Sunday, February 1, 2009
Imi Knoebel @ Mary Boone Gallery
Imi Knoebel @ Mary Boone Gallery
Imi Knoebel’s work is a bright spot in a dark world. Like the ad says,…’Add color to your life and your décor’. Not a bad thing to be in this, our hopefully long overdue, brave new world,…Maybe these are the first flutterings, the signs of a spring here,…Well Imi Knoebel is not a wound too tight kind of guy, or trussed up like Glenn Brown, or wound down to sludge but more like a lotus sprung bright out of fertile mud,…And he’s definitely from some mixed fertile beginnings, soil from the likes of Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke and Joseph Beuys. Imi Knoebel’s work goes casual, loosens it up, springs from the board of classic, lean modernism but more sprightly, louder and way less demanding,…uncomplicated. Like when you see orange and black, it doesn’t mean Halloween,…It’s just black as black and then orange as orange and yellow as yellow, green as green, etc.,…Stop looking for a problem to solve, a way in,…Take these paintings at face value,…Rootless no, cut loose from meaning, yes! Freshen up, press your re-fresh button now.
Like opening up your first box of fresh crayolas,…not iconic as Ellsworth Kelly or even wanting, needing to be now,…Knoebel makes that ethos seem frozen, while his organic, lung-ta’s fly round the gallery,…His forthright simple geometries of real color,…a pleasure. Front and center, suspended,…not so rigorous and chock full of the life that is not codified, structured or honed to a master plan,…presages new beginnings, keep it opened up,…anemones floating,…Simple, adroit,…It’s about the color!
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Imi Knoebel’s work is a bright spot in a dark world. Like the ad says,…’Add color to your life and your décor’. Not a bad thing to be in this, our hopefully long overdue, brave new world,…Maybe these are the first flutterings, the signs of a spring here,…Well Imi Knoebel is not a wound too tight kind of guy, or trussed up like Glenn Brown, or wound down to sludge but more like a lotus sprung bright out of fertile mud,…And he’s definitely from some mixed fertile beginnings, soil from the likes of Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke and Joseph Beuys. Imi Knoebel’s work goes casual, loosens it up, springs from the board of classic, lean modernism but more sprightly, louder and way less demanding,…uncomplicated. Like when you see orange and black, it doesn’t mean Halloween,…It’s just black as black and then orange as orange and yellow as yellow, green as green, etc.,…Stop looking for a problem to solve, a way in,…Take these paintings at face value,…Rootless no, cut loose from meaning, yes! Freshen up, press your re-fresh button now.
Like opening up your first box of fresh crayolas,…not iconic as Ellsworth Kelly or even wanting, needing to be now,…Knoebel makes that ethos seem frozen, while his organic, lung-ta’s fly round the gallery,…His forthright simple geometries of real color,…a pleasure. Front and center, suspended,…not so rigorous and chock full of the life that is not codified, structured or honed to a master plan,…presages new beginnings, keep it opened up,…anemones floating,…Simple, adroit,…It’s about the color!
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Thursday, January 1, 2009
'Oh Happy New Year 2009' 'Consciousness, Cracking It Up and Get Your Wonder Back'
Oh Happy New Year 2009
‘Consciousness, Cracking It Up and Get Your Wonder Back’
What is it that Kate Gilmore, Pipilotti Rist, Gemma Smith and Urs Fischer all have in common,…??? They are charged energy, cracking it up, moving it out, crashing through walls and pushing us out of the box,…over the precipice, out through the garden, over the walls, under the earth, to the land of random, out of bounds, out of range, out of time and space and into the great beyond, a heady start for this auspicious new year,…change you can feel,…the uncategorized all coming at you,…Out with the old, visors off, eyes glinting from a wide opened sun filled retina…What does it mean,…Consciousness opened out,…Implications global,…old, worn out, political and social institutions giving way,…On all levels, artists are on the loose, moving out and heading toward each other, breaking away from the ancient pedigrees, turf wars,…fences are breaking. We are inexorably charging past the old markers, not charting the passage and claiming the universe as our infinite territory. Does that have us in free fall, bounding through space, no attachment, no state, no homeland,…A big resounding YES,…YES, YES!!! Will instinct rule, a Darwinian feed forward, survival of the fittest, vile Zombies with heat and no morals,…NO,…NO, NO!!!…Does the big bang look back,…Do the Zen masters not jump off the 100 foot pole. This is not chaos but the kind of life giving momentum that pulls us all off the sofa, out of the ditch, to a universal table large enough to feed, propagate and spread the life energy throughout the universe,…Get out your pick axes, your propellers, open your eyes wide artists and get going. Consciousness is waiting,…
Stephanie Bell Behnke 2009
‘Consciousness, Cracking It Up and Get Your Wonder Back’
What is it that Kate Gilmore, Pipilotti Rist, Gemma Smith and Urs Fischer all have in common,…??? They are charged energy, cracking it up, moving it out, crashing through walls and pushing us out of the box,…over the precipice, out through the garden, over the walls, under the earth, to the land of random, out of bounds, out of range, out of time and space and into the great beyond, a heady start for this auspicious new year,…change you can feel,…the uncategorized all coming at you,…Out with the old, visors off, eyes glinting from a wide opened sun filled retina…What does it mean,…Consciousness opened out,…Implications global,…old, worn out, political and social institutions giving way,…On all levels, artists are on the loose, moving out and heading toward each other, breaking away from the ancient pedigrees, turf wars,…fences are breaking. We are inexorably charging past the old markers, not charting the passage and claiming the universe as our infinite territory. Does that have us in free fall, bounding through space, no attachment, no state, no homeland,…A big resounding YES,…YES, YES!!! Will instinct rule, a Darwinian feed forward, survival of the fittest, vile Zombies with heat and no morals,…NO,…NO, NO!!!…Does the big bang look back,…Do the Zen masters not jump off the 100 foot pole. This is not chaos but the kind of life giving momentum that pulls us all off the sofa, out of the ditch, to a universal table large enough to feed, propagate and spread the life energy throughout the universe,…Get out your pick axes, your propellers, open your eyes wide artists and get going. Consciousness is waiting,…
Stephanie Bell Behnke 2009
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
That Tired Old Thing Called Vitality
We wander around in that ‘sluggish mishmash’ says Peter Schjeldahl, a so-called ‘mishmash’ which has prevailed and characterized contemporary art for over a decade now, where everything is possible and nothing is qualifiable. Art is wide open…coming now from the four corners of the globe, in fact there are no more four corners of the globe…mutating, materializing – the hierarchy of the patrimony of the Renaissance is not the gold standard – M. Kimmelman’s fretting over the so-called ‘value’ of ‘Il Ducio’’s madonna/child…this value has changed…hard pressed to find typical, traditional significance…art that emerges now is not hidebound by the indigenous, the specific…Yet in spite of the fluctuating parameters there really is a playing field and scale for determining quality….Are we finally tired of perusing the dusty corners, the nihilistic slackers, the sordid deadenders…give me some shit…but not the squalid kind like Gunter Brus, more like the earthy, full of life kind, like…the Chris Ofili kind…you know where I’m going here, the Vitality…
Well, it really does matter what you hang your hat on and even if your hat is not a pipe, ‘c’eci n’est pas un pipe’…all art conundrums aside there is either a heartbeat or a lack of one and that is the heart of the matter…talking about our old friend ‘vitality’, the fact that there either is a heart beating or not…witness Anish Kapoor ‘s 2005 folly (as in architectural structure) for World of Interior’s magazine ‘projects’ in the snow. It doesn’t just evoke, it IS, it relays a Tantric fervor…his newest piece is a teardrop, the back of a whale, a vermilion tikka – packed snow covered in a thick, red powder skin, a dense opaque membrane…it melts, a pool of dye, a transient puja, celebrated then gone…his work carries all the power and might of Mohenjo Daro…it is infinite, a womb with the bouyancy of water, a mysterious blend of clean, coherent modernism combined with the deep, ancient proportions of Hindu iconography…Now, look at the Bean in Chicago…heavy – the surface curves like the slow movement of an anaconda – full and voluptuous but rigorous and devoted to the energy of solid weighted matter. Here is no rising Mozartian filigree, no emotion, sweet temperament or Baroque frenzy – instead – the skin is not about to burst but glides, dense, compacted, a powerful dose of the universe compacted then reflected with the contained energy of a meteor. Mined from a deep vein of potent, universal prajna/energy…they are both pieces, seeds incarnate, energy unsprouted, totally not inert but hovering constructs of deep, contained vitality.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
We wander around in that ‘sluggish mishmash’ says Peter Schjeldahl, a so-called ‘mishmash’ which has prevailed and characterized contemporary art for over a decade now, where everything is possible and nothing is qualifiable. Art is wide open…coming now from the four corners of the globe, in fact there are no more four corners of the globe…mutating, materializing – the hierarchy of the patrimony of the Renaissance is not the gold standard – M. Kimmelman’s fretting over the so-called ‘value’ of ‘Il Ducio’’s madonna/child…this value has changed…hard pressed to find typical, traditional significance…art that emerges now is not hidebound by the indigenous, the specific…Yet in spite of the fluctuating parameters there really is a playing field and scale for determining quality….Are we finally tired of perusing the dusty corners, the nihilistic slackers, the sordid deadenders…give me some shit…but not the squalid kind like Gunter Brus, more like the earthy, full of life kind, like…the Chris Ofili kind…you know where I’m going here, the Vitality…
Well, it really does matter what you hang your hat on and even if your hat is not a pipe, ‘c’eci n’est pas un pipe’…all art conundrums aside there is either a heartbeat or a lack of one and that is the heart of the matter…talking about our old friend ‘vitality’, the fact that there either is a heart beating or not…witness Anish Kapoor ‘s 2005 folly (as in architectural structure) for World of Interior’s magazine ‘projects’ in the snow. It doesn’t just evoke, it IS, it relays a Tantric fervor…his newest piece is a teardrop, the back of a whale, a vermilion tikka – packed snow covered in a thick, red powder skin, a dense opaque membrane…it melts, a pool of dye, a transient puja, celebrated then gone…his work carries all the power and might of Mohenjo Daro…it is infinite, a womb with the bouyancy of water, a mysterious blend of clean, coherent modernism combined with the deep, ancient proportions of Hindu iconography…Now, look at the Bean in Chicago…heavy – the surface curves like the slow movement of an anaconda – full and voluptuous but rigorous and devoted to the energy of solid weighted matter. Here is no rising Mozartian filigree, no emotion, sweet temperament or Baroque frenzy – instead – the skin is not about to burst but glides, dense, compacted, a powerful dose of the universe compacted then reflected with the contained energy of a meteor. Mined from a deep vein of potent, universal prajna/energy…they are both pieces, seeds incarnate, energy unsprouted, totally not inert but hovering constructs of deep, contained vitality.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Hard Wired/Hot Wired
Anish Kapoor’s Raw Voltage
Works on Paper 2007/Gladstone Gallery/NYC
Anish Kapoor’s ‘Works on Paper’ exhibition now at NYC’s Gladstone Gallery is a display of several similar and incandescent, deeply colored images…not your crayola box of primary colors, these are primal, sacred color…red, electric blue, black, purple, paste white…dense and reminiscent of Holi celebrations or Hindu puja. This is saturated color seen behind the closed eye, posited in the mind’s interior. The pieces are done in gouche which provides for a rich, powdery and sensuous depth of surface. Small but nevertheless potent the paintings create a tangible vortex and the way into a charged construct that knows no boundary. Each painting is a meditation of connection and nexus whether it be a sprouting, tuberous, vegetal form, luminescent egg, slippery knot of blood, or wired neuron.
Electric, charged…the paintings are hard wired, hot wired…ancient, cosmic force fields…rooted in earth or spinning in space…crackling raw voltage or heavy earth bound sprouting forms…
Anish Kapoor’s work is a feed on energy…potent, primal vitality at the heart of the world or the source of the universe…the nerve like tendrils reach and turn, grasp and flex, vibrate and rattle our retina. They mesmerize and expand vision by providing a sink hole for unrestrained consciousness…
FYI, the following is a previous article on Anish Kapoor…
Witness Anish Kapoor ‘s 2005 folly (as in architectural structure) for World of Interior’s magazine ‘projects’ in the snow. It doesn’t just evoke, it IS, it relays a Tantric fervor…his newest piece is a teardrop, the back of a whale, a vermilion tikka – packed snow covered in a thick, red powder skin, a dense opaque membrane…it melts, a pool of dye, a transient puja, celebrated then gone…his work carries all the power and might of Mohenjo Daro…it is infinite, a womb with the bouyancy of water, a mysterious blend of clean, coherent modernism combined with the deep, ancient proportions of Hindu iconography…Now, look at the Bean in Chicago…heavy – the surface curves like the slow movement of an anaconda – full and voluptuous but rigorous and devoted to the energy of solid weighted matter. Here is no rising Mozartian filigree, no emotion, sweet temperament or Baroque frenzy – instead – the skin is not about to burst but glides, dense, compacted, a powerful dose of the universe compacted then reflected with the contained energy of a meteor. Mined from a deep vein of potent, universal prajna/energy…they are both pieces, seeds incarnate, energy unsprouted, totally not inert but hovering constructs of deep, contained vitality.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Anish Kapoor’s Raw Voltage
Works on Paper 2007/Gladstone Gallery/NYC
Anish Kapoor’s ‘Works on Paper’ exhibition now at NYC’s Gladstone Gallery is a display of several similar and incandescent, deeply colored images…not your crayola box of primary colors, these are primal, sacred color…red, electric blue, black, purple, paste white…dense and reminiscent of Holi celebrations or Hindu puja. This is saturated color seen behind the closed eye, posited in the mind’s interior. The pieces are done in gouche which provides for a rich, powdery and sensuous depth of surface. Small but nevertheless potent the paintings create a tangible vortex and the way into a charged construct that knows no boundary. Each painting is a meditation of connection and nexus whether it be a sprouting, tuberous, vegetal form, luminescent egg, slippery knot of blood, or wired neuron.
Electric, charged…the paintings are hard wired, hot wired…ancient, cosmic force fields…rooted in earth or spinning in space…crackling raw voltage or heavy earth bound sprouting forms…
Anish Kapoor’s work is a feed on energy…potent, primal vitality at the heart of the world or the source of the universe…the nerve like tendrils reach and turn, grasp and flex, vibrate and rattle our retina. They mesmerize and expand vision by providing a sink hole for unrestrained consciousness…
FYI, the following is a previous article on Anish Kapoor…
Witness Anish Kapoor ‘s 2005 folly (as in architectural structure) for World of Interior’s magazine ‘projects’ in the snow. It doesn’t just evoke, it IS, it relays a Tantric fervor…his newest piece is a teardrop, the back of a whale, a vermilion tikka – packed snow covered in a thick, red powder skin, a dense opaque membrane…it melts, a pool of dye, a transient puja, celebrated then gone…his work carries all the power and might of Mohenjo Daro…it is infinite, a womb with the bouyancy of water, a mysterious blend of clean, coherent modernism combined with the deep, ancient proportions of Hindu iconography…Now, look at the Bean in Chicago…heavy – the surface curves like the slow movement of an anaconda – full and voluptuous but rigorous and devoted to the energy of solid weighted matter. Here is no rising Mozartian filigree, no emotion, sweet temperament or Baroque frenzy – instead – the skin is not about to burst but glides, dense, compacted, a powerful dose of the universe compacted then reflected with the contained energy of a meteor. Mined from a deep vein of potent, universal prajna/energy…they are both pieces, seeds incarnate, energy unsprouted, totally not inert but hovering constructs of deep, contained vitality.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Review of Huang Chih-Yang from New Chinese Art at the Asia Society
With a proliferation of blockbuster shows outside New York, ie. Van Gogh in D.C., Monet in Boston, Delacroix in Phildelphia and M. Cassat in Chicago and the majority of exhibitions in New York being video, performance, photography and installation I was recently jolted by the unique vision on display at the Asia Society Gallery of New Chinese Art. This exhibition brings to the stage a variety of imagery from divergent sources within Chinese culture both domestic and expatriate. The work that moved me out of my complacency was by the artist Huang Chih-Yang and is an exhibition unto itself of eight large hanging scrolls, contemporary visions of the figure painted in ink on paper. Huang’s work exists beyond the cultural boundaries of traditional brush and ink on scroll because of its bold scale and modern psychological edge but it also springs from this ancient continuum in a primal and very vital way, in the same way that the large portrait pieces done by Lucien Freud of Leigh Bowery draw on the tradition and historical anomaly of western easel painting. But first, the consideration of scale in contemporary art which in Huang’s work is totally appropriate and which also harkens back to ancient Chinese sources, ie. The caves at Dunhaung and Shaanxi. Huge scale itself should not be a ploy to mask deficiencies or even be a prerequisite for contemporary art but when combined with a mastery of all other components that pull together and complete a work of art, outsize scale can deliver an amazing punch. I’m thinking of Chuck Close’s portraits, his most recent being free and painterly work so alive and vibrant because he has finally used the paint in a sensuous and authoritative way. So scale can enhance or detract but when used successfully and succinctly as Huang does here one perceives and it resounds with a durable and deep resonance to both ancient and contemporary sources.
What so fine tunes Huang’s art is it’s build upon those very traditional sources. His brushstroke is a muscular rendering of volumn and form at once a visual abstract panorama of lush vibrant marksmanship and then in full focus the delineation of the figure with a complete psychological component. “Zoon”, the Chinese character that titles this series refers to craziness and reflects Huang’s concern with emotion, fear, taboos and fantasies. Unlike many of the new Chinese artists he has not adopted the language of minimalism but instead draws on native Taiwanese folk tradition and skews it with a momentum imbued with the modern elements of fragmentation and deliberate chaos that resists the authority of the newly industrialized Taiwan. These monster humans are not civilized people…as Huang says…”Man is such an animal. I am such an animal.” His work deals with the myriad elements of natural environment, traditional culture, urban modernization and unmasked human nature. His work creates a panorama of elemental human emotion and a physicality driven by a staccato industrial brushstroke and most importantly breaks with the conditional notion of a static “Chinese” art and instead creates a powerful new mix of cultural vision in sync with the larger world we now inhabit.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
With a proliferation of blockbuster shows outside New York, ie. Van Gogh in D.C., Monet in Boston, Delacroix in Phildelphia and M. Cassat in Chicago and the majority of exhibitions in New York being video, performance, photography and installation I was recently jolted by the unique vision on display at the Asia Society Gallery of New Chinese Art. This exhibition brings to the stage a variety of imagery from divergent sources within Chinese culture both domestic and expatriate. The work that moved me out of my complacency was by the artist Huang Chih-Yang and is an exhibition unto itself of eight large hanging scrolls, contemporary visions of the figure painted in ink on paper. Huang’s work exists beyond the cultural boundaries of traditional brush and ink on scroll because of its bold scale and modern psychological edge but it also springs from this ancient continuum in a primal and very vital way, in the same way that the large portrait pieces done by Lucien Freud of Leigh Bowery draw on the tradition and historical anomaly of western easel painting. But first, the consideration of scale in contemporary art which in Huang’s work is totally appropriate and which also harkens back to ancient Chinese sources, ie. The caves at Dunhaung and Shaanxi. Huge scale itself should not be a ploy to mask deficiencies or even be a prerequisite for contemporary art but when combined with a mastery of all other components that pull together and complete a work of art, outsize scale can deliver an amazing punch. I’m thinking of Chuck Close’s portraits, his most recent being free and painterly work so alive and vibrant because he has finally used the paint in a sensuous and authoritative way. So scale can enhance or detract but when used successfully and succinctly as Huang does here one perceives and it resounds with a durable and deep resonance to both ancient and contemporary sources.
What so fine tunes Huang’s art is it’s build upon those very traditional sources. His brushstroke is a muscular rendering of volumn and form at once a visual abstract panorama of lush vibrant marksmanship and then in full focus the delineation of the figure with a complete psychological component. “Zoon”, the Chinese character that titles this series refers to craziness and reflects Huang’s concern with emotion, fear, taboos and fantasies. Unlike many of the new Chinese artists he has not adopted the language of minimalism but instead draws on native Taiwanese folk tradition and skews it with a momentum imbued with the modern elements of fragmentation and deliberate chaos that resists the authority of the newly industrialized Taiwan. These monster humans are not civilized people…as Huang says…”Man is such an animal. I am such an animal.” His work deals with the myriad elements of natural environment, traditional culture, urban modernization and unmasked human nature. His work creates a panorama of elemental human emotion and a physicality driven by a staccato industrial brushstroke and most importantly breaks with the conditional notion of a static “Chinese” art and instead creates a powerful new mix of cultural vision in sync with the larger world we now inhabit.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
El Anatsui
No less than the great twentieth century innovator, Pablo Picasso exclaimed, “My greatest artistic revelation came about when I was suddenly struck by the sublime beauty of the sculpture done by the anonymous artists of Africa. In their passionate and rigorous logic, these works of sacred art are the most powerful and beautiful products of the human imagination.”
Well, African art is anonymous no longer and still breaking unprecedented ground. Almost a hundred years later the art world has finally come full circle, with the advent of a year long celebration in London of Africa 2005 and the multiple exhibitions of the recent work of Ghanian/Nigerian artist, El Anatsui. Featured along with several high profile contemporaries from the African continent, art that may once have been called ‘tribal/primitive’ has now given way to the future and inspired a new artistic and cultural, arena in the ‘transvangarde’. A professor of sculpture from the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, Anatsui both scholar and artist forged a prolific career from the early 1960’s with exhibitions around the globe working in clay, wood, metal and recycled objects. Using a chainsaw and pneumatic tools he carves wooden frieze like reliefs, creating a powerful, dynamic of ideographic, abstraction which are then charred or painted, infused with and accessing the complex history of colonialism in Africa.
Anatsui now steps up to the plate with a mesmerizing collection of work that breaks barriers and moves beyond indigenous tradition. With subtle improvisation, and his inspired handling of metal bottle tops, crushed flat, then tied with wire he weaves together metal ‘textiles’ like ‘Earth Cloth’, ‘Young Woman’s Cloth’, ‘Flag for a New World’ and ‘Peak Project’ to form monumental swaths of metallic, shimmering color and multi-dimensional construct. The visual field is awash in a gorgeous mosaic that at one and the same time creates a huge yet fragile splendor, a tender and barbaric vitality. Think of standing in awe before the mosaics of Ravenna for the first time without ‘reading’ the content. Ancient glamour is made new, while proportion and sensibility are recast to the present. His work is flush with the concept of ‘remix’, a transformation of recycled waste into a glittering celebration of a global, ritual identity outside the confines of indigenous, local connotation. The rigorous opulence of El Anatsui’s work awakens and charges the mind’s eye with an immediate, radical force reaching far beyond even the most powerful synthetic film/cinematic visual. The viewer is transported through a phantasmagoria of scale, color, surface, shine and movement that delivers on the scale of nature’s own radiant visual bounty. This is not art to find clever, to dissect or to bolster tired post-modern cliches but rather art that charges and creates a force field of universal allure. The frame has long since been dispensed with in western art and never so powerfully as these pieces show now.
The complex nature of ‘Signature’ revolves around the methodology and production of art…taking fallen timber, stacking it, painting it, placing it solemnly in a quiet forest to create a tableau of the simplest arrangement…culling abundance, marking it, coloring it…this is where the influence of art begins, as the viewer steps forward into the magic, the transformation…a deferral of meaning with only the pure desire to view and the pure felt vitality remaining.
Africa 2005 is a year long cultural celebration in London. El Anatsui’s work shown at Hayward Gallery, London as part of ‘Africa Remix’ show, October Gallery, London and ‘Man Cloth’ is at the British Museum, London.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
No less than the great twentieth century innovator, Pablo Picasso exclaimed, “My greatest artistic revelation came about when I was suddenly struck by the sublime beauty of the sculpture done by the anonymous artists of Africa. In their passionate and rigorous logic, these works of sacred art are the most powerful and beautiful products of the human imagination.”
Well, African art is anonymous no longer and still breaking unprecedented ground. Almost a hundred years later the art world has finally come full circle, with the advent of a year long celebration in London of Africa 2005 and the multiple exhibitions of the recent work of Ghanian/Nigerian artist, El Anatsui. Featured along with several high profile contemporaries from the African continent, art that may once have been called ‘tribal/primitive’ has now given way to the future and inspired a new artistic and cultural, arena in the ‘transvangarde’. A professor of sculpture from the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, Anatsui both scholar and artist forged a prolific career from the early 1960’s with exhibitions around the globe working in clay, wood, metal and recycled objects. Using a chainsaw and pneumatic tools he carves wooden frieze like reliefs, creating a powerful, dynamic of ideographic, abstraction which are then charred or painted, infused with and accessing the complex history of colonialism in Africa.
Anatsui now steps up to the plate with a mesmerizing collection of work that breaks barriers and moves beyond indigenous tradition. With subtle improvisation, and his inspired handling of metal bottle tops, crushed flat, then tied with wire he weaves together metal ‘textiles’ like ‘Earth Cloth’, ‘Young Woman’s Cloth’, ‘Flag for a New World’ and ‘Peak Project’ to form monumental swaths of metallic, shimmering color and multi-dimensional construct. The visual field is awash in a gorgeous mosaic that at one and the same time creates a huge yet fragile splendor, a tender and barbaric vitality. Think of standing in awe before the mosaics of Ravenna for the first time without ‘reading’ the content. Ancient glamour is made new, while proportion and sensibility are recast to the present. His work is flush with the concept of ‘remix’, a transformation of recycled waste into a glittering celebration of a global, ritual identity outside the confines of indigenous, local connotation. The rigorous opulence of El Anatsui’s work awakens and charges the mind’s eye with an immediate, radical force reaching far beyond even the most powerful synthetic film/cinematic visual. The viewer is transported through a phantasmagoria of scale, color, surface, shine and movement that delivers on the scale of nature’s own radiant visual bounty. This is not art to find clever, to dissect or to bolster tired post-modern cliches but rather art that charges and creates a force field of universal allure. The frame has long since been dispensed with in western art and never so powerfully as these pieces show now.
The complex nature of ‘Signature’ revolves around the methodology and production of art…taking fallen timber, stacking it, painting it, placing it solemnly in a quiet forest to create a tableau of the simplest arrangement…culling abundance, marking it, coloring it…this is where the influence of art begins, as the viewer steps forward into the magic, the transformation…a deferral of meaning with only the pure desire to view and the pure felt vitality remaining.
Africa 2005 is a year long cultural celebration in London. El Anatsui’s work shown at Hayward Gallery, London as part of ‘Africa Remix’ show, October Gallery, London and ‘Man Cloth’ is at the British Museum, London.
Stephanie Bell Behnke
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