Even the Ghost of the Past, Marcel Dzama, diorama, variable dimensions, 2008

“Even the Ghost of the Past,” Marcel Dzama’s elaborate show of drawings, sketchbook pages, sculpture, dioramas and video with live music accompaniment, (at David Zwirner through April 19), seems to energetically “take on” art history. Invoking the heady atmosphere of the 1920s, when the ideals of Soviet Constructivism bumped against European Dada, even Dzama’s name suggests a collision of Marcel Duchamp and Dziga Vertov.

Marcel Duchamp’s work is referenced throughout the show, but most boldly in the diorama the show is named after, Even the Ghost of the Past, which plays on Duchamp’s final work, Étant donnés, (Given).

Duchamp spent the last twenty years of his life working on Étant donnés, mostly in secrecy, and like many of his ambitious pieces it was inscrutable and largely rebuffed by audiences and critics. While Duchamp was undeniably one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, his career was also pocked by disappointments and rejections, of which Étant donnés is perhaps the most poignant example.

Étant donnés, Marcel Duchamp, Mixed-media assemblage, 7 feet 11 1/2 inches x 70 inches (242.6 x 177.8 cm), 1946-66

Étant donnés positions the viewer as a peeping tom; only one person at a time can view the diorama. The viewer is confronted with a mannequin of a woman’s splayed body, head out of view. Although the body seems lifeless, it holds up a gas light in the center of the tableau, illuminating an idyllic landscape, replete with Renaissance perspective. Duchamp was also one to take on art history.

As the viewer you feel implicated, when you, alone, look through the peephole at Duchamp’s piece – as if you are guilty of a crime, as if the scene is a product of your own uncontrollable imagination. The piece derives much of its power through the one-on-one relationship it sets up between the viewer and the opened-up woman, regardless of how one responds to that image.

Dzama introduces Even the Ghost of the Past as a replica of Étant donnés, with the same kind of wood and brick door, the same peephole. But the vision inside is far more pleasant. In Dzama’s version, a dreamy and de-sexualized scene of a male and female couple replaces the headless woman. The scene in Even the Ghost of the Past is a space in which the participants exist in their own world, unaware of the viewer, who remains psychically outside. The experience as a viewer is not uncomfortable; you are not made aware of your role as voyeur. Instead it is like watching a film, where you can take pleasure in watching, with no fear of being caught, bearing no responsibility for what unfolds before your eyes.

Even the Ghost of the Past is more like a romantic scene from Edward Burne-Jones’ Briar Wood than a response to Duchamp’s work. Dzama’s interpretation of Étant donnés calls to mind the impulse to shun adulthood, and in comparison to the original, seems naive to the point of being reactionary.

Even the Ghost of the Past – Marcel Dzama – March 6 through April 19

David Zwirner Gallery

525 W 19th St
New York (Chelsea)

Tue-Sat 10-6

Rugburn, Whiskey Back, Rosy Keyser, 2008, sawdust, enamel, and obsidian on canvas, 90×72 inches

Combining ink and enamel paints with materials such as obsidian, twine, mica, silk, and sawdust, Rosy Keyser creates a series of compelling large-scale paintings and a selection of works on paper in her first solo show in NYC, at Peter Blum.

With textures and materials that call to mind Anselm Kiefer, Keyser’s paintings have an immediate, visceral impact. They are abstract, with only a few recognizable elements emerging – some pond grasses perhaps, a reference to a tree – before submerging back into the thick, tar-like surface. The dark paintings in particular, with surfaces that appear bloated from water damage or reflective with mica, are a reminder of goopy oil spills washing up on the beach, mummifying the waterfowl. The paintings depict something undoubtedly toxic, at the same time there is fascination in the process of destruction and an undeniable beauty in the black, shimmering surface. This tension creates a powerful dynamic in Keyser’s compositions.

With their poetically disjointed titles, (And Go May Be Your Here; Flash Burn Arc Eye; Rugburn, Whiskey Back), this work makes Keyser out to be a modern-day Cassandra – a wild woman, foretelling doom. Indeed, she says the work arises from a deep conviction that the natural world is unstable and impermanent, linking her work to other recent shows by artists concerned about the state of the environment.

But Keyser’s paintings also function on a more personal, psychological level. The pollution seems to develop out of anxious corners of the imagination, as much as any external source. The discernible imagery suggests flashes of a dream, or a memory. And the tactility of the surfaces evokes a strong corporeal response: you can feel the sawdust sticking to your skin, the black enamel clouding your blood, the area of light eliciting a moment of relief. It is as if the instability of the natural world is a metaphor for the unreliability of one’s internal world – or perhaps each amplifies the turbulence in the other.

February 28 – April 19, 2008 at Peter Blum, Chelsea

526 W 29th St
New York (Chelsea)

Tree, The Black Estate, HD Video, runtime: 10 minutes

The collaborative team, The Black Estate, makes use of a Neo-Victorian aesthetic to contemplate an imagined nature in Stemma – a series of HD animations and objects at Claire Oliver.

Each video depicts a slowly shifting landscape: a snowy mountain range, a barren tree stirring in the wind. The subject and its transformations bring to mind Jennifer Steinkamp’s tree animations, such as Eye Catching 1. But whereas technology is at the forefront of Steinkamp’s imagery, Black Estate emphasizes the hand in the work. The images are created from ink brush drawings, and then vignetted. This darkening of the edges is a look that was popular in Victorian etchings, (intended to draw the viewer into an intimate scene), and often recreated in early films. Black Estate also picks up a trick from vaudeville: moving the foreground imagery to create a sense of motion.

The “video objects” are presented as curiosities. What looks like wooden lens housings from old view cameras are positioned face up, for the viewer to peer into the lens to see a tiny, black and white, looping animation. The experience is peculiar – by looking into the lens of the camera, one might expect to see the eye of the photographer. Instead, you see a seething organic animation, like the innards of an imaginary creature.

The pacing of the works is slow, and there is no dramatic action. Aside from some weather phenomenon, “nothing happens” in these videos, and they require the viewer to patiently watch for ten minutes to find that out for certain. What the work offers instead is far richer: the potential to imagine a slower time of small amazements.

The overriding aesthetic is charmingly awkward, with as many references to 19th century technology as there are to 21st. But, while the Victorian sensibility is certainly inspired by nature, Victorians were by no means environmentalists. The primary intent behind this work, (according the press release), is the artists’ concern for the current state of our environment. With this in mind, it becomes troubling to see Black Estate present nature as beautified and contained, like a butterfly collection under glass, captured for the viewer’s contemplation.

Stemma is closing soon (3/8), but it is well documented at the gallery website.

The Black Estate “Stemma” at Claire Oliver
Feb 7th, 2008 to Mar 8th, 2008

513 W 26th St
New York (Chelsea)

By adhering feathers to wood panels with different colors of acrylic, Gregory Coates has created a series of paintings with the ability to immediately charm the viewer, (at Magnam Projects through March). From downy comforters to animal fur to feather boas, the viewer is immediately reminded of pleasures of warmth and luxury. Yet, as you move into the gallery, past the white, grey and shimmery blue paintings, the mood changes from an almost baroque frivolity to something much darker; as the work becomes deeper in tonality, more profound meanings rise to the surface.

Feathers inherently imply lightness. But the feathers in these works have been rendered stiff with paint. In some of the pieces the feathers are evenly distributed and fully cover the support, in others the feathers are massed together – revealing areas of painted wood – areas which seem vulnerable and unattractive in comparison. The manner in which the feathers are put on the panels divulges what we imagine to be the artist’s state of mind while making them, generating a strong emotional undertone.

The form of the rectangle is strongly emphasized in these pieces, such that they function more like sculptural blocks, hanging on the wall. In the press release, Coates refers to the paintings as memorials, and each work bears as its title a first name, presumably of the person to whom it is dedicated. With this in mind, the simple rectangular forms take on a somber elegance, and the atmosphere of the show an elegiac tranquility.

While one color dominates each piece, the paintings are not monochrome. The paint is layered and built up before the feathers are applied and veils of blue hide under white, veins of red can be discerned within black. It is hard not to think “tar and feather” when confronted with white feathers fixed into place with black paint, with traces of red underneath. This thought ushers in a specter of cruelty, the weight of history; yet, it is the only piece with that reference. With an attitude of leniency, it becomes another muffled voice within a soundless chorus, when the show is viewed as a whole.

MUTE: (Adjective), Gregory Coates, February 15 – March 29, Magnan Projects, 317 Tenth Avenue, New York, (Chelsea)

Elger Esser, 2007, C-Print & DiaSec Face, h: 72.4 x w: 95.3 in

Elger Esser’s C-prints on milky, semi-transparent supports, (currently part of a group show at Sonnabend), suggest old hand-tinted photographs on glass: mundane landscapes made magical through a filter of technology and memory. In Esser’s case, the technology is as old as the earliest photographs his imagery calls to mind (lengthy exposures), while the memory is of an unrecognizable present.

In the past decade, German-born Esser has been photographing landscapes all over Europe and this current show features a number of images he shot in the US. When you look closely at the details, you can recognize a pick-up truck or road sign that locates the work in a specific place and time – but the stronger feeling is one of placeless-ness. As with Chinese landscape painting, the work is most compelling where the image dissolves into misty atmosphere.

Esser is also working with scale, by making the prints so large you feel you could swim right into them. The subject looks like a picture postcard from 1890. But an actual postcard is a personal (if mass produced) memento, small enough to hold in one hand, small enough so that one can internalize the experience of having visited the place pictured on it. I’ve been there; I can call up my memory of my experience by looking at my souvenir. By enlarging the personal relic to wall-size, it changes the experience from an individual memory to something more like cultural nostalgia.

Esser’s photographs carry so much romantic yearning for a time and place we hold vaguely in our heads as 19th century Europe, yet they are contemporary. Because these images are of our own surroundings, their impact is more poignant. They evoke in viewers a longing for that which we already have.

Becher, Morris, Höfer, Huynh, Esser and Vaisman
February 2, 2008 – March 1, 2008
Sonnabend
Address 536 W 22nd St
New York (Chelsea)