WHAT PEACE THERE MAY BE IN SILENCE

The heart of a small solo show by Korakrit Arunanondchai at PS1 is an installation called 2012–2555. It consists of a theatrical trompe-l'eoil architectural backdrop, colored fluorescent lights, an effigy of the young artist, piles and piles of plastic flowers, and – presiding over it all – two flat-screen video monitors set on easels. The artwork is right on trend, a willfully eclectic assemblage that deflates distinctions between sculpture, video, and performance, and conventional notions of composition and aesthetics. It’s just way too much: too much light, too much color, and too much stuff, all shot through with too many ideas.

The video content is similarly eccentric. The monitors are programmed with a series of artful, slow-moving clips, each about five minutes long. Among other things, they show the artist backpacking in the woods, a go-go dancer performing on a TV talent show, the artist’s grandparents walking down a shopping street in downtown Bangkok, and, movingly, the artist, disguised in pale blue bobbed wig, launching an effigy of himself into a tropical sea.

Yet, in spite of its sculptural extravagance and fragmented narratives, the installation has a deep, restful effect. It’s entirely silent. Also, huge denims pillows are piled right in front, for viewers to sink into as they take it in. My friend and I stayed for almost an hour, through an entire cycle of the videos, our bodies and minds at ease. My friend commented that the sensibility of the installation – the wild mix of plastic flowers and bright lights – was “very Bangkok,” and reminded her of the Buddhist shrines she saw there on the streets, piled thick with fruit, plants, candles, and other offerings. It’s an aesthetic of excess that, here, somehow, leads to peace.

Korakrit Arunanondchai. 2012-2555. 2012. Performance, two-channel video loop, flat screens, metal, wood, plastic, digital print on canvas, digital print on vinyl, fluorescent lights, plastic flowers. Courtesy the artist and CLEARING, New York.

September 23, 2014 by Nalina Moses

BARELY THERE

After writing earlier this summer about how difficult it is to work successfully at the junction of art and architecture, I came across an installation that does just that: Karolina Kawiaka’s Fractured Reflections, currently on display outdoors at the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe, Vermont. Kawiaka, who was trained as both an artist and architect, created the piece “deliberately as a folly." But it engages, deeply, concerns of art, architecture, landscape and theater.

The structure cuts an elegant, barely-there, figure in the landscape. It’s a pavilion five feet wide, eight feet long and eight feet tall, constructed from narrow galvanized steel angles set in a Mondriaan-like grid. It can be entered through high slots on each of its four sides, and its inside remains open to the sky above and the ground below. Selected openings in the frame are filled with mirror panels, that capture partial reflections of the lawn, shrubs and trees all around, and of visitors themselves as they move through. The structure complicates the landscape, weaving fleeting micro-views into a lush, cinematic spectacle.

What’s most remarkable about the piece is how quiet its forms are. With its platonic, cube-like proportions and skeletal skin, it looks like the diagram of a structure more than a structure itself. Its materials, which can be found at a lumber yard, give it the feeling of an apparatus rather than an artwork. And it doesn’t interfere with the ground, touching it only along the bottom edges. As both an artist and an architect, Kawiaka has an admirably light touch. Without minimal means, she has fashioned a structure with an fine, complex presence.

“Fractured Reflections” by Karolina Kawiaka. 2014. Galvanized steel and scrap mirror. Photograph courtesy of Karolina Kawiaka and the Helen Day Art Center.

September 15, 2014 by Nalina Moses

FALLING MEN

An opinion piece in today’s (September 14, 2014) Times, which describes (and endorses) the way one can fall in love with a work of art, is illustrated with this Garry Winogrand photograph of a man falling off a building. I was stunned by its uncanny resemblance to The Falling Man, the famous AP photograph of a man falling from the top of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Both images show the men in virtually the same position: upside down, facing the building, with arms flailing and legs bent.

Of course the context is dramatically different. Winogrand’s man is a performer, falling off of a low ledge, with three other men dressed as bellhops watching admiringly, and a bin of crushed paper to cushion his landing. The 9/11 falling man hovers high above the ground, but the striped skin of the Twin Towers behind him is instantly recognizable, and his fate is clear. Just days after marking another anniversary of the event, seeing Winogrand’s falling man, and reading the lighthearted piece accompanying it, which makes no reference to the other photograph, is chilling. Each time I look at Winogrand’s falling man I can only see the 9/11 falling man, who conjures violence and sadness.

“New York, 1950s,” by Garry Winogrand. Credit The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

September 14, 2014 by Nalina Moses

MODERN RELICS

While its purpose is to track the original furniture from Le Corbusier’s government buildings in Chandigarh, India, Amie Siegel’s film Provenance might be more stirring as a portrait of the buildings themselves, nearly sixty years after they were built. To set the scene, passages show exteriors and interiors of the Secretariat, Assembly and High Court buildings, which were designed, in the 1950’s, as the heart of the new state capitol.

After decades of heat and rain, and no particular concern for scrubbing them clean, the buildings’ facades are mottled with grit and mold. Feral monkeys crawl up and down them. Special piers and partitions that were painted in glossy primary colors, intended as architectural grace notes, are dull. These ultra-modern buildings have given themselves over to time and to the elements; they have a weathered, ancient cast.

Out of necessity, most of the interior spaces seem to have been overcrowded or repurposed to meet current needs. Cars are parked in shaded ground floor walkways. Small offices have been crammed with grey cubicles and padded rolling chairs, and hallways with metal filing cabinets. The most outstanding feature of the buildings, their brise soleil, the immense concrete screens that block sunlight and break their monstrous, blocks-long facades into deep, dynamic micro-rhythms, have been clotted with window fans, air conditioning units, wire mesh and curtains fashioned from old saris.

None of this dims the sculptural excitement of the architecture. One moves inside, through the grilles, into cavernous, multi-story atriums animated with dappled light. Ramps and stairs carry shuffling government servants through forests of slender columns and beams. The pan shots Siegel uses throughout the film (hypnotically slow, sliding consistently from left to right) capture the composition of the spaces clearly and also erotically, instilling desire. These are buildings of considerable beauty. They’ve lost their luster, and most of their furnishings, but their grandeur remains intact.

Image courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art. Amie Siegel (American, b. 1974). Provenance (still), 2013. HD video, color, sound; 40 min., 30 sec..,

September 05, 2014 by Nalina Moses