 |
|||
 |
|||
 |
Kota Ezawa, Lennon Sontag Beuys
On a mountainside in the Piedmont region of Italy, a giant stuffed pink bunny has sprawled pathetically since September 18, 2005, floppy limbs askew, googly eyes pointed skyward. The rabbit, two hundred feet long and knit of wool, promises to deteriorate grotesquely over the next twenty years, the life span planned for it by the Vienna-based artist group Gelatin. Visitors who have hiked the Colletto Fava to reach the sculpture may scale the bunny's twenty-foot sides and rest atop, seated astride the belly of a familiar childhood creature turned uncannily huge and flat-out dead, its innocence squashed and tumescent. The charming abjection Gelatin specialize in owes much to the Vienna Actionists, their local predecessors. But where Actionists like Hermann Nitsch and Rudolph Schwarzkogler eviscerated large animals and performed crucifixions and castrations using real blood, Gelatin-like their American counterpart Paul McCarthy, who traffics in Pinocchio, Santa Claus, chocolate sauce, and ketchup-have fashioned a prankster work out of the exaggerated detritus of our youth-loving, commercial mass culture. The Actionists, mind you, were acting out in the face of a repressed, profoundly conservative, and deeply Catholic Austria of the post-World War II era. Gelatin, mind you, is acting out in the face of a repressed, profoundly conservative, and deeply Catholic Austria of today, not to mention a world in which the American empire is running an endless war on terrorism of its own creation; some of the most destructive weather disasters on record have struck, reeking not only of an impending global warming nightmare but of wrenching loss of life; and Sudan's and Nigeria's problems rate as just part of a ceaseless list of horrible et ceteras buried somewhere in the nightly news report, if mentioned at all (and likely forgotten by the time this review makes it to press). Meanwhile, in New York City, the pink rabbit's much less abject brethren have been multiplying like, well, rabbits. Cartoon animation, coloured marker drawings, giant fuzzy black bears, and kewpie doll figures run around the Chelsea playroom like a bunch of kids who've had too much birthday cake. The grownup world seems to have gotten the slip, the run-around, the blank stare, the old switcheroo at many galleries, where artists-male, on the whole, though what to make of that?-have retreated to kiddieland styles and pictorial subjects in search of a filter through which to process wildly different vital matter, none of it of the sort typically directed at anyone under the age of majority, none of it really about anyone under the age of majority. In Lennon Sontag Beuys (2004), Kota Ezawa screens South Park-style animated audio/video loops of John Lennon interviewed during his and Yoko Ono's 1969 bed-in for peace at an Amsterdam hotel; of Susan Sontag lecturing in 2001 at Columbia University on images of violence; and of Joseph Beuys speaking in 1974 at the New School on his thesis of social sculpture. The triptych plays simultaneously and cacophonously, reducing three critical players in the recent history of cultural protest to an appealingly repackaged sound bite of flat, adolescent colour blocks. The speakers' physical accessories-Lennon's granny glasses and long beard, Sontag's dark hair and sophisticated scarf, Beuys's fedora-solidified here as geometric elements, render their respective images all the more iconic. Simplified quotations on both a visual and a content level, Lennon Sontag Beuys graphically exaggerates and further elevates the kind of sieve through which we too often prefer to trickle our information and inspiration: South Park, the cartoon show for adults. Trenchant criticism is so much easier to take in the ironic, pared-down form of plastic fiction, in the guise of a kid's program. Part of the irony of a television show like South Park involves the conscious naïveté with which it appropriates an immature representational style, in its case cut-out, two-dimensional cardboard paper shapes. Artist Tam Ochiai quotes an alternate kindergarten genre, the coloured pencil drawing, and using this method has made paintings and works on paper that paradoxically explore issues of colour field and geometric abstraction through the effortless forms of the sketchy kitten and little girl. During the summer of 2005, he contracted with children to do the reprocessing themselves, inviting two groups of New York City camp kids to "copy" his work onto the walls of Team gallery using coloured pencils. Inspired by this base layer, he then crafted a number of new pieces to be hung overtop and alongside the children's handiwork, thereby entangling a möbius strip of relations between authentic kid drawings and authentic Ochiai ones, between sincerity and calculated quotation, between the desire a child feels to please an adult and the desire an adult (artist) feels to please an adult (viewer) by means of the familiar, easy patterns of youth. Yoshitomo Nara, like Ochiai, consciously quotes the drawing styles of children in his prolific pictures of big-eyed little girls. His colour marker sketches, however, eschew sweetness in favour of rock n' roll mischievousness, depicting knife-wielding, devil-eyed kewpie dolls infectiously mocking any demands of good behaviour. In his exhibition at Marianne Boesky, Nara wields tight control over these lovely brats, building two separate showcases in which to contain them. The larger environment, Chelsea White House (2005), a salvaged-wood shack, is tricked out like a mini-studio, complete with drawing table, work in progress, kawaii trinkets, and crushed beer cans. Finished drawings are taped salon-style to the walls. Viewers peek at the scene from a kid-size balcony, through a low peephole, or via a window under whose sill the artist has graffitied the angry-teenager warning: stay out stay back. Nara's faux studio dramatizes his rebel kid characters into a closed world in which he can sequester himself, and which we too can now visit, ever eager to forget or infantilize what's going on in the adult world outside. Despite these current examples from the fall Chelsea roster, visual forms borrowed from the nursery room are not inherently bereft of adult affect. The exhausting abjection of Gelatin's beaten-down stuffed rabbit makes this grossly clear, as does the work of artists as diverse as Sally Mann, who made deeply honest and complex photographs of her own children, and Zbiegnew Libera, who fashioned concentration camps out of Lego blocks. The recent work of Koto Ezawa, Tam Ochiai, and Yoshitomo Nara, on the contrary, traffics in the absence of the adult and the affecting, frolicking in the lightness suggested by-but by no means implicit in-their choice of youth-seeking materials and formats. Perhaps Nara most aptly symbolizes their mutually regressive tactics in his unintended nod back to Gelatin's giant pink bunny and the Actionists' constant crucifixion performances: a worn teddy bear hung, arms outstretched, above the false exit door of his studio. > Lori Waxman The author is an independent critic and doctoral student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She lives in Brooklyn.
|
|
|
