Athanasios Argianas

MAX WIGRAM GALLERY
106 New Bond Street
October 6–November 11

View of “Laid Long, Spun Thin,” 2011.

In 1979 Umberto Eco defined the literary text as a “lazy machine,” a device that requires the active participation of the reader to produce meaning. The sculptures of the Athens-born, London-based Athanasios Argianas are static “machines” that function conceptually, in some sense, as examples of Eco’s theory—and not without a touch of irony. Song Machine 21 (thrice two, once one) (all works 2011) consists of a long, looped band of brass that snakes around a series of slender metal wall supports. Engraved into this curving metal band is a circular text, over one thousand words long, that obsessively juxtaposes measurements of different units: “ . . . a strand of the width of your arms unfolded, woven to form a sheet. A sheet of the width of the wingspan of a plane, a plane of strands of the width of your arms unfolded . . . ” The viewer who accepts the work’s invitation to participate must become not only a reader but also a performer: Perusing the passage along the twists of the ribbon gives rise to a small choreography. And presumably, those who follow the instructions implied in the work’s title even become musicians, as they intone the text’s hypnotic, songlike reprises. Though visitors in practice will most likely remain silent, such a performance is perfectly possible. In fact, on other occasions, Argianas has used his “machines” as points of departure for vocal canons that reveal, no less than the sculptures themselves, his taste for structures based on symmetry, repetition, and permutation.

Sound too abstract? In fact, Argianas’s mathematics of systems embraces more than a few of humanity’s existential concerns. The two-part wall piece, titled A variation on the classic model of free will (geometric, inverted), refers to the eternal dilemma between free will and predestination (apparently without favoring either one). Meanwhile, With Her Hands Where My Feet Were poetically combines a cast of the artist’s leg with another cast, set inside it in negative, of the arm of his companion.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Simone Menegoi

Elad Lassry

WHITE CUBE | HOXTON SQUARE
48 Hoxton Square
September 23–November 12

Elad Lassry, Devon Rex, 2011, color photograph, painted frame, 14 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/2".

Elad Lassry’s first solo show in London is predominantly made up of photographs all printed and framed to the same size. In many cases, the frame is painted the exact same shade as the dominant color of the image—that of either the background or the central object—and the frame is so deeply incorporated into the work that each verges on sculpture. As the frame becomes an intrinsic component of the work itself rather than just a means of presentation, we begin to look at the photograph more as a three-dimensional object than as a two-dimensional image.

The subjects of these photographs have little in common—animals, food, appliances—but are presented in a distinctly uniform way, causing a coherence between disparate objects to form. While Devon Rex (all works 2011) portrays a cat on a bright green background and Gourds B shows a group of translucent butternut squashes superimposed onto some cubes, their layout and presentation, identical in all aspects other than color, diminish the differences in subject matter. From a distance, these works seem to be part of a consecutive pattern, and they protrude an equal distance out from the walls in the manner of a sculpture.

Sculptures in the form of obviously nonfunctional furniture—doors without hinges, for example––are interspersed throughout the show. Thus the works shown here pose an overt challenge to preconceptions of artistic form: The photography attempts to be sculpture, and the sculpture tries to mimic furniture. Indeed, beneath the deceptively bright and pseudocommercial presentation of all of Lassry’s new work is an artistic intensity strong enough to crumble the preexisting distinctions we make among art objects.

— Ashitha Nagesh

Albert Oehlen

THOMAS DANE
11 Duke Street, St James's
October 11–November 19

Albert Oehlen, Conduction 7, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 82 7/10 x 106”.

Over the past decades, Albert Oehlen has employed garish mark-making and clashing color that have resulted in disorienting messy paintings, a good example being his “Finger Painting” series of 2008. Not the case with his “Conductions” series, which Oehlen began in the early 1990s and finished in 2008 as well. In the ten small drawings and two large paintings on view here, the exclusion of color coupled with a graphic quality brings to mind typography, doodling, and even computer pixels—which helps create the impression of a greater cohesion, making these works seem the most palatable of the artist’s oeuvre. Instead of his usual chaotic sensibility, an orderly calm seems to pervade. Despite this formal unity, there is still an underlying tension that hints at our chaotic, distracted digital lives, as if an algorithm had gone awry.

Oehlen is, in fact, a bricoleur at heart. A small group of works on paper provide evidence of his mind at play: Rectilinear pieces of patterned paper have been collaged onto graph paper while loose, calligraphic lines of ink cover the surface. The overall effect, similar to the paintings themselves, is of a disjointed palimpsest, as if we were offered a picture of the artist’s mind midthought. For Oehlen, order helps inspire divergence, distraction, and decomposition—his process somewhat reflects the way daily life unfolds. Disrupting his working method, he says, provides a sense of “insecurity,” and the visual mood is one of restlessness, a quality accentuated in the second part of the show, where Oehlen assumes the role of curator, mounting an exhibition of work by the Chicago Imagists of the ’60s. Given his appreciation for unsettling his own painting, the raunchy imagery and inventive techniques that pervade his selection should come as no surprise.

— Sherman Sam

Raphaël Zarka

BISCHOFF/WEISS
14a Hay Hill
October 12–November 19

View of “Gibellina Vecchia,” 2011.

Raphaël Zarka’s obsession with form borders on the near pathological. For his 2009 film Rhombus Sectus, the artist stalked the quadrilateral within modernist architecture, from building facades to lightbulbs. In his latest project, Zarka takes up Alberto Burri’s Il grande cretto, a never-completed memorial sculpture that sits on the ruins of Gibellina Vecchia, a Sicilian village leveled by an earthquake in 1968. In the mid-1980s Burri proposed to cover the remains of the city in flat top concrete, essentially converting a site of natural disaster into an expanded field for what he called his cretti, or “cracked” paintings. Rather than fostering regeneration, Il grande cretto fixed the contours of the former city into a smooth shell of platelets, seamed with alleyways deep enough to walk through.

The exhibition at Bischoff/Weiss builds along the fault lines of Gibellina, centering on Zarka’s Fourteen Views of Gibellina Nuova, 2011, a 16-mm film that silently surveys the site, underlining the strangeness of Burri’s project. As artificial as Il grande cretto may be, the film reveals how its particular geometries still slide easily into the patchwork of the Sicilian countryside. The shapes of the concrete slabs appear deceptively organic, as if they had been lifted like jigsaw puzzle pieces from the surrounding forests and farm plots, when they in fact derive from the very artificial imposition of urban life (which in turn must have subconsciously mimicked the agrarian in its design). This sequence of forms could have only been discovered by distilling the city to a pure formal arrangement, as Burri had attempted. In picking up with Burri’s quest, Zarka continues the transference of these forms.

Only a small fraction of Burri’s original proposal remains unrealized, but it was enough to spur Zarka’s search to recover the “lost” forms within other sources, which is documented in the Bischoff/Weiss exhibition through a selection of sculpture and photography. His findings range from eighteenth-century Piranese etchings to a friend’s tattoo that unwittingly echoes Burri’s handiwork as it traces the path of major veins along his forearm. Zarka even mines his own body of work for forms: Changer en île, No 4 (Change into an Island, No 4), 2004, is a straightforward documentary shot of a boulder split cleanly in two, and yet the two halves hold their positions, guarding the near-perfect symmetry of the crack between. It is a natural object unnaturally divided, a semantic inverse of Gibellina.

— Kate Sutton

Wilhelm Sasnal

WHITECHAPEL GALLERY
77 - 82 Whitechapel High Street
October 14–January 1

Wilhelm Sasnal, Kacper, 2009, oil on canvas, 29 1/2 x 35 7/16"

Out of distortion and abstraction come extraordinary moments of clarity in Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal’s first major solo exhibition in the UK. Sasnal seems to withhold what would be the most crucial parts of his paintings, leaving areas of ambiguity from which personal associations and complex meaning can be drawn. Somewhat disconcertingly, the facial features of the subjects in the exhibition’s many portraits have been either smudged or totally removed; and so, without the normal means by which we would read a person, our focus is redistributed to peripherals—for example, hands clutching what seem to be crimson apples, or a bright green backdrop suggesting a fecundity completely absent from the clothes and demeanor of the man in Palestinian, 2008. But the omission of narrative detail is nowhere so striking as in the image that initially seems the most straightforward—a portrait of a beautiful young woman, Agathe Kanziga Habyarimana, 2010, who, shockingly, the viewer later learns, was heavily implicated in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

For his “Maus” (Mouse) series, 2001, Sasnal takes images from Art Spiegelman’s 1973 comic by the same name, published for the first time in Poland in 2000. Sasnal strips these images of all characters, speech, and color, taking them completely out of context—and yet, it is striking how the few objects that remain in the otherwise bare paintings still retain all of their Holocaust associations. Similarly, the “Metinides Paintings,” 2003, replicate Enrique Metinides’s harrowing photographs of accidents and deaths, but with all of the gruesome narrative information obliterated—leaving only a disturbing atmosphere and a sense of tension that arises from the unseen. Indeed, the beauty of Wilhelm Sasnal’s work in this show lies predominantly in the negative space it creates.

— Ashitha Nagesh

Pipilotti Rist

HAYWARD GALLERY
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road
September 8–January 1

Pipilotti Rist, Selbstlos im Lavabad (Selfless in the Bath of Lava), 1994, seven minutes. Installation view.

Since before jumping to prominence with her exuberant video Ever Is Over All, 1997, in which she strolls down the street audaciously bashing in car windows with a giant flower, Pipilotti Rist has been working at the intersection of sculpture, video, and installation. Yet these are not the only connections she explores in her work. In a recent interview, she explained, “I want to treat the body as a landscape. Our body is an environment itself.” In this compact retrospective, it is obvious that Rist has been twisting and turning her body, as well as our minds, into thinking about nature through technology.

Despite the lightness of spirit conveyed through the clever use of music and video, there is an introspective, gemlike quality to her thinking: A trapped woman squeaks from a tiny monitor embedded in the floor in Selbstlos im Lavabad (Selfless in the Bath of Lava), 1994, while in Yoghurt on Skin – Velvet on TV, 1994, a group of handbags and large seashells echo the ocean as bodily appendages float by, conveyed via tiny embedded video monitors within the objects. Further on, a landscape is projected onto the viewer’s lap (Lap Lamp, 2006), whereas in the large installation Lungenflugel (Lobe of the Long), 2009, insects and flowers, rendered huge, become its real heroes. In each case, music and sound seductively and playfully draws us into observing and connecting with various aspects of nature and body.

At first glance, the Swiss artist’s work recalls the early organicism of Donald Lipski, or Tony Oursler’s projected bodies, but Rist’s interests lie in a more haptic, feminine experience––we journey happily through the body and through nature equally without hierarchy. This work entails neither a hard empirical encounter nor a political statement; rather, Rist offers landscapes as bodyscapes and bodyscapes as landscapes to traverse with our eyes. Our experience of this art is sensual but unsexualized. Unlike the show that preceded it, of work by Tracey Emin––another artist who works with multiple media, but significantly different content––Rist’s charm lies in a certain joie de vivre that she brings to serious matters.

— Sherman Sam

Barry Flanagan

TATE BRITAIN
Millbank
September 27–January 2

Barry Flanagan, light on light on sacks, 1969, hessian sacks, light, 6' 6 3/4" x 17' 4 1/2" x 7' 10 1/2".

Sometimes the fame of certain artists is unfairly bound to a single body of work, and curiously enough, it may not always be the best work in their repertoire. Barry Flanagan is known above all for the bronze sculptures he made beginning in 1980, depicting humanoid hares that leap, dance, and play the tambourine. “Early Works 1965–1982” opportunely points out that the “bunny” phase was preceded by fifteen years of some of the most interesting sculptural experimentation in the United Kingdom, while also reminding us that Flanagan was the only English artist included in both “When Attitudes Become Form” and “Op Losse Schroeven” (On Loose Screws), two epic group exhibitions compiled in 1969.

Curated by Clarrie Wallis and Andrew Wilson, this latest exhibition ranges from the artist’s early works, created when he was just out of St. Martin’s School of Art (whose sculpture department graduates included other restless and iconoclastic talents of the time, such as Gilbert & George and Bruce McLean), to his early bronze animal sculptures. There are works based on the properties of malleable materials like sand and fabric; sculptures constructed from sheets of metal that have been cut and folded; installations that document the encounter between three-dimensional forms and light projections (such as light on light on sacks, 1969); and, finally, a selection of works in sculpted stone. His career is one where different and even opposite tendencies often converge: phenomenological approach and literary references (Alfred Jarry comes to mind first), a de-emphasis on skill and a love for artisan tradition, the abstract and the figurative. Wallis, in her catalogue text, finds Flanagan’s particular empirical approach to materials and techniques to be the element that unifies such different impulses. Yet this show emphasizes that the other constant in Flanagan’s work is humor, often deliciously surreal. How can one remain serious before an elongated stone sculpture from 1977–79 titled a nose in repose?

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Simone Menegoi

Nathalie Djurberg

CAMDEN ARTS CENTRE
Arkwright Road
October 7–January 8

View of “A World of Glass,” 2011.

Nathalie Djurberg’s “A World of Glass” consists of two chilly rooms filled with translucent objects arranged on wooden tables. The strangely carved ornaments resemble frozen relics from a fabled land. Looking through them, other, more sinisterly beguiling realms come into view: Four looped videos play on either side of the faux-glass installations (they are actually polyurethane), set to haunting music that is interspersed with tinkling sounds, like the clinking of ice-filled goblets. Her videos are stop-motion animations of morphing clay figures: In Monster (all works cited, 2011), the proverbial bull is loose in a china shop. Fragile items—the same ones we see on the tables—are displayed in cabinets and a bull breaks them with malicious glee. He then lacerates himself and his flesh dissolves to expose bloody bones. Opposite, I’m a Wild Animal is just as preoccupied with unfurling the beast that lurks behind our “civilized” selves. Here, a skinny man emerges from the mouth of a sweaty hippopotamus only to encounter grinning crocodiles. Though he dons the red mask of a toothy creature, the disguise does not protect him: “I will eat you,” threatens the hippo. “Like it was a candlelight dinner,” corroborates a crocodile. They don’t lie.

Starting off as a painter and sculptor, the Swedish artist found neither satisfied her. The puppetlike beings that populate her animations evoke the sugar figurines on a spoiled child’s birthday cake—that is, until we see them in action. In the video My Body Is a House of Glass, a fox, an owl, and a reindeer live with a naked black girl in a giant ice cube. She cuts her leg on a piece of metal and the fox, while attempting (or pretending?) to lick away the blood, ends up gobbling her foot. As she huddles, weeping, in her glittering cage, a white horse bathed in eerie blue light appears. Is he plotting rescue or ravishment? The more we like Djurberg’s “World,” the less we like ourselves.

— Zehra Jumabhoy

Krzyzstof Wodiczko

WORK
10A Acton Street
October 19–January 14

Kryzstof Wodiczko, War Veteran Vehicle, 2008–2009, mixed media, dimensions variable.

For his solo show “The Abolition of War,” Polish artist Krzyzstof Wodiczko conducted interviews with British and American veterans about their postwar experiences, which he then integrated into two major video installations as a way of aestheticizing the process of recovery. While both works, War Veteran Vehicle, 2008–2009, and Veterans’ Flame, 2009, explore the repercussions of war by focusing on veteran therapy and rehabilitation, they remain politically ambiguous. Wodiczko’s work not only addresses warfare but also takes up the more general humanitarian problem of how to rebuild one’s life after trauma.

For War Veteran Vehicle, Wodiczko redesigned a military Land Rover to include a video projector and speakers on the roof. He then staged performances in Denver and Liverpool where he drove around both cities projecting—or, as he puts it, “firing”—images of text and playing audio recordings of the interviews. These performances are projected in one room of the gallery here along with a display of photographic documentation. In the video, some of the veterans condemn military recruitment systems while others mention living with symptoms of PTSD. One man says despairingly, “I’m sorry . . . I had to sort me out first.” Coupling projections of text taken from these stories with the veterans’ voices and sounds of gunfire, Wodiczko creates the sense that the violence of war continues internally long after these soldiers return home.

Veterans’ Flame features a solitary flame flickering to the rhythm of several unseen soldiers’ voices. The flame rises and falls in sync with the undulations of their accounts and thus seems constantly on the verge of being extinguished. One veteran talks about the experience of watching an Iraqi soldier die: “When you’re face to face with that, you can really see the consequences of your actions.” The flame comes to represent the inevitability of death, underscoring the fragility of our own existence.

— Ashitha Nagesh

Allora & Calzadilla

LISSON GALLERY | LONDON
29 & 52-54 Bell Street
November 23–January 14

Allora & Calzadilla, Half Mast/Full Mast, 2010, two-channel high definition color video projection, 21 minutes 11 seconds. Installation view.

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s Returning a Sound, 2004, follows a motorbike-riding former activist around the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, a US bomb testing site for decades. A trumpet welded to his exhaust pipe blurts a fluctuating sound track as he revs the engine and the bike picks up speed or negotiates bumps. It heralds the victory of the test site’s closure, which the artists witnessed while taking part in the civil disobedience campaign that forced the US military to abandon the island in 2003, and it celebrates the reassertion of the people’s voice over their land, but is also an amusingly sardonic take on anthems, reinforcing the fragility of the popular voice against the might of bombs.

The films Allora & Calzadilla have made on the island since 2004 are shown together here for the first time. The stuttering negotiations for Vieques’s future are satirized in Under Discussion, 2005. A man sails an upturned table with an outboard motor around the island, foregrounding its surreal landscape: verdant tropicality and picture-postcard beaches next to a scarred, wreckage-strewn dystopia.

Shown in the duo’s 2011 Venice Biennale presentation, Half Mast/Full Mast, 2010, features pairings of static shots of various Vieques landscapes and interiors. At the left of each image is a flagpole, from which gymnasts hoist themselves horizontally, becoming human flags. In the top screen, the “flag” is shown at full mast, denoting a site of victory in the people’s struggle, but in the lower image, at half-mast, it signifies the location of a setback. We are left to speculate about why the different sites represent different fortunes. But whatever delight Allora & Calzadilla must have felt following the US military’s departure, they scrupulously avoid triumphalism, partly through their enduring taste for the absurd. These videos add up to a profoundly ambiguous and complex rumination on Vieques’s landscape, its contentious past, and the struggles to define its future.

— Ben Luke

Gert and Uwe Tobias

MAUREEN PALEY
21 Herald Street
November 26–January 15

Gert and Uwe Tobias, Untitled, 2011, colored woodcut on canvas, 78 3/4 x 118 1/8".

Occupying two floors at the gallery, the Tobias brothers’ first solo exhibition in London features large-scale woodcut prints, mixed-media works, collage, and ceramic objects, in a space where the walls have been painted dark blue to create a hallucinogenic journey through a sinister landscape. The identical twin artists grew up in Brasov, Romania, unaware of the Transylvanian region’s famous mythology until they moved away to Germany. The presence of the moroi, a vampirelike ghost in Romanian folklore that rises from the grave to feast on the blood of the living, lingers in the downstairs gallery in several untitled works. A ghoulish face stares out from one piece, grinning demonically and sitting uncomfortably between a mischievous hobgoblin and Leatherface. Upstairs, a collage featuring a reproachful-looking turkey corresponds with the nearby ceramic pieces; its puckered and pimpled skin is replicated in the distorted clay items and spreads across the traditional vases like a creeping mold.

The woodcut prints are stunning; the vivid colors and shapes are akin to the folk art of their homeland. In the largest print, a canvas in two parts that fills the entire back wall of the upstairs gallery, a seemingly human figure with a bird’s head lies on the ground while other strange hybrids cavort nearby. Its flapping blue tongue and wild eyes make it appear panicked, evoking the ill-fated creatures of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, as another bird, whose lower body is fused with a chair, looks on. Bringing together their country’s traditions along with their bizarre fascinations, the brothers reveal their own dark mythology.

— Grace Beaumont

Ann Craven

SOUTHARD RIED
2nd Floor, 67 Dean Street Soho
November 25–January 28

Ann Craven, Brown Eyed Susan (8/23/11), 2011, oil on linen, 24 x 20".

Ann Craven paints with heart, the operative terms being paint and heart. She also paints from an unusual stance, however, in that her work seems to lie somewhere between irony and devotion. As in the work of a traditional painter, things around her become her subjects; flowers, her husband, children, birds, the moon, are all transformed into lush painterly representations. Even the leftover palettes, which incidentally are always fully primed canvases, become paintings, while the remaining paint on her brush goes into creating abstract stripes. Winston Churchill once wrote about the joys of painting as a pastime, and Craven’s stance appears to espouse this thinking: Paint what you love.

“Summer” features work hung in rows, subjects repeated, and even some former palettes, now paintings of birds, propped against the gallery wall. All together they lend this exhibition a colorful, lighthearted spirit. Yet Craven’s project is not to be taken lightly, despite its sense of ease and joy; the serial and obsessive nature of her work hints at a framework that is far from flippant. Her representations of the moon are painted from actual skyward observation, while the birds are created from photographs. She is touching on memory, time, and repetition—in other words, human habits and how we frame the world. Repetition, after all, is a form of devotion.

— Sherman Sam

Taryn Simon

TATE MODERN
Bankside
May 25–February 2

View of “Taryn Simon,” 2011.

Taryn Simon has been perfecting an approach to photography we might call forensic: Stark, systematically organized images lie in acres of white space, accompanied by captions written in a bloodless officialese. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, 2008–11, is her most ambitious and rigorous undertaking yet. She documents eighteen families—or “bloodlines,” to use her more evocative, violent term—affected by war, disease, religious strife, or economic predation. Each section features portraits of a central figure among his or her ancestors and descendants, arrayed in a strictly ordered series. Though the artist traveled around the world to photograph these families, you wouldn’t know it; all eight hundred–plus portraits are taken against the same cream background, with the same disconcertingly generous headroom. Alongside the portraits Simon includes an explanatory text and key, as well as a frame dedicated to less austere images that Simon calls “footnotes”: a landscape, an interior.

Many sections chronicle families living along contemporary political fault lines: One panel follows a South Korean abducted by North Korean naval agents, another a Palestinian woman involved in several plane hijackings. Others concern the legacy of earlier cruelties—for instance, one set depicts the descendants of a Filipino man put on display at the 1904 World’s Fair. She even records acts of brutality within a single family; the title story concerns an Indian man who discovered he had lost his land after his own heirs bribed records administrators to have him declared deceased.

Simon may have a literary model in mind, with her use of “chapters” and “footnotes” and heavy reliance on text. But the real productive tension in her work comes from two opposing photographic impulses: a journalistic one that prizes clarity and detachment, and a more artistic one that relies heavily on obliquity. Even when documented with the greatest rigor, she seems to say, this world will never make much sense.

— Jason Farago

Yuri Pattison

SON GALLERY
Unit 9c, 133 Copeland Road, Peckham
December 9–February 11

View of “focal-plane,” 2012.

Yuri Pattison’s current exhibition at this gallery, which is located in an industrial park, gives the archiving of visual information in both real and virtual storage spaces the readymade treatment. Here, three shipping crates underscore the show’s thematic of the gallery as industrial storage unit. Through an investigation of the aesthetic reproducibility of the white cube––its essential four white walls––a spatial comparison is made between the gallery and shipping crates, particularly those transporting artworks across the world. This examination also extends to industrially manufactured digital equipment––cell phones, cameras, camcorders, computers, and laptops––that facilitates the mechanical production, reproduction, and dissemination of images.

Taped to the rear wall is an array of photographs (their subjects ranging from a pile of red sand to a telecommunications outpost housed in two freight shipping containers), while in the center of the room two vitrines each contain flat-screen monitors streaming Internet image feeds, such as found footage of nuclear surveillance following the 2011 Japan earthquake sourced online and Pattison’s own recordings of abandoned 2004 Athens Olympic Games sites. All of the imagery can be viewed at www.focal-plane.org, a website-as–white cube that breaks from temporal or spatial confinement and treats the image itself as a storage unit. Disrupting the frame of the exhibition even further, a rogue screen is placed atop one vitrine in an act of aesthetic rupture. Indeed, as Duchamp used industrial objects to break aesthetic standards within exhibition contexts, the digitized image is here treated in a similar fashion.

— Stephanie Bailey

Asier Mendizabal

RAVEN ROW
56 Artillery Lane
December 8–February 12

Asier Mendizabal, Untitled (Memorial), 2009, concrete, 32 x 54 x 10”.

Asier Mendizabal’s latest body of work investigates the capacity of signs to embody ideas. Though the Basque artist draws from a lexicon of political and social visual symbols, including flags, crests, and emblems, he does not attempt to capture the spirit of any specific movement. This artistic decision creates a pronounced tension between the intimate, enigmatic art object—as many of Mendizabal’s works are almost abstract sculptures that invite the viewer into their space—and ideas of mass movements.

Two works show the contrasting fortunes of communist monuments: Untitled (Memorial), 2009, is at first glance purely abstract—a concrete wedge with a strange void at its heart. But the sculpture has local history: It re-creates a structure designed by modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin to house a bust of Lenin in London, yet without the communist leader’s head at its center, it becomes a sculptural form shorn of its purpose. Elsewhere, a photograph depicts an improvised monument in Bilbao that incorporated busts of Lenin and Marx into a concrete block in 1993, running counter to notions of a pan-European rejection of communism in the late twentieth century. As Bilbao is Mendizabal’s home, the complexities of Basque identity inevitably inform his work. See, for example, Auñamendi, 2006–10, where the artist plays on the region’s reputation for violent struggles for independence by presenting a grid of romantic photographs of mountain villages from the Basque Encyclopedia, manipulated with soft focus: The idealized tranquility of these images makes it seem implausible that dissent could foment amid such a bucolic landscape.

An elegant series of works, “Delimitar,” 2009, reduces national and organizational emblems to white outlines on deep brown Gravoply, leaving us to guess at what these hints of eagle wings, laurels, and cogwheels might represent. The teeth of a cogwheel also inspire a concrete and iron sculpture that evokes the kind of improvised stage that might accompany a rally or demonstration. Rather than being upright, the structure leans at an angle. Far from an enduring symbol of industry or strength, it feels neutered and uncertain.

— Ben Luke

Selma Makela and “Solar Do-Nothing Machine”

PEER
97 & 99 Hoxton Street
January 4–February 18

Selma Makela, Hill Walker, 2010, oil on canvas, 10 1/4 x 11 3/4".

Rejecting the tyranny of dreariness typical of London in midwinter, this show expectantly embraces transience in nature. Films by various artists and a group of paintings by Selma Makela touch on the ephemeral. Anna Barriball’s film Projection, 2003, harnesses the intangible: The artist stands at an open window as sun cascades in, reflecting coruscations off her rhinestone shirt. Similarly, Rachel Lowe’s series of video shorts A Letter to an Unknown Person, 2008, captures the artist’s attempts to draw Magic Marker outlines of the fast-moving landscape outside onto a car’s passenger-side window. As the films progress, the traced shapes of fugitive scenery accumulate to obscure the view. Charles and Ray Eames’s Blacktop: A Story of the Washing of a School Play Yard, 1952, also uses passing moments of abstract forms, as soapy water full of bubbles flows wistfully and sinuously across gritty black tarmac to a sound track of the Goldberg Variations. Evocative of “skying,” the British tradition of contemplating clouds as practiced by the likes of John Constable, the film ultimately captures the banal reality of water mixed with soap suds in bewildering formations of transcendent, mesmerizing abstraction. Makela’s small-scale oil paintings of the physical world—ice, snow, meteors, solar storms, and so on—are distillations of the ephemeral environment, made vulnerable as it is made permanent on canvas. Like stars coalescing into a glittering constellation, this dual exhibition quietly provides, through the assembled works, a fresh view of natural phenomena.

— Kathleen Madden

Brian Griffiths

VILMA GOLD
6 Minerva Street
January 12–February 19

View of “The Invisible Show,” 2012.

Brian Griffiths’s brand of quasi-Victorian Arte Povera reanimates the detritus of fantastical culture to carnivalesque effect. He is known for large-scale sculptures and motley object-constellations, which have contained puppet-size porcelain clowns, baby grand pianos perched on dark oak china hutches, and a moon-faced panda head carved into stone. Griffiths’s imagination is baroque––prey to the adventure and exoticism of a certain era of the British Empire (from the invention of science fiction through to the cold war)––and nostalgic for the now-obsolete mechanics of transformation, titillation, and the new.

Yet Griffiths’s current solo show is something of a departure from his recent explorations of antiquated entertainment value. It engages the problem of cultural wastage––the sorry remnants of consumptive pleasure-seekers––in shockingly topical light. Five massive cubes in slightly variable dimensions (two Small-, one Medium-, and two Large Invisibles, each 2012) compel the viewer to trace a labyrinthine circuit through the room. Draped in layers of ungessoed canvas in varying shades of beige, the unspectacular forms obscure a space where a sculpture might stand.

As a kind of verso to the circus tent, “The Invisible Show” remains perfectly coy––the adolescent who has eaten mushrooms and, hiding behind long hair, presumes her presence imperceptible. With nothing much to see, one could accept the premise––the volume, the undulating surface––as antidote to a general exhaustion with imagery, or perhaps find a treatise on contemporary painting’s problematics. In any case, on the back of Griffiths’s previous work, this starkly reduced theatricality approaches the conceptual to rival Minimalism’s iconoclasm, providing a strange relief in aesthetic quietude.

— Kari Rittenbach

Grayson Perry

THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Great Russell Street
October 6–February 26

Grayson Perry, Pilgrimage to the British Museum, 2011, ink and graphite, 23 5/8 x 23 5/8".

Priceless artifacts from the British Museum’s vast collection come into dialogue with Grayson Perry’s sardonic wit in “The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman.” Perry explores his lineage as a textile artist and ceramicist, and places himself in a long line of international craftsmen. He has spent the past two years carefully selecting his favorite pieces by unknown artisans from the British Museum, and then creating his own works in response to them. By locating parallels and discordance alike between his own ideas and those of his artistic predecessors, he is able to address contemporary culture in a manner that is by turns humbling and amusingly poignant. By pairing a gold hoop earring, attached to a shriveled human earlobe, with his Coffin Containing Artist’s Ponytail, 1985, for instance, he venerates these anonymous artists of the past while simultaneously satirizing the contemporary art industry.

The show explores in depth several motifs, including shrines, flags, and sexual imagery; yet a main focus of the show is undoubtedly, in Perry’s own words, “the god of [his] imaginary world”: his fifty-year-old teddy bear, Alan Measles. If much of the show is a documentation of Perry’s pilgrimage into the past as explored through his interaction with pieces from the museum, a large part of the preparation for this artistic journey was an actual trip that Perry and Alan Measles took to Germany, during which Perry also sought to come to terms with the anti-German war games played during the artist’s childhood. Photographs and memorabilia from this trip are displayed at the entrance to the show, as is the bubblegum-pink motorcycle that Perry had built especially for the journey, now converted into a shrine to Alan Measles—who is nonetheless absent; a stunt-double teddy is there in his place. For Perry, Alan Measles is too precious for the British Museum.

— Ashitha Nagesh

Liam O’Callaghan

TEMPLE BAR GALLERY & STUDIOS
5-9 Temple Bar
December 16–February 4

Liam O’Callaghan, Bit Symphony, 2009–11, furniture, record players, various sound and computer equipment, dimensions variable.

Liam O’Callaghan’s installations use found objects, reassembled in ways that reveal beauty while also hiding nothing of the mechanics of creation. One particular sort of found object he’s favored lately was once the staple of every home, from small studio to glamorous mansion: the turntable—now a quaint timepiece, its appeal almost archaeological. For those of a certain age, there will always be something seductive about vinyl and stylus, about a diamond-tipped needle hitting a groove to release pure sound. In O’Callaghan’s Bit Symphony, 2009–11, a Heath Robinson–esque pile of turntables, amplifiers, and speakers periodically comes to life and plays the artist’s own composition, made up of the melodies, riffs, hidden beats, scratches, and static that have been lying latent in the grooves of LPs. Visually arresting and aurally mesmerizing, Bit Symphony also explores how, while the ghost in the machine may have been philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s way of debunking dualism (the mind and body are not, he thought, separate entities), ghosts of energy and previous use do lurk in our abandoned machines. Sound waves never actually disappear; they just fade and merge: Out there, in the ether, Bit Symphony plays on forever.

— Gemma Tipton

Omer Fast

THE MODEL ARTS AND NILAND GALLERY
Model Satellite, 9 Castle Street
September 3–November 27

Omer Fast, 5000 Feet Is the Best, 2011, still from a color film, 27 minutes.

Watching the films of Omer Fast confounds our expectations of the medium. 5,000 Feet Is the Best, 2011, is presented like a conventional big-budget Hollywood movie and has similarly high production values. Yet Fast frustrates the narrative element that Hollywood teaches us to expect: While stories unfold, repetitions and obscurities challenge the idea of a central controlling account. Ultimately, one is left with the postmodern awareness that there is no truth, no core to cling to.

Different artists have tackled this central tension between medium and matter in film in different ways. Bill Viola and James Coleman slow down movement and image, while Fast’s approach is more in tune with the fractured expositions that James Joyce employed to disrupt the narrative drive of the novel. The film, which has been playing simultaneously at the Venice Biennale, Dublin Contemporary, and The Model, takes as its subject the drone pilots who remotely operate bomber planes over Afghanistan while working nine-to-five days at their bases in the United States.

The production values are slick, almost to the point of parody, reflecting the aesthetics of blockbuster movies and of those highly glossy prerecession artworks (think of Jeff Koons and his Hanging Heart, 1994–2006) in a way that feels at odds with the content of the film. Nevertheless, Fast’s anti-narrative devices bring about an uncomfortable level of anxiety and perplexed anticipation as we are caught between our expectations of story and what is actually playing out on-screen. These are mirrored in the second installation on view at the Model, Nostalgia, 2009. Nothing seems to make sense as it unfolds, and yet at the end, even though no conclusive story has been told, a greater understanding of humanity appears to have been reached.

— Gemma Tipton