May 29 - July 12, 2008
Oh ChiGyun: Defining Landscape
Curated by Raúl Zamudio
Oh ChiGyun
Noho
1993
acrylic on canvas
197x121cm
Recently there have been exhibitions that focused on painting in the U.S. and abroad that can be referred to not without a sense of irony as the return of "the return to painting." Although this is akin to Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" and no less tautological, these exhibitions inadvertently reiterated the "death of painting" polemic espoused in the 1980s by ideologically-vested critics. The arbiters of artistic taste who sounded the death knell during what was referred to in the U.S. as the "Reagan era," articulated their ominous observations in the wake of other theoretical endgames from both the political right and left, including, respectively, Francis Fukiyama's "end of history" and the poststructuralist "death of the author." Shifting away from nihilism and the fatalist foreclosure of "painting's demise," the recent exhibitions oriented around painting promised much by way of their titles. With catchy pronouncements such as "Painting: Division and Displacement" (2001), "Painting at the Edge of the World" (2001), and "Trouble Spot Painting" (2000), for example, these exhibitions attempted to take the medium to task, albeit that their analyses ultimately came short of their curatorial intentions. Other exhibitions such as "Painting as Paradox" (2002), however, investigated painting's influence by, and absorption of what has been fashionably called new media. Painting's tête-à-tête with a gamut of technologies including digitization, computer imaging, the Web, and video to name just a few, were the curatorial linchpins of the exhibition. But what happens when a painter makes a turn about face, so to speak; to the degree where her/his aesthetic cuts against the grain of contemporary trends and in doing so, broadens painting's discourse in unexpected ways, as is the case with the artist Oh Chi-Gyun?
— Raúl Zamudio
November 15, 2008 - January 21, 2009
The Aesthetics of Terror
Curated by Manon Slome & Joshua Simon
Jon Kessler
Habeas Corpus (Edition for Parkett 79)
2007
" To Rebel against to-day's hegemonies can take place without a spectacle "
Patrick Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, 1997 p. 310
What happens when an image of war or terrorism moves from the newspaper or news networks, to the gallery or museum? What causes the shift from an image having "documentary" relevance to it becoming an aesthetic object circulating in the art system? As artists navigate these boundaries, either through direct translation or through appropriation, does violence retain its power to inspire fear and dread, or does this contextual transposition fetishize violence, stripping it of meaning through aestheticization? The Aesthetics of Terror will explore the juxtaposition/integration of the traumas of the daily news with art and question the nature and purport of this integration.
Terror is, in and of itself, an image making machine. The very point of terror is a spectacle that plays endlessly in the media. In 9/11, thousands may have died, but billions of people watched the attack and the falling towers endlessly until those images were etched into the global psyche. While terrorism and its representations have been widely discussed ever since 9/11, very few of these contemplations have tackled the issue of specific formal qualities and pictorial strategies of terrorism. The exhibition The Aesthetics of Terror will try to do exactly that; namely, it will investigate certain visual characteristics of the spectacle of Terror and its echoes in contemporary art. The exhibition also employs the distinction made by artist Roee Rosen on the principle gap between representations of underground terrorism, produced by terrorist groups, and images of State Terror - this is the gap between figuration and abstraction.
The representational apparatus of State Terror, says Rosen, is based on the blurring or erasure of central figures, exchanging it for abstraction: Smart Bombs' aerial views of bombardments, for example, or the blocking of visibility by grids or satellite type images that obscure rather than illuminate. "The prototype for this is the image of the Atomic mushrooms of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which would be, in terms of abstract painting, the stain", he writes. On the other end, representations of underground terrorism strive for a central, powerful figure - the portrait of a suicide bomber, collapsing skyscrapers and the icon of Bin Laden with his golden gown and triangular composition - "this is an icon in the religious sense: a human, semi-divine person whose very appearance defies the divide of life and death", Rosen claims.
The Aesthetics of Terror maps the relationship between abstraction and technology; color and violence, pixilated images and sovereignty, saturation and contour, authenticity and resolution. One of the questions raised by the exhibition is whether much of this art can be considered "art engage" i.e. politically motivated, bitter denunciations of slaughter, profiteering and hypocrisy (as for example in the work of Grosz and Dix) or whether the work is emptied out of moral content1 to become itself a self conscious participant in the spectacle of consumerism of images, an appropriation of which "terror" becomes one more trope. As Zizek comments in, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, we should be aware of the dangers of the "Christification of Che", turning him into an icon of radical - chic consumer culture."2
Much of the work in the exhibition deals less with direct depiction of violence and terror than with its media representations or perceptions of war as filtered through the media - itself a corporate entity whose failure to lay bare the species of evil that is being enacted under the rubric of a war on terror is also very much the point. For example, Coco Fusco's examination of the apparatus of psychological torture used in interrogation is filtered through the rubric of a reality show, Harun Farocki and Johan Gimonperez dismantle news coverage of high jackings and war coverage, Jon Kessler creates war machines with imagery derived directly through magazines and action heroes, Claude Muller pits one kind of media representation against another.
What the exhibit strives to suggest is the emergence of an artistic sensibility which has been informed by the imagery and politics of terrorism in the current common culture as they have been formulated and conveyed through the popular media. Since current-day global terrorism actually relies on the global media network to maintain and extend its psychological impact on its targets, artworks that work from the media-imagery of terror may be, in fact, engaged more with the means by which terrorism works as a primarily psychological phenomenon. Artworks might imitate or mirror this media rhetoric, identify its mechanisms to the viewer, critique it, push back or protest against it.
Artists include:
Josh Azzarella, Daniel Bejar, William Betts, Chris Burden , Maurizio Cattelan, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Zoya Cherkassky, Naeem Mohaiemen Jeanette , Doyle, Marlene Dumas Harun Farocki , Coco Fusco, Johan Grimonprez, Kent Henrickssen, Jon Kessler, Fransje Killaars , Yitzik Livneh, Rabih Mroué and Elias Khoury, Yves Netzhammer, Miguel Palma, Cristi Pogacean, Sophie Ristelhueber Roee Rosen, Martha Rosler, Ivana Spinelli, Stephen Shanabrook, Avdey Ter-Oganian, Jan Tichy, Sharif Waked, Andy Warhol, Catherine Yass
A fully illustrated catalogue will be produced for the exhibition with texts by Manon Slome, Joshua Simon, Ariella Azoullai, Sven Lutticken, and Eric Stryker.
1A review in the New York Times, Nov 3 2007 on "Allemagne, Les Années Noires" refereeing to Grosz and Dix asserts, ) "Yet many decades later, their art still carries a punch, their pacifist and humanist message somehow transcending Germany's "black years" to remain relevant. In that sense they have been vindicated in their belief that artists have social and political responsibilities. On the other hand, it is that very conviction that dates them. (p.A23)
2 The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, Slavoj Zizek, MIT, 2003
p. 30
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