Reviews

In which Suzanne Wise follows the yellow brick road to two shows:
Kim Kimball at Pierogi and
Omer Fast & Akiko Ichikawa at Momenta Art

In the movie "The Wizard of Oz," the big punch line of the whole story is Dorothy’s discovery of the Wizard who turns out to be a fumbling, ordinary mortal creating a mythic identity of power and greatness behind a big curtain. The artist, like the wizard (like God), is responsible, of course, for our excellent adventures in the otherworlds of galleries and museums. Two shows open now in Williamsburg reveal the artist as the shyster that s/he is (and aims to be).

Pierogi 2000 (177 N. 9th St., 599-2144) presents "Enthusiasm," video and installation by Kim Kimball, on view until October 9, and Momenta Art (72 Berry St.) presents a video work by Omer Fast and a wall drawing and installation by Akiko Ichikawa, on view until October 16.

According to my dictionary, "enthusiasm" is "an ecstasy of mind provoked by divine inspiration." It is also "extravagant hope and confidence of success." Kim Kimball is out to punch holes in these airy, high-minded sentiments so often romantically associated with The Artist. Kimball shows us the air gushing out of the punching bag that is today’s New York artist. And we get to watch as he jabs and jabs.

Entering "Enthusiasm" is in fact like walking into an exploded pinata of agitprop artistic artifacts. One is confronted by a fury of props — loudly colored tools of an artist’s workshop that refer ironically to spiritual inspiration as well as to the nuts and bolts of art. Shrine-like accumulations of objects — plastic flowers, plastic letters, jewelry and other knickknacks — sit side by side with objects that refer to art-making and perception: a box of pipe cleaners; a color wheel that revolves like a pinwheel and is powered by an ancient sewing machine; a magnifying glass; actual paintings (figurative ones plus portraits of the word "enthusiam") and long party-esque multi-colored chains made of pipe cleaners that have been twisted into rings and dangle from ceiling to floor (at the crowded opening, visitors couldn’t keep their hands off them: loops were peered through, chains were fondled and swung).

The installation also refers to the body and more specifically the body of the image-, object- and sound-maker that is the artist. In addition to the aforementioned paraphernalia are a plastic representation of the respiratory system; clothes hung on the wall (including a Joseph Beuysian set of brown pants and shirt with a bunny mask); and a series of stills from Kimball’s videos that feature the artist’s head and upper torso distorted by a magnifying glass.

All these props are referred to or make guest appearances in the background of the videos. The little TV set sitting unobtrusively in the corner by two twin beds and two elaborately dressed dolls plays 75 minutes worth of short videos created by Kimball. Viewers quickly become acquainted with the central metaphor/image of Kimball’s videowork as foreshadowed by the still photos. Stretched and squeezed and swollen in all manner of uncomfortable contortions, the artist’s body appears to be under assault. And it is our gaze through the punishing magnifying glass that is doing the damage. This is body art based on an S&M rapport with the viewer. This is body art that’s a hoax (it’s all done with mirrors!).

Kimball, who appears alone and speaks to the camera or sometimes on the telephone to an unknown other, plays a number of wacky characters. Many are insecure New York artists or visitors to New York who have something to say about the Big Apple. All are bombastic yet full of insecure giggles and other nervous ticks. The cast includes insurance salesman Bob Oliver from Minnesota who has just let his kids loose on St. Marks Place; Jimmy Ray from Ft. Lauderdale who thinks New York is "fuckin’ great," and the reoccurring appearance of a desperate whiny artist who seems on the verge of tears as his brags about the new Chelsea building he’s just bought and is going to rent out ("I’m gonna charge plenty .... the only problem is ... I don’t have any ideas."), talks up his show at Blow Art gallery ("The gallery turned out to be bigger than I thought so I put in some sculpture I did in college."); or complains about some guy who’s unfairly been given a show ("He doesn’t even have to work a full-time job .... his dad invented curly fries!").

Beyond poking fun at the art world, there is an exploration of sound and articulation, as well as painterly intersections of figure and abstraction. The fast-talking, self-justifying personas dissolve into pixilated blocks of color and bleepy sounds. In "Wadjasay?" a contorting head plunges into spongy swatches of color. And instead of speech, we hear sounds that range from the plaintive to the partying ("Ha cha cha cha!"). Language here is a system that breaks down in conjunction with notions of a unified self. But the speech act remains—as much a bodily impulse as sex or mark making.

Kimball’s 20 odd videos can be read as part of a whole: a manifesto of sorts where the fragmentary nature of the self — an infinite subjectivity — faces off against the art world’s objectification of the artist. While Kimball mocks those who embrace the hierarchical world of galleries in the great aim of achieving celebrityhood, he also embraces insider know-how of art history and the art world. Much of the humor depends on familiarity with the trials and tribulations of being a contemporary emerging artist, from the all-important Packet (prepared and sent to the right galleries to get the show) to grant-writing workshops to anxiety of art historical influences.

For me, the freshest moments in the videos were those that journeyed past easy targets into more abstract and fragmented territory. The massing of artistic props and materials within the gallery space and the repetition of similar imagery (the anxious contortionist) throughout the videos seemed sometimes like the nervous chatter of one of Kimball’s characters. I most enjoyed the videos that had more quietly odd (though always very funny) moments, such as in "Wadjasay?", "Birth of the Uncool," which features dancing vowels, and "Hail and Two Sneezes," which depicts the events of its title and is a lyrical capturing of an unexpected act of nature meeting an unexpected and banal act of the body.

Like Kimball, Omer Fast appears in his own work as a multiplicitous creator of the work we are viewing. However, unlike Kimball, Fast appears not as a character or characters but as a poker-faced manipulator of sounds. He is the wizard behind the curtain that creates the sound track to accompany a series of portraits of buildings--mostly homes--in a small Montana town.

But, like Kimball, there is no curtain for Fast to hide behind. Instead of a supposed reality on the outside and the backstage engineer who creates the simulation from the inside, we are presented with two adjacent worlds inside two video monitors.

What we see most immediately in the first video monitor is an everyplace suburban landscape: building after building--mostly homes complete with tidy little lawns, garages and driveways--is centered before the lens of the camera. We see all manner of architectural eccentricity and adornment: columns, fancy door trim, peaked roofs, turrets. Every structure, even the most grand, appears quaint in its careful details, its hopeful domestic self-expression when lined up with so many others.

Although we are also usually given views of the edges of neighboring homes and yards, a swath of paved road, a sidewalk and the occasional jogger or child toddling by, the landscapes feel empty, unpeopled. An oversized vehicle parked out front or a garbage can dwarfing the dwelling behind it seems more owner of the house we see than any human.

Along with these ordinary yet colorful images of a small- town residential neighborhood, we hear banal suburban sounds such as insects buzzing, birds chirping, a dog barking, and a car passing through the foreground. The other monitor, however, reveals that these sounds are faked. We see here Fast at work. With dead-pan intensity, he mouths the barking of a dog, insects, wind, engines, etc. Sometimes the sounds overlap. Fast is sometimes one and sometimes three or more, appearing in various cubes of a split-up screen.

While the artifice Fast creates is quickly revealed, a strange deeper mystery is generated. The stream of structures we see in the first video is now proven to be inhabiting a space that has been robbed of sound. We realize that whatever comfortingly familiar noises we hear have been supplied for our viewing pleasure. The fact that the sounds are accurate and appropriate to the scene at hand and yet are a trick makes us doubt the assumptions and nostalgic associations we have about suburban American life.

As a result, there is a closed-down, shuttered feeling to the procession of manmade American dwellings and the accompanying sounds that are a mixture of the manmade and a domesticated, overly familiar nature. The buildings become like a lineup of crime suspects. We never see an overview of neighborhood, just facades with their blank-eyed windows. Sometimes the dwellings are bold in color, appearing flat against the sky like thin cardboard sets. Other times the buildings appear crouched in shadows, porches and entryways and windows lost to darkness.

While Fast never speaks, his performance becomes our anchor in the face of the other silent world. His focused and precise recreation of familiar sounds is strangely compelling and even dramatic such as when he makes the sound of a passing car by moving his entire body in one sweeping gesture past the microphone. It is interesting to note that Fast’s sound room, a vaguely homey (kitchen-looking cabinets, bar stools) space, is the only interior we are invited to see.

It could be said that Fast, who is a native of Israel, is adeptly creating a metaphor for what it means to be outside of a language and a culture. For me, Fast’s humbly elegant work travels beyond this formulation. Creating a convergence of constructed experience and documentary reportage, what is foreign or remote comes to be the realization of any culture’s longed-for--and mythologized--notion of home or community. Language and its explaining powers go quiet in the face of the distance between such simple desires and an opaque physical world. In place of speech, what we normally think of as background noise reigns. Birds, insects, wind, a lawn mower revving up, the vroom of a car passing through the foreground.

Like Fast and Kimball, Akiko Ichikawa is interested in eroding our knee-jerk formulations of the world. Unlike Fast and Kimball, she withholds much of the connecting tissue of metaphor. Instead, we get arrested narrative, we get broken down or yet to be built structures.

Entering Momenta, visitors are met with cinder blocks and bricks in towers and piles. Navigating around the stacks, in search of "the art," one finds drawings on the wall in colored electrical tape. Wearing tank tops and old-fashioned ear protectors, these slim-figured 1950s-era wrestlers appear at first as the kind of simplistic illustrations you’d see in yesteryear’s textbooks.

The problems arises in trying to read the actions of these anonymous characters. One can’t add the lines up. One can’t quite connect the dots. The intersecting bodies wipe each other out mid-struggle. Lines that, according to the rules of realistic illustration, should be used to give shape to a figure are in the wrong places. Oddly drawn, the lines appear to be rigs or snags or holes in the flesh. Moments of violence jumps out as one attempts to discern one body from another: a head with loose hair being smashed into the ground; a man posed so that he appears to be straddling someone in an almost sexual yet violent embrace.

Is this sport or assault? Is wrestling a metaphor for wrestling with the materials of making art? I want to resist such straight translations. Trace pencil lines at the edges of the images etched with the bold colored tape suggest something more mysterious. The faint marks gives the affect of ghost figures or ghost actions not complete but not withheld. Those traces marks remind me of the now-vanished artist at work lifting and moving cinder blocks and bricks. What’s left by her, however, is not a firm and lasting structure. It is not a building or an easily readable form.

While Ichikawa’s enigmatic work corresponds to the destablizing efforts of both Kimball and Fast, what’s different here is the lack of a fixed starting point, a place of origin. Instead, we get literal building blocks but no building. We get story lines but no story. We get aftermath. And I admit I left the gallery feeling that I was missing something. Maybe it was the wizard who didn’t stick around waiting to be discovered, who seemed to have left a long time ago.