"Black Cake" Exhibition
Team Galllery (47 Wooster Street)
This event has ended.
Team presents a group exhibition organized by New York-based curator Alex Gartenfeld.
Various anthropologists and poets tell us that even into the 19th Century, in early spring certain Gaelic villages would partake in the tradition of Beltane by making a bonfire and a mealy cake. This latter would be divided into lots, one for each member of the tribe, and dumped into a bonnet. A single chunk was covered in dust, and the person who drew the black piece was pushed into the fire.
In his 1983 book The Ruin of Kasch, Roberto Calasso described the sweetness of the Beltane cake: "The nausea provoked by an excess of sweetness corresponds to the moment when the sacrifice should take place." Calasso's cake is a totem that declares to represent the social body, and in this respect oscillates radically between ecstatic togetherness and isolation.
Black Cake is an inter-generational exhibition that examines artists' use of sweetness across mediums and treatments. In common speech sweetness conveys authenticity, warmth, conviviality or affirmation; or just as likely, a certain dumbness, vacuousness and opacity.
Perhaps the most literal iteration of the black cake is the work of Cecily Brown, whose painting might seem to illustrate the allusion. The artist's use of color and brushstrokes, luscious and stammering, suggests the continuity of organic and synthetic materials and gestures. With a similar eye for color and affect, the frontal orientation and vernacular subjects of Josephine Halvorson's close-cropped still lives belie optical heat and an uncanny gestalt effect. For decades, Maria Lassnig has reinvented storytelling techniques with her dark fairy tale-like paintings, rendered in fleshy, acrid tones.
The Bible Part One: These Words are Alive by Tommy Hartung is, like many of the artist's videos, a large-scale work shot in handmade models. The scale of his semi-narrative social realist videos contrasts with the texture and density of his images. For Ed Atkins new, often troubling, forms of intimacy are endemic to video-imaging technologies. The patina of age and craftsmanship unites Sam Anderson's multi-part sculptures, which make multiple references to cinema.
Works in the exhibition address changing relationships between media, subject and cliché in contemporary image production by inhabiting familiar-and thus commercial-forms. Ryan McGinley's youth-oriented photographs negotiate the terms of self-expression and the sublime within the limits of mediation. In his videos, Tabor Robak inhabits the world of the video game, imbuing the fantastic form with allegory and critique. Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff's collaborative photographs document performance, revising the emancipatory potentials of self-presentation using the spontaneous affect of bohemian lifestyle photography. Massimo Grimaldi's slideshows, comprising pictures of under-privileged children in Third World countries, interrogate the power of the image-maker and the redemptive logic of charity.
In popular media, sweetness has been evacuated of its nutritional value, but not its use value. By emphasizing the sociability of form, featured artists engage the transitivity of the network, where social relations might be elaborated, functionalized and fetishized. David Scanavino manually installs brightly colored linoleum tiles to uncover the sentiment suppressed in official styles. Monica Bonvicini takes the lavish surfaces of modern architecture beyond their logical ends, creating seductive, violent surfaces. In his pedestal sculptures Sterling Ruby riffs on the romanticism of anonymous public expressions.
Featured artists seize upon Calasso's aphorism, "After the revolution, progress forgets sweetness," to consider notions of temporality in both the production and circulation of the work. Steffani Jemison's videos comprise tropes appropriated from early cinema, drawn out to stage and suspend empathy with the subject. The intensity of Lari Pittman's works results from his vigorous mixing of genre images, but also the texture and luminosity of the painting.
[Image: David Scanavino "Not Yet Titled" (2012-13) VCT tile, fish glue, MDF, 75 x 96 x 360 in.]
Media
Schedule
from January 10, 2013 to February 16, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-01-10 from 18:00 to 20:00