Faux / Real
ln today's world, the experience of artificial mediums replacing their natural counterparts, and fictional characters replacing real ones, is more and more prevalent. These developments can be observed in the most extreme forms in contemporary Japan. Artificial seasides under glass domes simulate waves, sunshine and sand. Children who have never seen actual beaches play in these artificial resorts and enjoy them as if they were the "real thing". Businessmen play golf in artificial golf ranges set up in high nice buildings. In school, children learn how to read and write about characters from manga books, which are the much more common and widely read counterpart in Japan to Western comic books. Even the Bible is taught through manga characters.
One might be led to think that in the not so distant future only copies of real or natural elements, and fake instead of authentic environments, might take over. The world will be full of man made gardens, mountains and forests. To experience the sight of the Pyramids, the Eiffel tower or the Piazza San Marco of Venice, one could simply travel to Las Vegas and see them all there in one place. Short of moving Mount Fuji or Mont Blanc, this fantasy oasis in the Nevada desert can boast of being home to copies of almost all of the world's most famous tourist sites, from the Taj Mahal to the Statue of Liberty.
Bridget Smith for many years now has been fascinated with locations around the world that simulate and recreate far away locations, such as the Pyramids site in Las Vegas with its life size copy of the Sphynx guarding the enterance. In an earlier picture called Luxor, taken by the artist from a high angle with the airplane strip in the desert visible right below, one is fooled into believing that this is actually the real Sphynx with the Egyptian desert behind. Smith's photo-graph in Faux/Real, titled Castle, shows a site in Disneyland resembling a medieval castle in Europe while recalling a cardboard copy trying hard to be authentic.
On a similar visual note, Timothy Hutchings's DVD The Arsenal at Danzig and Other Views depicts remarkable medieval to 18th century buildings. At first glance, they appear part of a tourist film of 1930's Eastern Europe, featuring an unremarkable figure who walks among buildings and occasionally waves to the camera. In fact, the buildings are all landmarks that were destroyed in the world wars, and the animated sequences are based on vintage photographs. The man in period dress is the artist, who has inserted himself into these scenes like a traveler. In one view, a pedestrian who was in the original photograph has been brought to life. Combining video and digital animation, Hutchings has reanimated these buildings while allowing small errors of motion to remain a clue for the viewer that the apparent charm of these lost buildings is not exactly what it seems. This nostalgic and romantic image as fata morgana recalls the novel One Thousand Years of Solitude by the magic realist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Fictional characters replace actual ones in a phantasmagorical tale that leads us into believing in a fable made out of allegedly real stories and characters.
Recalling that leap into the unknown represented by Alice's tumble down the rabbit hole is Deborah Mesa-Pelly's photographic work. In settings that are comfortable and safe - the ur-suburbia of 1960s sci-fi movies - Mesa-Pelly imagines a crack in the world, a void into which her heroines can escape to explore a new, even dangerous, life. In Coop, a chicken coop seems to be a hiding place for an adolescent as well as a door to another hidden place, the lighting on the "chicken coop" seems to be otherwordly, illuminating the entrance like a stage, an opening to an adventure. Mesa-Pelly talks about her "protagonists" and their "tasks" as if they were characters in some private mythology. Yet the artist says of the girls in the photos that "keeping them rooted in some kind of reality is very important."
Linking reality to mythology, entwining fantasy with unseen reality, is Mark Wallinger's Ghost, a transfiguration of George Stubbs's famous magical painting Whistlejacket. The animal in black-and-white reverse, looking like an X-ray or a phantasm, has a horn added by the artist, as if discovering the mythological beast within the horse, as well as an ancient symbol of Christ. In this simple process, so perfectly transparent, the invisible spirit of Whistlejacket is thus "revealed" to be that of a unicorn (The Observer Review, Nov. 2001, Laura Cunning).
Transparency is crucial to Wallinger's art. There is no sense of concealed illusion - his methods are always made fully apparent. His rendition of Stubbs's painting of a dark brown stallion against a pale blank background is a photo in black and white and in negative. The image might make you think of looking at Old Master paintings with a black light, or spirit photography picking up auras and apparitions.
This play with borderline cases, where belief and disbelief can both be suspended, is a concept continued in Gary Hill's Goats and Sheep. This black-and-white DVD video depicts in sign language a text relating to a passage of Mathew's Gospel in the Bible. You see the artist's white hands move against a black background forming signs and hear his voice as he reads a text about the left hand and the right hand (possibly referring to the left side and the right side of the brain) in a surreal and symbolic way, repeating passages, playing with words, reciting a poem without a beginning or an end. The video has something otherworldly about it: the moving hands are hypnotic, the voice sounds like a monotonous repeated prayer resembling a strange mixture of Buddhist chanting and a Gertrude Stein poetry reading. The meaning of it all is left to the viewer's interpretation as the text is comprehensible but the sequences aligned in a totally abstract way:
And if
The right mind
Did not know
What the left hand brings forth
And back to
Doubling its reflection
Of differences
And if left
In a symmetry
And if left
In a syrmietry
And if left
Did not know
fhe left hand
Cannot know
fhe right hand
And back and forth
Doubling its reflection
Of differences...
By taking dust from minimalist sculpture in the Whitney Museum and manipulating it into sculptural forms, Vik Muniz draws ironic parallels with the work of Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Donald Judd and Carl Andre, among others. He transforms his subjects by rendering them ethereal, then photographs them to create an even greater remove from the original, thus sculptures conceived to be radically nonexpressive achieve a poetic state. Muniz's images, which reproduce not reality but a reproduction of reality, are so many steps removed from actuality that the very definition of documentation is nullified (see Joyce Korotkin, NYArts, April 2001). Muniz is a master in generating illusions by using ephemeral material that can be "held" only by camera -as we see in his pictures of cartoon cloud formations drawn by skywriters over Manhattan, or chocolate syrup portraits of Jackson Pollock and Joseph Beuys. He might well be regarded as a contemporary magic realist for his lush understanding of the ways in which the political, personal, and spiritual realms twine and untwine, creating a world full of unexpected imaginings. A kind of trompe l'oeil at first glance, Yun-Fei Ji's watercolor, ink and pigment drawings on paper look like traditional Ming Dynasty landscape painting exuding consummate skill and a lush, decorative beauty. At second glance, strange creatures (half human and half animal), warring insects, turned-over cars, army tanks, and political figures appear among serene-looking valleys and mountains, a whole Hieronymus Bosch world hidden away, the drawing Rebellion of the Singing Ladies, one of the most recent works of Yun-Fei Ji, is like a glimpse into the Forbidden City. Are these ladies looking like butterflies or rare insects, in a setting that associates various flora with a repertoire of virtue and vice, planning a rebellion or just wandering around a paradisiac garden? In The Forbidden City Ghosts in this exhibition Madame Mao turns up as a naked ghost (nudity making her "more human") and chairman Mao is surrounded in a pleasure garden by young girls. In this particular work a figure with a fish head emerges next to Lin Beel, who plotted to kill the chairman and in the process got killed himself. In Chinese culture a fish head represents good luck and fortune, which in this case is used in opposite, twisting and undermining traditional symbols, the aesthetic and cultural juxtaposition never sinks to the level of the one liner; the subversion, say, of the attempt to lose oneself in a beautifully rendered hillside (see Lytle Shaw, Time Out, June 2001).
A fabulist and definitely one of today's "magic realists," the Australian artist Rosemary Laing in her new body of work Groundspeed is primarily preoccupied with the way we slowly but steadily replace what we know to be nature with a new kind of artificial nature. What was phantasm in fairy tales, where a "magic carpet" carries us to faraway mythical places, becomes 'reality' in an accelerated fugue of Nature/Culture traveling along the interface of nature and technology. Laing places Feltex carpets in different locations, like Red Piazza in a 'ferny dell' at the George Boyd Lookout and Rose Petal in what remains of the big timber country near Morton National Park (all locations south of Sidney).To see the carpets out in the austerely lyrical locations of the Australian countryside is a brain melt. The carpet designs, drawn from popular fabric pattern evoke suburban parlours or ladies' bedrooms. Laid down in the forest according to the artist's specifications by specialists, these carpets build a shimmering synthetic meadow in the depths of laquered rocks and trees, or an inhuman lightless forest, exposing what Rosemary Laing calls 'our fraught sense of belonging' (George Alexander's catalogue essay for Groundspeed). And we are meant to belong, in a primary way to the physical world and interrelations that make up ecology (from oikos - household, or habitat) of which we are a part.
In his latest video Amsterdam, Ömer Ali Kazma uses computer technology to "change" or "idealize" reality by, for example, combining the soft and fragile elements with the hard-edged and precise digital medium. The artist is searching for a new aesthetic that does not discriminate between the real moment and the modified one, and his process itself reflects this thematic duality. He feels a close connection between his editing process and the ancient crafts of fabric and carpet weaving. The video which consists of 48 split screens, uses different audio and visual patterns to explore and expand this connection by including time as an integral element of the work.
Taken together, the artists in Faux/Real present a melding of fact and fantasy, of naturalness and artifice so complete as to defy differentiation. Their works thus offer a wry confirmation of theorist Jean Baudrillard's belief that we live today, for better or for worse, in an age of the simulacrum-where the imitation is often more familiar (and more desired) than the real.
Elga Wimmer
One might be led to think that in the not so distant future only copies of real or natural elements, and fake instead of authentic environments, might take over. The world will be full of man made gardens, mountains and forests. To experience the sight of the Pyramids, the Eiffel tower or the Piazza San Marco of Venice, one could simply travel to Las Vegas and see them all there in one place. Short of moving Mount Fuji or Mont Blanc, this fantasy oasis in the Nevada desert can boast of being home to copies of almost all of the world's most famous tourist sites, from the Taj Mahal to the Statue of Liberty.
Bridget Smith for many years now has been fascinated with locations around the world that simulate and recreate far away locations, such as the Pyramids site in Las Vegas with its life size copy of the Sphynx guarding the enterance. In an earlier picture called Luxor, taken by the artist from a high angle with the airplane strip in the desert visible right below, one is fooled into believing that this is actually the real Sphynx with the Egyptian desert behind. Smith's photo-graph in Faux/Real, titled Castle, shows a site in Disneyland resembling a medieval castle in Europe while recalling a cardboard copy trying hard to be authentic.
On a similar visual note, Timothy Hutchings's DVD The Arsenal at Danzig and Other Views depicts remarkable medieval to 18th century buildings. At first glance, they appear part of a tourist film of 1930's Eastern Europe, featuring an unremarkable figure who walks among buildings and occasionally waves to the camera. In fact, the buildings are all landmarks that were destroyed in the world wars, and the animated sequences are based on vintage photographs. The man in period dress is the artist, who has inserted himself into these scenes like a traveler. In one view, a pedestrian who was in the original photograph has been brought to life. Combining video and digital animation, Hutchings has reanimated these buildings while allowing small errors of motion to remain a clue for the viewer that the apparent charm of these lost buildings is not exactly what it seems. This nostalgic and romantic image as fata morgana recalls the novel One Thousand Years of Solitude by the magic realist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Fictional characters replace actual ones in a phantasmagorical tale that leads us into believing in a fable made out of allegedly real stories and characters.
Recalling that leap into the unknown represented by Alice's tumble down the rabbit hole is Deborah Mesa-Pelly's photographic work. In settings that are comfortable and safe - the ur-suburbia of 1960s sci-fi movies - Mesa-Pelly imagines a crack in the world, a void into which her heroines can escape to explore a new, even dangerous, life. In Coop, a chicken coop seems to be a hiding place for an adolescent as well as a door to another hidden place, the lighting on the "chicken coop" seems to be otherwordly, illuminating the entrance like a stage, an opening to an adventure. Mesa-Pelly talks about her "protagonists" and their "tasks" as if they were characters in some private mythology. Yet the artist says of the girls in the photos that "keeping them rooted in some kind of reality is very important."
Linking reality to mythology, entwining fantasy with unseen reality, is Mark Wallinger's Ghost, a transfiguration of George Stubbs's famous magical painting Whistlejacket. The animal in black-and-white reverse, looking like an X-ray or a phantasm, has a horn added by the artist, as if discovering the mythological beast within the horse, as well as an ancient symbol of Christ. In this simple process, so perfectly transparent, the invisible spirit of Whistlejacket is thus "revealed" to be that of a unicorn (The Observer Review, Nov. 2001, Laura Cunning).
Transparency is crucial to Wallinger's art. There is no sense of concealed illusion - his methods are always made fully apparent. His rendition of Stubbs's painting of a dark brown stallion against a pale blank background is a photo in black and white and in negative. The image might make you think of looking at Old Master paintings with a black light, or spirit photography picking up auras and apparitions.
This play with borderline cases, where belief and disbelief can both be suspended, is a concept continued in Gary Hill's Goats and Sheep. This black-and-white DVD video depicts in sign language a text relating to a passage of Mathew's Gospel in the Bible. You see the artist's white hands move against a black background forming signs and hear his voice as he reads a text about the left hand and the right hand (possibly referring to the left side and the right side of the brain) in a surreal and symbolic way, repeating passages, playing with words, reciting a poem without a beginning or an end. The video has something otherworldly about it: the moving hands are hypnotic, the voice sounds like a monotonous repeated prayer resembling a strange mixture of Buddhist chanting and a Gertrude Stein poetry reading. The meaning of it all is left to the viewer's interpretation as the text is comprehensible but the sequences aligned in a totally abstract way:
And if
The right mind
Did not know
What the left hand brings forth
And back to
Doubling its reflection
Of differences
And if left
In a symmetry
And if left
In a syrmietry
And if left
Did not know
fhe left hand
Cannot know
fhe right hand
And back and forth
Doubling its reflection
Of differences...
By taking dust from minimalist sculpture in the Whitney Museum and manipulating it into sculptural forms, Vik Muniz draws ironic parallels with the work of Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Donald Judd and Carl Andre, among others. He transforms his subjects by rendering them ethereal, then photographs them to create an even greater remove from the original, thus sculptures conceived to be radically nonexpressive achieve a poetic state. Muniz's images, which reproduce not reality but a reproduction of reality, are so many steps removed from actuality that the very definition of documentation is nullified (see Joyce Korotkin, NYArts, April 2001). Muniz is a master in generating illusions by using ephemeral material that can be "held" only by camera -as we see in his pictures of cartoon cloud formations drawn by skywriters over Manhattan, or chocolate syrup portraits of Jackson Pollock and Joseph Beuys. He might well be regarded as a contemporary magic realist for his lush understanding of the ways in which the political, personal, and spiritual realms twine and untwine, creating a world full of unexpected imaginings. A kind of trompe l'oeil at first glance, Yun-Fei Ji's watercolor, ink and pigment drawings on paper look like traditional Ming Dynasty landscape painting exuding consummate skill and a lush, decorative beauty. At second glance, strange creatures (half human and half animal), warring insects, turned-over cars, army tanks, and political figures appear among serene-looking valleys and mountains, a whole Hieronymus Bosch world hidden away, the drawing Rebellion of the Singing Ladies, one of the most recent works of Yun-Fei Ji, is like a glimpse into the Forbidden City. Are these ladies looking like butterflies or rare insects, in a setting that associates various flora with a repertoire of virtue and vice, planning a rebellion or just wandering around a paradisiac garden? In The Forbidden City Ghosts in this exhibition Madame Mao turns up as a naked ghost (nudity making her "more human") and chairman Mao is surrounded in a pleasure garden by young girls. In this particular work a figure with a fish head emerges next to Lin Beel, who plotted to kill the chairman and in the process got killed himself. In Chinese culture a fish head represents good luck and fortune, which in this case is used in opposite, twisting and undermining traditional symbols, the aesthetic and cultural juxtaposition never sinks to the level of the one liner; the subversion, say, of the attempt to lose oneself in a beautifully rendered hillside (see Lytle Shaw, Time Out, June 2001).
A fabulist and definitely one of today's "magic realists," the Australian artist Rosemary Laing in her new body of work Groundspeed is primarily preoccupied with the way we slowly but steadily replace what we know to be nature with a new kind of artificial nature. What was phantasm in fairy tales, where a "magic carpet" carries us to faraway mythical places, becomes 'reality' in an accelerated fugue of Nature/Culture traveling along the interface of nature and technology. Laing places Feltex carpets in different locations, like Red Piazza in a 'ferny dell' at the George Boyd Lookout and Rose Petal in what remains of the big timber country near Morton National Park (all locations south of Sidney).To see the carpets out in the austerely lyrical locations of the Australian countryside is a brain melt. The carpet designs, drawn from popular fabric pattern evoke suburban parlours or ladies' bedrooms. Laid down in the forest according to the artist's specifications by specialists, these carpets build a shimmering synthetic meadow in the depths of laquered rocks and trees, or an inhuman lightless forest, exposing what Rosemary Laing calls 'our fraught sense of belonging' (George Alexander's catalogue essay for Groundspeed). And we are meant to belong, in a primary way to the physical world and interrelations that make up ecology (from oikos - household, or habitat) of which we are a part.
In his latest video Amsterdam, Ömer Ali Kazma uses computer technology to "change" or "idealize" reality by, for example, combining the soft and fragile elements with the hard-edged and precise digital medium. The artist is searching for a new aesthetic that does not discriminate between the real moment and the modified one, and his process itself reflects this thematic duality. He feels a close connection between his editing process and the ancient crafts of fabric and carpet weaving. The video which consists of 48 split screens, uses different audio and visual patterns to explore and expand this connection by including time as an integral element of the work.
Taken together, the artists in Faux/Real present a melding of fact and fantasy, of naturalness and artifice so complete as to defy differentiation. Their works thus offer a wry confirmation of theorist Jean Baudrillard's belief that we live today, for better or for worse, in an age of the simulacrum-where the imitation is often more familiar (and more desired) than the real.
Elga Wimmer
