Pablo Bronstein

The Metropolitan keeps a substantial part of its contemporary display in an awkward position: a horseshoe-shaped suite of galleries between the first and second floors. On the floor plan of the visitor’s guide, the area becomes a ghost hovering at the rear of the museum, and even the physical presence of the gallery hugging the south stairwell gives an impression of instability: Its ceiling is rutted with runners for moving walls and lights, underscoring the transience of the shows its hosts.

Pablo Bronstein has used his time in that gallery to show a series of large-scale ink and gouache drawings that reflect on museum architecture and the notions of art and display it facilitates. First and Second Installation of Precolumbian Objects at the Metropolitan Museum (all works 2009) comprises two arrangements of sculptures on preposterously ornate, three-tiered walls, with sphinxes and hulking male caryatids that distort the room’s scale and balance. It comes off as a smirk at the Met’s Greek and Roman galleries, the upper stretches of which are adorned with heterogeneous fake columns and functionless squares of crossed bars. Those very designs appear in Six Affordable Neo-Georgian Futures for the Metropolitan Museum as decorative patterns on architectural drawings of squat, conjoined facades expanding on the Met’s present shape. The plans, laid horizontally on tables in the center of the room, seem to speculate on what might have happened if Philippe de Montebello had been succeeded by Prince Charles. In the gallery’s back corner, The Departure of the Temple of Dendur from Egypt imagines an epically oversize version of the Met’s prized shrine being carted out of the desert by horses and slaves. As the viewer approaches the drawing to examine the details of the tableau, set under an inky wash of lightless sky, he can’t help but glance left and notice, in the shadows behind a partition, a door marked STAFF ONLY. Accident or not, the juxtaposition precisely articulates the humor and tension that make the exhibition strong—the fantasies of romance and grandeur prompted by the museum, and their abrupt encounter with its mundane realities.

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Tigran Khachatryan

Published in Artforum, January 2010

Making a gallery debut that looks like a retrospective can be a risky endeavor, especially when the artist is not yet thirty. But Tigran Khachatryan’s video remakes of great films constitute an idiosyncratic history of cinema and revolutionary thought that is best considered as a whole, while his aggressive political stance makes virtues of low production value and raw frankness—a productive foil for the monographic survey format. The opening credits for his Brother of La Chinoise, 2005, are written in dry-erase marker on the wall of a bathroom; the artist attempts to reconstruct the ideological conflict of Godard’s 1967 film by posing stone-faced for the camera, as slogans and speeches stream past in subtitles. Stalker, 2004, is a jumble of reenacted vignettes that strip down Tarkovsky’s drama to a parodic polemic about belief and doubt in the possibility of radical change. Khachatryan puts the viewer to the test with his version of the scene where the Stalker’s daughter telekinetically pushes glasses across the kitchen table; where Tarkovsky constructed an illusion of smooth motion, Khachatryan makes the objects skip forward in a series of visible, jerky edits.

The Beginning, 2007, the show’s most compelling work, is based on Armenian director Artavazd Peleshian’s 1967 short, a montage of documentary film and photography that reflects on political upheaval in the half-century after the October Revolution. Khachatryan has intercut video of skaters and anarchists sourced from the web into Peleshian’s collected footage of militant violence, and he timed the original soundtrack’s gunshots and explosions to punctuate scenes of boys falling off roofs and other stunts gone wrong. Inspired by Peleshian’s ambition to create a montage of ideas rather than images, Khachatryan has constructed clashes that leave the viewer with anxious questions. Are the bone-crunching mishaps of today’s punks a metaphor for collapses of revolutionary ideology? Can a revolution only be sustained through chaos? Peleshian’s Beginning finishes with hope, lingering on a young girl’s bold stare, but Khachatryan closes his remake by repeating earlier footage of a mob and slaps “The Beginning” over the end–a portentous suggestion of history stuck in a loop.

By comparison, Man with a Video Camera, 2009, is a dry exercise, hewing so close to the original that one wonders if it turned out shorter than Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera only because Khachatryan got exhausted after doing little more than thirteen minutes. The artist inserts himself and his Panasonic into the early sequence of a prole waking up on the street to find himself getting filmed, in a hammy application of the Kuleshov effect; he adds science-fiction footage of robots and monorails to Vertov’s montage about Moscow’s burgeoning public transportation network. Whereas The Beginning excites with the insight that cheap recording equipment and video-sharing sites have hyperbolically embodied the collective vision and camera mobility that directors like Vertov yearned to achieve, Man with a Video Camera takes agency away from the crowd and gives it back to Khachatryan. Here, montage is a style, not a statement. Twelve Sexual Commandments of the Revolutionary Proletariat, 2009, however, takes a different direction. The series of prints combines text from a 1924 sexology manifesto with blown-up digital snapshots, coarsely pixilated and tinged yellow, giving the impression that the posters were composed with a few clicks in Photoshop. The commandments are redolent of Lenin’s moral paternalism, while the photos are lazy scenes of the artist and friends hanging out. Are we to see the complacent leisure they depict, like the accompanying slogans, as reactionary? Or are they offered as proof of the contemporary body’s relative freedom? Like The Beginning, Khachtryan’s Commandments splices past and present in a way that opens both to reinterpretation.

“Headquarters”

Published in Artforum, October 2009

In 2003, Andreas Angelidakis presented “Neen World,” reconstructions of buildings that the architect had designed on the Active Worlds platform so that internet artists belonging to the self-branded Neen group could meet there and chat. The real estate in Active Worlds—as in the newer, more popular Second Life—tends to channel users’ McMansion fantasies; Angelidakis’s pavilions, on the other hand, blatantly disregarded real-world requirements. In this they were like the sketches of many inventive architects, but unlike their analogues on drafting tables, they actually framed a community’s collective behavior, albeit online. This year, Angelidakis joined Angelo Plessas—another member of the lapsed Neen network and his partner of ten years—to help build the Angelo Foundation, a project in which Plessas reuses imagery from his web animations in performances and installations. Now Angelidakis’s architectural ideas have shaped the website www.theangelofoundationheadquarters.com, where old and new works by both artists share a scrolling gray plane beneath a dusky sky. A video capture of the web site was projected at “Headquarters,” a gallery exhibition that served as a temporary center for the Foundation.

“Headquarters” felt domestic, like a simulation of the studio of two artists who live and work in one home. Old chairs wrapped in gold foil and potted plants, both real and fake, furnished the spaces between displays of sculptures and architectural models. Plessas’s pieces show a fascination with the brain’s habit of finding likenesses of faces in accidental arrangements of markings; his neon signs and clay sculptures are disembodied faces amid Angelidakis’s uninhabited buildings. In Future Is Fake, 2008, two white arrows and a red triangle form a neon grin. Two collages thinly pile cutouts of iconic shapes—stars, crowns, arrows—at points corresponding to eyes, nose, and mouth. The artist’s reconfigurations of discrete entities in paper and neon reflect his work with Flash, which he uses to code web animations; the widely used object-oriented language manipulates two-dimensional graphic files with a series of commands that unfold over time or in response to viewers’ clicks. Angelidakis’s contributions to the exhibition also indicate origins in software. His three-dimensional prints of trapezoidal towers are nearly identical, indicating his copy-and-paste process of producing several versions from a single module.

Angelidakis’s variations with no final draft and Plessas’s rearrangements of limited elements both suggest dynamic systems. Similarly, their collaborative sculptures stand in for fluid structures: The Bank of Angelo, 2009, is a triangular stack of foam-board “Angelo money,” a kind of microeconomy; Plessas’s Notice Board, 2009, bears announcements for a robot poetry reading and a cross-dressing fest that presuppose the existence of a community. The Angelo Foundation is so named not only because Plessas wanted to parody self-aggrandizement, but also because a foundation can be an exhibition space and/or a dematerialized system that subtly influences art-world processes through loans, grants, parties, and so on. This summer, the diffuse, foundation-like nature of Plessas and Angelidakis’s collaboration was particularly evident because of concurrent displays at Jeu de Paume in Paris—where a projection of www.theangelofoundation.com was shown in a reading room—and at Rebecca Camhi. If in 2003 “Neen World” was a gallery representation of an online creative community, today the many simultaneous manifestations of the Angelo Foundation represent an attempt to construct a network of mutually influential events in a gallery, in a museum, and on the internet—a personalized microcosm of the real, wired world.

“Fantastic Tavern: The Tbilisi Avant-Garde”

Published on Artforum.com, July 25, 2009

The book was the default medium for poet Alexei Kruchenykh, but as he began to experiment with illustration, fonts, and the placement of letters on the page, it also became a way to defy philistine expectations of what a book could be. Printing editions was a cheap way to distribute his new visual language. Given Kruchenykh’s interest in replication, he might be pleased that photographs of his books and those of his colleagues in Tbilisi, where he lived from 1917 to 1920, are now displayed in a Manhattan gallery.

“Fantastic Tavern” defies audience expectations, but not by the deliberate coarseness of the books’ type or by their verbal novelties, since the better part of Chelsea traffic is inured to avant-garde shock tactics and can’t read Russian or Georgian. Rather, the surprise is that a site for rare and expensive objects has made room for art historians from Switzerland and Georgia to assert the existence of a little-known tradition using photographs, films, and audio recordings.

The exhibition has a strong ethnographic component—a Caucasian kilim decorates the gallery’s lobby, a shelf in the back has souvenir-stand books on Georgian modernism, and sepia-toned photographs of Georgia and Georgians are scattered throughout. This generous overview of early-twentieth-century Kartvelian culture conspicuously lacks a nod to Niko Pirosmani, the painter of stylized pastorals who was to Kruchenykh’s Moscow circle what Henri Rousseau was to Matisse. But like the theatrical curtains that divide the rear galleries, Pirosmani’s absence from “Fantastic Tavern” underscores historiography’s drama of oblivion and memory, which is here the real object of display.

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Irina Korina

Published in Artforum, Summer 2009

One of the few Russian words Walter Benjamin used in the diaries he kept while in Moscow in the 1920s was remont. Apparently he found the German term for renovations too weak to convey the scope and urgency of efforts to undo the chaos wrought by revolution and civil war. For Benjamin, remont was a phenomenon specific to the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s. He could not have suspected that in Russia, remont never stops. In the 1990s it spawned the mutant euroremont:  the new advertising class began tacking on the prefix to lend bourgeois glamour to synthetic furnishings made in Turkey or China. Euroremont equals remont in magnitude, but it also implies a vulgarly ity and an exaggerated eagerness to efface the past.
Euroremont, or the study of it, is Irina Korina’s specialty. The nine works in “Installations,” her first solo museum exhibition, incorporate wallpaper, carpeting, and other home improvement materials bought at Moscow’s bazaars; they evince a revulsion with the old that is the dark side of the desire to start fresh. Each of Korina’s installations stages a kind of surrealist drama, where new, tacky surfaces confront spatial or sculptural suggestions of the ghosts they suppress. In 29 Transformations, 2000, the earliest work in the show, photographs of supermarket displays hang amid bulges in the wall. Real sausages and fake fruit mingle on beds of plastic grass, but a bluish tint in the pictures makes it hard to distinguish the edible from the artificial. In a corner of the installation, faintly glowing light bulbs clustered like polyps mediate between photographed grapes and tumors like swellings beneath the walls’ white paint. For ), 2007, Korina built irregular shapes from sheets of MDF printed with imitation wood and marble grains and decorated them with fixtures like vents and doorknobs to hint at clownish faces. Smiling emoticons like the one Korina took as a title for the installation are usually used to remove ambiguity—they assure the reader that the writer is “just kidding”—but the unfinished, inanimate faces with trailing wires and other loose parts have the opposite effect, producing a setting as disconcerting as it is silly.
Korina actively manipulates her audience’s experience of space. Back to the Future, 2004, sends viewers down a curving corridor to a small chamber. There, above the rim of a varnished plywood wall, they can glimpse the top of a mosaic made of painted squares of foam, depicting triumphant cosmonauts. The mural mimics public art of the 1960s, when space travel was one of many manifestations of the Soviet obsession with the bright future. Recently, the economic stability accompanying that period’s social stagnation has become the object of popular nostalgia. But from the perspective of the optimistic sixties, Russia’s present is the wrong future. Back to the Future traces that crooked loop of history. Its cosmonauts are the exception to Korina’s avoidance of explicit references to the Soviet period. The other works in “Installations” invoke it abstractly, with disorienting environments that simulate the alienating effect of socialism’s aggressively monumental architecture. But in Back to the Future, as elsewhere, Korina makes surfaces from textures that just recently entered her country’s material vernacular. Her works show the leftovers of a difficult past being swallowed up by a present that may be even worse.

Published on Artforum.com, March 7, 2008

In Boris Groys’s three video collages, clips from popular and obscure movies pass in silence as the philosopher reads dense lectures on religion, immortality, and film. While they handle similar subject matter, the images do not illustrate the texts, nor do the texts interpret the images; oblique associations proliferate in the gap between words and pictures, casting doubt on either’s capacity for effective communication. Religion as Medium, 2006, juxtaposes Andrei Tarkovsky’s and Mel Gibson’s visions of faith as Groys’s voice investigates the role of the sacred today. Immortal Bodies, 2007, pairs zombies from Night of the Living Dead and stomach-turning scenes of necrophilia with notes on utopian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov’s challenge to scientists to prevent and reverse death, so that the oppressed workers of the past and present can enjoy the justice of the communist future. Then Madonna kisses an animate statue in the “Like a Prayer” video, with full audio. Iconoclastic Delights, 2002, describes how YouTube, TiVo, and ambient television have eroded film’s power to make audiences sit still. Digital technology has subdued film by restoring the viewer’s option of movement, Groys says, just as film once subdued older media with illusions of movement and celebrated that iconoclastic victory in images of destruction, like the obliteration of New York and Paris in Independence Day.

Groys the philosopher does not let his turn on display pass without critiquing the gallery from within. The exhibition, titled “Thinking in Loop,” takes issue with the role video art has been allotted—moving eye candy to be glanced at and ignored. Besides broaching this problem in Iconoclastic Delights, Groys offers a solution in the exhibition’s installation, which provides ideal conditions for close viewing. There is a sofa in front of a big screen that shows the three videos in succession, while in the gallery’s rear, separate consoles for each video have rewind buttons, so viewers can sit down and watch the works from beginning to end. Printouts of the texts lay on a table flanked by deep leather armchairs. Do not go to “Thinking in Loop” unless you can spend an hour there. Echoing the ambitions of the early Soviet avant-garde, Groys has transformed the gallery from a space that welcomes a leisurely shopper’s gaze to one that demands engaged reading, watching, and thinking.

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