Critical Whimsy: Sandow Birk’s American Qur’an at PPOW
Sandow Birk is one of the most interesting artists working (hard) in America. I began following his work at first because our friendship is a Bali bond. Then I continued following because it’s impossible not to once you start. There’s a plethora of plots to follow in Sandow’s work, all of them with twists. He’s prolific, proficient, precocious, provocative, and still really young (meaning under 50). By way of introduction he’s done a critically acclaimed series of epic history paintings in the grand tradition entitled “The Great War of the Californias,” and a painted restaging of Dante’s Inferno set in LA today and worthy of a spectacularly staged full-on opera to the music of Lou Reed from his Metal Machine Music period. Sandow’s speciality is making deep irony look “fun”. Devilishly smart, in other words.
Years ago, Sandow and I met while working together creating a monumental collection of carved panels for the Hawaii home of Silicon Valley success-surfer and disk-spinner extraordinaire, Steve Luczo (who btw happens to be happily married-with-kids to the sincerely beautiful woman-who-models, Agatha Relota). Obviously, there’s beauty in this story from every angle, so read on.
Sandow has surfed Indonesia a number of times, and was commissioned by Steve to come to Bali to absorb the artistic what-the-what that is here, or was here, in order to create a set of drawings for this epic group of Balinese panels for Steve’s Hawaii beach house. Sandow got it. He got Bali on a gut level, and I don’t mean he got “Bali Belly” He absorbed the Bali Thing into his pores without even trying. He hung with our Bali carvers, he rummaged around temples, palaces, galleries, jungles and pointed point breaks down Uluwatu way, then came up with a splendid set of very Bali drawings which the Balinese carvers received with great glee. They carved with chisels, they carved with grins, they carved with demons, nymphs and kings. The panels were pretty good, in other words. We are all very happy.
And right now I am specifically happy because in a few weeks’ time, PPOW gallery in New York opens a show of works from Sandow’s epic long-term opus, American Qur’an. He has undertaken to paint every surat from the Qur’an, illuminated in the margins with scenes from life, meaning life in America from catastrophe to catastrophe, as it is being lived. In classic Sandow fashion, this project is an itch-inducing thorny tightrope of works, but it works, because he’s not in fact cashing in on cross-cultural hypersensitivities here. Instead he exposes the absurdity of this neurotic hypersensitivity itself, along with the bend-over-backwards politesse of American mass culture toward The (hated and feared) Other, in this case Islam. American Qur’an goes further still, by inviting us through its deep irony to see how the velvet glove of American political correctness fails miserably to conceal the iron knuckles of ignorance and fear.
The pointed paintings of American Qur’an save Sandow from a fatwa by being packaged as pop, as Zippy the Pinhead comics of life. And there’s the real statement. These days, it seems a serious man can only get critical whimsy in under the radar if he cloaks it in the stealth bombing costume of a harmless kook. (We don’t want another Danish debacle, now do we? So coat it in candy. Pop rocks come to mind. They were dangerous candy that wasn’t actually dangerous. We really liked them and will never forget them, those of us who lived through the Pop Rocks epoch of American history without exploding or imploding. Are we having fun yet?)
Ebon Heath at Kendra Gallery Bali: We Listen with Our Eyes
Stereo.type, the subject of the current exhibition at Kendra Gallery, is one of the myriad projects of artist-designer-activist Ebon Heath. It consists of metamorphosed typography which transmits subtle messages about printed words themselves and their broadest meanings. The title Ebon selected for his website, “listeningwithmyeyes” voices eloquently the peculiar effect of freeing typography from its familiar context. Text moves from the page into the atmosphere, where it is more seen than heard-in-the-head, as one hears words while one reads them on a page. Released from the page, text can be sensed in new ways. Ebon is experimenting with a form of synaesthesia, which I suspect he feels himself and always has, in relation to text and typography.
No surprise then, that Ebon has for over a decade been a pioneer in graphic design, exploring divergent paths in typography, and in other graphic means to transmit urgent and potent messages. His graphic work evidences an innate understanding of the prevailing conditions of his clients’ publics. He fathoms just how deeply we wallow in a surfeit of text, messages, text messages and constant clever clamoring after our attention.
Ebon seems to propose his mobiles as a means to float above the imperatives of prolific message making. They are not the products of an assignment to Ebon the graphic designer, requiring him to hit a target with a specific message shot from a grassy knoll into a cluttered world. Rather, they seem to be his own response to the nebulous nature of the printed word itself as a phenomenon. And equally, as an expression of Ebon’s own understanding of that phenomenon, or cluster of phenomena, after years of deployment on missions as a sniper on the battleground of printed messages. Me, I can’t help but like this stuff, as a veteran of the sharp-shooting message squad myself (JWT, O&M, etc).
I’m not sure that Ebon has achieved the full effect he hopes to achieve with Stereo.type, yet. Nevertheless, his trail-breaking at this juncture still affords us access to paths that were not previously available. In other words, there is value in the Stereo.type project, and one would do well to follow its course and expect even greater work as Ebon conjures forth his word-clouds (as above, at Kendra).
The art products comprising Stereo.type are primarily undulating and exploding mobiles of typography which release printed words from the constraints of the two dimensional page. Words hang in the air. Words fly. Poetry floats. We are invited to feel in a spatial and physical way how real words really are. As embodied beings ourselves, we witness an analogous embodiment of the texts that fill our world. In this way we can begin to comprehend what the printed word is actually doing in our world, from religious texts to text messages to political campaign slogans. Everything written, printed, and distributed is hovering in the atmosphere around us, twisting and drifting like Ebon’s mobiles (above).
As text is decontextualised in Ebon’s artworks, so is the artist himself deliberately decontextualised. He drifts wantonly away from the orthodoxies of the contemporary art market, disregarding agreed-upon categories of fine art as we know it. He is colouring outside the lines that separate fine art from, say, interior decoration, graphic design, body ornament and indeed, activism. Ebon’s mobiles are “going retail” later this year as constituent elements for high-design interiors. As are other Stereo.type art products, including laser-cut typographic earrings, cuffs and belts (above).
Photographic prints are another form of art objects within the Stereo.type project (above, visible to the right of a word-cloud). A dozen or so of these these limited edition prints are avaible through Kendra, and several are hung in the gallery now. They twist the text-to-art story into yet another permutation, by first taking the printed page into three dimensions (mobiles), then intentionally flattening it out again (photographs of mobiles), but with its earlier 3-D state having transformed the text in disorienting yet salient ways. It’s all as twisted as the morphed, warping words whirling slowly in the air-con at Kendra, now through 16 May. Go. Spend an hour or two in the gallery if you are in Bali, and consider how words and text exist among us, take form, move, morph, move, and insinuate themselves into our very atmosphere.
Kim Randall, la femme chef d’affaires of Kendra Gallery, was radiant on the occasion of Ebon’s vernissage last Saturday, as she always is (above, with Chun Gee of Bule Fusion studio). She’s an object lesson in natural beauty, which has nothing to do with airs and everything to do with graces. That characterises Kim (below, far right), who was on fine form on the night. The artist, on the other hand, initially seemed to be on less than fine form, having not yet appeared until well into the second hour of the vernissage. Kim explained matter-of-factly, “Gosh, Susi, he’s been up for three days working on the installation. Now he’s crashed out asleep in his room!”
Kendra is situated at Uma Sapna, one of the few well-designed boutique villa hotels in Seminyak. It, and Kendra Gallery, were discreetly created by their ineluctable éminence grises, Bruno Wauters and his enchanting partner Sekar Warni (above, third from right, beside interior designer Laure DeGuillaume and architect Cheong Yew Kwan). Given the fact that Ebon was staying at Uma Sapna, he was understandably inclined to recharge – - after three days discharging the painstaking duty of affixing innumerable strings of typography to walls and ceilings he had never seen before.
But lo and behold! The artist ultimately emerged! At the very moment the crowd reached maximum numbers, which were impressive numbers indeed (see above), Ebon Heath popped out like a rabbit from a hat, and proved to be remarkably personable, approachable, affable, relaxed, and generous in answering questions and discussing his work – - not to mention, beaming smiles for miles. I guess the mattresses and sheets at Uma Sapna are top-drawer, and the rooms are as serene as a Trappist monastery. It seems that a two-hour siesta there is equivalent to eight hours of shut-eye anywhere else.
Live Art @ KuDeTa Bali: The Writing is on the Wall (For Charity)
Be at KuDeTa on Friday 26 February for a no-jive, all-live, art attack. Two UK artists painting live before your eyes to the tune of globally-regrooved hip hop, morphed tropical urban house and deep subterranean sounds spun by six (count ‘em, six) DJs. This art extravaganza isn’t happening just for YOUR benefit. It’s a benefit for the I’m An Angel charity, which does good in great measure for local people, places and problems.
Mondo at Biasa Artspace: This Ain’t No Party, This Ain’t No Wonderland
Nice party. Beautiful people. Harrowing canvasses. Clearly, this ain’t no fooling around, even if it did take place in Bali, the ultimate island for fooling around, art-wise and otherwise. But a wonderland, Bali is not. A rabbit hole to wonderland, this exhibition is not. We are at Biasa Artspace, Bali’s pre-eminent, credibly independent, contemporary art gallery. November 21. It’s a vernissage for the disturbingly beautiful and beautifully disturbing recent oeuvre of Bali-based painter Edmondo Zanolini (AKA Mondo), entitled “Follow the Rabbit”.
Shades of Lewis Carrolls’s rabbit? Perhaps. But this is no recreational trip into a whimsically altered state, it is a harrowing one into a raw state of naked awareness, and certainly not a wonderland by any stretch of any addled imagination. It is more Helter-Skelter than Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Stop dreaming, says Mondo. Wonderland and the House of Horrors are one and the same. Drop the dreams and wake up. The antidote to dreams is down this rabbit hole, so follow the rabbit, if you dare. Reality is weirder than dreams ever could be.
Indonesian Textiles as Art: The Eyes Have It
An exhibition “Indonesian Textiles as Art” opened on 19 July at the Museum Pasifika in Nusa Dua, Bali. We were there. We saw. And we agreed wholeheartedly with the stance of Georges Breguet who mounted the exhibition, that the best textile arts of the archipelago are indeed art, and should be viewed as such. Read more…
Disconnected Threads: Tisna Sanjaya @ Kendra Gallery
Start Here: Too Much Text
If art works demand a seven page “curatorial essay” then perhaps there is something amiss, some loose threads in the fabric. Shall we examine some random loose threads trailing out with frayed ends from this unravelled exhibition? Bearing in mind that loose threads can be fibers broken from the fabric they should have been warped or wefted into, and they can also be long, trailing anomalous strands never intended to mesh into the main fabric in the first place, but snaked outward from it to become incidentally entangled in other stories. Such wayward strands could easily snag on dinner forks, dissertations, discourses, or discarded hairbrushes, and stay fast there forever, much to our amusement or annoyance. So here we go with loose threads splayed outwards from Tisna Sanjaya’s Cogondewah show at Kendra Gallery in Bali, which opened last Saturday, 11 July, to moderate applause. Read more…
Fine Friends: Tribal Art Meets Modern at the Beyeler
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Tribal talks to modern and the conversation is scintillating.
A truly outstanding exhibition at a truly outstanding institution. The Beyeler Foundation in Basel offers “Visual Encounters — Africa, Oceania and Modern Art,” through 24 May 2009.
The show juxtaposes masterpieces of tribal sculpture with important canvasses of modern masters; van Gogh, Cézanne, Braque, Matisse, Léger, Picasso, Rothko. The result is utterly sublime. The way these works talk to each other is like long lost friends who have just met by chance after decades. The conversation is animated, joyous, rich and deep.
Generously spread over thirteen exhibition spaces in the Beyeler’s Renzo Piano designed gallery, this exhibition suggests new avenues for serious art collectors to explore. The juxtapositions make both bodies of work resonate more strongly than either would on its own. This is an an aesthetic nuclear fusion, releasing tremendous energy. Go. See. Be awed and inspired.
© Photo Hughes Dubois, Brüssel – Paris
It’s Simply Biasa Being a Fool for Indieguerillas’ Fool’s Lore
OK here we go, a bit late. The best gallery opening of the winter holiday high season in Bali was just before Christmas at Biasa Artspace. Indieguerillas were the artists, a husband and wife team out of Central Java, who hail from the worlds of interior and graphic design and from the burgeoning galaxy of Indonesian global geekdom. And what a show it was. These two (Bung Otom, pictured above right, and Santi Ariestyowanti), go boldly where no Indie couple has gone before, orbiting the separate suns of Javanese sacred iconography and global-techno-sound-data-culture. Swinging from the gravitational field of both of these in a twisted Moebius loop, and fueled by the spirit of post-punk alt culture, this binary star system of partnered artists explodes across our visual and perceptual fields with a pow that punches at least as good as Lichtenstein’s did for his own milieu.
What we have here is an irreverant bundling of the software of pop and global culture now, with ancient iconography, into a critical cartoonish package, and the artist-couple takes great pains to present it to us as it should be presented. The impeccable quality of painting is here, matched by meticulous competence in other media and means, as well. Laser-etched plexi meets epic-scale canvasses meets sound+vision on the outdoor terrace of Biasa Artspace into all hours of the night. (That’s Bung and Santi standing up to the scrutiny of renowned Bali-anthropologist-at-large Jean Couteau, above.)
I doubt many of the free-drink scavenging masses of Seminyak society knew why the vibe was so real and so alive that night. It was the art that did it, augmented by the spirit of generosity and inclusiveness that characterises Biasa Artspace.
This multimedia evening was an ecstatic celebration of generous talent and generous patronage on the part of Susanna Perini (above), proprietress of the whole Biasa biosphere. Who wasn’t there? Indo and mondo and molto and pseudo and slinky all gathered in the charged energy of an indoor-outdoor Indiguerillas moment.
Indie = Independent/Indonesian. Guerillas = operatives on a mission using the means available in a creative and subversive manner. That’s what we got with this exhibition, and it surprised everyone who was paying even the slightest bit of attention.
The title of the show, Fool’s Lore, was apt. There we had the Punch and Judy poignant criticism of iconic Javanese wayang kulit, mixed with ironically deployed imagery from animé, China-pop, gaming and the whole gamut of pop culture icons. Masterfully mixed it was – iconoclastic icon revival in the disco-ball light of now. (Even international tribal art dealers Michael Palmieri and Antonio Casanovas, pictured above, made the scene.)
To the title, Fool’s Lore, all I can say is “Lord what fools these mortals be,” and count myself willing or no among the foolish band of mortals. Thanks, Indieguerillas (Bung above left, Santi above right), for this moment of self-awareness which startled me like seeing myself in the security cameras of an office-block elevator, looking like the earnest little fool fixed in the Indo-mix that I am. That’s me silhouetted like a shadow puppet in front of the digi-video screen, below right.
I bought one piece from this show, and it wasn’t the free beer that made me do it. I had them slap a red sticker on the first work you could see on entering the gallery, almost the minute I arrived. It’s a laser-etched perspex panel on stainless steel mounts, representing a “gunungan,” the Javanese phalliform shadow puppet which begins and ends every story. The “gunungan” traditionally depicts within it all the contents of the known world, and my Indieguerillas “gunungan” has etched into it PSX-worthy icons of sounds and speakers and DJs and a hi-tech Hanoman (the monkey-god from the Ramayana) all woven into a unified visual groove as if they were parts of a single circuitboard. I could not resist this encapsulated statement of the schizo-Indo zeitgeist, in which the complexity and contradiction and raw humour of the moment is rendered eternally in plastic.
I had a fine evening, to boot, in addition to scoring a fantastic work of art. There’s Susanna of Biasa Artspace again, above. She clearly enjoyed the celebration, and I know it was a pandemonium of effort to get it all together, so bravissima Susanna.
Witness the Self-Evident: Budi Agung Kuswara at Komaneka Gallery
Who hung this show? I forgot to ask during the opening last Saturday at Komaneka Gallery. What was extraordinary to me, and what begged the question about who hung this show, was the spontaneous emergence of a narrative, revealed in the sequence of images considered in turn while circulating clockwise (as one often does) around the gallery space.
Beginning with a full frontal floating self portrait (detail above) that almost knocks you backwards down the stairs as you enter the space, and returning to it again after a clockwise circuit, a story unfolds. The artist earnestly explains that he did not intend any sequential relationship of the works as they were hung. Yet a story tells itself, as if it had an independent will to make itself evident.
Pretty Viscera: Davina Stephens at Ganesha Gallery
Something profound happened at the opening reception for Davina Stephens’ exhibition entitled “This Side of Paradise” (Ganesha Gallery, Four Seasons Resort Jimbaran, 18 December). What happened is perhaps best voiced by considering the contrasts in Davina’s most recent work. On the one hand these are images that could be, and have been, called soft, sentimental and decorative. On the other, they expose dark and visceral themes that are deeply disturbing.