by Kerrie Welsh
I spoke with Amy Ruhl last August just as her mesmerizing film How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body premiered in New York City. It has since played in festivals, galleries, and salons from Anthology Film Archives to the Eye Film Institute Netherlands, picking up a best Best Featurette Award at the London Underground Film Festival along the way.
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by Pac Pobric
Photos by Cathy Carver © 2012 Fred Sandback Archive; courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.Certain things about Fred Sandback’s work are abundantly clear. That his central concern was the possibility of pushing “drawing in space” to its most literal (or, in other words, to its most abstract) is plain enough to see. The open/closed dichotomy that Modern sculpture had begun to deconstruct with Picasso’s 1914 Guitar was blown wide open with Sandback’s yarn work.
Yet it did so only through a greater achievement: the articulation of a drawing-as-sculpture opposition pushed each to its limit, which is to say as far from one another as possible. The two-dimensional drawings that serve as “models” for Sandback’s three-dimensional work do so only ostensibly. As the artist noted in 1975: “I don’t have an idea first and then find a way to express it. That happens all at once.”
Photos by Cathy Carver © 2012 Fred Sandback Archive; courtesy of David Zwirner, New York. The drawings in fact follow their own logic insofar as they are able to do what drawing cannot help but do: put figures in space.
None of the more “abstract” two-line drawings (as opposed to the “models” for sculptural work) shown at David Zwirner feature intersecting lines. There’s a good reason for that: it would simply flatten the image too much, whereas the goal of all drawing (and not only Sandback’s) is the elaboration of a form in space, however abstract. Especially because all these drawings feature only one color, an intersection would beg the question: which line crosses which? Because it would be impossible to answer, the point of intersection would be a point of flatness in otherwise illusionistic space. The result would be a confused image.
With drawing trapped in two dimensions, Sandback’s sculpture does its work in three, carving the space which it intersects into perpetually shifting sections. More apparent in this exhibit than others, however, is Sandback’s relative inability to wrestle with color. The exclusive use of yellow or black in each drawing brings to bear the more varied use of colored yarn in the sculptures, but doesn’t do it any favors. Untitled (Sculptural Study, Twelve Part Vertical Construction) does in fact read as more of a study than a finished work. Its use of a pale yellow in tandem with black and a darkened blue betray that Sandback didn’t have a painter’s natural eye for color. If it’s a work in progress, one is left to imagine that the central question left unaddressed is how to more fully integrate the colors.
But color, in the end, is a principal issue only for painting, not for sculpture or drawing. That Sandback’s work entirely bypasses the problems of painting is probably made most clear by an untitled glass construction that is truly out of place in the exhibit. The work calls to mind Newman or Marden, but its diminutive size betrays its timidity in engaging with painting. Sandback’s best work was of a different order. His concern was for drawing, in two dimensions and three.
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– Kareem Estefan
Radio is, famously, a location-less medium. It exists in the “ether,” neither here nor there. Often it meets listeners in transit: on the road one catches broadcasts from the local station, or tunes in to more remote content from satellite transmissions. Depending on where the dial (or on-screen arrow) lands, one hears either corporate content assembled by automatic playlists or carefully selected regional voices; however uncommon the latter, radio remains a rare haven for independent production. With Free Radio, Brian Gillis and Robin Lambert aim to expand the social space opened by community radio, helping underserved community groups to develop and transmit their “voices” through a DIY radio station that could be heard across the New York metropolitan area from CUE’s gallery.
Free Radio is the first collaboration between two artists who have recently expanded their practices into more relational territory. Gillis, a professor at the University of Oregon, gradually shifted from fabricating objects to fabricating situations that evoke human potential through the excavation of buried social histories. (He credits Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States for helping to inspire this approach.) Lambert, who teaches at Red Deer College in Alberta, Canada, sets up situations with the possibility—sometimes curiously narrow—for strangers to interact. For example, in The only thing I know for sure is that while I am looking for you, you are looking for me (2009), the artist invited two strangers to live in Montreal, a city they hadn’t visited before, in order to find each other. After a month of searching, they never met.
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A pair of men’s briefs that fit on a pinky finger; that quintessential comedic prop, the banana peel; a little bust of the cartoon character Olive Oyl mounted on a spindly wire; the still-shocking hooded figures from the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal; a miniature car battery rigged for electrocutions; the small frame of eleven year old Kim Phuc burned by napalm; naked devil men; a minute vignette of two men in a life raft; a mini Michael Jackson striking his well-known moonwalk pose.
This is only a sampling of the subjects that Los Angeles-based artist Michael Minelli has included in his most recent body of work, Souvenirs (2011). All miniaturized and able to fit in the palm of your hand, these objects are hand-modelled from a colorful array of Sculpey brand polymer clay and evoke a range of emotional responses. From the serious to the comical, the sacred to the profane―what do Minelli’s objects even mean? Are they ironic or genuine? Funny or tragic? Pathetic or profound? The answer lies, perhaps, not in trying to determine the status of Minelli’s objects as either/or, ironic/genuine, funny/tragic or pathetic/profound, but instead, in the open-ended possibilities of both/and.
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Triple Canopy is an excellent and revered online publication that covers contemporary art and theory. This morning the Editors sent an email titled “Working for a living wage?” saying that they need help paying their writers. Currently they can only rely on the goodwill of aspiring intellects. Click here to support Triple Canopy.
Below is the letter from the Editors:
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CUE Art Foundation/ Trestle Restaurant
January 18, 2011, 11:22 am
CUE 1: Conversation
Louis: I think maybe we should begin by saying that we’re here at the CUE Art Foundation 
in New York City, about to look at the John Corbin exhibit, titled “Drift.”
Robert: Curated by Lynn Crawford.
L: Right. And what we’re going to do is record ourselves having a conversation, both at the gallery itself and then afterwards, about the exhibit. Part of the idea is to use the conversational form as a kind of constraint for giving weight to our immediate and subjective experiences of the work. Continue reading
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