Everyone Their Own Projector is a book created by William Kentridge. It was published by Editions Valerie Cudel, a small publisher in Valence, France.  One thousand five hundred copies of the book were made and one hundred and twenty of these were copies were signed and included a lithograph by William Kentridge.  The lithograph was printed by Mark Atwood in South Africa.

I had the privilege of viewing the original pages of this book at Marian Goodman Gallery in the Marais district of Paris. I was able to purchase the book for sixty dollars and it remains one of my most cherished possessions.

A critique of this art experience could zero in on the pages by Kentridge—all exquisitely crafted with an admirable consistency, innovation and apparent dedication to ephemera.
Pages made from text and graphics torn from books of multiple languages and various disciplines are layered so that the idea of knowledge reveals itself as a process: collaborative, diverse, diverging, subjective and subject to change.  Kentridge draws liberally on these collage backdrops contributing his free-handed black ink gestures and prominent red pencil accents to the pile of information attached to the page.  The three colors in the book are white (various creams of faded paper), black and red.  The topics of the drawings are diverse. Some veer towards notions of sensuality and the thinking woman; multiple drawing show nude women in various reflective poses.  Others depict censorship; masks over heads or blocked out text. Many use tearing to reinforce the sense of multiplicity, decomposition and regeneration.

One could also talk about Kentridge in general, Paris in general, or printed matter.

For the benefit of my own local community, however, what I want to say about this book is that it was fostered by a kind young woman at the door of the gallery. I have never experienced the level of attention—intellectual and hospitable—in any New York gallery as I did in Paris that day. Not once have I been met at the door by someone who seems to value where my interest stems from. This young woman’s kindness ensured that I came back with friends to see the show a second time and that my enthusiasm spread to friends and family who visited the Kentridge show at SF MoMA several months later, and that I returned to watch Kentridge perform live with one of his musical collaborators. She was available, courteous, sympathetic and proficient. Of course, it was also wonderful that there was something in the gallery that I could afford to buy. Perhaps that is why she was so kind.

http://www.mariangoodman.com/

Justin Amrhein, Untitled, 2008. Ink on handmade paper. 6 x 9 inches.

Studio Visit

June 25, 2008

Conselyea Street, Brooklyn

Of his weapons of mass destruction, Justin Amrhein says “I would never ever want to use them. I am fascinated with how they are built.” Amrhein researches components of weaponry and combines his favorite mechanical features to invent weapons. He draws them with precision on graph paper and annotates the diagrammatic forms with text. He is a smiling, gentle but intensely driven character; kind and precise in his communications. The drawings exhibit exactly the love of form that he describes. The weapons are not doing anything on the page but function as a record of intently observed parts. In their attempt to portray the construction of weapons, these works actually represent a man’s desire to deconstruct what interests him-or perhaps the fine line between making and breaking.

If you never met Justin, you might wonder about his obsession with weapons. Why is he drawing them? Why so obsessively? What does it mean to sit around documenting the formation of a weapon? How is this obsession related to the global-media-government interest in weapons of mass destruction? Indeed, as Amrhein explains on his website (justinamrhein.com), his interest in weapons of mass destruction originated during the “failed search for weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq.

Amrhein’s discussion of these objects involves a noticeable emotional detachment from the social connotations of his fixations. He reveals no particular political view and is not specific about how he feels about the weapons he deconstructs. It is as if he is so captivated by the curve that the function of the curve is of no importance. I consider it akin to Zen meditation—where the idea is to fixate on the nuance of the form of the breath. Indeed his “Constilaminate Combustion Engine, 2008” is ultimately Buddhist in layout.

Justin attained an MFA in San Jose, California and moved to Brooklyn. He says he works about 45 hours a week for Pierogi and 20 hours a week in the studio. He does not have health care and considers himself to be looking for representation at a gallery. He says his works are for sale but he hesitates to sell them in order to have them around to show people.

9.21.2008

Carey Maxon

Justin Amrhein, Consilaminate Combustion Engine, 2008. Ink on vellum graph paper.

Conditions of Desire
October 12-November 12, 2007

Pierogi
177 North 9th
Brooklyn, NY

The span and specificity Dawn Clements’ portrayal of visual nuance of interiors combine to offer an impossible vantage point conveying the impenetrability of a world carefully observed. Stopping herself in rooms or scenes within films, Clements notes the shapes and arrangements of objects in space through drawing: an activity that represents a particular attitude. Clements joins her drawings from sight to form mural sized monumental impressions of interiors.

In a moment when the naïve and the digital dominate, Clements’ work as objects represent the practice of drawing from sight as much as they represent the narratives within each piece. Her drawings are not brought to a photo-realistic finish. Rather, Clements’ disciplined hand uses mostly line and shading to portray underlying structure in a way that–for its lights, darks and emphasis on pattern–borders on abstraction. Occasionally, Clements spirals into obsessive repetition of certain visual elements. In Color Oval (2007), hair-dos, faces, and floor patterns are pursued with this automatic technique: sights seen becoming abstract patterns. These sections are often called doodles. The subtle boundary between this and the more traditionally representative sections of her work indicate that her desire to record what she is an unconscious, spontaneous, perhaps impulsive phenomenological meditation.

The artist recently told me that she makes a drawing of her coffee mug every morning. To do anything every morning, one has to be convinced of its importance in daily life. Indeed, the drawings spread out over the floor show Clements’ commitment to the practice (interesting in and of itself) as well as the variation intrinsic to one person’s daily interaction with a single object. Drawing allows for repetitive engagement with a topic without ever running the risk of exact replication. As such, it is innately expressive of human nature. These mild changes over time as expressed through drawing relate to a sense of the infinite that is central to Clements artistic choices. By making pieces made of pieces; by selecting segments to portray in detail and only alluding to others in faint outlines, she relates the viewer to a potentially ever expanding narrative; the great unraveling of space, time, and personal experience.

Untitled (Color Kitchen), 2005 from Clements’ recent exhibition at Pierogi, uses pictures within pictures to: drawing our attention to an interpersonal relationship through portraits; environmental concerns through the depiction of an oil field; self-reflexivity through art historical images. Finally, it demands confrontation with wall paper’s overwhelming floral pattern and returns our attention to the undeniable importance of the quotidian. Fruits, flowers, sweets and coffee are seductively painted cultivating a focus on the tangible.

12/2007 Carey Maxon

Larissa Goldston Gallery
530 West 25th St. 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001

March 30 – May 05, 2007

Upon our first recognition of darkness in a space we expect to be light, throughout our attraction to an environment that confounds us, and in our ultimate resistance to leaving, Orly Genger’s MASSPEAK instigates contemplation of the seductiveness and sadness of subversive alternatives.

The installation which occupies two rooms in the gallery is made of knotted climbing rope arranged to suggest a textured universe with no hard edges, little delineation, and an unknown source. The gallery’s lights are dimmed and the piece reads as black. Open spaces, nooks, and curves bring on a sense of exploration, while the back room almost completely filled with rope makes for the feeling of a dead end or inevitable intimidation. Observers must tread the surely foreign surface.

MASSPEAK’s multidimensional message is hard to figure out. It provides its viewers an almost simultaneous experience of opposing dynamics and herein lays its power.

In the back room’s wall of knotty darkness, the curving snake-like lines that in the front room create more of a landscape become fearful when we see that they are unavoidable. The confines of the room and the overwhelming mass of rope denote something that does not fit well in its environment. Matthew Dunehoo noted ‘this is like the worst parts of my own head looking me straight in the face.’ The piece’s unending lines of black denote untamed threat of destruction and its mass suggests piles of death. Genger approaches the horror of something weighty and pervasive.

In his essay “Anaesthetic Ideology,” Mark Grief explains a contemporary craving for anti-experience. Overwhelmed with narrative and drama, there is growing contemporary wish ‘for some means to reduce the feeling.’ Genger’s repetitive manipulation of a single material produces an alternative space that accounts for time and change yet provides consistency. As would a nest or sitting with closed eyes, MASSPEAK makes it possible to separate oneself from experience. It is an environment distinct, constant, and protected enough to produce a soothing effect.

Since she turned to yarn and rope, Genger’s sculptural work has investigated obsessive action. By restricting her compulsion to act to the formations of knots and loose compositions of shapes in space, Genger reveals that the human compulsion to act can be used to form harmless, evocative, monumental neutrality.

Carey Maxon 4/13/07