calendario eventi  :: 

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8/12/2005

Two exhibitions

White Cube, London

Richard Phillips: Michael Fried

White Cube is pleased to present Richard Phillips’ latest project Michael Fried, a group of seven large-scale oil paintings.

Over the last decade, Phillips has developed a striking signature style that derives its tension from a selective use of lurid popular images from that he subjects to the technical, value-laden refinements of academic painting. As a self-conscious American painter weaned on postmodern appropriation strategies, Phillips is acutely interested in the continuing discourse on "the sacred cloth" and how his own work situates itself within, and contributes to, its canonical status. To this end he has designed an octagonal, chapel-like enclosure for this particular group of paintings and titled it, provocatively, Michael Fried.

One of modern art’s eminent historians and critics, Fried famously took Minimal Art to task on account of its irredeemable theatricality in Art and Objecthood (1967), then later explored the dialectical relationship between theatricality and non-theatricality in painting in the writings of Denis Diderot and the painting salons of eighteenth century Paris in Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980). Fried remains a leading, though contested, exponent of the vexed relationship between art criticism and art history.

The critic suggests new possible ways to understand a work of art but for Phillips, critique is as much an intrinsic material in the conception and staging of his own paintings as the paint and canvas with which they are made. In this exhibition, in a reversal of the normative relationship between artist and critic, Fried is cited as the very subject of Phillips’ attention.

Visitors to Michael Fried encounter a panoptical space, where an image confronts from every wall. Culling his subjects from fifties soft porn and other genres in the lower reaches of the subject hierarchy, Phillips crops the body from each figure, scales up the faces via gridding technique, and resets them against bold, striped grounds. The beautiful and banal ‘Eve Bello’, ‘Mickey Jines’ and ‘Janise Carter’ stare boldly out of their frames, rendered to impervious perfection. In counterpoint to these huge portraits are four reworked graphic images a pencil sketch of a man’s face, a bleeding heart, a pornographic drawing of a sexual threesome, and a Manga cartoon girl.

Phillips’ deft and selective scrambling and conflating of genres is a challenging comment on the condition of painting now. Is it an important and vivid medium or a redundant object of nostalgic connoisseurship? How do current art practices relate to painting’s history? And is painting itself central or peripheral to them?

Born in Massachusetts in 1962, Richard Phillips lives and works in New York. He has exhibited his work in numerous individual and group shows internationally. For his most recent work, he has devised specific architectural environments, beginning with Law, Sex & Christian Society at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York, a companion show to the White Cube project.

A fully illustrated catalogue, with an essay by Michael Bracewell, has been published by White Cube to accompany the exhibition.

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Runa Islam: Time Lines

'Time Lines proposes in an intricate web of references a new paradoxical look at the city: the city that stands there to be observed and enjoyed as it is filmed is also a city that doesn’t exist, since ultimately it only exists in its own cinematic reality.' (Miguel von Hafe Pe'rez)

White Cube is pleased to present ‘Time Lines’, a new work by Runa Islam - the first film that the artist has shot and projected on 35mm. ‘Time Lines’ focuses on three early twentieth century structures in Barcelona: the once iconic cable car of Montjuic whose linear journey is now used primarily as a tourist excursion, and two rides in the antiquated Tibidado fairground - a plane that moves in a fixed circle overhead and a crane that rotates upwards to what was formerly the highest point in the city. Islam was drawn to these subjects not because of their immediate visual appeal (the cable car’s small red box skimming the city’s rooftops for example, or the candy coloured ironwork of the rides) but rather for the impossible airborne points of view that they access and for the perfect readymade tracking shots enabled by their automated functions. Like Richard Serra’s ‘Railroad Turnbridge’ (1976), these constructions provide both the subject and the method of the filmmaking process, from which the images could develop ‘in a free associative way, moving laterally and literally, vertically and horizontally.’

‘Time Lines’ deals with notions of suspension and the deconstruction of time/space coordinates in both a literal and metaphorical manner. Scenarios and ‘timeframes’ are montaged in the film, using both amateur and professional actors in period costumes ranging from the 1900s to the present day set against intermittent points of the cable car’s journey. Fragments of physiognomies, clothing and architectural details are syncopated together, with overlaid sounds of ambient noise, 1920s music and the amplified hum of turn-of-the-century engineering. Occasionally, the camera cuts to the cable lines in the sky, a completely abstract composition, and then switches back to long shots of the car taken from a roving viewpoint.

As is often the case with Islam’s films the actors are simply left to appear, functioning more like narrative decoys; obstructions rather than points of entry into any logical plot line. In this way, the work reflects Bresson’s notion of characters being ‘formed’ on film, something that the artist has employed in earlier works such as ‘Screen Test / Unscript’ (2000) where close-ups are used to transform faces into characters on screen and ‘First Day of Spring’ (2005) where a group of rickshaw drivers were choreographed to simply sit and do nothing in antithesis of their daily labour. Although Islam often engages documentary techniques such as behind-the-scenes shots of crew and camera and occasionally shots of herself directing the scene, the works always rest in the space between the viewer’s collusive identification with film as fantasy or fiction and the ‘authenticity’ of the documented image. In this way, she utilises the self-analytical construction and disruptive chronology of Structuralist filmmaking as a way to draw attention to the very artificial space of cinema.

In ‘Time Lines’, narrative set-ups are used more as vehicles to situate the city, from its vast expanse of sky to its horizontal rooftop panorama, the latter a motif that has frequently appeared in Islam’s work: a city snowstorm in ‘Dead Time’ (2000) for example; the banal architectural tropes of twin port cities Oporto and Rotterdam in ‘Parallel’ (2001) and the urban sprawl of Newcastle Gateshead in ‘Scale (1/16 inch = 1 foot)’ (2003). Islam makes connections between the ‘architecture’ in her films and the installation space, creating a network of visual relationships that begins with the images on screen and ends with the particular set of spatial coordinates developed for each film. These range from intimate single screen 16mm projections (‘First Day of Spring’, ‘Be the First to See What you See as you See It’ (2004), ‘Dead Time’ and ‘Stare Out (blink)’ (1998)), to architecturally-scaled multiple screen DVD installations (‘How Far to Faro’ (2005), ‘Scale (1/16 inch = 1 foot)’ and ‘Parallel’), each calibrated to enhance the ability of film to act as a material conduit into a projected mental space.

Islam has exhibited internationally in group shows such as 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003), 51st Venice Biennale (2005) and Goteborg International Biennial (2005). Recent solo exhibitions include Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg, Camden Arts Centre, London, UCLA Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles and Mart, Trento.

‘Time Lines’ was commissioned and produced by Centre d’Art Santa Mo'nica, Barcelona with the support of Goteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2005. A full colour pamphlet with an essay by Sara Arrhenius will be available during the exhibition.

‘Time Lines’ will be on view at Kunstverein Dusseldorf 11 December 2005 - 19 February 2006.

White Cube
48 Hoxton Square - London
White Cube is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10.00am to 6.00pm. Closed from 23 December 2005 through to 2 January 2006 inclusive.

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