You are Here
Ballroom Marfa
- James Bae -
The bracketing of individuality within the context of any “massive new young artists show” is certainly within the popular zeitgeist, blooming in various Kunsthalles and project spaces worldwide. But the Ballroom Marfa presents the ambitious You are Here with surprising clarity and a battered but rollicking sense of erudition. In a show that could have easily turned into a cheap trick—young artists huckstering for space and exposure like PS1’s Greater New York—or an excuse simply to be part of something meaningless that is meaninglessly part of something else like an afterparty at Deitch Projects, You are Here’s decisive strength lies in what large group shows often forget to do: display exceptional works and there are more than a few memorable works and artists one should remember from this show.
Suntek Chung, Suburban Fury, 2005
C-Print
40 X 56 inches
With Greater New York barely over, You are Here is a reunion of sorts, with alumni Deborah Grant, Adam Helms, Matthew Day Jackson, Allison Smith and Will Villalongo presented in concert with others who should have been included at PS1 but were bewilderingly left out—Andrew Guenther, for example. There are the relatively unknowns who should make it (Larry Bamburg, Ian Sullivan, SunTek Chung) and a painter who seemingly possesses the highest ceiling of all: Roger White. The fifteen artists combined in You are Here ostensibly fall under the loose rubric of curator Fairfax Dorn’s theme of what constitutes present-day America though this is not explicitly stated, to brilliant effect. Rather, the show’s particular identity is parlayed in a judicious lack of a heavy curatorial hand—an open-ended cosmology of various emotional readings for viewers to ultimately sort out. The enterprise benefits immeasurably from refraining to apply otherwise boring sociological imprimaturs. The success of the show lies, then, in allowing the art to speak for itself in a dizzying array of American tropes. And what, if anything, is more American than the mythologizing concept of the vaunted anything is possible conceit? You are Here is the furthest extrapolation of such thought.
Ian Sullivan, Indian Giver, 2005
Color pencil and thread on paper
20 x 14 inches
Courtesy the artist
There’s no way to write about all the artists in the show, so a few will have to suffice for the rest. Two of the show’s pomp and glory pieces, Matthew Day Jackson’s large-scale play on an Alexander Calder mobile in the main space and Allison Smith’s strangely ornamental installation of wooden rifles and muskets, both indicate that the allegorical strength of objective imagery is not quite dead. In the Ballroom’s rather large gallery, both of these works possess larger-than-life personas, part and parcel of an utterly American truism: iconography as stand-in for immemorial power.
Playing upon a continuing riff of reassessing power symbols in the realm of personal and ideological myth, Jackson channels the strange whimsy of the immediately post-World-War II attitudes reflected in Calder’s balanced art, proscribing within its manufacture a vocabulary of political dissent. One side of the fulcrum is weighed with the deconstructed appendages of a carved eagle, assembled as if from a box of The Colonel’s original recipe; the other displays a whole vulture, proudly in full roost. The insinuation of desiccated institutional thinking and that of a culture left to pick through the carrion of its own, self-created social detritus finds middle ground in the precarious ethical balance the piece strikes—an ethical pivot of a neither/nor situation, alluding to a new era of subversive methodology.
Near Jackson’s work, Smith’s piece seemingly asserts the American need to turn everything into a form of entertainment. An inner wheel made of wooden rifles, framed in such a way as to suggest a mandala, creates a specific continuity on what it is about violence that captivates the human imagination. Part telos, part choreographed scene from an Esther Williams poolside spectacle, it grants a fitting suggestion as to why Civil War re-creations occur with great pleasure every weekend across America.
Adam Helms,Hinterlands, 2005
Gouache and graphite on paper
42 x 76 inches (framed)
Courtesy the Artist and Sister Gallery, Los Angeles
More than a few artists here are suggesting the American Dream has taken the form of a nightmare. Adam Helms’ amazingly rendered drawings of Minotaurs depicted as contemporary militiamen rendered in pencil, carry the weight of their buffalo heads. The surrounding landscape, limited in palette, implies no distinct location of where carnage is taking place. In connection with the anthropomorphized features of the figures, this ambiguity indicates the strange, indistinct absurdity of violence as a universal event: the work appears to be as much about Kosovo as the Michigan Militia. Reducing all humanity to an animistic nom de guerre, Helms’ subject matter skillfully revives the Hobbesian warning of humanity as being only one paycheck away from reverting to beasts.
In Deborah Grant’s sculpture of a distinctly American creature, the Plains buffalo—known as much for its visual accessibility as for its consumptive demise—the slick surface of the beast is branded with an iconographic symbol of mediocrity: the Chanel “double C” logo. This irony makes a case—and a classist one at that—that America still looks to Europe for definition. Perhaps the deeper symbol of the buffalo—its blackness—implies further damnation. As a stand-in for the African-American cavalry, the historical appropriation of the Buffalo Soldier within the piece casts an ugly specter of a government pitting the marginalized peoples against each other for its own purposes: the 10th Cavalry were used to track down Geronimo and Victorio and also served extensively in wars against the Plains Indians. Grant’s buffalo points out that both soldier and prey saw their demise as largely purposeless.
Deborah Grant, Boys from Lawton, OK, 2005
Oil and mixed media on birch panel
42 x 40 inches
Courtesy the Artist Pension Fund of New York
Like Helms and Grant, Andrew Guenther and Roger White use color to elaborate effect. Pairing verboten animistic themes in seemingly out-of-tune pastel colors reserved for Raoul Dufy, Guenther’s washed-out images of skulls dissolving into near pictorial illegibility confuses the ground between a failed Fauvist pastoral and a shoe-gazing nature morte in its most literal sense. This differentiation—the balance between colors that seem in direct conflict with subject matter, no doubt indebted to the likes of Francisco de Goya’s final, paranoid disdain of humanity—creates uneasy romanticism about America’s multiple attempts to foster countercultural progress. It’s one of the crowns of the show. Fit for a hippie bucolia, the soft focus of Guenther’s motifs is devoid of any straight reading—especially here. It doesn’t seem the relevant point. It’s somewhere else, residing perhaps in the mythification of fetishisms.
Roger White comes from the same peripheral approach. Matching Guenther as one of the show’s hardest reads, his painting of a warmish, modulating sun breaking through the waiting actuation of clouds evokes a catalogue of disparate aesthetic pedigrees: Vija Celmins and Caspar David Friedrich, among others. If this painting is an expression of nature, its content is up for debate. Undoubtedly, White’s other paintings have been compared to Luc Tuymans’, a match that registers as partially relevant in the Ballroom painting. In some ways, the painting also shares its strategic impulse with Wilhelm Sasnal, another painter who leaves a flat account of subject as a black mirror of expiation.
White’s work is either a glorious depiction of the sublime or, in the veridical relationship between the viewer and the figurative plane, an ethical recognition (the complicit situation of witnessing an atomic detonation from an overhead angle, as if from a plane). The former read asserts the constancy of the aesthetic present; the latter, a condemning memento of society at a crossroads of moral understanding. Without suggestions, the painting is an astounding work of the latitude tacitly involved in interpreting the eidetic.
In such light, Larry Bamburg’s installation represents the final stasis of our era: a localized apocalyptic pile of paper, string, bouncing insects, air and light in a mounting algorithm of self-realizing mass—the utterly mundane, seemingly recursive in all its battered panache. Buried within is the profundity of retrieval— an ultimately human event. One sees what one wants to see. Memory activates meaning into reading. Bamburg’s dishabille is a fitting summation for this astonishingly diverse show.