Video Artist Chen Chieh-jen's Mesmerizing Take on Image-Making

Video artist Chen Chieh-jen offers a mesmerizing take on the politics of image-making.

Globalization, we've been told, creates new markets and wealth, even as it causes widespread suffering, disorder, and unrest. At home, we've come to know the effects of globalization through campaigns like Live Earth and the United Colors of Benetton. But how is globalization pictured from abroad? What images are artists in marginalized countries marshaling to describe their experiences, and what do these say about us?
One answer is contained in "Condensation," an exhibition of five films by the Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-jen, now on view at the Asia Society. Chen's first major solo outing in the U.S., this exhibition heralds the arrival of a major new talent. An artist deeply committed to investigating the politics of image-making, this show demonstrates Chen's especially canny ability to recover haunting, memorable images from stories vastly underrepresented by the politics of mechanical reproduction.

Going where Magnum and AP have rarely gone before, Chen represents his native land as an isolated place, a nation unable to write its own narrative and largely excluded from the dominant flow of world history. "Taiwan has become a fast-forgetting consumer society that has abandoned its right to self-narration," the artist declares in the museum press release, "and this has spurred me to resist the tendency to forget."

A diagnosis that invokes less the "difference" of postcolonial academics than a trade unionstyle universalism, Chen's overt politics of image-making are of the kind once associated with the old humanist left. Examinations, even critiques of our present global economic system, Chen's films—whose work with non-actors recalls the neorealism of Vittorio De Sica while echoing the stylings of Michelangelo Antonioni—mesmerize the eye through long pans and gorgeous attention to human detail, while giving the ear what amounts to the silent treatment.

Deploying a brilliant strategy that activates the expressive possibilities of silent film, Chen amplifies the work's meditative nature by eschewing all spoken lines, voice- overs, and music. The opposite of an MTV video, Chen's works bulk up their sparse action with added, subtle symbolism, the better to underline correspondences between his poetic representations and the hardscrabble conditions they portray.

One work, for example, The Route, re-edits the 1995 Liverpool dockworkers strike—an event that gained transnational importance when longshoremen from around the world refused to unload a U.K. cargo ship in solidarity with English workers—while providing an alternative ending: a staged picket line staffed by Taiwanese dockworkers, many of whom participated in breaking the original boycott. Another video, Factory, is a textbook example of how to meaningfully dramatize real-life events and make extremely abstract phenomena, like multinational industry's relentless quest for cheap labor, painfully concrete. Containing footage of former garment workers perambulating inside their previous place of employ, Factory portrays its fiftysomething seamstresses through the kind of detail—nearly five unforgettable minutes are spent on one woman's futile attempt to thread a needle—that turns the essentially documentary nature of Chen's films epic.

But of all of Chen's works on view, one in particular is capable of an extended commentary on the nature and history of both the still and moving image. Titled Lingchi—Echoes of a Historical Photograph, the piece pitilessly reenacts a Chinese torture that in the West came to be known as "death by a thousand cuts." Based on a group of 1904 photographs taken by French sailors that Georges Bataille, among others, notoriously reproduced in his book The Tears of Eros, Chen's film takes as its subject a particularly nasty bit of history situated solidly within a clusterfuck of cultural misconceptions.

Images of a gruesome death sentence, photographs of lingchi traveled throughout Europe as shocking postcards whose purpose was both perverse entertainment and ideological education. Souvenirs of brutality, they proved uniquely capable of condemning those portrayed—torturer, victim, and spectator alike—to the status of inferior beings. The subjects of these pictures remained backward and exotic nearly until our present day. Rescuing them from objecthood via film is part of Chen's artistic mission; so is his querying of our contemporary ambivalence to the unending stream of real and fictional media violence.

An excruciating if gorgeous 24 minutes long, Chen's Lingchi makes affecting art from material that, despite its historical remoteness, is much more present now than it has been in decades. Crafted from images that echo the digital age's snuff stuff—think repeating 9/11 footage and beheading videos on the Internet—Chen portrays the dismemberment of a person as something happening not to abstract concepts (like white devils or Orientals) but to a human being, with both savagery and empathy (and everything in between) left intact.

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Death Metal Artist Banks Violette's First NY Solo Show in Five Years

Banks Violette tones down the death metal, but still torches drums.

Metaphorically speaking, the artist Banks Violette is hunkered down in the parental basement done up like a dungeon. The door is locked, and he refuses to come out. Faithful to a youthful romanticism that makes a cult of destructive musicians, violence, satanic imagery, and monks' robes, the 34-year-old artist has not outgrown the Death Metal thing that has made him a sort of art anti-hero. In a colloquy published recently in Flash Art, he claimed to be "just as involved with that subculture as I am in the art world." He mixes the two freely. His previous installations have alluded to a church burning, Kurt Cobain's suicide, the ritual killing of a teenage girl by three male classmates who were inspired by Slayer, and the murder of a musician by two members of a Norwegian Black Metal band (he also collaborated with one of the two convicted musicians, Snorre Ruch, for a piece at the Whitney). Yet what distinguishes Violette from the usual horde of skull-mad goth artists is his ability to turn cheesy adolescent rebellion into something sexy. And, more perverse, to do it thoughtfully.
Mounted in two galleries—Team in Soho and Gladstone in Chelsea—Violette's first New York solo show in five years draws its energy less from Death Metal than from recent art history, especially the hyper-intellectualized, anti-romantic Minimalist and post-Minimalist '60s art you might imagine him hating. The music has evolved, too—as he did last year in London, Violette has collaborated on a soundtrack with Stephen O'Malley, of the drone-metal band Sunn O))), and vocalist Attila Csihar. In London, the band played inside the gallery—Csihar singing from inside a coffin—while the audience was kept outside to listen. This time, they recorded the soundtrack—a sort of chanted throat song-—at Team, though you can hear it only at Gladstone, the well-deep droning buzzing your bones. Still, O'Malley's music isn't the most dramatic effect Violette has conjured: That award must go to Team's smashed and flaming drum kit—yes, real flames—strewn before a wall of fluorescent light tubes shooting out in rays from an upside-down fluorescent deer's head, which shelters an inverted cross in its antler rack.

In fact, Violette's over-the-top theatrics link him intimately with the austere Minimalism to which his installations so often refer. The big critical gripe against Minimalism was that it was theatrical: It included the "beholder," the audience, in the experience of the work. Violette transforms this abstract theory into something bluntly literal and lavish: He makes sculptural objects out of the theatrical elements—except that his theater is the concert hall. And, like any good headbanger who's also an aficionado of post-Minimalist artist Robert Smithson, Violette relishes entropy. It's not the pristine apparatuses of a concert that will become his sculptural objects, but destroyed amps and drum kits.

In both galleries, the floors are painted a shiny black, and the entirety of the show is rigorously monochromatic: The objects are black, white, or silver, shiny or matte. Everywhere, modernist grids are disorganizing. At Gladstone, a refrigerated, wall-size grid of rectangular aluminum sheets seems to fall apart, its plates crumpling onto the floor while ice and fog form on its edges. The white ice crystals also visually echo a grid of corrugated soundproofing board, made entirely of salt, that hangs in an adjoining room. The salt forms seem to be eroding; the ice on the aluminum grid gradually evaporates. Near another grid—this one inadvertently formed by the garage door serving as the gallery wall—a low stage of black epoxy supports the shattered remains of an amplifier cast in salt. The dispersed pieces of the amplifier, as well as those of the drum kit at Team, seem like hyper-dramatized versions of the scatter pieces that Minimalists Barry Le Va and Robert Morris created some 40 years ago.

Not that you need to get the show's many references to enjoy the spectacle. Consider, for instance, the fluorescent light tubes hung in a rectangle above an elegant frame structure that looks like a jungle gym built from black four-by-fours in one room at Gladstone. You could ponder the allusion to Keith Sonnier or Dan Flavin ('60s artists who used tube lighting), or simply groove on how, at one end, the rigid structure falls apart into a tangled wreck of wire, glowing tubes, and black beams.

For all the entropic decay here, there is no disorder: Violette constructs an installation as precisely as a stage set, with none of the shaggy qualities one might expect from someone in a concert T-shirt. Sure, some of it—like the flaming drum kit—is a little overblown, and some feels a little slick. But all this calculated drama makes for a killer performance, one that reverberates long after you've left the show.

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Jes Brinch @ V1 Gallery, Copenhagen

V1 Gallery presents:
The Perversions of Mechanical Normality

An exhibition by:
Jes Brinch
Opening day: August 10, 2007
Opening period: August 10, 2007 - September 2, 2007

V1 Galllery proudly presents The Perversions of Mechanical Normality, Jes Brinch’s first solo show at V1.

On August 10th the notoric outsider Jes Brinch lands in V1 Gallery with a comprehensive solo exhibition entitled The Perversions of Mechanical Normality. The exhibition, questioning the abiding norms of society, is a distillation of the artistic experiences Jes Brinch has made throughout his career. At the same time The Perversions of Mechanical Normality bears the stamp of Jes Brinch’s life in both Vietnam and Denmark.

The Perversions of Mechanical Normality is a humdrum of materials and themes joined together by a red thread of thoughts on – and critique of – modern life. The monumental and majestic marble of the antique style intertwines with the concrete of modernity, colourful tapestries of silk and nylon, see-through sound installations and paintings while existentialist contemplations merge with (gallows) humoristic reflections on absurd everyday situations.

In The Perversions of Mechanical Normality the viewer meets Self-Hate, the man in marble scolding his own mirror reflection: ”Don’t ever funcking do that again you fucking idiot!”, Colonial Romance, an elderly marble man in trunks trying to kiss a young asian woman (a commix of a classic motif by Gauguin and Jes Brinch’s own observations of the sex turism in Vietnam) and Head, a surreal portrait of a meditative state where the mind literally flows out of the cranium. The viewer can ascend the three Chinese concrete mountains Mountain of Tradition, Moutain of Love and Mountain of Friendship, manifesting the hypocritical aspects of the words: tradition, love and friendship. And she can get lost in modern society’s sometimes incomprehensible authority and status systems, that Jes Brinch has mapped out on soft tapestries – e.g. Lifestyle Suicide, in which you catch a glimpse of a man who has to stand on his Wegner chair in order to get a noose around his neck. All of the physical works are framed by a soundtrack produced specifically for the exhibition.

Today Jes Brinch is officially recognised as one of Denmark’s most important contemporary artists. He is currently living in Vietnam with his vietnamese girlfriend. The Perversions of Mechanical Normality was produced in Vietnam in 2007 with the support of the Danish Arts Council. The day after The Perversions of Mechanical Normality opens at V1 Gallery, the exhibition The Human Mind by Jes Brinch og Per Elbke opens on VesterfÊlledvej 7A.

We are looking forward to seeing you.

V1 Gallery. Absalonsgade 21B. 1655 Kbh V. www.v1gallery.com
Wed-Fri: 2pm –6pm. Sat: 12pm – 4pm. Jes Brinch will be available for interviews in the week prior to the opening. For more information on the exhibition please contact V1 Gallery:
+(45) 33 31 03 21 / +(45) 26 82 81 66 / elg@v1gallery.com.
Thank you Danish Arts Council, Tuborg, Pernod & Nanna Thylstrup for text.

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Spielberg sued over painting on FBI's list

The Oscar-winning film-maker Steven Spielberg is facing a courtroom battle over a valuable painting that he bought in good faith 18 years ago, only to learn this year that it was on the FBI’s list of the most-wanted stolen works.

The director of some of cinema’s biggest box-office successes, including Jaws, ET and Jurassic Park, avidly collects the 20th-century American artist Norman Rockwell, whose Russian Schoolroom was one of his prized works – until he discovered that it was stolen 34 years ago. The oil painting, measuring 16 by 37 inches (6.3cm by 14.6cm), was taken from Arts International, a gallery in Missouri, part of a chain of US galleries that belonged to Jack Solomon.

It disappeared without trace until 1988, when it surfaced at a New Orleans auction, changing hands for $70,000. Mr Spielberg bought it a year later from Judy Goffman Cutler, a Rhode Island art dealer, for a reported $200,000.

Today, its value has soared to about $700,000 (£350,000) and it is the subject of two lawsuits. In the first, filed in the Nevada federal court, Mr Solomon – whose gallery chain went bankrupt in 1996 – is suing both Mr Spielberg and the FBI, claiming that the work belongs to him.

He alleges that the FBI wrongly allowed Mr Spielberg to keep the painting despite knowing of the theft.

In the second case, Ms Goffman Cutler has filed suit in New York against Mr Solomon and the Art Loss Register (ALR), the British agency with an international database of 200,000 stolen artworks, which Mr Solomon asked to assist in recovering the painting. She asserts that Mr Spielberg severed his business relationship with her shortly after Mr Solomon made his accusations and is demanding $25 million (£12.3 million) for losing Mr Spielberg “as a client” and damage to her reputation.

She claims that she has acquired good title in the work and that Mr Solomon’s interest in the work ended when his business went bankrupt – although he maintains he never gave up title to the work. Mr Spielberg’s spokesman, Marvin Levy, told The Times yesterday: “We are the innocent victim in all of this. [Steven] bought it in good faith.”

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Linda Yablonsky on Banks Violette and Lydia Lunch

Sometimes the most ordinary events can seem historic. Witness the divine convergence of punk and punter last Thursday, when spoken-wordsmith Lydia Lunch performed live in New York for the first time in more than a decade, and Prince of Darkness Banks Violette greeted his opening at both Barbara Gladstone and Team with a disappearing act.

ARTFORUM.COM: The call came from the Gladstone gallery about an hour before its doors were to open on Violette’s blue-chip Chelsea solo debut. “Banks is still working on the installation,” Miciah Hussey told me with studied nonchalance. “So the show will open next Friday, but we’re going ahead with the dinner tonight.” I couldn’t help but wonder about the delay; something to do with propane. I had been planning to see the show, of course; I wasn’t planning to rush. Now I was dying to go. Alas, I would have to occupy myself till dinner.

“My problem . . .” Lydia Lunch was saying when I got to Leo Koenig. “My problem is that I have too much fucking e-lec-tri-ci-ty.” The onetime punk priestess, briefly in town from her home in Barcelona, actually did electrify old-guard New Wavers who turned out for her single performance at the gallery, where she also had several color photo montages on display. Filmmaker Scott B was there to video her program, serendipitously titled “Hangover Hotel,” for possible use in a kind of where-they-are-now documentary that he is making about the East Village Super-8 movie scene of the late ’70s. That was when the cool people expected to spend at least one night of the week watching semiamateur but oddly compelling films by the B’s (Scott and his then partner Beth B, who made New Wave noirs in which Lunch frequently starred), Jim Jarmusch, James Nares, Vivienne Dick, Amos Poe, and Becky Johnston.

Lunch is a voluptuous tattooed beauty who, if memory serves, is the daughter of a Bible salesman and arrived in New York at sixteen to take the underground music scene by storm with Teenage Jesus & the Jerks.

She formed a few other bands before reinventing herself as a ’90s fetish feminist who spoke out for the resistance to violence against women, collaborated with Nick Cave and Thurston Moore, took up with composer J. G. Thirwell (aka Foetus), and left town to write books, start a record label, tour her shows, and make art. She is a compelling subject for a film, but she remains most effective on a stage, and it didn’t take long for her to find a groove at Koenig. You could see it in the upturned faces of other performers in attendance, Karen Finley and Reno, Bush Tetras guitarist Pat Place (who costarred with Lunch in Vivienne Dick’s 1978 short She Had Her Gun All Ready), and musician Pat Irwin, from the Raybeats, Eight-Eyed Spy, and the B-52’s.

Then it was time for dinner. Or at least I thought it was, but dinner was still a long way off when I arrived at Indochine. Making my way through the bar, I spotted Maureen Paley and Joel Wachs, Richard Flood and Barbara Jakobson, Clarissa Dalrymple and Neville Wakefield, and Keith Sonnier and Jane Rosenblum. I did not see Banks Violette. “Barbara has too much class to start without Banks,” I heard Dalrymple say of Gladstone. “I don’t think he’s going to make it,” Times Style man David Colman reckoned. “I think he might be embarrassed the show didn’t open,” ventured Gladstone Gallery director Rosalie Benitez. I asked Team Gallery owner Jose Freire what was going on. “It’s been a very complicated installation,” he told me, blaming himself for spreading his artist too thin. There were lights it had taken a master electrician two weeks to wire. There was refrigeration. And there was that nasty propane.

By now, a couple of hours in, the evening had acquired a mystique it would never have achieved had the guest of honor or his art been within easy reach. “Brilliant marketing,” I told Gladstone. “Yes,” she agreed with a nervous laugh. “We’ve been planning it for weeks!” Finally, even Gladstone had to admit defeat. Violette wasn’t coming; dinner was served. Collectors Eileen and Michael Cohen were at my table, hidden behind a column with their collector friend Wendy Goldberg, a senior vice president at Six Flags. A moment later, Nancy Spector came over to join us, saying there was no room at her table. Violette’s good-looking bad-boy compadres Dan Colen and Aaron Young soon followed, in the company of Yvonne Force. It seems that the inner circle does just fine without its center. “Oh, I own a work of yours,” said Goldberg when she was introduced to Young. “And I have work of yours,” Eileen Cohen told Colen. They were meeting for the first time, too—sitting there was very copacetic. Later, I heard that Violette had spent the night at a Brooklyn bar. I don’t know whether it’s true, but I will bet that if he were a female artist, few people would be so amused.

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HuskMitNavn @ Vicious Gallery, Hamburg

WINNERS OF THE CARNEGIE ART AWARD 2008!

We are happy to announce the prize winners of the Carnegie Art Award 2008. The first prize of 1 million Swedish kronor will go to Torsten Andersson from Sweden. Danish Jesper Just will receive the second prize of SEK 600.000 and John Kørner, also from Denmark will receive the third prize of SEK 400.000. The scholarship to a young artist of SEK 100.000 will go to Nathalie Djurberg from Sweden.

The award ceremony will take place at the opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki on 25 October 2007.

The artists participating in the Carnegie Art Award 2008 have now been selected!
Out of 143 nominated Nordic artists 26 artists have now been chosen. In the end of June 2007 the jury will gather for their second meeting to compile the exhibition and select the prize winners. The recipients of the awards will be announced on June 29 2007.

The 26 artists of the Carnegie Art Award 2008
Out of 143 nominated Nordic artists 26 artists were chosen by the Jury to participate in the touring exhibition.
Thordis Aðalsteinsdóttir (IS), Torsten Andersson (SE), Nathalie Djurberg (SE), Gardar Eide Einarsson (NO), Anette H. Flensburg (DK),
Jens Fänge (SE), Else Marie Hagen (NO), Ellen Hyllemose (DK), Jarl Ingvarsson (SE), Kristina Jansson (SE), Jesper Just (DK),
Pertti Kekarainen (FI), Jukka Korkeila (FI), Ferdinand Ahm Krag (DK), John Kørner (DK), Tor-Magnus Lundeby (NO), Jussi Niva (FI),
Fie Norsker (DK), Allan Otte (DK), Vesa-Pekka Rannikko (FI), Silja Rantanen (FI), Kirstine Roepstorff (DK), Thorbjørn Sørensen (NO),
Anna Tuori (FI), Thór Vigfússon (IS), Karin Wikström (SE).

Preliminary exhibition tour 2008
Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki: 26 October 2007 - 6 January 2008
Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo: 1 February 2008 - 30 March 2008
Den Frie Udstilling, Copenhagen: 18 April 2008 - 25 May 2008
Listasafn Kópavogs, Kópavogur / Reykjavík: 18 June 2008 - 10 August 2008
Konstakademien, Stockholm: 5 September 2008 - 26 October 2008
Royal College of Art, London: 15 November 2008 - 23 November 2008
Göteborgs konstmuseum: 5 December 2007 - 1 February 2008

The Jury of the Carnegie Art Award 2008
Tuula Arkio, Counselor for Cultural Affairs, honorary PhD in Visual Arts, Helsinki (Chairman)
Gunnar J. Árnason, Lecturer at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and art critic, Reykjvik
Ina Blom, Associate Professor, IFIKK - Dept. of Art History, University of Oslo
Mikkel Bogh, Rector of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen
Maaretta Jaukkuri, Senior curator, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki
Lars Nittve, Museum Director, Moderna Museet, Stockholm
María de Corral, Art critic and independent curator, Madrid

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Gavin Turk: Me as Him @ Riflemaker Gallery

Andy Warhol and Gavin Turk have a lot in common.

Both artists are, after all, immediately recognised for transforming everyday objects into works ofart — such as Warhol's iconic Campbell's soup paintings and Turk's bronze bin bags. Similarly, Warhol and Turk both examine the concept and boundaries of "original art": Warhol was known to enlist "collaborators" to carry out his instructions, while Turk has exhibited several works conceived by other artists, replacing the subject with his own image. In this exhibition, Turk appears as Warhol in his "Fright Wig" paintings, taking on the master of self-promotion at his own game while raising further questions about the nature of authorship.

Riflemaker Gallery (79 Beak Street, W1, 020.7439.0000) Tube: Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus, Tottenham Court Road.

Tue 3 July - Sat 8 Sep (10am-6pm)

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Peter Blake at Tate Liverpool

Pop art seduced Peter Blake, but did it make him happy?

The best definition of pop art I have come across is, predictably, Andy Warhol’s. “Pop art,” drawled the great reducer, “is liking things.” It is an idiotic insight, the kind of opinion a six-year-old might have mouthed, but it is also perfect, because it manages in five supremely uncomplicated words to nail down the emotional thrust of the movement while alerting us to all of its shortcomings. Liking things is good. But surely there needs to be more to it than that?

With the better pop artists, there obviously was. With the lesser ones, there probably wasn’t. I would definitely place Peter Blake in the first group. His poignant retrospective at Tate Liverpool unveils an artist who likes most of the things pop artists can generally be expected to like – girlies, pop stars, wrestlers, comics, advertising signs, Marilyn Monroe – but who likes them gloomily and damply, as if they brought him lots of solace and little joy. Blake is capable of charm and jokiness, even the odd touch of blankness. But, in the end, the overwhelming emotion you sense in him is desperation. Yes, he likes things, but as grimly as a capsized sailor likes his lifeboat.

He was born in 1932, in Dartford, Kent, and much is made of the fact that he spent the war years away from home, an evacuee to the countryside. The war took away his childhood, it is said, and forced him to recreate it later by sticking images of girlies and pop stars into his pictures, where a real teenager would have stuck them on a bedroom wall. I accept some of this: the masturbatory loneliness of the teenage English onanist is a mood Blake certainly captures all the way through his 50-year career. However, having explored Dartford, I can also testify to an endemic gloominess to those parts that would have been Blake’s inheritance had the war happened or not. It’s a Kent thing: a flatness, a dampness, a grimness that comes with the territory.

The Tate show immerses you in it straightaway, with a row of small grey paintings done while Blake was still at art school, the bleakest of which shows two schoolboys standing in a field with their hands in the pockets of their shorts, fiddling glumly with their privates. Neither acknowledges the other. Both stare sadly ahead. Even the badges they have pinned to their lapels are sad badges. One seems to be advertising membership of a club for dog-spotters. Another gets you into the cinema on Saturdays. It is 1955 and, judging by the hopeless demeanour of these two lost chappies, with their sticky-out ears and knobbly knees, there is absolutely nothing in Britain to look forward to.

A few years later, in 1961, Blake outs himself as one of the glum schoolboys by painting his famous Self Portrait with Badges, in which he shows himself dressed from head to toe in ill-fitting denim, his chest busy again with badges, clutching an Elvis book. His pose repeats the schoolboy one: standing bolt upright, staring straight ahead, as if a car had caught him in its headlights. On its most superficial level, it is a picture about liking things – Pepsi-Cola gets a badge, as do the American flag and Elvis. But, beneath the surface, it is about knowing what a comic figure you cut; about noting your own podgy inelegance; about hating what you see.

The grim 1950s, whose drizzly mood the young Blake is so excellent at capturing, eventually slink back into their bedsit, to be replaced by the vibrant, snazzy and tempting 1960s, whose pace he turns out to be equally skilled at recording. He was teaching at St Martin’s School of Art by then, and the resulting immersion in the moods of London in the 1960s immediately ups the tempo of his art. The grim little paintings of staring schoolboys give way to a series of brightly coloured shrines devoted to the sexy new gods imported from America.

A typical Blake of the period would surround a few delightful photos of Marilyn, cut out of fan magazines, with a striking op-art frame painted onto rough wood with lurid household emulsions. We know from interviews that these lively bits of homemade heraldry were intended as a sly riposte to Jasper Johns, the American painter whose painted targets and flags were – and still are – considered to be among the most revolutionary artworks of the 1950s. By quoting Johns alongside Elvis and the Everly Brothers, Blake pays homage to the American dream, but because he is British, and cursed with the sarcastic gene, there is a mocking note.

The show contains a fine assortment of these shrines. There is a famous one devoted to the Beatles, another to the Beach Boys. Girlie Door, from 1959, has Sophia Loren sniffing sexily at a flower while Marilyn shows off her legs below. The catalogue suggests complex readings of these eminently watchable classics, but I don’t sense any complication in them. All we are witnessing is a pent-up British libido worshipping the objects of its desire in a very British fashion. British DIY at its wonkiest is capturing British nostalgia at its fiercest.

Blake’s most famous contribution to our culture – his iconic cover for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album – gets short shrift in this display. The rest of us might believe it to be a crowning achievement, but its designer clearly thinks differently. The whole Sgt Pepper adventure is dealt with cursorily and grudgingly in a tiny alcove. Instead, the show dwells on what was surely the most regrettable interlude in Blake’s career: his sad involvement, in the 1970s, with the ludicrous Brotherhood of Ruralists.

I had better watch what I say here. The last time I criticised the Ruralists at any sort of length, I was rounded upon afterwards in a BBC lift by Ian Dury, the late pop singer and a former pupil of Blake’s, who threatened to bash me up if I ever spoke badly of his teacher again. The Ruralists were formed on March 21, 1975 (the spring solstice, alas), and their loudly declared ambition was to revive British art by returning it to its rural roots. To that end, the Ruralist cast moved out of London and into the countryside, forming a loose painting fraternity that specialised in fairy pictures and florid Shakespearian topics necessitating the inclusion of half-naked girls.

Titania was a favourite subject; Ophelia another.

Blake was, unquestionably, the best of the Ruralists, but even he could not avoid their central failing – not, I now see, being a bunch of dirty old men leching after young girls in the woods, but the far more serious crime of being unforgivably silly. No amount of waving wands and forcing kids to dress up as fairies could turn England, in the years of the three-day week and the miners’ strike, into a replica of preRaphaelite Britain.

Thankfully, Blake seemed to realise this soon enough. By the beginning of the 1980s, he was back in London, back on the urban front line, where he continues to this day to make interesting art, though in the fiddly and inconsistent manner of a man who lost most of his subject matter when he lost his darkness. So he is a sad clown, and a very English clown at that. If he were a comedian, he’d be Tony Hancock. If he were a round-the-world yachtsman, he’d be Donald Crowhurst.

Pop art is supposed to be glamorous and sexy, but when it crossed the Atlantic and Blake took it up, it became problematic and seedy. It is not the most glorious of achievements, but it is a very British one.

Peter Blake, Tate Liverpool, until Sept 23.

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Ryan McGinness "Equo ne Credite, Teucri" ("Do not trust the horse, Trojans!")

The World is Round features new commissions and recent works by Jacob Dyrenforth, Diana Guerrero-Maciá, Chris Hanson & Hendrika Sonnenberg, Matt Johnson, and Ryan McGinness, all of whom have created works that explore collective consciousness and expression. Although the artists work in a variety of media and thematic areas, their practices are all linked by an interest in shared languages and systems, whether personal or political, formal or informal.

New York-based artist McGinness utilizes the authoritative and universal visual language of corporate logos and public signage to create lively, iconic artwork. Noting that "logos create perceived value," McGinness recycles certain motifs, incorporating myriad pop cultural and art historical references as well as anonymous graphic forms and ornamental embellishment to create a dazzling visual system of his own making.

McGinness's installation, Equo ne Credite, Teucri ("Do not trust the horse, Trojans!"), comprises a set of signs placed throughout the MetroTech Commons. They play off of the way signage employs simple pictograms to convey information to a wide cross section of the public. Upon first glance, the signs appear to be officially issued, since their colors and finish are in keeping with other fixtures in the area. However, they are actually a series of eye-catching but cryptic images imbued with personal meaning. With its title—a reference to the ancient priest Laocoön's attempt to warn the Trojans against letting the Greeks' gift inside city walls, described in The Aeneid by the epic poet Virgil—McGinness warns viewers of his attempt to subvert the public environment with his cooptation of mainstream communication strategies.

Artist Bio
McGinness was born in Virginia Beach, Virginia in 1972, and received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University (1994). He has exhibited his work in numerous solo exhibitions including Never Odd or Even at Paolo Curti / Annamaria Gambuzzi & Co., Milan and Vous Etes Ici, Amsterdam (2006); Galeria Moriarty, Madrid (2006); and Installationview, Deitch Projects, New York (2005).

Sponsorship
The World Is Round at MetroTech Center is part of an ongoing program organized by the Public Art Fund and sponsored by MetroTech Commons Associates, an organization that consists of MetroTech companies Bear Stearns & Company, Forest City Ratner Companies, JPMorganChase, KeySpan, and Polytechnic University.

Special thanks to Forest City Ratner Companies and First New York Partners.

Location
MetroTech Center is located in Downtown Brooklyn between Jay Street and Flatbush Avenue at Myrtle Avenue. Viewing hours are dawn to dusk daily for outdoor works, Monday through Friday 8am to 6pm for Jacob Dyrenforth's installation in the lobby of One MetroTech. Subway: A, C, F to Jay Street/Borough Hall, exit at Myrtle Promenade; R to Lawrence Street; Q to Dekalb Avenue.

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Marilyn Manson @ Galerie Brigitte Schenk

MARILYN MANSON / LES FLEURS DU MAL / Aquarelle / 28. Juni - 5. August 2007

GALERIE BRIGITTE SCHENK
ALBERTUSSTRASSE 26 50667 KÖLN
TEL: 0221. 925 09 01
FAX: 0221. 925 09 02
E-MAIL: art@galerieschenk.de