A Forest II
November 3-December 31, 2006
Curated by Jocelyn Adele González Junco and Gamaliel R. Herrera.
Abel Auer, Ulla von Brandenburg, Matias Faldbakken, Gabríela Fridriksdóttir, Oliver Lutz, Guadalupe Ruiz Cifuentes Rihs, Aaron Spangler, Luis Vidal, Cang Xin.
‘A Forest II’ was the at large exhibition which began with a selection presented at Filter/Projektraum für internationale zeitgenössische Kunst in Hamburg on August-September 2006.
The idea for this exhibition arouse from our observations during the last couple of years. In the hyper-urbanized cultures of today, themes of nature - and in particular that of ‘the forest’ - have been coming to the foreground of artistic positions in recent years. Fictional or realistic, figurative or abstract, crude or decorative, formal or conceptual, recombinatory approaches to the subject matter of the forest have been surfacing at a quiet but solid pace. We would like to consider that perhaps a tendency has developed. Borrowing the title from a song released by The Cure in 1980, this show is our modest attempt to recreate a contemporary forest aura.
The forest develops as an ecology of fragments, of memories, of elements that question or modify our mass-produced reality. The participant artists invite us to rediscover unmemorable times, going deeper into the collective psyche of our de-naturalized societies, or into their own psyche, in search of -or against- a legendary, shamanic or mythical narrative.
Space Other acknowledges Tommaso Corvi-Mora, Kerstin Niemann, The Saatchi GalleryLondon, Galerie Spielhaus Morrison Berlin, and Standard (Olslo) for their support for this exhibition.
A Forest (Romanticism or a return of the sublime)
‘A Forest, Part II’ is at large the exhibition that began with a selection presented at Filter / Projektraum für internationale zeitgenössische Kunst in Hamburg on September 2006. The idea for this exhibition arouse from our observations during the last couple of years. In the hyper-urbanized societies of today, concerns for nature seem to have been coming to the foreground of cultural activity. We would like to point out that perhaps, within the broad category of themes of nature, the forest is a recurring motif found in many contemporary artistic positions. Fictional or realistic, figurative or abstract, crude or decorative, formal or conceptual, re-combinatory approaches to the subject matter of the forest have been surfacing at a quiet but solid pace. Borrowing the title from a song released by The Cure in 1980, this show is by no means a comprehensive survey of the multiplicity of variants relating to the forest or themes of nature, but our modest attempt to recreate a contemporary forest aura, in an effort to consider identifying a few of the conflicts that are brought on by this metaphor. What propels the contemporary young artist into such archaic onomatopoeic (and arguably anachronistic) quest for the natural?
The forest may appear as an imaginary space associated with dreams or fantasy. This imaginary often alludes or plays with notions related to Romanticism. Idiosyncrasies are developed into systems through strategies resorting to juxtaposition, ancestry, and extreme sentimentality, ensuing irony and the kitsch.
The paintings of Abel Auer (bo. Munich, 1974) reveal a melancholy for a space abiding to psychological regression or primordial feelings, manifesting an urge for freedom, rebelliousness, irrationality, spontaneity, and primitivism. The often mountainous landscapes of Abel Auer are said to “rise out of the metropolis” and from “19th century landscape painting, the landscape painting of the artist’s grandfather and Yugoslavian ancestors” (Source: Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Berlin, 2005). A preoccupation with adolescent sensibility, a mysterious spirituality , and a nostalgia for a folksy timeless memory characterize the works of Abel Auer, who plunges into a kaleidoscope of funky colors with an abbreviated aggressiveness and humbling sincerity that derails claims of authenticity.
Abel Auer strolls a traditional road between the German movements of Expressionism and Romanticism, jumping to the plurality of present times. Between the unstrained, frenzied palette of shrilling colors and the frenetic, disorienting composition of juxtaposed idyllic landscapes, he seems a naïve standpoint with a tendency towards the hermetic and folkloric aesthetics. In The Hedgehog (2006), mad but rather playful and vivid childish stories are secretly woven through a myriad of vertical and diagonal lines. Desert plants coexist with for the most part leafless trees in a forest of hidden creatures and invisible castles. The moon peeks out watching over a heavy nightfall. In the background, a dormant city lurks.
“Il a rendu à mes déserts quelque chose de leur beauté heureuse, et du romantisme de leurs sites alpestres […]”
(É. de Senancour, Oberman, LXXXVII, 1804).
For some artists the forest is raw and untamed heartland, developing from memories of elements that question or modify our mass-produced reality. In the works of Oliver Lutz (bo. Maine, 1973), “Romanticism is conflated with fantasies of control, power and collapse. In the mental-model of the artist, the notion of will is closely intertwined with the landscape of the Alpine Mountain and particularly with its peak.” There is a Romantic inversion of hierarchy because of an apparent dominant interest in nature in terms of subjectivity/perception, and objectivity/scientific exploration on the other hand. There is an inversion of institutional artistic value from the textual to the aesthetic. Presented is a commission work where the mythological orientations related to the alpine heights persist. A particular arrangement of the works is necessary in order that the overall viewer experience is on target. As Lutz himself states, this work “emphasizes the surveillance aesthetic, strangeness, and shift in information between real and mediated images”. “As a philosophical trope, will is constantly torn into the political instrumentations” of –ism agendas. Nothing seems to fail like will or success! The snow covered mountain is offered as a fantasy only to be obscured by a forest or tangle of convoluted gesture lines in frenzy, affording “some slippage towards the similarly romantic desires for collapse” - to the point of throwing the metaphorical baby out with the bathwater. (Source: Oliver Lutz, 2006).
“If we could not forget…” (Jorge Luis Borges)
Ulla von Brandenburg works with multiple media such as drawing, video, film, installation and performance. Von Brandenburg’s works excite wonder, curiosity, or surprise. Her delicate drawings and cut-outs reveal a special ambivalence or state of fluctuation between what is resolutely clear and what baffles efforts to comprehend or identify. Familiar or historic motifs are stirred by or attracted to the inexplicable and paranormal by what appears to be an innocuous exercise through transparency.
The illusory memory of an image is captured and interpreted. In this process that involves choosing, recalling, capturing, translating, the building blocks of memory are deconstructed and stripped to bare essentials. Works that make us return from chaos (Appolinaire) by delicately examining the language of memory and creating language. What seems to be a process related to basic illustration becomes a complex artifice that absorbs, modifies and filters codices, often attempting to perform yet another magical operation: deceleration, a pause.
Von Brandenburg’s works manifest a conscious attempt at probing the unnatural post-industrial society through the deployment of terse, young and apparently rigid operations that enable the viewer to fall into the trance of contemplation. The sublime in this case has to do with an acknowledgement of the aesthetics of personal experience, which is at odds with preconceptions of how that experience should be interpreted, described or expressed.
Today, even the most natural is inescapably unnatural. The forest is created by mankind, because it is allowed a marginal existence or is recreated, replanted. Man again and again strives to triumph against nature, however, nature is dependent upon man.
Aaron Spangler’s (bo. Minnesota, 1973) bas-relief titled The Hideaway (2005), a loan from The Saatchi Gallery in London, is a complex and peripheral grim scene of destruction in carved maple wood painted in black gesso and covered in graphite. The bas-relief technique was for the most part reserved to religious art, from Mesopotamia to Gregorian times, and surfacing during the Romanesque and Baroque epochs. Spangler chooses to draw from one of the most classical and antique of sculptural practices to depict a profane apocalyptic scene, bringing to mind an inverted or hellish door of the Florentine Quattrocento. The use of maple carving emphasizes carpentry and skill. The secular character of the medium, and the raw and almost “folkloric” feel, point towards a tendency to the rural and epic that Spangler brings into his oeuvre, attaining the credibility of time with its ancient quality.
With a sober monumentality, Spangler gives us a sharp vista of warfare in recognizable times of Humvies and urban detritus. Fractured trees evoke the stillness and vulnerability of corpses, a rain of nails permeates the central right area of the piece, while a violent man-made storm accentuates density and desolation.
For other artists the forest may function as a marginalized space of nature within or outside an urban landscape, growing off the fissure of a failed utopia. The forest simultaneously works as a buffer-zone and as a cathartic agent. It is a place of self-exploration and freedom, a tolerance-pocket or free-port where one may escape urban social expectations, which often appear all-consuming.
Decades of social democracy in the Scandinavian countries have resulted in the world’s highest living standards. The Nordic model, nevertheless, is not devoid of paradoxes, which over the last decade have offered artists a large reservoir of material for research. The work of Matias Faldbakken may be found within these coordinates. His black and white print Untitled (Woody), 2005, relates to Faldbakken’s “investigation into the gap between a confortable middle class and the desire and necessity to transgress the limits imposed by the system” (Source: Jonas Ekeberg, 2005: http://www.apexart.org/exhibitions/ ekeberg.htm). In this small piece, the forest is an intervenible landscape and geopolitical space, a physical terrain and immaterial image. The forest is chosen as a political text, both reclaimed and dissolved through banalization.
The recognition of the need of transgression is stronghold within the works of Guadalupe Ruiz Cifuentes Rihs (bo. Bogota, 1978). Working mostly in series, Guadalupe’s photographic work results from a profound, however, understated understanding of her visual heritage as a Latin American, transformed by the experience of living in Switzerland since her adolescence. The often poignant compositions may allude to art history or are found between the stage and a hard place.
In the group titled La Pradera, Bogotá, El Hall, and Parque Nacional, 2005, Ruiz Cifuentes Rihs photographs in the city for the city, exploring its possibilities and its implications. The works intimate a search for place. If the lost Eden is ever to be recovered, it will not be a well-manicured urban-garden, but a place where people have broken the bondage of their isolation, for the cities may not the ultimate goal of the human animal. This negation is perhaps a consequence and parcel of the modernist esthetic, which has been so heavily enshrined and morphed in Latin America.
With a penchant for exposure, Luis Vidal’s (bo. Barcelona, 1970) forest names the darkness of a hostile environment. The vulnerability and fragility of children is the basso continuo in Luis Vidal’s oeuvre. For over a decade, this Spanish artist has been denouncing exploitation of minors (physical, sexual or emotional abuse) in a society that blinds itself from a reality that permeates all social and political strata. The drawings from the presented series belong to the most recent and larger work in progress titled Garden of Abuse.
A Garden of Eden turned Inferno is the departing point towards a seemingly endless threaded story of abuses, where predators are not a representation of nature, but a metaphor of man. Sparse landscapes of dead trees with thorns are splattered with the watered-down blood-red aquarelle. Danger in the garden, danger in the forest, these are nightmarish preludes to the series’ main works: large format burnt leathers with images of child abuse downloaded from illegal yet freely accessible Internet sites.
The forest may also function as a formula to rediscover historic or unmemorable times, allowing us to go deeper into the collective psyche of our de-naturalized societies, or into a personal psyche, in search of -or against- a legendary, shamanic or mythical narrative.
Explaining his works, Cang Xin (bo. Suihua, China, 1967) has talked about his concerns around issues of tourism, consumption, and the exoticism of cultural myths. He has suggested that his performances relate to his identity as a Manchurian and a Chinese, and that ancient Manchurian shamanism inspires his work. The connections between body and nature, the primitive or the sacred, and issues related to Self and Other are centripetal to his works, which are both ceremonial and spontaneous, and dependant on the participation of others for completion.
The two drawings Untitled Nos. 1 and 2, 2006, are large works of graphite on rice paper. These show the artist’s head portraits growing off the branches of a dried old tree (No. 1) and off what functions as old contorted roots in the inverted image (No. 2). The artist chooses not to be the drawer, but it is an army of anonymous drawing students who produce the ‘self-portraits’. These works reference the artist’s performances in Norway and Casula (Sydney Biennial 2002), where Cang Xin’s body was buried in a ninety-centimeter hole on the ground and only his head and neck are visible. He claims that he was trying to symbolize the way that the Japanese tortured the Chinese during the Second World War (Source: www.yishujounal.com). There is a strong element of historical and natural inevitability in these drawings, stressing the importance of a metaphysical experience through a connection with nature.
Western culture has long observed the rural pagani as rustici and as villani. The forest is the locus of this rural mind, which has usually been more resistant to change than the urban. Following this line of thought, the works of Gabríela Fridriksdóttir (bo. Reykjavik, 1971), Versations/Tetralógia –South and Versations/Tetralógia – East are included, a duo of the four-part installation that was composed for the 2005 Venice Biennial.
Gabríela Fridriksdóttir’s work has been called “polyphonic” as she tends to transcend media and visual arts, going from music to performance to video, sculpture, or drawing. Her seemingly naive manner does not negate a certain irony, as the works take us into journeys through the inner recoils of the self. Her visual voice bizarrely tells of ancestral Icelandic tales and sagas. Scurrile naturalism and gloomy spiritualism mix to create a fantastic and phantasmagoric world dwelling between dreams and reality.
According to Laufey Helgadóttir (Excerpt from the Venice Cataloge) “the Artist addresses this illogical Icelandic tradition of discourse in her work, and underlines this with the title Versations, where she has omitted the prefix con- from conversations, implying that this is not a true conversation but an attempt at conversation. And perhaps it is the most powerful who seize the right to be heard; but words are vital, although their virtual reality traps us ever more securely in its net. Gabríela delves beneath the surface of the words, strives to find the reality beneath, gives herself over to a fantastical imagination which she unleashes, seeking inspiration equally in literature, mysticism, musical and visual arts. She has taken a piano melody which she improvised and has been composing since she was a teenager, and asked four musicians – Daníel Ágúst Haraldsson, Björk Gu_mundsdóttir, Borgar Thor Magnússon and Jónas Sen – to compose a piece based on the melody. The video and musical works are then edited together to form the Tetralógia, which as a whole forms a quartet, although each video is autonomous.”
In summary, this exhibition considers ‘the forest’ as a recurrent motif or metaphor that connects the works of various artists with a repositioning of a tradition of resistance or enstrangement to a super-rational system designed to reduce the possibility for fantasy, deceleration, risk, transgression or metaphysical experience.
Jocelyn Adele González Junco
Gamaliel R. Herrera
We gratefully acknowledge Tommaso Corvi-Mora, Zach Feuer Gallery (LFL), Kerstin Niemann, The Saatchi Gallery London, and Galerie Spielhaus Morrison Berlin, whose support made these exhibitions in Hamburg and Boston possible
Artists
Abel Auer (Born in Munich, 1974). Auer is a graduate of the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts, and has worked in a close relationship with other artists such as Kai Althoff, Dorota Jurczak and Armin Krämer, exhibiting in venues such as the Diozesanmuseum Freising, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Corvi-Mora Gallery London, Galerie Daniel Buchholz and Galerie Nagel in Köln, Kunstraum Walcheturm Zürich and the Kunstverein Hamburg. Auer lives and works between Hamburg and Wuppertal, Germany.
Ulla von Brandenburg (Born in Karlsruhe, 1974). The works of Ulla von Brandenburg also deal with the theatrical and the performative, the gestural and the pantomimic, the historical and the cinematic at large. Parting from an interest in the commedia dell’arte, the deceptive devices of trompe l’œil and illusions mingle to form shadows and silhouettes. Invoking the narrative, with an element of bourgeois leisure, and the simple aura of a circus show, she creates magic moments of an expectancy, the stillness before an act. Von Brandenburg graduated from the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts, and now lives between Hamburg and Paris. She has exhibited in venues such as the Kunstverein Heidelberg, Kunsthalle Zürich, Kunstverein Hamburg, the Royal College of Art in London, the Tilton Gallery and Greene Naftali Gallery in New York, the Kunstverein Braunschweig, The Moore Space in Miami, and the Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Matias Faldbakken (Born in Hobro, Denmark, 1973) is fascinated with systems of knowledge, of power, order and exchange. He is interested in how art and artists can be active participants in these systems, and uses text to highlight their influence. Faldbakken lives and works in Oslo, and has written two novels under the pseudonym Abo Rasul (Macht und Rebel and The Cocka Hola Company). These highlight the differences and similarities of the so-called underground and the mainstream, and between the ‘independent’ and the ‘commercial’ in everyday life - subjects that are central to Faldbakken’s recent art practice. Faldbakken represented the Nordic countries at the 51st Venice Biennial (2005) and is included in the current group show titled “Defamation of Character”, (Curator Neville Wakefield) at PS1 MoMA, New York. Source: www.the-artists.org
Gabríela Fridriksdóttir (Born in Reykjavik, 1971) is the youngest artist who has represented Iceland at the 51st Venice Biennial (2005). Recipient of several national and international grants and scholarships, she has collaborated with artists like the French designer duo M/M, Matthew Barney, and amongst her numerous musical projects, has joined forces with Björk Gudmundsdóttir. Her work has been exhibited among others in New York (recently at Mary Boone Gallery), Amsterdam, Barcelona, Bergen, Berlin and Copenhagen. Gabríela Fridriksdóttir’s first major solo exhibition was on view until mid August of this year at the Migros Museum in Zurich.
Oliver Lutz was born (1973) and raised with his twin on a goat farm in Maine, USA. Oliver Lutz had experience as an “information architect and user experience strategist” in industry before graduating (MS) from the MIT Visual Arts Program in Massachusetts. A multimedia artist, Lutz is primarily a painter, but also a drawer, installation artist, performer and filmmaker. Recently included in the group exhibition ‘Kampsite K48’ at John Connelly Presents in New York, ‘A Forest, Part I’ was his first exhibition in Europe, which was followed by a group exhibition at the Wurttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart.
Guadalupe Ruiz Cifuentes Rihs (Born in Bogotá, Colombia, 1978) moved to Switzerland during high school and remained living there. She graduated from the Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne and subsequently from the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Zürich. Previously included in the Space Other program, Ruiz Cifuentes Rihs’s works have been exhibited in several venues across Switzerland (Swiss Art Awards Basel 2004, 2005), Nice, France, Bogotá, Colombia, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Aaron Spangler (Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1973) received his BFA in 1993 from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He is known primarily for his sculptures or wood carving works in maple. In a New York Times review, Ken Johnson has described Spangler as an artist who “uses his extraordinary technique to elaborate profusely detailed, darkly comic visions of rural Post-apocalyptic ruin…he leaves things a bit rough (creating) a magical tension between the raw material and the epic fantasy”.
Luis Vidal (Born in Barcelona, 1970). Luis Vidal’s works have been shown internationally at the Bass Museum in Miami, the Herning Kunstmuseum in Copenhagen, Fundacion La Caixa in Barcelona, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Buenos Aires, and Centro Cultural de Espana in Mexico D.F., La Habana, and San Juan.
Cang Xin was born in Suihua, Heilnongjang Province, China in 1967. Autodidactic in the visual arts, Cang Xin studied music in Tianjin until the late 1980s. He is one of China’s first performance artists and was a part of a controversial group of experimental artists living in The East Beijing Village in the early ’90s, who became notorious for the sometimes extreme physicality of their performance work. This group of artists included Ai Wei Wei, Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming. Cang Xin is best known for his performative works of licking around the world. Performance sites have been well-known tourist attractions, such as the Great Wall of China, the Parlament Building in London, and the Coliseum in Rome. His actions have been performed in the Sydney Biennale (2002), the Guangzhou Triennial (Guangdong, 2002), and his work has been featured in the most relevant comprehensive contemporary Chinese art exhibitions of the recent years. Cang Xin’s works will be exhibited in the upcoming exhibition New Art from China, at Saatchi Gallery, London.