Continuing Education Blog

Synthetic Slut: A Novel by Bjarne Melgaard, 2010

Synthetic Slut: A Novel by Bjarne Melgaard at Greene Naftali could instead take its title from the popular T-shirt and bumper sticker slogan “I’m not racist; I hate everybody equally.”

In Melgaard’s narrative, a narcissistic, racist, sex-addicted misanthrope flails in a tornado of excess, irradiating himself with drugs, reckless sex, hate, and corresponding subcultures.

Sharp, Dressed Man

The artist, barely visible behind the character, has an equally insatiable appetite for decadence: in his sprawling installation, no material is too precious for desecration.  He sacrifices Margiela garments and shoes, marble sculptures, pricey perfumes, and spitefully, tubes of Old Holland paint – too expensive for painters you and I know – and any hope of social probity.

If you see a suspicious package...

The show’s title will condition viewers for fiction, but it seems impossible to exhume the “real” Melgaard from the storied alter ego.  Is Melgaard’s crystal queen/roid rager/sadist a fictional surrogate, like Philip Roth’s Zuckerman?  Is it a “stage” persona Melgaard inhabits while working in the studio, then sheds once he clocks out?  Or is this “really” him?  Moreover, is this the diaristic sample of a sociopath’s lifestyle?  Or is Melgaard actually saying out loud the dark things we’re all too timid to talk about?

...see something, say something...

To answer at least one of those questions, Melgaard seems to have imported his library, his medicine cabinet, his furniture, and his wardrobe.  We also see remnants of the food and drinks he consumed, presumably while installing the show.  Scores of self-portrait photos present the artist at various ages and places, gazing outward toward the other hundred of so self-portraits, creating an echo chamber of self regard.  A canvas bag bears empty cases of drugs from the Duane Reade pharmacy, prescribed to Bjarne Melgaard.

These drugs, synthetic sustenance, shuttle us from the outside to the inside of his fictive slut and back, working as devices for the narrative and materials for the sculptures.  From the outside, prescription drugs enter the body to regulate schizophrenia, anxiety, and insomnia.  Anabolic steroids enter via penetrating syringes to pump up the body with excessive muscles, as if fortifying the interior.  Couture garments elevate the figure and conceal the striated, coarse body underneath.  Fragrances scent  the facade with ornamental fragrances, including Commes des Garcons. (Mere coincidence?: Garcons = boys, scent > consent).  There’s also the abundant Serostim scattered throughout the show, a substance that controls HIV-related facial wasting, that scarlet letter endured by the otherwise undetectable Poz patient.

You could have it all/ My empire of dirt

Each of the sculptures piles heterogeneous materials and familiar Melgaard silver bullets together, often giving hints about the unflinching stories he tells of indiscriminating exploitation and self debasement, in which libido and mortido reach frightful intensity.  But if you think he’s amoral and depraved, just look at his apparent idol, Arkan, who becomes the protagonist’s lover in the story.

Nationalist Gothic

In real life, Arkan was a ruthless career criminal, murderer, spy, militia leader, and war criminal.  The violence embodied in that villain returns to Melgaard’s story in the sadomasochistic sexual encounters, militant nationalist come-ons, and in dormant bowie knives and bear claw knives.  Simulated bear claw gashes rake across at least three of the paintings.

Sharp, Dressed Man

One ensemble in particular proposes a source for Melgaard’s phallocentric contempt (a scathing sentiment confrontational enough to have prompted a shorthand feminist intervention by a certain band of lesbian artists).

Reads "FEMENISM" (sic)

The sculpture in question includes a photo of the artist looking backward and through a window, as if in the grips of an inchoate memory, along with a pair of girls’ shoes, a canine pup, and a disturbing cartoon in which a naked prowler hides under the bed of a boy sleeping face down.  Together, this ensemble seems to constitute a reckoning with traumatic childhood sexual abuse, an allegation elucidated by three black-and-white paintings of nude boys, photorealistically resurrected from “NAMBLA images” (as identified from the indexical press release), which initially seem out of place among the scattered, expressionistic objects.

Adopt?

nice

Also seeming out of place is the photorealistic painting of two African soldiers, which associates a little too closely for comfort with the armed Planet of the Apes action figures.

Too Close for Comfort

The racial epithets scrawled into the paintings and cut into vinyl adhesive letters could be mitigated by their place in sexual fantasy.  Nobody has to excuse his or her private desires, and anyway, the racial shrapnel cuts both ways, from white to black and black to white.  However, given all-too-recent jokes about President Obama, Henry Louise Gates, Jr., and countless other people, the monkey gag breaks the skin.

Nietzsche: "this path is now forbidden, since a monkey stands at its entrance"

Which brings us to the platypus, which appears in nearly every sculpture, in one form or another.  The platypus is native to Australia, where Melgaard grew up, and the male releases poison from a sharp spur on the back of his hind feet.  It won’t kill a person – at least not an adult – but it will cause excruciating pain that can haunt its victims for weeks or even months.  The platypus is the only living member of its genus, mainly because unlike most mammals, it lays eggs rather than bearing live young.  It is such a strange animal, that its original discovery 200 or so years ago was thought to be a hoax.  It’s the perfect spirit animal for misfits beyond redemption.

... and in this corner ...

Karla Black/Nate Lowman reads like a battle of the sexes.  Is it a lover’s quarrel?  Not really, because it feels too general.  Karla Black’s installation asserts its femininity – hear it roar.  Nate Lowman seems to be coming to terms with outmoded male rage.  No more misogyny, misanthropy, and misfiring.

The Scottish Karla Black blankets the cold gallery floor with solvent femininity, without veering toward The Maternal.  Platonic Solids includes powder paint and cosmetics material, parted in some places to reveal whimsical drawings of geometric shapes, both flat and dimensional.  Its passive expanse and unprotected edges appear to be vulnerable, though the bright pigment is formidable enough to establish boundaries and ward off trespassers.

No doubt, her work has feminine qualities.  Can that claim be derogatory?  What about “girly?”  But thank heavens for girls!  Can’t live without ‘em.

The girly nature, and the pastel palette, remind me of Lily van der Stokker’s murals and installations.  Her lowercase cursive text and cartoony, buoyant fields of color are distinctly preteen feminine.

Lily van der Stokker

Above this scatter sculpture is Don’t Detach, Adapt, a staggered grid of painted paper.  The contiguous body hangs limply and bears sheets individually  painted and undelicately bound together.  Most sheets seem to have passively drifted through pastel-colored fog, but a few pop out in bright red.  Is there a periodicity to these?  They appear random, but women artists using intermittent reds makes me think of menstruation.  “I don’t trust nothin’ that bleeds for seven days and don’t die.”  Speaking of, the whole piece is brutally, traumatically penetrated by a structural steel beam, which gores the piece like a pin through a butterfly specimen.

Mary Heilmann, Rosebud, 1983

Meanwhile, Nate Lowman dances around Karla Black’s territory, melodramatically bidding “Happy Trails” to the priapic monopoly of art history, most specifically in High Modernism.

Lipstick on a Pig

In Anger Management Trilogy #2, he revises Willem de Kooning’s violent Marilyn Monroe with a pathetic, infantile gesture too weak to even fill the canvas – like throwing a shoe down a hallway.  Next to it is Snowman, alkyd on canvas, whose subject pessimistically – but accurately – shares his fate via a caption that would make Gillian Wearing curdle.  To remind the viewer that the image is only a frozen moment in parabolic dissolution might correspond to the analytic interpretation that a Pollock is a record of gravity – or at least, “action.”  And his untimely death?

After Gillian Wearing

The lean Broken Zip fits perfectly into the show, foiling the steel probe overhead with a disintegrating erection that refers to Barnett Newman “zip” paintings, as well as his great Broken Obelisk.  A row of vintage gas pump veneers, rusted and decrepit, reminds me of Edward Hopper imagery, and maybe takes on the provincial heritage of American art history, now buried by globalization and the looming peak oil armageddon.  The trompe l’oeil in the middle chromatically coordinates with Black’s green.

Oh, snap!

Green with envy

Finally, his For JJ (like vah-jay-jay?) consummates in the back hallway with her Division Isn’t, which would collapse like a fainting wife and crumble to the floor, were it not suspended by tiny strings.  If the steel probe overhead is any indication, we’re seeing the result of a Lowman’s barbaric insertion, a crime whose only clue is a newspaper clipping about middle-aged riflemen.

Or is it the other "JJ?" (Jasper Johns, Painting with Two Balls, 1960)

Notably, the testicles are turned backward: for most men, the left hangs lower.  That is not the case here, so we must assume that we are sneaking a peek from behind.  They are also blue: coitus interruptus among us!

Wham Bam, thank you, Ma'am. Ma'am?

I guess that’s why they call it the blues?

On day one of my brief visit to Tokyo, I met artists Benjamin Butler and Anne Eastman for a tour of some galleries in Kiyosumi-Shirakawa, culminating in an enlightening, private tour of Benjamin’s show at Tomio Koyama Gallery.

Benjamin Butler

After we checked out hiromiyoshii, Taka Ishii, and KIDO Press, Ben walked me through each of his oil paintings and colored pencil drawings.  He produced this work in three different locations throughout Japan: Kamakura, Tokyo, and Nikko.  All of the work is from 2010, a revealing fact that makes us ask whether Japanese industriousness is transmissable, especially for wayfaring Western artists.  Or maybe Ben Butler perspires paintings.

The new paintings initially look flat, decorative, patterned, and playful; but quickly reveal structural branches and skeletal armatures from which fields of briskly painted pigment seem to wave and stretch like flags and tarpaulin.  The unfussy palette comes mostly from the tube, which must mean that Benjamin is more interested in color selection and arrangement than mixology.  The results are as gratifying as a leisurely visit to an aromatic flower shop.

Some are bold and dominant, like active ingredients, rendering their quieter neighbors more like vacuoles of colored ground that still emerge, then hover, above the structural strips of unpainted, white canvas.  Those strips are scored by unwavering paths of pencil.  These abstract elements seem to “stack” or supplant each other, which reminded me of the way trees continue through the ground and into the earth.  I accept the pencil lines as the roots of each painting.

Elsewhere, especially in the colored pencil drawings, patches of soft-spoken color gently nestle among their cohabitants, subtly modulated as if indexing a course of color-filtered lights. Some of these continue the “tree” shape motif, while others venture into crackling, fractal matrices.

Benjamin seems to pursue a matter-of-fact, solemn process that savors nature, yet still allows for – and even emphasizes – joyful spontaneity.  The work can be analytic without feeling technical.  In appearance, his kin could be Richard Aldrich, Raoul de Keyser, and even Daniel Hesidence.

Benjamin Butler and Anne Eastman

In his Barnett Newman-esque monochrome work, Autumn 2010, Ben seemingly eyedropped Sublime orange from JMW Turner.  The painting beams gleeful citrus at such penetrating intensity that it could cure scurvy and give Turner a jaw-grinding buzz.  It is outstanding, ferrying us to the hearty north pole of Ben’s range of touch.  His south pole adopts the sensitive delicacy and tensile reliability of a feather.  In between, we witness heterogeneous dry brush scraping, saturated strokes, and velveteen coats populating each canvas and paper; and that range seems to be the subject matter, at least as much as color.

IMAGES: Michael Bilsborough

What just happened? was the dominant thought as dumbstruck art kids shuffled out of a second-floor gallery at PS1.  To hear the varied accounts is like watching Rashomon.  Everyone saw the same events unfold, but every version is different.

As part of the new Saturday Sessions initiative at PS1, curators Sarvia Jasso and Andres Bedoya brought their Brooklyn is Burning faction to Queens.  After performance artist Georgia Sagri completed her self-hijacking fugue, most viewers were shocked when the next performer, Ann Liv Young, took the stage and verbally trashed Georgia’s romp.  Then it gets blurry (and messy).

Ann Liv Young urinated into a tray, Georgia left and then returned with middle fingers ablazing, both taunted each other, and then Ann Liv Young began masturbating on the floor, flopping and grinding her pelvis toward Georgia, her bare flesh flapping against Christian Marclay’s matrix of vinyl records.

Ann Liv Young, censored by me (Photo: David Shapiro/MUSEO)

Not sure what happened to Georgia after that, because most (wide) eyes were on Ann, who now appeared to be bleeding downstairs and staggering around with the tray of urine, only to spill a little and then dump it over herself like a Gatorade tank on Coach Paterno.  And now the lights are out.  “Is this real?” some wondered aloud.  “Is it part of the show?” “Maybe it’s like a Martin Creed sort of thing.”  No wonder the NY Times said of Ann Liv Young, “For the viewer it can be hard to tell if the show is unraveling or if Young’s behavior is the show itself.”

Who made the call to cut the power?  Many people blame the PS1 staff for silencing a daring performance.  That would be especially confusing if it came down from new Director Klaus Biesenbach.  The champion of the edgy and provocative Marina Abramovic wouldn’t be easily shocked; Ann Liv Young has nothing he hasn’t seen before, right?

(l-r) Ulay, some guy, Marina Abramovic; Marina Abramovic

After all, who can forget “the Vault,” which was the subterranean sex dungeon component of Klaus’ 2006 survey at PS1, Into Me/Out of Me?  How about the sensational Pipilotti Rist supervideo he brought to MoMA, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)?  Rist’s psyche-sanguine content was risky (risty?) business, too – and one of the absolute coolest undertakings we’ve ever seen at the new MoMA.  He also brought us the mesmerizing Douglas Gordon: Timeline and at PS1, Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz. Hot!

That Marina photo reminds me of Man Ray's "Le Violin D'Ingres"

But then PS1 has compromised unusual projects for specious reasons.  One example comes from a few years ago, when PS1 support staff removed part of an installation by Jesse Bercowetz & Matt Bua: a dead chicken suspended from a window.

Artist and Brooklyn is Burning participant Julia Oldham might be the first to have blogged about the event.  We chatted about it over email and I spoke for the steady stream of dejected viewers upset about a repressive gesture that looked reactionary and hypocritical.  But don’t listen to me; I was just riled up after watching Keith Olbermann all day to help with my merciless winter depression.

Even if Klaus issued the cut-off directive, it might be unfair to wolf-cry censorship.  Censorship entails a greater degree of deliberation for the purpose of personal or political gain. If an aggressive performer is bleeding, flinging urine, and staggering around, maybe a prudent adult should hit the Panic Button.  Intervening into the escalating altercation might have prevented a catfight or worse.  Or maybe PS1 thought Ann Liv Young’s performance spilled over into uncooth hysteria, and censorship doesn’t apply, since antics aren’t really content.  Maybe Admiral Klaus ruled that Ann had jumped the shark when the mad clam bared its teeth.

nom nom nom meow

More Ann Liv Young (link NSFW)

UPDATE 1: From BiB co-curator Sarvia Jasso:
As one of the curators of BiB, I would like to take this opportunity to express my opinion about the event at PS1. Despite the fact that BiB is a collaborative project, my fellow curator Andres Bedoya and I have respectfully diverging opinions that have not necessarily been fully reflected in any of the statements posted thusfar.

While I do not claim to know the reason the museum turned the lights off, I can say that the perceived animosity and escalating verbal and gestural attacks in the room from one artist to another were absolutely antithetical to my understanding of what BiB represents. The situation ultimately compromised the participation of the other artists involved, causing the last artist to perform in the dark. Despite the unforeseen and unfortunate outcome, I remain committed to a completely open format for expression. I think the framework (content and context) for any ensuing discussions should take into account the complexities of experiencing a live performance within an institution, instead of jumping to the conclusion that the impetus for removing power during the event originated in an attempt at censoring the performers.

A claim of censorship could easily develop into a self-serving mythology with its own inertia, which could then quickly become detached from the event itself. I think we need to be very clear that no one was asked to leave and all of the planned performances occurred during the course of the event.
From a curatorial point of view, a broad range of performances is vital to the program, but the underlying message always stays the same—BiB is forging a community that respects and celebrates diversity in all its complexities. Anybody who has ever attended a BiB event can attest to the fact that we try to create a positive environment in which to present work that can be challenging and, at times, difficult to digest.

UPDATE 2: From PS1:
The decision by the Director of PS1 to curtail the performances near the end of Saturday Sessions was made to safeguard the audience, performers, and PS1 staff from an escalating and potentially volatile situation. The performers’ actions were not previously discussed with or planned by PS1.

Jaime Isenstein in "One Minute More" at The Kitchen

As of tomorrow, Friday, Guggenheim visitors will find a museum stripped bare by a bachelor.  33-year-old Tino Sehgal, younger than jesus, will take over the museum by emptying the walls and halls of artwork, staging two TBA performances, and subsidizing visiting crowds with 200 stooges hired to mingle with the tourists.  UPDATE: The NYT says he is 34.  My bad!

This show can be best understood through its influences.  He is a young artist, after all.  So art lovers seize the opportunity to list the inventory of gestures and exhibitions built around an empty space.  Artist Matthew Weinstein says on JSF (Jerry Saltz’ Facebook page), “nothing going on here is more radical then a sol lewitt drawing diagram, duchamp’s paris air ampule, and the entire career of john cage. and that’s fine. he’s working within a well established tradition, and adding to it.”

Magnus von Plessen at Gladstone

Saltz himself identified Gabriel Orozco’s Yogurt Cups, now at MoMA, as “an homage to the Empty Gallery as Work of Art.”  A few years ago, Ralph Rugoff curated A Brief History of Invisible Art.  Months ago, Adriana Lara appropriated the New Museum’s opening hours as her entry in its Younger than Jesus survey, as well as the daily ingestion of a banana by a museum guard, who would then leave the empty peel on the shiny floor.  In 2007, Urs Fischer excavated a giant pit from the poured concrete floor of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, literally ripping GBE a new hole.  Months before that, Terence Koh exhibited at the Whitney Museum a near empty gallery, occupied only by a charcoal-colored sphere and a Klieg light.  In 2003, Trisha Donnelly released I Am Taking Your Morning, a CD recording in which she describes how she steals every aspect of your morning: your bed, coffee, newspaper, cigarette break, etc.  In 2001, Simparch built a skate bowl at Deitch Projects, leaving the content of the show up to the skaters who made use of the space.  Since 1991, Rudolf Stingel has done show after show in New York of near-empty galleries.  You can find more examples of emptiness in each of the last few decades.

(detail)

So it isn’t new to vacate a gallery.  But then isn’t it ironic how a show that owes so much to art history is banishing the tokens of that history?  We can best explain Tino Sehgal by invoking his ancestors in the brinksmanship legacy of dematerialization and relational aesthetics.  That tale had been reported by DIA, but then muted, when DIA went so Minimalist that it closed shop!  Yet Sehgal’s response to inherited art history is to wipe the walls clean, deforming the Guggenheim into one circuitous tabula rasa.

No, no! We said "Rasa"

This is poignant – or not – when compared to other negations of exhibition.  The Met had to withdraw Picasso’s The Actor after a woman ran into it (literally ripping Picasso a new hole, ha ha).  Worse, the Met is hiding its depictions of Muhammad and deleting “Islamic” from the “Islamic Galleries.”  (Read David Shapiro’s razor-sharp response at Muse.)  If the Met can’t defend itself against clumsy visitors, at least it can try to avoid pissing off bloodthirsty Muslim extremists.  At the Met, art is concealed under duress and fear; for Tino Sehgal, it’s the anti-exhibition basis of an exhibition.  Rigorous?  Or decadent?

The empty museum isn’t the goal of the show, it’s just the means to the real goal, which is the interaction of the visitors with each other and with the space.  “Sehgal seeks to reconfigure these conditions by producing meaning and value through a transformation of actions rather than solid materials,” says the Museum.  But is that a myopic view?  Hysterical?  Art has often been exchanged as anticipated action instead of material.  Again, Sol LeWitt wall drawings…  Or an advance payment for a commissioned portrait of some old Queen or other.  How about Momus’ Stars Forever album, whereby interested parties paid Momus $1,000 to write a song about them?  Jeff Koons did, and he paid not for the song itself, but for the service of creating a song.  (And it’s a great one.)

Breakfast of Chomp-ions

From the Gugg: “a visitor is no longer only a passive spectator, but one who bears a responsibility to shape and at times to even contribute to the actual realization of the piece. The work may ask visitors what they think, but, more importantly, it underscores an individual’s own agency in the museum environment.”  In other words, we won’t have to stand there all day looking at some crusty old painting, or cumbersome sculpture made by some dead guy.  We will be the art! Us!  I’d better order some teeth whitener!

Spencer Tunick

After all, people are more valuable than art.  That’s why I’ll hang in a museum when I’m dead, and my bedroom will be Landmarked, like Benjamin Franklin’s phantom house by Robert Venturi.  Guggenheim also says that Tino Sehgal “considers visual art to be a microcosm of our economic reality, as both center on identical conditions: the production of goods and their subsequent circulation.” Is that accurate? What kind of goods? I am no Ben Bernanke, but I always thought the mercantile economy operates on mass manufacturing, while art is commonly a distinct one-of-a-kind. Art is more like luxury goods, right? And that’s not really a microcosm of anything, just a mirror of conspicuous consumption. I think McDonald’s burgers or Chevy trucks would be more of a microcosm.  -The End.

Robert Venturi

UPDATE 02-10-2010: I finally saw the show. It was incredible! I plan to post something later this week about my trip.