Michel Auder
dal 24/9/2003 al 26/9/2003
Segnalato da
24/9/2003
Michel Auder
Participant INC, New York
A solo exhibition of photographs and videos. Auder will exhibit two bodies of recent photographic works, Orchard Street (date) and his ongoing series, Details. The exhibition will also premiere new videotapes.
SECRET SHARER
Opening Reception, Thursday, September 25, 2003, 7-9pm
PARTICIPANT INC is pleased to open its second season with Secret Sharer, a
solo exhibition of photographs and videos by Michel Auder. Auder will
exhibit two bodies of recent photographic works, Orchard Street (date) and
his ongoing series, Details. The exhibition will also premiere new
videotapes including Fun and Fire and Apocalypse Later (2003). Following
his recent retrospective of film and video works (1969-2002) at Anthology
Film Archives in June, Secret Sharer will present works exhibited in New
York for the first time.
Auder’s photographic work relies on an editing practice very close to his
work in video: rigorous editing from massive volumes of material. The
photographs that comprise Orchard Street were meticulously culled from ##
hours of surveillance video shot by Auder in his Orchard Street studio
over ## years in (date). Auder’s recurrent blue-gray palette, together
with the grain of video image, here, in serialized still form, establishes
a mood of dreamlike obscurity. His illusory Details are conscientiously
rendered minutiae, anthologized fragments from pornography websites. As if
he has become indifferent toward the central action, Auder looks toward
the peripheries, bringing into focus lush yet mundane details of décor and
surface texture. Together with his recent videos that arrive from a
spontaneous archive of footage (all shot in 200#), Secret Sharer manifests
an in-depth look at Auder’s most recent projects.
In Auder’s first feature film, Cleopatra (1970), the queen’s zoo is an
animal enthusiast’s room at the Chelsea Hotel, the desert is made of snow,
and characters speed by on snowmobiles. Filmed on 35 and 16mm and operatic
in scale, this version of the Cleopatra story is also recklessly
idiosyncratic, and foreshadows Auder’s subsequent three decades of
art-making in its casting and staging of dramas from his lived experience.
In palette and texture, his photographic series, Details, returns to his
early interest in the opulence of the mundane.
Auder’s only other film, Keeping Busy (1969), directly responds to Andy
Warhol’s distilled film ennui by positing this presumed home movie as a
worthy pastime for superstars on holiday. Occupying a similar gray haze,
the occupants of Orchard Street dramatize an autobiographical
non-narrative of languid encounters. Together, in their immediacy, his new
video works emphasize the function of his work to date (to keep
busy)—providing a means to structure otherwise uncomposed moments of
Auder’s life, both in relation to others and alone.
Internalizing the filmic influences of his early contemporaries, ranging
from the reductivist tendencies of Warhol to the naturalistic, intimate
style of Frederick Wiseman and Robert Frank, Auder developed a unique
signature that fluctuates between closeness and distance, positing himself
as both insider and outlaw. Auder perhaps wanted it both ways in his
movies, and found this possibility in the medium of video, a newly
developing art form in the late 60s-70s. He could record everything around
him. Maybe use it later. It provided a way of being in a situation,
intimately involved with his ensemble, as well as remaining outside, an
observer more closely affiliated with the viewer.
Auder’s inadvertently indexical Chronicles, for example, reside
conceptually somewhere between Gerhard Richter’s Atlas and Nan Goldin’s
Ballad of Sexual Dependency. A massive body of unedited video, this
archive is the source material from which he culls numerous finished
works. Casting doubt on the distinctions between anonymity and intimacy,
staged and spontaneous performance, the footage comprises an unfolding
family portrait, travel log, and diary. Often unselfconsciously recorded
and stored, the Chronicles necessarily change with time. And as time
passes, certain people are revisited, years later, or old footage is
re-edited to tell different stories.
Some of Auder’s recent video works have emerged from these disparate
temporal sources, and incorporate video letters and his own narration of
various scenes--in general, more of Auder in front of the camera,
positioning himself, reflectively, in the present. His works on view in
Secret Sharer are comprised mainly of new footage, and rely heavily on
digital technologies and respond to the increased anonymity of the
internet. While responding to and interacting with others through his work
is not unusual for Auder, his most recent videos explore an artist left to
his own devices. His strange methods of communication are refined in works
that implicate the artist more explicitly in intimate scenarios.
Encompassing the complex range of methodologies that comprise Auder’s work
to date, Secret Sharer discloses an unwavering acceptance of the potential
of art to conspire with life in unanticipated ways.
Contact: Lia Gangitano, 917 488 0185
Gallery hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 12-7pm
PARTICIPANT INC
95 Rivington Street New York City