touching me touching you

Everyone remembers the great joy (although maybe it's more a boy thing?) of going to a science museum (or even better: more recent museological funrides like the Exploratorium in San Francisco) and being able to hit buttons, making sparks fly, setting whirring planetary models into motion, proving... oh but what were those presentations demonstrating in fact?

Carl André's invitation to walk on his floor pieces of aluminum or wood squares notwithstanding (ha, a pun! - and sadly, the last time I was in MOMA, they seemed to be discouraging touching or walking on the André piece), contemporary art remains generally disdainful of the public's touch.

Not so, two gallery shows currently on view in New York.

* Yoko Ono at Galerie LeLong (http://www.galerie-lelong.com/newyork/fr_newyork.htm).  Love her, hate her, it doesn't matter.  The LeLong show (April 18 - May 31) invites the public to "Touch Me" via molded soft rubber parts of the artist's body (lips, knees, breasts, belly, feet).  The effect is a little creepy: I could swear that someone had got her nipples wet, and her foot was already missing a toe (the panel next to the feet referenced the loss as typical of the violence that a woman's body is always subject to).

Touching Yoko's knee.

I am a little confused about the work's ideology, however, for Ono asks the public to cut themselves up and objectify their own bodies by shoving their limbs or faces out through holes cut in a large canvas and having the gallery assistant take Polaroids which are then pinned to a wall (with the pictured people's comments written on them).  I wish this part of the show had more force, but everyone seemed so excited about having their stocking-covered leg or well-posed hand mounted on the wall, that it was just goofy.

(I think this was why I so loved Kate Gilmore's video piece Star Bight, Star Might (2007) from the 2007 Arsenal Show - pushing her head through that plywood is a painful and laborious act.  Splinters and scratches remain on her face when she finally manages to break through.)

Kate Gilmore, Star Bright, Star Might

I guess Yoko could have forced her public to endure something more humiliating or honest than Polaroids.  Although I saw a couple of nipples on the wall, I didn't see much that dared.  How 'bout us being forced to endure groping and touching?  Would the public oblige?  Would the public touch?  (Even sex clubs keep the lights down in their back rooms).

(Ancillary thought: Michel Leiris talks a lot about the essential element of the kind of art he is engaged in (confessional, intimate) being "risk", exposure to the horns of the minotaur... It's a good mantra.)

* Upstairs at Tanya Bonakdar (http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com), and in concert with a major show of his works at MOMA and PS1, there is a nice participatory sound piece by Olafur Eliasson called Spatial Vibration: String-Based Instrument, Study II (see http://spatialvibration.blogspot.com).  Using something resembling (tonically) a traditional asian instrument attached to a turntable-like drawing machine, the public can create a large round paper image of the vibrations they play.  SPROINGGGG!  CHHHHRRRRING!

Eliasson's Spatial Vibration (the assistant is changing the ink pen)

Groovier still, you can take the huge round sheet of paper home, Felix Gonzales-Torres like.  Stamped with the artist and the piece's name no less.  It's got noise.  It's got free.  It's got participatory.  It's got take-home.  What more could you want?  From a gallery, at least.

strike the tall grass

I am obsessed with people tangled in and lost among trees, bamboo and tall grass.  

So, when I saw pictures of Fang-Yi Sheu clinging to and tangled upside-down in a field of plastic blue reeds  -- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon style -- in TimeOutNY (go to these sites for pix; dance theaters are very strict with trying to take pictures during a show), I knew I had to see the Ballet Tech / ManDanceProject (www.ballettech.org/mandance.html) performance of Eliot Feld's works at the Joyce Theater (www.joyce.org).

Along with the reed sequence mentioned above (an Isis story with a curious set of stations (of which the reeds were one): part descent into the Labyrinth, part exercise machines in a gym from Space-1999), several other images throughout the evening were stunning:

* the condensation of breath and body heat on the inside of a clinging transparent plastic sheet womb wrapped around a body struggling to push through.

* a long roll (50+ feet by 6 feet) of butcher-colored paper/plastic, crumpled and spilling forth, enveloping and obliterating the contours of a body-become-shambling heap.

* the glinting strobe effect of light bouncing off a large (5' diameter?) shallow silvery bowl and onto Fang-Yi's body as she tipped and rocked the bowl while dancing in it.

In the seat in front of me during the show, a person I took later to be the choreographer himself (? - people congratulated him afterwards) chatted up his guest during the show and, once, let out a obscenely loud "damn it! that's their cue to get off the stage!".  Harrumph.

One more thing: the set change from the first to the second piece was done with the curtain up.  The purposeful and disciplined striking of a set is a mesmerizing bit of choreography.  I would love to make a piece consisting only of sets, flats, curious arbitrary ramps and objects being placed, raised and struck again and again, silently.

air bear

I love Joshua Allen Harris' New York subway grate ephemeral inflatable bear, although it looks a lot more like a dog to me (thanks to YouTube's Rocketboom for featuring the piece in their broadcast today).  It makes me so freaking happy to see that apparent trash slowly rise up and take form as the subway air comes rushing from the grate, and then wag, shake its head (the mouth half-open in anticipation), shiver with excitement...

... then sink down to the grate -- commuters on their way -- and disappear once again as a heap of discarded plastic on the city street.

(New York's fifth season, as everyone knows, is when the plastic bags bud in all the trees, thrust there by winter/spring winds rushing through the steel and glass canyons... Ian Frazier has a nice piece about his own personal obsessive attempt to tackle the problem one tree at a time -- (see http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2001/01/treebags.html) : "Bag snagging was our exercise, our companionship, our hobby, our impromptu community action program")

Harris' second inflatable piece is more kooky, a kind of alien sideshow assemblage of critters waving arms, but it reminds me a bit of those inflatables outside of car dealerships and it doesn't have the fragile -- and ultimately lonely -- impact of the lost dog... er, bear.

You can find out a little more on Harris' work at the Wooster Collective ("dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world"): http://www.woostercollective.com/

biennial 2008

Complaining about the Whitney Biennial (http://whitney.org/biennial) is as New York as griping about how your neighborhood isn't what is used to be or about the proliferation of Duane Reade's, Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks on every block.  

Angry Dog Barking at Whitney-Goers 

(dog, electrical van, plastic cones, 3 hours - unplanned site-specific installation)

And true to form, while I haven't caught the Park Avenue Armory section (a new feature) of this year's show yet , I did find the work at the Whitney to be lackluster overall.  There are a lot of large pieces this year, but the number of artists represented is significantly smaller than in previous years (from over 100 in 2006 down to 81)and there is also almost no painting.

My ideal biennial is a rousing, overflowing, reckless affair, with art spilling out every old which way (like Chris Johanson's wooden streetscapes in the stairwells in 2002), including sound art and internet art, defying easy summaries of the state of contemporary art in America and surprising me at every step.  For this reason, 2002 was a great biennial (http://www.whitney.org/2002biennial/index.shtml), and I still have in my mind Roxy Paine's aluminum tree, Trenton Doyle Hancock's wall-size graphite tree, Karin Campbell's open/closed eyes, Stephen Dean's Holi festival video, Vija Celmins' spiderweb, Chris Ware's comic art, Robert Lazzarini's warped payphone, and Tim Hawkinson's self-portraits, to name a few.  

This being said, I find my memory of any specific biennial becomes rather blurry over time, and in my head they all meld into some kind of super-mega biennial composite of all the biennials I have seen, 2002's works placed beside Yayoi Kusama's firefly room and Eve Sussman's live action recreation of Velasquez's "Las Meninas" from 2004 and Paul Chan's haunting shadow show of floating bodies from 2006 (I could add dozens of other artists/works to this list).

Among the works that did work for me this year:  

* Lisa Sigal's strange little room "The Day Before Yesterday and the Day After Tomorrow" (http://whitney.org/www/2008biennial/www/?section=artists&page=artist_sigal ) with its decaying wallpaper, peeling paint, cracked lathe and plaster, and slits in the back wall through which one can glimpse tiny alcoves.  There is a nostalgic feeling of an abandoned apartment (shades of Christian Boltanski) and of discovering lost secrets, and it reminds me of my time in a crumbling squat when we painted on the walls and were kept up at night by the scurrying of the mice.

(Like the Sigal piece, space/place and architecture seem to be preoccupations this year: William Cordova recreates the police informant floor plan of the Chicago house of two Black Panthers, infamously burned by the cops in the 1969; Adam Putnam creates an optical illusion of hallways and doors in a dark room; Mika Rottenberg constructs a goat cheese shanty tended by long-haired maids; Charles Long works through/with found items and shapes (bird droppings) from the L.A. river...)

* Jedediah Caesar's resin works (http://whitney.org/www/2008biennial/www/?section=artists&page=artist_caesar ).  The  large block in the middle of the show has a beautiful drippiness with stalagmite-esque hollows and crevasses, while his wall-mounted polished resin squares show off cross-cut detritus and urban junk like millennia-old fossils.

*Ry Rocklen's box-springs spangled with carpenter nails (a bedtime version of Eva Hesse's Ascension).

* My friend L. loved Julia Meltzer and David Thorne's video "Still from not a matter of if but when: brief records of a time when expectations were repeatedly raised and lowered and people grew exhausted from never knowing if the moment was at hand or was still to come" (which is, you have to admit, a great title), a (on first blush) straightforward arab-language video-blog narration (with subtitles) of tragedy, frustration and life quandaries that engages you with its sense of seriousness, but remains utterly inscrutable, it being impossible to fully comprehend what the heck he's going on about.  Which, I guess, says (among other things) a hell of a lot about US-Arab relations today.

***

addendum - I think that Holland Cotter's review of the show in the NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/arts/design/07bien.html ) captures the mood pretty well -- "uncharismatic surfaces, complicated backstories", "low-key", "questioning", collaborative -- and is correct about the prevalence of narrative (especially via film/video).  I also appreciated the observation that this biennial (unlike 2002, for example) is not a repeat of works from the year's galleries, but instead a place for newly commissioned works (although, is this entirely a good thing?).  I would hesitate however to extrapolate from this show to a description of contemporary art as "lowered expectations" or "recession-bound": just chalk it up to the biennial being a highly-selective idiosyncratic curatorial snapshot.

collective play

Following upon the massive YouTube success of a video from their February 2007 (uploaded in January 2008 - over 6 million views!) "Frozen Grand Central" mission (which spawned similar scenes of people frozen in motion in London and elsewhere), Charlie Todd, founder of Improv Everywhere, was on the Today show last week while a small group of IE "agents" replicated their waxworks play on the ropeline outside.   A few days earlier, the group was also featured on ABC's Nightline.

Originally founded in August 2001 in New York City (preceding the flash mob phenomenon of summer 2003, although they really started  hitting their stride in 2003), Improv Everywhere is a loose creative collective which "causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places".  (http://improveverywhere.com ). 

There are things I absolutely love about certain IE missions (and for full disclosure: I have participated in several, including "Even Better than the Real Thing" (May 2005 - a fake roof concert by U2 : you can see me bouncing around yelling "Bono Bono" in the background).  Among my favorites:

• The Moebius - March 2003 (a series of unrelated events repeat themselves again and again in the Astor Place Starbucks)
• Look Up More - March 2005 (the windows of Union Square South become the site of a dance-fest)
• Cell Phone Symphony - February 2006 (the bag-check of the Strand becomes the site of a cacophonous symphony of ringtones)

Occasionally their missions have an almost intimate feel (like Romantic Comedy Cab (July 2005: can a friendly cab driver make the connection between the stories told by two of his riders and bring the couple back together?)), while others take on corporate culture (No Shirts (October 2007: Abercrombie & Fitch), Redheads (July 2007: Wendy's), Slo-Mo Home Depot (August 2006), Best Buy (April 2006)).  Some, like Frozen Grand Central, are a massive splash of verve (as too the various MP3 experiments and No-Pants subway rides).

I realize that my own zen "poethics" privilege certain smaller IE missions over others and that what interests me most is precisely a glint of magical awe in the midst of the mundane city, while my punk-anarchist heart is also attracted to the anti-corporate gesture.  Nevertheless, something about the sheer size of some of the recent missions, or the overly-scripted nature of some (the MP3 Experiment 2.0 (October 2005) made me feel like a passive cog following the silly commands of the disembodied voice in the sky) has left me cold.

An anecdote: I came back to New York after a summer abroad and in my first day wandering around outside my East Village apartment, I noticed what I took to be a radical change in fashion from the last time I had been in the city: all the boys were dressed in spangles, feathers and wigs as if Madison avenue had decreed the transgendered look as this year's style.  It was only later that I realized that Wigstock (the outdoor drag festival, http://www.wigstock.nu ) was taking place in Tompkin's Square that day; fashions returned to their norms the following morning.

What I love about my mistake was the lingering incertitude I was in, and my attempt to understand the irregular within a rational schema.  (addendum: check out the "what's the benefit" observer in IE's Mobile Desktop mission from this month: "(That's) the strangest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Have you seen that in another Starbucks? Is it like a new trend or what? What’s the benefit? Do you know what the benefit is?")  This method was also the hallmark of the first two Improv Everywhere No-Pants missions in which there were only a handful of participants riding the January subway in their boxers.  The latest No-Pants missions, however, are so massive that the non-participant's wonder is crushed by the collective and the missions have effectively become pants-less subway parties (similar to the NYC "One Night of Fire" performance party).  The charming Warp Zone mission (April 2002) put a number of random agents in a store humming, then singing, the theme to Cheers, as if by infectious exuberance; the employees were, on the whole, taken in by the scam.  If 300 agents started to sing, the slight-of-hand would be revealed. 

I realize that my criticisms may seem to imply a infatuation with the elite, marginal and secret, but I remain thoroughly enthusiastic about a (largely youth) culture that still enjoys collective play and provocation, and that hasn't been reduced to passively consuming what big-media has prepared for them.

As my case makes apparent, one's reactions to public collaborative works such as those of Improv Everywhere are highly subjective (for whom are the works intended? for the participants? for the viewing public? for the creator? for the YouTube spectator? can a work succeed for one of these, but fail for the others?) and participants may be drawn to these acts by a host of conflicting desires, including:

• the desire to participate in a marginal enterprise or secret group
• the pleasure of collusion with an inside-joke or scam
• the desire to throw a spanner in the works of big-box retailers
• the desire to "épater les bourgeois" or shock out-of-towners
• the desire to create magic or mystery in the modern city
• the hope of meeting artsy new people
• a sense of humor or mercurial exhibitionism

The reactions of non-participant participants - the hapless employees and bystanders that confront the act - are carefully catalogued in the IE's agent reports.  Officious security guards and angry managers seem to justify, to a large degree, all the chaos they are forced to confront with their humorless drudgery.  The litany of friendly "that was so strange/cool" comments, and, in certain missions, the questions about whether the chaos is random or a prank are charming reactions.  As pranks though, some of the missions are not without their darker side, especially when the victims are a well-meaning bunch of Joes; these dynamics have been wonderfully explored in a 2005 episode ("Mind Games") by the radio show This American Life which did a study of the "Best Gig Ever" mission in which IE agents made out that they were hardcore fans of the unknown band Ghosts of Pasha playing their first tour. (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=286  )  The story was also reused in episode one season one of the T.A.L. television show ("Reality Check" http://www.thisamericanlife.org/TV_Episode.aspx?episode=1 )

These ambivalent reactions are all in the nature of "play" itself which can be both a form of socializing and exclusion, both useful and purposeless, both fun and dangerous, as nicely described in a recent article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine called "Taking Play Seriously" by Robin Marantz Henig (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/magazine/17play.html ) 

(NB: I would have liked to see a broader discussion of play as it appears in the social theory of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, for whom human action can be interpreted largely from the perspective of strategic action and game play, including one's participation in fields of cultural production (the arts, academia, politics, literature) in which implicit and explicit rules of action define our gestures and give us meaning.  For example: the non-participant in the "game" of abstract art decries the canvas as worthless; the MFA, whose education has been centered on believing the game worth playing and the results of great import, grogs the De Kooning.)

Improv Everywhere has been going through a massive expansion lately, their "No Pants 2008" mission was replicated in numerous cities around the world, and there is now an IE Facebook group (group id=5021079203) and a global social network (http://improveverywhere.ning.com ).  It is hard to know whether success will spoil the fun.  The 2003 flash mobs of New York were victims both of their own success and of our contemporary auto-documenting obsessions: the number of participants increased exponentially (what else was there to do that summer?), one out of two with cell-phones or video cameras filming the action, and somehow the quirky magical "in-the-moment" event became highly scripted self-aware pageants.  Will Improv Everywhere avoid a similar fate?