The Bushwick Biennial for Art Notes

"Trailer Park" by Kim Holleman

The constant flowering of bohemia is not a construct of advertising, nor of the whims of a dozen infamous gallerists. It is the generational engine of youth culture, alive and well, striving at the border of the mainstream, throwing out its various statements while at the same time contributing to a community that has registered a similar creative echo for at least 25 years. Bushwick is the locus of new creative energies, the same ones that are active in many other parts of Brooklyn, especially its neighboring wards of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. This year saw the emergence of its first official celebration, The Bushwick Biennial, brainchild of NURTUREart gallery director Benjamin Evans, in collaboration with Austin Thomas of Pocket Utopia, Chris Harding of English Kills, and Jill McDermid of Grace Exhibition Space.

I first heard Ben utter these two words over a year ago, and since then he has worked hard to make it a reality. As the director of NURTUREart, he has seen first-hand what sort of influence the art community as a whole can exert when given proper focus within the scheme of the larger art world. Certainly the word ‘Williamsburg’ echoes out into the international art world, and so should its generative offspring. Just as Soho created the possibilities for Tribeca and Noho, Williamsburg has spread into the outlying areas of Greenpoint and Bushwick, and further, all along the corridors of the L train and the B61 Bus, and into the minds of New Yorkers, Americans, and people around the world.

Each of the three galleries I visited that weekend had a different focus of interest. The show Fortress to Solitude (an event that was actually part of the yearly organized Bushwick Open Studios, overlapping this year with the Biennial), curated in an independent studio space by Guillermo Creus and hosted by Brooklyn Fireproof landlord Burr Dodd, featured the work of some 22 artists, many of them working out the formal strategies of abstraction, some figurative, and some with text and a combination of elements. Paintings by Amanda Church, Peter Fox, Lisha Bai, and Anna Pedersen presented drippy phantasms that were either visceral, limpid, or gossamer. Other abstract works were more structurally based, combining radically different mediums such as oil and spray paint (Guillermo Creus, Baptiste Ibar), making naturalistic allusions (Diane Carr), and stretching into hard edge materialism (Tom Meacham, Gary Petersen). Another work by Peter Fox is a pale light blue canvas with two words painted in bold red letters, spelling out the expression ‘Idiot proof’, which is to say, anyone can get my art, and anyone could have made it. One very iconic portrait of President Obama by Tom Sanford is overlaid with the words What You Believe Is Already True emblazoned over a half quizzical facial expression of our fearless leader; is this just sloganeering, is the artist poking fun at authority, or is this just a painting about painting? Perhaps we will never know. The title of this exhibition, a play on words originally describing the re-birthed spiritual home of the comic book legend Superman, is a telling narrative about the nature of creativity and how it is specifically vested in areas such as Bushwick. The overwhelming presence of abstraction in the exhibition can be characterized not only as the aesthetic bent of its curator (a painter him self), but also as a statement on the manic focus of Bushwick artists, whose concern is with forms of expression, and though they are a fairly idealistic bunch, such values do not always lead them down the primrose path of ideology. They remain committed to the formalism which inspires them. Hung randomly with a lot of white space between them, we get the effect that spatial concerns still matter in the Bushwick of 2009 as they did in the Soho of 1969, and that giving artists room to think, and showing their work as existing within a systematic but disinterested locality is the best thing for them. Finally Utopic is not just a pun, it’s the last show in the space that was once the studio of its director, the conceptual artist Austin Thomas, and features work by all the artists she has championed since her project began only two years ago. It has always existed as a sort of playground for artistic intentions, not taking itself too seriously, looking at art as if it were a form of conversation rather than a political slogan or commercial advertisement. Molly Larkey, who is usually a sculptor, here presents gestural rather slapdash gouaches that intimate the beginnings of an idea that may later take physical form; Valerie Hegarty cracks the plaster of the wall before pasting a poster over the hole, that will ultimately rip the image along its ragged edge; Rico Gatson installs Systemic Risk Funky Revolutionthat is one part tautology and one part puzzle. The air overall is one of tentativeness, as if no one statement should predominate and none will last beyond the end of the space itself.

A strong tenor of idealism was evident in works at NURTUREart, curated by Benjamin Evans, though this motif was not always comprehensible in the same way; the works here were by and large non-abstract, or at least not within the limits of a formalist bent. His own curatorial statement states that “These fourteen artists in- volve both optimism and melancholy, and reflect the tensions between doomed worlds, better places and personal mythologies. Themes of transformation and strategies of transformative experience run through the work and link it to the neighborhood that is transforming all around (and partly because of) them. Mike Estabrook’s video loop The Road to 'Nam is both entertaining and pensive, as it combines images of brutality in war and the dour countenances of Kissinger and Nixon with a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby song "If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Of Baked A Cake." We recognize the images from the front page of The New York Times, of a US Okie aiming his gun at a Viet Cong, with politicians thrown in for good visual sense; but the whole arrangement falls apart with the song resounding. It’s so cheery and chummy that war can almost be seen as a big party in which we laugh until we have to cry. Audrey Russel made a special installation on the adjoining rooftop that created a visual and physical spectacle which gallery guests had to step around as they talked, drank, and shared their experiences of the past evening’s activities. Made from pink foam insulation, a large wooden pylon and Xmas lights, Beam Tower with Pink Grass waved around the roof like the froth of an ever renewing tide. There is something very energizing about always living on the edge, engaging with what seems newly relevant. The Bushwick phenomenon has us looking for the next aesthetic event around every corner.

Angie Arlene Smith | Shadows of the Heart

In the tradition of the artist there are many aspects which make up a picture, many procedures and specialties which combine to create that specific illusion of reality called artifice. Yet not every artist is called upon to master them all, not even to become fascinated with a few of them. Some take it upon themselves to discern the qualities which prove the importance of only one specialty. For Angie Arlene Smith that has been landscape, or rather the paradox of perspectival contingencies which we usually regard as the backdrop for dramatic action. Smith is fascinated with the pictorial qualities which construct a scene possessed of mystery, foreboding, and complexity even when there are no persons present.

But there are no simple pastoral scenes here, everything is angle and shadow. Sometimes one little element of the picture seems to be coming to life, as if a tree branch or an outcropping of rocks were so vividly drawn they were beginning to move of their own volition. At other times we are certain, given the angles of the scenes, that no one passive or uninteresting could possibly inhabit them. There must be a conflict unfolding in such a place as she draws for us.

In one image a flower or shell like structure sits at the edge of a cliff, looking as if it is about to give birth to a new creature. There is no movement, no narrator to set the scenario up for us. The “pod” seems to balance on the edge of a cliff or float down a stream that’s about to pour out over the edge into illicit depth. Will it open and reveal its secrets, will it be dashed on the rocks below, or will it somehow float onward, opening not for us but for others?

In another image a strange mawkish hut sits amidst cragged rocks, holes in its roof showing it to be empty, but who knows? We can’t see everything from where the artist has situated us. Everything in the image is hardness and sharpness and there is a breathless quality to the very air surrounding the physical elements presented here.

In Smith’s largest work, she depicts a scene that is so complex it is nearly a microcosm. We see what appears to be a pier, with columns standing in deep water and streetlights barely illuminating the walkway above. Curving steps lead up from the water’s edge to a jumble of paved paths, winding caves, and above them all, an aerie from which a stranger looks out—but not over us, rather into the pale distance, into further areas of mystery yet undiscovered. At the far left side of this scene, following the pier, is a sheer rock face broken only by a high door with what look like prison bars inside, and above a set of empty cages and still further up, two more openings with craggy orifices, the shadows of which resemble figures; and with steps that seemingly lead nowhere. Smith is a spinner of tales which have a mastery of dramaturgy at their core. Her images direct us to a place where knowledge is not as important as adventure; her shadows are the corridors of our own hearts.

Taney Roniger "Concatenations" at Slate Gallery

There is something very obstinate yet enduring in the work of Taney Roniger. Her recent exhibition “Stones and Ciphers” at Slate Gallery in Brooklyn brings together two bodies of work which share a similar aesthetic interest informed by scientific ideas. They manage a specific aspect of abstraction in which method is equal to madness. How else are we to perceive the finitude which characterizes this work, in which all color is limited to hues of black, white, gray, and sometimes sepia, as if the painting were no more than the printout of some military-industrial computer bank? Roniger doesn’t need words to transmit the values in her paintings. Perhaps because she wants to achieve the status of a document or an artifact--both products of excessive effort and detritus relevant to the passing of time.

We look into these images and we see both information and mystery. It makes perfect sense for an artist to be attracted to matters of abstract reality, yet the degree to which Roniger has extended this interest begs further analysis. Nature at this level offers an amazing clarity and symmetry that no other model can teach. The attraction of artists to elements of design is one aspect of this work. But Roniger is also fascinated by the appearance of scientific printouts, and on the algorithmic procedures which emerge from the systems used to measure random natural events. Despite their serial quality, their streamlined and machinelike structure, the fact that these images exist as the demonstrative subset for a sequence of otherwise unknowable events, they are especially admirable as a form of artistic expression.

Roniger gives her works oblique titles which resound with the respect she has for puzzles, whether logic or theory derived. One vertical work within The Cipher Series is titled Prisoner’s Dilemma and the reference is to a logic game in which two people, each of them accomplices in a crime, both tell exactly the same story, making both of them innocent and canceling out the notion that competition is the primary urge in normal social relations; that we have an instinctive need to protect ourselves. Perhaps Roniger is telling us that even at a molecular level, competition, i.e, the concept of kill or be killed, is not just the law of averages, but is the law in word and name. Matching system for system and obliqueness for obliqueness we cannot fail but we drawn into the web of aesthetic expectations that shrouds these works and keep us from being alienated by the streamlined and transparent quality they so easily evoke.

Of Roniger’s second body of work on view, The Stone Series, the best example was titled Embedded Form #1 which most resembles a hill, or even a mere stone, with its edge torn away to reveal a vein of some other ore, perhaps coal or gold, which reaches from one side to the other like the lines in a person’s hand, giving innate dimension to an otherwise consistent substrata of bubble forms that press together, creating a linkage of tangencies which seem to infer density and content. The less consistent vein interrupting them represents a void instead of an exception, a gesture of something flowing from one unknown origin into an uncertain future.

Each of these works combines structural with esthetic perspectives on a field of endeavor which is essentially abstract only because it exists below the level of an everyday visual commonplace. We cannot sense these images via sight, touch, or smell, and therefore we can only know them as textbook illustrations. What an artifact and a cipher both share is the quality of evidence, which adds to their beauty and also lends them a degree of authority that moves beyond cultural reference, manifesting equally as knowledge and inspiration.