida after he’s bottomed out in the flailing economy while the relational wall is generally a reflection of the last three years of the art boom. It’s an outcome of Powhida’s forced reflection while sitting in a Thai prison cell. Certainly facebook, which my art dealers are probably scouring right now, has informed the structure of the work, but all the images (including the surrounding wall of prints) are primarily from celebratory art world photographs from Artforum diary and Artnet while all the information is based only on gossip, supposition, and personal knowledge. I included the 2,500 plus portraits (the last 3 years of Art forum Diary) around the painting to suggest that there isn’t going to be much lasting value in most of what the art world takes so seriously. The relational wall is a paranoid, obsessive snapshot of the art world at the height of our inglorious gilded age funded with all that money that disappeared when the stock market nearly halved itself. That money is gone, and may never come back. Certainly not without heavy taxes on the wealthy. Still, I completely agree with you that many of the major players will still exactly be right where they are in the hierarchy with only the supporting characters changing and exchanging roles in a year or even five years and I’ll still be doing whatever it is that I do. My hope, like most of my work, is that it reflects my actual cultural experience during this period. I pulled Bourriaud’s quote because it suggests that the relational wall is Powhida’s self-portrait. Anyway, the game isn’t over, as Bourriaud suggests it won’t start over until the ’social setting radically changes’. That would probably require an alternative to capitalism. I hope the painting didn’t cause any permanent damage.

   -Cheers,

   William