Michael Zansky | Looking is Believing

Michael Zansky’s American Panopticon is an ongoing project, in which a series of installations investigate the relationship between karma and authority—that is to say, between personal and idiosyncratic fatalism, and institutional and societal directives. This project has been reinvented numerous times, at Gigantic Art Space in New York, The Arco Art Fair in Madrid, and The Edsvik Konsthalle in Stockholm. In each of instance Zansky has selected various themes and concepts from the main tautology behind Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon and arranged the various elements of his installation according to architectural and curatorial demands.

The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. The design consists of a circular structure with an "inspection house" at its centre, from which the managers or staff of the institution are able to watch the inmates, who are stationed around the perimeter. Bentham himself described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example. (Bentham, Jeremy. Panopticon (Preface). In Miran Bozovic (ed.), The Panopticon Writings, London: Verso, 1995, 29-95). Although the Panopticon prison design did not come to fruition during Bentham's time, it has been seen as an important development. It was invoked by Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) as metaphor for modern "disciplinary" societies and their pervasive inclination to observe and normalise. Foucault's argument is that discipline creates "docile bodies", ideal for the new economics, politics and warfare of the modern industrial age—bodies that function in factories, ordered military regiments, and school classrooms. But, to construct docile bodies the disciplinary institutions must be able to (a) constantly observe and record the bodies they control and (b) ensure the internalization of the disciplinary individuality within the bodies being controlled. That is, discipline must come about without excessive force through careful observation, and molding of the bodies into the correct form through this observation. This requires a particular form of institution, exemplified, Foucault argues, by Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. It allowed for constant observation characterized by an "unequal gaze"; the constant possibility of observation. Perhaps the most important feature of the panopticon was that it was specifically designed so that the prisoner could never be sure whether they were being observed at any moment. The unequal gaze caused the internalization of disciplinary individuality, and the docile body required of its inmates. This means one is less likely to break rules or laws if they believe they are being watched, even if they are not. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish_)

Yet how does this translate into an esthetic event? How do we manage to engage ourselves with the spectacle he provides if we feel that our every act is observed and judged? Doesn’t the act of looking at art predicated by a certain leisurely freedom? By enveloping us with phenomenological installations which manifest their ideological basis but remain putatively indifferent. Zansky’s American Panopticon is characterized by a passive yet loaded state of existence in which everything is in motion, intermittently illuminated, creating interdependent spectacles that draw our attention to a procession of scenes. The viewer inhales the air of mystery animated by a single object reflected in the convex surveillance mirrors, becoming party to aesthetic and symbolic power. One is guided not only into a moment of esthetic recognition but into a world-view.

Zansky gives us the canine resurrection; the second gallery becomes a Plato's Cave, where a projected shadow dog seizes the enormous space with a Lockean sense of property. Again, a lensed arrangement of a urethane dog, glass globe, surveillance mirrors, and carved wood elements provide the earthly elements. The globe, a reference perhaps to the Judgment of Paris, the mirror to Van Eyck's "Arnolfini Portrait," the wood a nod to The Crucifixion. A Bat-Signal searchlight traces out arcs on the far wall, referencing celebrity culture as well as a metaphysical search for enlightenment. The mirror, like our position when viewing "Las Meninas" allows us to see the actors in the scene, but not ourselves; the mirrors suggest temporal, earthly existence and Vanity. We are positioned so that we only see the impure, shadow version of the reincarnated dog, moving obliquely across the cavernous wall. This mise–en-scene suggests a primitive, or primal, version of what the Dominican Fra Michele da Carcano suggested was of essential importance to art with regard to our enlightenment. "On account of the ignorance of simple people, so that those who can't read…can yet learn…of our salvation," Carcano wrote in 1492, and "Images [are] introduced because many cannot retain in their memories what they hear, but they do remember if they see." The object of the dog, placed in illuminated isolation in the center of the room, is radically contrasted with its shadow, which is refracted and projected on the wall. From afar we see only a slim and penitent creature that exists to fulfill a specific bidding, whether as a beast of burden or as man’s best friend.

In Zansky’s drawings extraneous shadows are cut away to reveal the focus of the spotlight. These realistic renderings of the abstract space created with the elements of his installations are a further investigation of perspective; he allows the viewer to focus on concept by arresting the action. Authority controls, demands, or determines; while Karma broadly names the universal principle of cause and effect, action and reaction, that governs all life. In the case of Michael Zansky’s American Panopticon, these concepts are unified.

Zansky combines paradox and spectacle with an air toward transcendence: how is it that a person observing an event differs from someone observing another person at authoritarian remove? The difference is in the contrast between aesthetic perception and institutionalized surveillance. What is innately different is the dynamic character of spectacle: who is doing the looking, and how their attention is esthetically determined. Having contemplated a mystery of such implied magnitude we are forever conscious that looking, and not seeing, is believing.

Thomas Frontini | The New Horizon

If the need is pressing and the world is not forthcoming, then vision will dictate how the object of desire can be created (James Elkins, The Object Stares Back, pp 30-1).

A picture is not only a view onto the world, or onto someone’s imagination: it is a peculiar kind of object that sets us thinking about desire…. Looking immediately activates desire, possession, violence, displeasure, pain, force, ambition, power, obligation, gratitude, longing…there seems to be no end to what seeing is, to how it is tangled with living and acting (Ibid).

It’s long been said, and much to the detriment of true understanding, that artists live outside of society; what artist really desire is to understand society. Once they have expressed this understanding in their work, they can begin to make their place in it. The recent paintings of Thomas Frontini are proof of this. They present a version of the world that is Edenic, devoid of societal complication, yet metaphorically redolent. Each one is an allegory of the elements that construct artistic vision and its role in delegating levels of pictorial and social meaning.

When we look at a picture, we want to be convinced that it is saying something about the nature of human experience. How we define the scale of perspective, the scale of human drama, is by a comprehension of the degree of intimacy. In film we have the pull-back and the close-up, we have a certain degree of staging, of mis-en-scene. This translates easily into painting depending upon the size of the scene, its number of objects or persons, the complexity of its background, and the scale that it gives to the actions. In Frontini’s recent oeuvre, scale is everything. His stage is the world, but the world with everything slightly askew; or with vital parts missing; or his subject focused upon so intently that it excludes everyday contexts.

The term mis-en-scene means, literally, putting things in place, preparing the scene. Frontini presents us with scenes that might confuse us if we were to understand them fully. He gives us details in the order of reckoning: from the near to the far, and back again. And this is why the horizon functions so actively in his paintings. We look to the horizon to give meaning to our lives, but for just as much as is present in the distance, there are details within intimate space that cannot be ignored. Frontini seems to want us to enter a dialogue between the present and the future.

In many of Frontini’s paintings he presents us with a scene that pretends to be a narrative but is in fact a pastiche of complex allegories on themes such as existence, youthful vitality, nature, civilization, myth, and the passage of time. Spatial arrangements of recognizable objects, persons, places, as well as mysterious and oblique ones—symbolic embellishments if you will—present us with experiences that are only to be had in paintings.  What Frontini is in fact involved with is the act of cultural transference.

The agenda of the set-up that Frontini borrows from film can never operate exactly the same way since the assumed reality of a filmic scene, replete with perspectival gestures on the part of the cinematographer and our own aptitude for details, do not succeed when the scene is depicted in a painterly fashion. This is where reality and artifice diverge.

The scaling of experience possible in painting succeeds because the talent of the painter allows us to view everything at once, from the merest speck in the distance, to emergent details on the very edge of conscious understanding, and at every level of attention to noticeable events, objects, and persons right up to our very noses.  

If Frontini’s paintings are puzzles, then his titles are clues. Since most of his titles have symbolic portent and are immediately reinforced by parenthetical asides, we can only assume that he means not one thing by them, but many. Take for instance Last of Its Kind (Empire, Forgotten Monument), which includes a young woman holding a small white dog in her lap, by the sea-shore, with an ominous and vaguely anthropomorphic mountainous island behind her, mounted with a flag upon its crest; and beside her, a bowl with a large bird’s egg in it. Clearly our attention is at first drawn to the girl with the dog, since we are apt to assume that since she is the only person there that the painting must be about her. But she provides only a presence, a quality of humanness to an otherwise alien environment, and presence in Frontini‘s paintings is not always the same as agency. She may activate the painting but she does nothing else. Next we are drawn to the island behind her: it is unremarkable except that it resembles a monolithic head of some forgotten god. Like a shrine, it sits in self-evidence, undisturbed only by a portal that has been carved in the lower end of the rock face and a flag that has been planted at its crest. We can only assume that if it is not currently inhabited, that it was at one time, or its inhabitants have preferred to remain anonymous. The face of the god stares impassively out into some unknown distance, over all our heads. Nearer to us is the bowl with the egg, and of this we can say at least something. Maybe this is what he means by the main part of his title, the Last of Its Kind? Not even hatched and already it is on our minds. It will consume our curiosity and distract us from all other issues at hand. For potential life and the advent of birth, are much more joyous and filled with portent than facts we may already know or may never know. Prehistory and human agency are a glass half-empty and new life is a glass half-full.   

Frontini deals not only with myths connecting cultures, but more often than not he turns his pictorial imagination to scenes in which the main character is an artist, a collector, or some other role within the contemporary art world that resonates at a pre-cultural level. Who knows when the first artist emerged from his social peers, but Frontini hints at how the structures of social organization that created the need for them have always been around. Two of his current works, Documentation of Youth/Art Star and Painter At the Easel/Young Monster are good examples of this agenda.

The first concerns a young girl who is ready, as they say in Hollywood, for her close-up: the paparazzi shot that brings her face into the news. Except that Frontini’s parable is meant to fall flat. She stands in front of a large ornately gilded mirror and is aimed at by several old fashioned yet unmanned cameras. She is alone, even a birdcage that hangs above her is empty and desolate. In the distance behind her a parachute falls to earth, evidence that there are other, perhaps more important events at hand. But youth holds sway over our attention, and the fact that the girl is an ‘art star’ seems similarly devoid of specialness. The mirror behind her reflects only the cameras that, without direction, take no pictures. How do we know she is a star? Or an artist? We only know that she is young, and that youth is prize. Is the mirror behind her a stand-in for an easel, the picture that can never be painted because time is always ticking away? We are tempted to ditch this scene and find out where the parachutist has landed.  

In the second painting we have his Young Monster who is at the beach making a painting. We know nothing of his character or even his sex as he is covered from head to toe in fine brown fur. He stands far away from his easel, which is easily twice his height, the tool of an adult monster. His posture is one of intense focus and even agitation, and his presence there, as both an artist and a monster is in stark contrast to the summary background details of a sailboat and a lighthouse. In this painting Frontini pokes fun at the concept of the artist-maudit, or madman; perhaps there is a pun in the word monster, referring to the ideal of artistic mastery. One can never be more masterly, only more monsterly. The better monster is a better artist, always at odds with his surroundings, but also growing closer to his craft and its results.  

A third painting explores the essential role of art to inspire connoisseurs who are attracted to art but whose instinct for it alone cannot make them artists. Dream of the Great Collector enacts a scene in which an older man sits to one side and observes as a work of art, in this case a sculpture that we would call a relic, releases a spirit into the air, who was perhaps trapped inside of it. He is not surprised and only seems to be blithely pleased, either because his hopes have been realized, or because he did not suspect but knew of this event before it happened. What he is witnessing may be the emergence of a muse, or the essence of artistic vision itself in disembodied form. This intimate event is powerful because it is limited to his experience, and through Frontini’s imagination, to our attention as well. As an event in history it is not verifiable, but it remains true.   

Frontini’s desire to bring philosophical importance back to the role of the painter has led him in divergent directions which share a symbolic unity: animals or birds as familiars and spirits, and architectural structures of a symbolic character, real or imagined. Several recent paintings take birds as their central figure, but really the bird is meant to distract us from other elements of the composition that become clearer once we look past it. In both For Him Monuments Will Be Built/ Great Balladeer and Red Parrot with Hermit/ Silent Landscape there is the foregrounding of the bird, made epically larger by its proximity to the viewer, and narrative details that inhabit the scene which are made more miniscule by contrast. The great balladeer in the first work is in fact a tiny man who stands before a real white cockatoo over a Palladian garden, singing to him. We can hardly see him he is so small, and perhaps his what Frontini wants us to think, that his acts of artifice are less important than the animal before him, who is muse, companion, and spirit all rolled into one, and connects us more immediately to the natural world where myths and stories begin. In the second painting the bird is again a more imposing figure than the man who stands behind him, involved in a series of prayers or exercises, while a rural background verging on being a desolate wasteland, imposes a moodiness on all but the bird himself, whose plumage and jaunty expression are enough to give the painting life.

Likewise, Frontini is attracted to forms of symbolic architecture, which imply a strong regard for historical accomplishments, and alternately the imposition of dead values. Eternal Temple (Before the New Empire) and Orange Temple both present us with parables, one of glory and the other of waste. In the first work, two mermaids hold strings to support a temple structure, with ornate walls and single round window, floating amid a swirl of water vapors upon the very surf itself, while a vast and current empire spreads off in the distance shrouded by a veil of red dust. Of course, they cannot be holding up a building, this is only a vision offered up to the initiated, a last glimpse of lost glory that is waiting for us, like Atlantis or Avalon, in a separate dimension. The second work is a more direct image of a building that is minimal to the point of spiritual impoverishment. Standing alone except for two bedraggled trees, fashioned from simple bricks, with none of the ritualized design characteristic of most temples, it is a sacred structure in name only: the name we give to it. Temples are the historical precursors to modern-day churches, and what they represent, more than which deity they were built for, is the moment when man first moved his acts of worship inside a structure he made himself, separating himself simultaneously from nature and from the values of other men. It is at this point that belief became scripture, when an interior reality made art necessary.

Frontini fulfills the promise of the artist in his new work: to address the big issues, ones older and long-unanswered, that are left to him. He takes us into scenes where every detail focuses on the character of meaning, in which the very landscape is used to imply the variety of symbolism available to us. His horizon frames the immediacy of experience, bringing us into contact with objects as well as ideas, and making every destination, many of them within us, a line to be crossed for no other reason than we know it is there.

Roya Farassat | The Mirror Has Two Faces

The paintings that fill Roya Farassat’s solo exhibition “A Mirror with Two Faces” present a variety of symbolic portraits that reflect the repressive social conditions in her homeland of Iran and the psychological repercussions that have resulted from them. What begins as a form of social critique gives way to a pantheon of ciphers and phantoms that are iconic and pathetic, expressive and opaque. We can view them alternately as a reflection of ourselves, or of a world in which we do not belong.

Though they at first seem to resemble one another, subtle differences emerge from these images, which in their degree of symbolism are similar to ghost portraits popular during the Victorian era, or effigies constructed to perform rituals of vengeance. They are small in scale, creating an intimate viewing experience, like looking at family photographs. In truth, we are observing one large aspect of the psychological family of man, in which the various states of emotional existence are broadly manifested. They can be said to separate into certain classifications: a demonized woman in a veil, gesturing and peering down a street; a manifest embodiment of self-consciousness marred to paranoia, symbolized by a body with no head but only one large eye, like the searchlight atop a lighthouse, blankly surveying everything within its optical territory; and characters that resemble effigies or totems, creatures of darkness who emerge out of the dark recesses a primordial past, to take on the fears Farassat depicts; which in being hers, are ours as well. Who has not seen a creature in their dreams, a demon at the gate, or under a bridge, exacting a psychic price for the rigor of wisdom?

Farassat’s exhibition is a hall of mirrors that reflects what is inside each of us. They are a pantheon of gods and demons, but they are also pieces of humanity, each one a minute reflection of where a repressed society, constantly imposing a status quo value system while denying each of its members the freedom to express themselves idiosyncratically as members of a race, a nation, a community, and as individuals. The loss of the chance for progressive socialization within the community and individuation within the self. Of course, these are modern ideas which a democratic society takes easily for granted.  Given that Farassat’s background denied her access to modernity, it makes perfect sense that her images would express a grotesque sensibility. Surrounded by a veiled populace, wondering at their motives and their possible actions, Farassat has been prompted to symbolize this state of emotional siege rather merely describe it. Her work allows us to understand what it means to be blindly accused and confront the appearance of our accusers, seeing them while at the same time being seen.