"News From the World," a show by Alexander Haring, Patrick Roberts, and Lola Schnabel, looks like it could have been made by any number of people, offering an eclectic jumble of different kinds of work in varying mediums. In keeping with the long, irritating tradition of weekly show openings, this exhibition leaves the work without labels and without titles, keeping the work—unless you know the artist, or the pieces beforehand—anonymous. Maybe that anonymity serves the theme suggested by the title, and maybe the work is supposed to be shown anonymously, as artifacts from the world. But if that is the intention, it isn't executed with enough conviction, and without titles or names, I felt farther away from the work, that the work was not communicating to me, or that the jumble of work in the show was not anchored.
What is the news from the world? The most consistent fascination in the exhibition is bodies, their beauty and their strangeness. Almost every piece engages directly with the figure. Two exceptions include photographs that tell a story of human ruins—architectural decay in one, an atomic mushroom cloud in another. This violence is present in the other work, as in the busts of a female human torso and a cushion, which have flashing, sexual imagery projected onto them. Or the looping projection set at floor level, which shows a man trying without success to get closer to the viewer, and being pushed back by some invisible force. Both of these projections have a fast, frantic quality that succeeds in conveying a sense of aggression on the bodies they depict.
The questions concern the body or maybe the body in pain, maybe most explicitly imagined in the three photographs with lush colors that frame snapshots of police detainment, or maybe, as with the severed fingernail, the effects of torture techniques.
The work here is thoughtful, and the curation for the most part lives up to that. The use of the gallery space is creative and while the show does not feel too sparse, it also feels like the work has room to breath. If you only went for the opening night snacks, it's worth a second trip.
Henry Chapman
2 comments:
though I can understand that it is petty of me to be critical of this, I couldn't help but be jarred by the consistent return to name-dropping in lola's work. The cast of her film was a who's who of weak-ties to art world fixtures and her final credits ('dedicated to my father, julian schnabel') were in poor taste.
It was not enough that she simply dedicate it to her father, whose name is well-known by almost anyone who saw the show and who might see the work in the context of an art market; she also had to identify him by his familial relation to her and his first and last name.
This bars any subtlety or grace from entering the reference in that we are not allowed to first see lola's last name and then connect it to her dedication to her father (obliquely filling in lineage from there) and we are not allowed to first see it simply as a dedication to an artist and then remember that her last name matches his.
Given that the piece was shown looped with another individual's piece, the audience almost had to sit through lola's credits to see the other film and/or see the beginning of her piece if they missed it. For this reason consideration of lola's word choice, while less important than other elements, is still significant.
The firm attempt to lock familial relationship comes across, to me, as a both haughty and desperate gesture that the work would be better without.
Apart from these considerations, the shooting was somewhat clumsy and most of the text was slipshodly integrated and poorly written.
As for the positive elements of Lola's film, its colors were utterly fantastic. I can safely say I've never seen such vivid colors in an art school film.
And her colors were consistently breathtaking in the rest of her pieces in the show, even if they sometimes ran the risk of 'safety' and were sometimes applied to unworthy subjects.
The smaller video piece projected onto the wall of the houghton gallery beside the larger screening area was the single most interesting piece of the show and I found myself returning to it many times. I'm not sure that I understand exactly what was happening, but I don't care to as it was an arresting visual that made itself available to openness of interpretation (my current favorite quality in art).
I should close with a note of self-criticism in calling attention to the problematic number of times I mentioned lola (it was not her show alone) and also the way in which I refer to her by her first name instead of her last. Forcefully skirting the issue of relationship while discussing it is just as bad as audaciously announcing it, though it may have happened that way because I wrote this in response to a review which already established the first-name-basis of identification.
this is problematic, but much less ambiguously bad is my inability to identify whose work the smaller video I liked so much was. I feel that I simply accepted the work as 'not-lola's' and inwardly connected my enjoyment of the piece to its separation from lola.
this is a personal slight on my part that I take responsibility for, but I suspect something similar will continue to happen to others like myself with lola's work if it continues point so enthusiastically back to her father.
joshua
(p.s. I never in my life thought I'd see david blaine in person.)
Your understanding or admission of your "petty" criticism does not free you from culpability.
Your comments are absurd and unfair. An artist has the right to credit anyone by any name of any provenance, and a filmmaker- no matter who it is or what line of work their parents were in- should never have to feel as though their audience was forced to "sit through" their credits before they get to move on to someone else's film. Furthermore, it is your responsibility as a viewer to separate the artist's vision from her parent's. She has done her part by making her own film. His films are quite different from hers, and I actually think that hers are better.
What you have posted is a very thorough criticism of the film's credits with very little attention to the film itself. I find it hard to believe that you even watched it.
I take serious issue with your criticism of the "clumsy" camerawork. It is fundamental to the discourse about a work of art that you credit the maker with deciding how the object "is" (looks, smells, whatever). She isn't stupid. She knows what the film looks like. If she didn't shoot it (which I don't think she did) she hired someone with a particular vision and gave that person directions.
But what does "clumsy" camerawork mean? That she didn't try, or didn't care what it looked like? Or that the photographer didn't use a tripod, or that an object within the frame moved without her express intervention? Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
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