S. Brown, “Somebody Order a Pie?”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     Just a sad, partially-animated face-fusion hungry to understand the answer to one of life’s great questions.
 
 
 
 

More of Brown’s work here.

       Paul McCarthy (b. 1945) & Mike Kelley (b. 1954)
       stills from Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone, 1992, video and installation (second image from top courtesy of Hauser & Wirth gallery)

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     I know, I know, it’s been awhile — I should prolly rechristen to “Art of the Month” at this rate. Or “Art of the Indeterminate Multi-Weekly Interval”. And with that mega-syllabic title, I launch into another, that of today’s Art of the Day: “Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone” (1992) by Paul McCarthy & Mike Kelley.
     I saw five or ten minutes of “Heidi” in an NYC gallery years ago, I don’t remember which, might’ve been MOMA. I remember strolling about and suddenly finding my peripheral vision arrested by some kind of onscreen frenzy that disturbed me before I understood why, before I’d focused my full attention on it. I approached it and stood watching, embarrassed, compelled, fascinated, repulsed. If I remember correctly there was a man and a woman, both were manipulating some kind of mannequin torso, struggling to push what appeared to be sausages down its cavity & which exited the doll’s anus in some kind of basin of liquid. The adult figures went about their activity with haste & focus and urgency, splashing and slipping and wrangling with the doll in this weird pointless (and simultaneously deadly important) ritual of forcefeeding that sort of resembled midwifery or operating room surgery in its energy and concentrated involvement with the body. It was a weird tangle of fluid and skin and wet that suggested birth, death, defecation, abuse, parental care, discipline, emergency room, horror movie, the list goes on. It was just so stacked with meanings, so many of them charged and taboo.
     But it wasn’t just that richness of disturbing referent that compelled me to watch. It was the camera framing, the man’s monotone voiceover (disconnected from the immediate action), the direction, the focus of the piece that all helped it transcend mere grody viscera thrown in your face. A vision and a narrative structured all the onscreen juice & frenzy, even if I didn’t get to stand there long enough to see it all play out (eventually embarrassment got the better of me and I walked away). The memory of watching that video snippet remained with me for years whenever I’d see some video artist attempt to mine similar body-shock territory (rarely with anything close to the focused & thoughtful transgression I saw in that brief bit of “Heidi”).
     Fast forward about ten years to just the other day, when I was reminded of “Heidi” again, and decided finally to do some net-hunting for the artist(s) and title (I’d forgotten both years ago). After several wild weird online goose chases involving lots of amusing & pornographic Google results, I finally realized McCarthy & Kelly were the artists and “Heidi” the piece. I was thrilled. If anyone out there’s ever had an art object — be it book, poem, film or sculpture or whatever — whose title and creator you’ve forgotten gnaw away at your mind you’ll know the thrill I mean. You get this little pop of relief and excitement — because up until that moment the entire experience had begun to seem to me like some kind of incorrect dream from a decade ago, some amalgam of other artists, other videos, some bizarre sticky psychological stew I’d whipped up that had no reality-referent.
     At any rate, I didn’t find the full video, but I did manage to scrounge up some stills that (unfortunately) only hint at the sheer primal birth/sex/death/family/shit/pain/horror power this piece communicated. And I learned more about the artwork itself — it stems from co-creator McCarthy’s interest in Joanna Spyri’s 19th century novel “Heidi” (the chronicle of a young girl’s travels and experiences & Switzerland’s most well-known literary achievement) and, in his words, “consisted of a fabricated set, a group of partial and full life-size rubber figures, two large backdrop paintings, and a video tape shot entirely on the set.” (from eai.org). Enjoy & see the full-length version if you can/want. Oh & in the more-info links section below is a link to a small clip of the video I found on Vimeo — be warned, it’s pretty graphic.
 
 
 
 

A short clip from “Heidi” (warning: graphic) at vimeo.com.

More about McCarthy & Kelley’s “Heidi” at arttorrents.blogspot.

More Kelley at pbs.org.

More McCarthy at Hauser & Wirth.

       Hussein Al-Mohasen (b. 1971 (?) in Qatif, Saudi Arabia)
       Untitled, 2010, Acrylic on canvas

       Nihad Al-Turk (b. 1972 in Aleppo, Syria)
       Untitled, 2010, painting

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     Two lovely works by contemporary Middle Eastern artists Hussein Al-Mohasen & Nihad Al-Turk. I first stumbled across Al-Turk’s “Vase”, and loved its big fat beet-like proportions and moody maroons. It immediately drew me to it, it had gravitational pull. & I liked its heavy black outline too, and the way it shifted back and forth between two and three dimensions, alternately looking like an upright vessel and some kind of liquefied brick puddle oozing over a mat.
     I was excited to post “Vase” and call it a night when my art-image search, the results of which I was just about to close, revealed to me Al-Mohasen’s “Untitled”. Anyone who’s followed “Art of the Day” or who knows my art tastes won’t be surprised that I gravitated to this piece — I’m a sucker for controlled visual noise (or, better yet, as in the case here, frantic color harmonies and resonances easily mistaken for visual noise). Blues and purples of different intensities, varieties and emotions anchor the piece and provide context for the central burnished golden urn/pouch object. The urn/pouch floats with beatific glow, touched by kelp strands and efflorescing golden glyphs, itself bursting with treasures and curlicues of exuberant color, sprouting pale flowers, lipstick smudges at its mouth. You can probably see why, with Al-Turk’s “Vase” fresh in my mind, this other round stout vessel-portrait caught my attention. That’s where the similarities end though; each work departs from that common ground in very different directions & through wholly different means achieve its own vision & presence & power.
 
 
 
 

More about Al-Mohasen & more of his art at Greenboxmuseum.com.

More about Al-Turk & more of his art at Ayyam Gallery.

 
 
 
 
“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?

Yet, O Lord most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.

Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears unto our prayers; but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, though most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall away from thee.”

                    – from the Book of Common Prayer (as revised by composer Henry Purcell)

 
 
 
 
Here is Purcell’s musical setting of “Funeral Sentences” (Note: videos appear shrunken on purpose; just use to play sound, the visuals are unnecessary):

1. First, the Funeral March:

 
 
2. Second, the sung text:

A terrific bio and collection of info about Purcell lives over at classical label Naxos’ site, right here.

       Yang Hongwei (b. 1968 in Tianjin, China)
       Family of China No.1, 2007, Wood engraving

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     Been awhile! Sorry for the absence folks, will try my best to be semi-regular about this from here on out.
    Today I’m offering up this stunner by Yang Hongwei, “Family of China No. 1″. Like most of the art I post for Art of the Day, this, and its artist, were new to me. This one bricked me when I saw it, just stunned me with its tone, texture, themes. What at first seems like a Fangoria zombie murder scene reveals itself to be more complex: a family in a bathtub, struggling, holding each other desperately. A kind of ghost figure leaning in on the right side. Flesh merging with flesh as the family members lose their autonomy, seeming to eat each other to survive, becoming one unit. A smoky industrial sky, as if these people live out in the sooty open, naked and tangled.
    All of this to me evokes first of all the bloody, raw grind and compress of poverty. The way it forces boundaries erased and puts people in conditions where privacy is impossible. Where there isn’t emotional energy left to waste on anything but extreme expressions of yearning, mourning, fear, hunger, anger. No time for nuance, subtlety.
    And it suggests the ways in which a family, in order to protect itself and survive, can turn inward, become insular and conglomerated, & thereby finding a strength in that insularity, but also a deepening of their confusion.
 
 
 
 

More of Hongwei’s work at Artnet.

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
       Joel Bacon
       fugue, 2009, graphite on paper

 
 
       Yeon Jin Kim
        4 Zoonomia, 2010 (?)

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     As promised, part two my survey of the Governors Island art bits I came across in September. As readers of Art of the Day know, I never review stuff I don’t love (I’m a negative enough old cudgel as it is). So while I came across a lot of noteworthy art things while wandering on Gov’s Island this past labor day weekend, I’m only covering the stuff that I loved most.
     First up tonight’s a work by Joel Bacon that wasn’t something I saw at Governors Island, a piece called “fugue”. So why did I choose it? Well, a) I like it, but the primary reason’s b) — the two pieces of his I did see and love were ungoogleable: “Barbell Diptych” and “Hedgerow”. And that’s a shame because one of the pieces, the former, was strong as hell, and tied for first in my Gov. Island favorites list (co-winner being the next artist I’ll cover). “Barbell Diptych” comprises two tall oblong canvases side by side, each depicting some kind of tall barbell-shaped mass of reddish, wormy viscera. They hovered there, sentient, full of pulsing alien presence. It felt like they could talk to each other and to you in some weird telepathic whisper. Alternately, they seemed just masses of dead, sculpted meat. A lot of the piece’s power for me resulted precisely from this duality: alive & aware extraterrestrial presence vs. sheer impact of two masses of gutty blorp.
     Yeon Jin Kim’s “4 Zoonomia” was my other favorite piece of art I saw on Governors Island over Labor day. It’s a beautifully strange, unnerving piece of video art where the mouse-eye view camera tentatively enters & navigates a heavily textured dreamscape of plant props, leaves & dried coral. Humanoid forms detach from the vegetal background unexpectedly and move in cute halting shamble, eerie soundfx of their echoey footsteps provided. All the while the camera takes you deeper, pausing and lurching, creating suspense as to what presence will manifest next, leaves and shadows wriggling and shaking. A blue door opens, a feasting giant bug lumbers by, prey in its mandibles.
     Just as interesting was Kim’s “All Intellectual Animals are Dangerous” (not shown here). The best way to describe this video is just to provide improvised running commentary: Gray and white bricks. Ominous backwards-speech sounds. Camera slowly crawls along them. Roots jostle out of holes made in the brick. A window shows a mass of bright red blood encircling a curious dog sitting calmly in the kitchen. Paper cut-out elk stare at you while their heads fall off. The camera keeps crawling up the brickwall, presents us with a goat chewing off the skin of its companion, green ichor spilled, chewing and chewing in the checkered tile chamber. Camera pans, roots everywhere, broken bricks, hole opens into chamber: tall lithe giantess is there, sad and hugging her knees, Alice after the grow potion, filing up the room. Brick wall again, dog looking out at bluecloudy apocalypse storm space, now a dead shark on droughtland. A window glows now soft echinachea rose, the blueshutter opens. Alligator grins at the exposed foot in the bathtub.
 
 
 
 

More of Bacon’s art at Galleryell.com.

More of Yeon Jin Kim’s gorgeous videos over at what I believe to be her youtube channel, here.