NEWSgrist: *Joy Episalla: for the birds* Vol.4, no.19

NEWSgrist: *Joy Episalla: “for the birds”* Vol.4, no.19

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Vol.4, no.19 (Dec 8, 2003)

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*Underbelly*

Bulletin board: post your own news, press releases, urls:

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CONTENTS:

- *Splash* Joy Episalla: “for the birds”

- *Url/s* tofu; artleaf

- *Amnesiac* Kimmelman on Places of Fire (NYTimes)

- *Degustation* Schjeldahl on Guston (The New Yorker)

- *Call for Artists* Artist-in-Labs Program (Switzerland)

- *Book Grist* NY Readings: from McKenzie Wark to John Shirley

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*Splash* http://newsgrist.net

splash archived at:

http://www.newsgrist.net/Splash_Episalla.html

"for the birds"

Joy Episalla

18 December-25 January 2004

Private View:

Thursday 18 December 2003

6–8 pm

Studio 1.1

57a Redchurch St

London E2 7DJ

Only in UK: 07952 986 696

From outside the UK: +44 207 739 3362

puffin@dircon.co.uk

Hours: Gallery open 12–6 Friday–Sunday

Studio 1.1 is pleased to present “for the birds”, a solo exhibition by

New York-based artist Joy Episalla.

Episalla’s work operates in the place where photography and sculpture

intersect. She utilizes diverse media—photography, digitally

manipulated images, sculpture and video. Her past work has often

featured images of everyday, mundane objects that we live with and

which in some sense bear witness to our presence: piles of pillows

without their pillowcases on to cover the markings of stain and sweat,

curtains moving ever so slightly in the breeze, close-ups of upholstery

on the back of a sofa, a well-worn carpet shot in a way that reveals

all the traces of its history of use.

In this new body of work, Episalla has extended the range of her focus

to an investigation of a particular site: the garden out back behind

the flat where she lives. The hub of the exhibition is a single channel

video piece entitled “for the birds”. The video will fill the entire

back wall of the gallery. A seemingly simple time-based depiction of an

ivy-covered brick wall reveals itself to become a virtual live-action

flick set in a massive bird condominium complex. It functions like a

living, breathing monochrome. Ripples start to happen on the surface of

the ivy almost imperceptibly (caused by wind or animal movement) until

birds begin to dart in & out from under cover. The exhibition will also

feature several photographic pieces--a mass of ivy leaves printed on

industrial billboard vinyl, a close-up of the undulating webbing of a

lawn chair and an ivy-covered hole in the ground.

Joy Episalla lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited

in the US and internationally including “Chelsea Rising”, Contemporary

Arts Center New Orleans, “Pretty As A Picture: Beauty & Banality in

Contemporary Art”, Carrie Seacrist Gallery, Chicago and “Up & Coming”

curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud, ARCO, Spain. Solo shows include Neue

Galerie/Interaktion Kunst, Hannover, Germany, Mercer Union, Toronto,

Canada, Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona, Clifford•Smith Gallery, Boston.

She is currently represented in New York by Debs & Co. Gallery.

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*Url/s*

1) tofu magazine reloaded

version02 is on line >>> http://tofu-magazine.net

2) new artzine/forum >>> http://Artleaf.net

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*Amnesiac*

Photographs That Cry Out for Meaning

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

NYTimes, December 6, 2003

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/06/arts/design/06PIX.html

In "Brandstätten" ("Places of Fire"), a new book by the historian Jörg

Friedrich, we see a photograph of a seated woman.

I think. Is it a woman?

Assuming it is, she has a child on her lap. The child is perhaps 3 or 4 and

wears an overcoat with big buttons. The woman's head is facing up

(heavenward), her mouth wide open. She wears a cape with a hood,

which surrounds her like a halo. Behind her are two figures.

Mother and child with two saints. Or so you might think, except that the

figures are incinerated. Their corpses are lightly dusted with rubble. The

backdrop is a collapsed wall. The caption says, "Hamburg, July, 1943."

Some years ago the art critic John Berger wrote about the violence that is

in all photographs shot by strangers, what he called public photographs,

as opposed to private snapshots, which we take for ourselves and are

continuous with our own memory. Public photographs "carry no certain

meaning in themselves," he wrote. They are "like images in the memory

of a total stranger," lending themselves "to any use."

Presumably a photojournalist or a German official shot the picture in

Hamburg. Without the caption in the book, we would not know that it was

Hamburg or 1943. It could be a picture of any conflagration. It could be

put to any use.

In this case it is being used to recover a supposedly neglected and

contested part of modern military history. Mr. Friedrich is following in the

footsteps of the writer W. G. Sebald, who died in 2001. In his last book,

"On the Natural History of Destruction," based on lectures he gave in

Zurich in 1997, Sebald addressed a "scandalous deficiency": what he

perceived as a self-imposed silence by Germans after World War II

about the effects of Allied bombings on German civilians and cities.

Against this "collective amnesia," Sebald, a Trümmerkind, a child who

grew up in the ruins, tried to piece together what had transpired during

the war. The bombs on Hamburg, Sebald recounted, caused a firestorm

that rose miles into the air, sucking oxygen, lifting roofs off of buildings

and rolling at a tremendous speed, "like a tidal wave through the streets."

Mr. Friedrich's "Places of Fire" is a collection of photographs of Germany

during the war, visual traces of Sebald's missing history. Mr. Friedrich is

mysterious about their origin. They seem to have been amassed by the

country's efficient record keepers and collected in town archives. They

show scenes of Nazis hauling corpses across the smoking ruins of

bombed-out Dresden and Hitler Youth clearing dead children from streets

in Cologne.

Mr. Friedrich, another Trümmerkind (like Sebald, born in 1944), published

an earlier book, "Der Brand" ("The Fire"), which incited charges that he

wished to portray Germans as victims and the British and Americans as

war criminals. Now "Places of Fire" has caused even more criticism. The

German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung recommended that readers

throw it directly into the garbage.

At the encouragement of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Mr. Friedrich

says, he included a few photographs showing the effects of Nazi bombing

on British and Polish civilians, as a kind of balance. And he has responded

that while the decision to publish the German photographs was difficult,

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, "forbade these photos of our

victims from the German papers."

"In a way we've obeyed his orders until this day," Mr. Friedrich said. "If

you like looking at these photos, you're crazy and you need a doctor. But

this is a matter of truth."

I leave Mr. Friedrich's motives, the question of German memory and the

justification for the Allied attacks on German civilians for others to decide.

Whether the history of these attacks has even been a taboo and repressed

in Germany is a matter of debate among scholars. Goebbels's order was

not universally obeyed. In any case at issue here are the creaky moral

mechanics of photography, a visual art matter.

Photographs do illustrate a basic, unremarkable truth that war, like all

forms of suffering, is terrible. But beyond that their relationship to reality

is complicated.

It was the Nazis who first turned photography into a systematic form of

propaganda. Photographs, it has often been said, both objectify and

subjectify what they depict. They atomize time, disconnecting past from

present. A picture may tell a thousand words, but words have ultimate

power over photographs because each photograph is just a fragment: it

needs words to assign it a context, and this context may change along

with the message of the image.

A dark, uncaptioned, black-and-white photograph of the crumpled remains

of unidentified people scattered across a street accompanies Sebald's

account of the Hamburg bombing. It is not clear what place the picture

shows, or even that these are corpses, since they are burned beyond

recognition. In the small photograph, they look almost like heaps of litter

after a parade.

On the facing page Sebald cites a passage from the diary of a man named

Friedrich Reck, who shortly before the end of the war was sent to Dachau

by the Nazis and died there of typhus. Reck describes the exodus of

several dozen refugees in Upper Bavaria from the Allied bombings, which

were like those in Hamburg.

Reck recalls the refugees forcing their way onto a train. A cardboard

suitcase "falls on the platform, bursts open and spills its contents," he

says. "Toys, a manicure case, singed underwear. And last of all the

roasted corpse of a child, shrunk like a mummy, which its half-deranged

mother has been carrying about with her, the relic of a past that was still

intact a few days ago."

Not many years ago photographs turned up from Tuol Sleng, where the

Khmer Rouge tortured and killed Cambodians during the 1970's. More

than 14,000 people were imprisoned there. Seven survived.

Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge kept obsessive records, including mug

shots of those they arrested, among them a mother cradling a baby; two

men, shackled and blindfolded, holding hands; a boy, maybe 12 years old,

hands bound behind his back, his expression perfectly calm despite the

prison number safety-pinned directly into his bare chest.

He is a modern St. Sebastian. The Tuol Sleng photographs, like those in

Mr. Friedrich's book, are unbearable. Does it alter their impact to learn

that many of those killed at Tuol Sleng were themselves Khmer Rouge,

as the dead in "Places of Fire" include Nazis?

Surely it does, but the photographs themselves remain morally neutral. A

photograph in Mr. Friedrich's book, from Dresden, 1945, shows scores of

limp, charred German corpses piled in a heap, precisely like the pictures

of the murdered inmates at the extermination camps. The caption explains

that after the Allied attack on Dresden, Russians built enormous pyres to

incinerate the partly carbonized bodies.

Another picture, captioned "Battle of Berlin, 1943/44," shows two men

wearing German uniforms hoisting a woman, seated in their arms, from

a rubble wasteland. It can summon to mind, almost involuntarily, the

much-reproduced photograph by Shannon Stapleton of Reuters, of five

dust-covered rescue workers at the World Trade Center carrying out the

Rev. Mychal F. Judge, a Fire Department chaplain, who had died in a rain

of debris while ministering to victims when the towers collapsed, a

modern-day Pietà.

Other pictures in Mr. Friedrich's book (presumably inadvertently) bear

more associations with familiar art. A photograph of a young girl, kneeling,

arms extended, weeping over the prone corpse of her sister, is a standard

Entombment. A photograph of smoldering Berlin, in silhouette with trees

against a leaden sky, looks uncannily like "Winter," by the German

Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.

It is one of the basic truths of photographs that they inevitably beautify

horror (in the process, cleansing the events they capture of unattractive

sounds and smells). The writer Walter Benjamin noticed this. The camera,

he perceived, "is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish

heap without transfiguring it." It has succeeded "in turning abject poverty

itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of

enjoyment."

Enjoyment and beauty provoke sympathy. Images of Germany during

World War II, which, consciously or not, we associate with other images

already familiar to us, raise the essential point that Susan Sontag made

years ago: "Contrary to what is suggested by the humanist claims made

for photography, the camera's ability to transform reality into something

beautiful derives from its relative weakness as a means of conveying

truth."

To this I might add a final disturbance deriving from the presumption

that photographs of suffering are shot as if in our name. War

photographers show moments of agony that are meant to shock us, as

sympathetic viewers, into a condition of moral alarm. Mr. Berger, the

critic, located this condition in the discrepancy between what we see in

the picture and our own (more fortunate) lives.

Shock registers as a feeling of "personal moral inadequacy." The

viewer's "own moral inadequacy may now shock him as much as the

crimes being committed in the war," Mr. Berger writes. In this instant

the viewer may decide to shrug off the feeling as too familiar or

perform an act of penance. In either case, "the issue of the war which

has caused that moment is effectively depoliticized," he adds. "The

picture becomes evidence of a general human condition. It accuses

nobody and everybody."

So we stare at the sensational photographs in Mr. Friedrich's book

with our beliefs about the war struggling to anchor images that

threaten to come politically untethered before our eyes. The pictures

beseech us to feel outrage while they exploit the amoral status of

photography, with its deeply misleading reputation for truthfulness.

The only way to look at such pictures — because not looking is an

unreasonable choice — is therefore to keep their equivocal status in

mind. The meaning of words, while fungible like the meaning of

photographs, can be easier to control. Sebald ends with a reminder that

"the real pioneering achievements in bomb warfare" were by Germans.

The German Sixth Army had reached the Volga in August 1942, he

points out, when 1,200 Nazi bombers descended in a single raid on

Stalingrad, then swollen by refugees. "During that raid alone, which

caused elation among the German troops stationed on the opposite

bank," he says, "40,000 people lost their lives."

::::::::::::::::::::

Brandstätten (Places of Fire)

by Jörg Friedrich

http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/3549072007/qid=1070830013/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_11_1/028-1194848-9370933

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*Degustation*

THE JUNKMAN’S SON

by PETER SCHJELDAHL

A Philip Guston retrospective.

The New Yorker, Issue of 2003-11-03; Posted 2003-10-27

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/art/

Around 1967, Philip Guston abandoned the tremblingly sensitive, lofty

Abstract Expressionism for which he was revered. In its place came an

outburst of gross cartoon imagery: gregarious Ku Klux Klansmen with fat

cigars; one-eyed heads, like lima beans, in need of a shave; interiors

a-jumble with liquor bottles, cigarettes, food, and painting gear. Guston,

who died of a heart attack in 1980, at the age of sixty-six, had seemed

the most compunctious member of American arts greatest generation.

Intimations of figures sometimes haunted his abstractions, only to be

visibly suppressed--he was a knight of emotional restraint. When his new

work was shown in bulk at the Marlborough Gallery, in 1970, it was as

though an elegant veil had parted and out had stepped a yakking geek.

I was one of many people who hated the show, and I found myself

half-agreeing with the headline of a famous pan by Hilton Kramer, in the

Times: a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum. Mandarin seemed

wrong; a better analogy, for me, would have been mountain-dwelling

scholar-poet. But the rest fit the masochistic bearing of a style that felt

all the more grotesque for being executed with the artists insinuating

brushwork and ticklish color.

That moment retains its shock in the current Guston retrospective at the

Metropolitan. (The show began last spring at the Fort Worth Modern Art

Museum.) Reliving it, I understand both why it took me more than a

decade to come around to late Guston and why I now regard that work

as the most important American painting of its time. The reason in each

case is a traumatic upheaval of the nineteen-sixties. Late Guston belongs

among other explosive, harshly significant cultural departures of the era.

Bob Dylan, plugging in an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in

1965, also abruptly trashed a precious taste with which he had been

identified. It seems appropriate that Guston lived in Woodstock, New York,

where he had moved in 1947. His breakthrough work in 1967 even

seemed to echo underground comic-book stylists of the day, notably

R. Crumb, though evidently he was unaware of them at first. (The

resemblance points to shared influences. Both Guston and Crumb took

inspiration from such classic comic strips as George Herriman’s Krazy

Kat.) I loved rock-and-roll Dylan, but I clung to a faith in high-toned

abstraction as the pinnacle of contemporary art. Guston’s 1970 show--

in retrospect, modern paintings Appomattox--left me feeling betrayed.

Guston was born Philip Goldstein to Russian Jewish immigrants in Montreal

in 1913; he was the youngest of seven children. The family moved to Los

Angeles seven years later. Philip drew obsessively, often holed up in a

closet with a bare light bulb. (That bulb is a leitmotif in his late work.)

When he was ten or eleven years old, he found the dead body of his

father, Louis, a blacksmith who had been reduced to working as a junk-

man. Louis had hanged himself. Jackson Pollock was Guston’s classmate

and best friend in high school. Budding leftists, the two were expelled

together for leafletting against the schools emphasis on sports. Pollock

left for New York in 1930, while Guston remained in California, profiting

from friendships with cultivated older artists and intellectuals. He acquired

his lifelong passion for Old Masters--Piero della Francesca was a god to

himand embraced the Depression-era fashion of Social Realism. His

fascination with the Ku Klux Klan began early. In a drawing that he made

at the age of seventeen, a Klansman in a group that has lynched a black

man fingers a rope with apparent anguish. Guston said of the K.K.K.

figures in his late work, What would it be like to be evil? To plan, to

plot. There’s a harrowing touch of Heart of Darkness--upriver, where the

beast thrives--to this aspect of Gustons imagination.

After working on murals in Mexico, under the aegis of David Alfaro

Siqueiros, Guston moved to New York in 1935, stayed with Pollock, and

joined the mural division of the Works Progress Administration. He

married Musa McKim, an artist and poet and his inseparable companion

for the rest of his life. He hung back from the trend toward abstraction

in the work of Pollock and other friends, including Mark Rothko. In 1941,

he left New York for Iowa City and St. Louis, where he taught for six

years. As late as 1945, he was painting in a politically tinged, Surrealistic

vein. If This Be Not I is an enigmatic allegory of slum children costumed

in the manner of a Venetian carnival; the picture is notable mainly for soft

blues, dirty pinks, and other uncannily sentient colors. He finally went

abstract in the early fifties with a mode that art-world wits promptly

dubbed Abstract Impressionism: drifting masses of short, worried strokes

in delicately abrasive, glowing colors. During the next decade and a half,

that style became more dramatic, with dominant reds and blacks, broader

handling, and jostling forms like possibly living things astir in shadows.

Guston had a de Kooning-like knack for making scraps of contour that are

pregnant with descriptiveness while describing nothing but themselves. No

one has ever had a more charismatic touch. (The plangent brushstrokes

that Jasper Johns wielded with irony in his flags and targets are

Gustonesque.) To Fellini (1958), a quaking abstraction evocative of

carnival joys and fears, strikes me as a supreme feat of sheer

painterliness--existentialism la Rubens.

Plainly, something is brewing in Guston’s manner of the early and middle

sixties, as mask-like black forms hover in jam-ups of pewter grays,

ardent blues, sickish reds, and the occasional, blaring green. His achingly

self-aware drawings of the period have the stuttering air of efforts to

grasp memories that are just out of reach. Then, boom. All hell doesn’t so

much break loose as move in and set up housekeeping. Klansmen in what

look like surgically sutured hoods flagellate themselves, take spins around

toon towns in lumpy cars, engage in bang-bang-you’re-dead finger-

shooting, and paint images of themselves. Abject old shoes, some at the

ends of bodiless legs, pile up like the debris of obscure atrocities.

Belligerent arms brandish garbage-can lids. A bean-head may lie face

down on the ground, contemplate empty bottles and other tokens of bad

habits, or direct a thousand-yard stare at nothing. An oddly insistent

horseshoe shape recurs: the Greek omega. Drowning deluges of water

rise. Hilarious, weirdly compassionate caricatures of Richard Nixon, with

a colossal phlebitic leg, occupied Guston for a while. The manner of

drawing in the late work is beyond coarse; it flaunts ham-fisted

arbitrariness. (Crumb is Ingres by comparison.) But everywhere,

realizing boundless varieties of wonder, there is that buttery, tender,

wonderful stroke, and those colors like materialized day and night and

pared flesh.

Late Guston scared me. Thrashing about in my personal share of the

time’s chaos, I had thrilled to a promise, in his painting, of inviolable

aesthetic elevation. Plausible father figures were scarce in the sixties;

here was a cherished one running amok. (In a fine, sorrowful memoir by

his daughter Musa Mayer, Night Studio, which was published in 1988,

Guston emerges as a warm but relentlessly self-absorbed dad. Once, in

her early childhood, she writes, Philip spent hours making a cookie for

me, cutting up currants, marking the reins and halter of a beautiful

Greek horse...When I saw it, I cried, Oooh, my cookie, and reached for it.

But it was taken away and mounted on the wall, as art.) Now I recognize

as heroic Gustons surrender of a lifelong yearning for august refinement,

which was always strained and tinged with falseness, coming from a

tragic junkman’s son. Guston felt guilty, in later life, for having changed

his name, in 1937--for denying what he was. I got sick and tired of all that

purity! he said. His cartoon personae were thus the opposite of self-

invention. In their disorder, he found peace. For young artists who were

less interested in spiritual reassurance than in how to make the

beleaguered art of painting newly credible--in varying degrees, most of

the important painters of the past thirty years--he became a father figure

indeed. His example renews a timeless truth about creativity: the royal

road to the heights leads down.

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*Call for Artists*

from The Artist-in-Labs-Project (AIL-Project)

http://www.artistsinlabs.ch

We are pleased to announce that our research group has secured funding

from the Swiss Innovation Promotion Agency KTI, as well as commitments

from nine Swiss Science partner laboratories to proceed with a pilot

program entitled: The Residency Awards.

The deadline for artists to apply for residencies is January 5, 2004. Soon

after this date, 12 Artists will be chosen for The Residency Awards in 2004,

each with duration of 3 to 6 months.

Project proposals from artists who wish to work with the following

scientific disciplines are encouraged: Bio-chemistry, bio-technology, solar

energy, computational and information science, electron microscopy,

micro-electronics, artificial intelligence research, ecological risk

research, medicine, micro robotics, nano-technology, physics and

environmental science research.

Information including application forms, regulations and laboratory details

are available at http://www.artistsinlabs.ch . Artists from any age or

nationality may apply.

The aim of our project is to encourage education, research and innovative

processes and methods of production, which blend the disciplines of art

and science. It is assumed that innovative research basically takes place

in novel collaborative environments like these, so we wish to encourage

you all to apply.

Cheers and please see our www site for more details,

Prof. Dr. Jill Scott and René Stettler

University of Applied Sciences and Arts Zurich

Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich ( Zürcher Fachhochschule)

School of Art and Design - Forschung & Entwicklung -

Research & Development

AIL Artists in Labs Project, http://www.artistsinlabs.ch

Prof. Dr. Jill Scott, Media Artist, Project Leader, jill.scott@hgkz.ch

René Stettler, Scientific Coordinator, rene.stettler@hgkz.net

Hafnerstrasse 31

CH-8031 Zürich, Switzerland.

Tel. 0041 (0) 1 446 26 55

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*Book Grist*

NEW YORK READINGS

ANTIPODES. A North American Journal of Australian Literature, is pleased

to announce a reading by three contemporary Australian authors at the

Australian Consulate general in New York City, 150 East 42nd St., 34th flr

(one block east of Grand Central Station).

Our readers will be:

John Kinsella, acclaimed poet whose PERIPHERAL LIGHT, his most

authoritative North American collection to date, has just been published

by Norton.

Tony Perrottet, whose PAGAN HOLIDAY (published in hardcover as

ROUTE 66 AD) is a hilarious and self-aware travelogue of travelers in the

ancient world.

McKenzie Wark, author of THE VIRTUAL REPUBLIC, DISPOSITIONS, [and:

A Hacker Manifesto version 4] http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html

Reception to begin at 6:30, reading at 7. Snacks will be served and there

will be an open bar.

For more information please contact Nicholas Birns at nicbirns@aol.com

NOTED AUTHOR/SCREENWRITER JOHN SHIRLEY

Says William Gibson, author of Neuromancer:

"Barely street legal, Shirley's Bosch-like visions mark him out as perhaps

the closest thing contemporary American fantasy has to a genuine

'outsider artist.'"

Clive Barker called him

"an adventurer, returning from dark and troubled regions with visionary

tales to tell, confronting the reader with marvels and horror in equal

measure."